hey yall need some game balance input that’s beyond the scope of my usual megathread ramblings but also i don’t want to wade into reddit. i’m running a campaign that probably would have been better in another system, but it appears i’m locked into d&d 5.5 and i want to mod the things i find most frustrating/unfun about the system out. i mostly stole/adapted ideas from Nimble and Draw Steel, just want to make sure they won’t break anything & also have some other clarification questions for those who are familiar.
Nimble 5e Dying Rules
Want to use the Dying Rules from the original Nimble 5e hack instead of the default “unconscious + death saves” system. Pasted below:
The one difference is I want to try to keep Exhaustion as a debuff as well, since it’s a lot more reasonable in 5.5e than it was in 5e. Here’s how it works in 5.5:
Would that be too punishing? I’m open to straight up changing the Exhaustion system to a Wound system as the original hack intended, but feel like an interesting layer of challenge could come from having to manage the Exhaustion debuff. My games won’t be too conservative about clearing Exhaustion levels. I use a modified rest system where a Long Rest is two days focused rest in a safe place (clears all exhaustion levels, mostly intended to be done between adventures/missions/story arcs), a Short Rest is a night of sleep (clears one exhaustion level), and the original version of short rests exist as a sort of mini-rest where you can use hit dice to heal and maybe roll a D20 to see if you can clear an Exhaustion level.
Also, if there’s anything I should more generally be aware of about how this rule alters game balance do please sound off!
Ping-Pong Initiative
I basically made a tweaked version of Draw Steel’s alternating side initiative since I find ranked init clunky & uninteractive. it goes like:
-Players roll initiative. The player with the highest roll goes first.
-DM rolls against the highest player-side roll, adding the highest enemy combatant initiative bonus to the roll. Higher of the two goes first (tie favors players).
-Combat then proceeds with both sides alternating taking turns until all combatants on one side have gone. Then, any remaining combatants take their turn in an order of their choosing, then the round resets.
-At the end of a player’s turn, they choose the next player to take a player-side turn from players who have not yet taken their turn this round. The last player to take their turn chooses any player other than themselves to be the first player-side turn next round. DM chooses order of enemy combatants.
This one I’m most confident won’t break anything, and am also fairly confident will be more fun than default initiative. I also had to change how surprise/ambushes work to accommodate it. Still, open to feedback.
Nimble 5e Mana rules - iffiest on these, but like a lot of aspects
Pasting below:
I enjoy the increased flexibility, but am I wrong that the mana-math just straight up gives casters more casts per adventure-rest-recharge cycle? I’m a bit wary of this since I think magic already kinda does too much, and the attrition game can be difficult enough to balance/prep for properly. Also, doesn’t this break the intended design of Warlocks? It feels like they should use the half or quarter caster rules for the amount of mana they get (considering they get it back on a short rest).
I’m open to running this alternate rule but tweaking the math down a bit, but also want to make sure that won’t break the intended design.
Anyway thanks for any help yall can provide nerds! keep on g@min g@merz 
I used very similar dying rules for a 5e 2014 and they worked well imo. I wanted it to be punishing, as I wanted to discourage the ping pong nature of 1 HP being the only hp that was important. It’ll probably be even better with 2024 dying rules. I also thought combat was getting too easy, though, so not sure if your players are unconscious more often than mine are.
tbh my players are all really new so i’m not totally sure how they’re gonna approach combat, we’ve only had one fight so far and one person went unconscious. i’m mostly considering the Nimble dying system because i think unconscious+death saves is uninteractive/unfun and yo-yo healing is weird and immersion breaking.
my big concern with exhaustion remaining a debuff is that it might be overly punishing to martial characters just for doing their main thing, that’s the big argument i see for making it purely a measure of how close to dying you are (basically a Wound system, which is what it got renamed to when Nimble was moved from a 5e hack to its own system)
Ya I hate the yo-yoing, too. I could see the concern it’s overly punishing to martial characters, but at least I didn’t notice any major effects. But then again, 2014 and 2024 were exhaustion are very different it seems lol.
I’ve got a few thoughts but I have not played Draw Steel however I have read it.
What are the themes of the campaign? What do you and your players like doing in heroic fantasy?
I get a feeling from the proposed changes that there is some enjoyment of the tactical combat, as well as the superhero nature of more heroic fantasy as opposed to gritty fantasy.
The mana change would cut down on book-keeping at the expense of potential balance not only around combat but also the gameplay loop of combat - rest - non-combat encounter - combat.
Have you considered Lancer style initiative where the players go first, you go second, and then repeat until combat ends? No rolls needed, just the players to decide who goes first.
Are you going to use the automatic hit rules from Draw Steel or keeping the swingy to-hit of a d20 attack roll?
Is character death important at all?
While the Dying/exhaustion is interesting it seems to be adding more bookkeeping, you might want to think about increasing the ways the players can recover from exhaustion unless you all like the idea of waiting around for a few days to get enough long-rests to recover from a near-death encounter.
I’m curious about your campaign and group and would love to hear more.
We did some pathfinder 2e about a year ago but I couldn’t keep it up as I’m honestly quite tired of the genre (d20 heroic fantasy) but there are some neat additions to the genre the past couple years.
hey these are all great questions! it’s a bit early to tease out a singular theme, but based on my worldbuilding combined with the characters my players have created i’d say “traumatized subalterns finding their strength & (if they’re lucky) found family in the process of taking on the sicko elite in a Weird Fantasy anti-capitalist setting.” of established d&d settings, i’d say my homebrew world is closest to Eberron, so there’s a lot more space dedicated to the intrigue/social/out-of-combat game space (this is part of why i use a slower rest system, it allows me to make combat less frequent in the fiction while not breaking resource attrition). the PCs feel kinda like freelance magically empowered private detectives/spies, sort of a “sword & sorcery noir” tone. outside of established d&d settings, the elevator pitch for my world is “the Dieselpunk pulp fantasy vibes of Dishonored mixed with the socialist weird fiction vibes of Disco Elysium.”
went pretty long, more tactics and homebrew thoughts
i do like tactical combat, but more as one slice of the pie/the spice that makes the base of the meal come together. in my experience, combat sings the most in TTRPGs when it’s rooted in the stakes of a story and characters the players are invested in, and when the DM is given room to breathe so they can prepare encounters intentionally (harder to do when the system pressures you to throw combat after combat after combat at the party). no shade to systems where tactical combat is the core draw though: PF2, Lancer, Draw Steel all sound like great games for what they’re trying to do, just a step in the wrong direction for the kind of game i want to run.
my interest in the Nimble 5e hack and stealing alternate initiative systems is mostly to make combat feel faster/more interactive & to cut out cludge/boring bookkeeping that isn’t additive. there’s a lot of “sitting around waiting for your turn where you might not even be able to do anything” in vanilla 5e which i really dislike: ranked initiative is completely uninteractive, “unconscious w/ death saves” is mostly uninteractive, so alternatives hold appeal in just making a more dynamic, exciting game during the combat layer with more decision points.
i’d say i actually like a certain amount of grit/groundedness in my fantasy (prefer sword & sorcery to fantasy superheroes on the Heroic Fantasy spectrum), and to me unconscious + death saves doesn’t really feel gritty OR heroic so much as…video gamey? yo-yo healing just doesn’t make sense to me immersion-wise. and i guess i see the Nimble rules as a big upgrade dynamic-combat-wise, a lateral move grit-wise: staying in the fight no matter what does make PCs stronger in one sense, but the fact that dropping to 0 has more lasting consequences makes them feel more vulnerable at the same time. also FWIW, reading through some replies i got i think i’m gonna deploy the Nimble Dying system, but not Mana: while i like the flexibility of the latter, i think it buffs a part of the game that can already be pretty overshadowing (magic) and yeah that might tilt things more superheroic. i am also going to keep the “roll d20 to hit” at the core of 5e, even though both Nimble and Draw Steel do away with it - i just don’t trust removing that not to break a bunch of unforeseen stuff, plus it removes certain tactical considerations that i do like (e.g. using cover for AC bonuses)
Lancer initiative definitely does hold appeal! and tbh the ping-pong initiative i arrived at is very very close to this, just with some extra baubles hung onto it & massaged to accommodate 5th edition’s “combat round” system. i do like the tiny little sprinkling of randomness of the opening initiative roll (kind of the one vestigial bit of default init i kept), and the “roll initiative” ritual of transitioning into combat is fun for me even if the follow up bookkeeping isn’t.
but yeah appreciate the thoughtful questions/engagement! i realize 5e isn’t ideal for my weird investigative 20th century communist setting, but it’s the system i know so i mostly trust myself to be able to mod it with relatively little game-breakage. i do enjoy 5th edition’s rules-medium-ness and modularity, so if i switch systems in a subsequent campaign in this same setting i’d probably use something like…Cypher maybe? i’m also more of a “rulesets/systems are toolboxes to mix and match from more than out-of-the-box complete consumer experiences” kind of guy (though there’s obv nuance to this, some systems work better as one or the other and they can also be a bit of both).
Sounds like an amazing campaign, thank you for sharing
The exhaustion / nimble dying rules sound like they would facilitate the “the Dieselpunk pulp fantasy vibes of Dishonored mixed with the socialist weird fiction vibes of Disco Elysium”
I totally get the charm of the roll for initiative and the randomness that d20 brings to the game both in the to hit and the initiative roll. If you are comfortable with the system that is just as valid as someone that changes systems frequently, having fun telling a story together is the most important thing to me.
Leaning into the exhaustion mechanic could be effective, spending more time investigation means you get more exhaustion. A fail forward consequence could be a level or two of exhaustion in addition to the usual HP loss / status effect / item loss.
Is there some sort of Dieselpunk way of removing exhaustion at the cost of HP?
How many of the players are full casters?
After having run many “tactical” systems I think it isn’t for me, I resonate with the approach you described and like the pie/meal analogy.
While you would need to tweak the setting a bit, The Between could be a great fit or Blades in the Dark. Especially BitD if you want to lean into the faction aspect, it is known for being a “heist” game but expanding on what the concept of a “heist” is can open it up to more robust campaigns.
Honestly though it sounds like you have a great idea for a game and using what works for you! Reminds me of some dimension 20 campaigns in the best way, and Eberron is such a cool setting
aw really appreciate you saying that!! i should check out Dimension 20, i’ve really enjoyed Brennan’s DMing from the snippets of his work on Critical Role that i’ve seen. Actual Plays are just such a time commitment.
If you are comfortable with the system that is just as valid as someone that changes systems frequently, having fun telling a story together is the most important thing to me.
yeah i think this is a big part of it! seems like the current culture of the hobby is very find-the-right-system-centric, which does make sense from a certain POV especially considering how many cool indie games are coming out and how crappy wotc/hasbro is. but idk just with how my brain works, i’m not the best at retaining how a game works just from reading the rules, and reading through a whole rulebook is tough on my attention span. switching systems is a genuine investment of time, labor, mental energy, and often literal money, so (shrug) i tend to stick to what i know. but on the other hand there are so many cool games i’d like to try if time/the social labor of finding a group weren’t an issue! (for example i actually own Blades in the Dark, have always loved the flavor, but just couldnt find the right time/people to give it a whirl).
I also used ping pong initiative in a D&D 4e game recently (I’ve been rediscovering it) and it worked pretty well at least. Considering it has the same initiative system as 5e, I think that would work well, too!
Haven’t tried mana yet, but ya, I’d be the most iffy on that one just because spell slots are such a big part of the 5e balance economy. Haven’t read it yet in full or thought of it yet, though. Will have to come back to that one.
yeah i’m leaning same. i think i’m definitely gonna try the Dying houserule but leave spell slots as is. i also just don’t really mind spell slots even though i know they’re a pretty common sore spot for other folks who are d&d critical.
playing with a bunch of newbs i do see how slots aren’t immediately intuitive though, i’ve had to call them “basically mana” and “D&D’s mana equivalent” while teaching my new players a bunch of times already lol
