Basic Ruleset
- Because this is a 5.5E D&D game (it used to be a 5E game but we switched!), we will abide by… the 5.5E D&D rules. The only potential problems here are 1) Your GM is relatively new to the 5.5E D&D rules and 2) The 5.5E D&D rules are supplemented by a number of old 5E hard cover books, parts of which are, frankly, rather confusingly written. Therefore,
- Rules lawyering is encouraged so long as the act of rules lawyering entertains and/or educates the GM and other players. If the act of rules lawyering fails to entertain/educate or, worse yet, results in annoyance, divine punishment may ensue.
- Once the GM has rendered his infallible decision, the rules lawyering must cease. Otherwise, it will be considered annoying and may result in the divine punishment referenced above.
- During the game, 5.5E/5E D&D books may be used at any time to ensure that play is proceeding according to the Grand Vision of the Wizards of the Coast – i.e. to check and make sure we’re following the rules correctly.
Limitations on Use of Outside Materials
- The game will have establishments known as Adventurer’s Guilds in some of the larger cities of the kingdom. When you are in a town with an Adventurer’s Guild, you may use the Guild’s World Wide Wizard network to look up any information you choose. That means that you, the player, can look up anything you want in our world. For instance, you may,
- Learn some math from the Internet.
- Read up on dragons in the Monsters’ Manual.
- Check out and read a textbook of marine engineering from the library.
- If, however, your character is not in a town with an Adventurer’s Guild (or a game session ended with your character not in such a town), you may not do any of these things. The World Wide Wizard network is not available in the boonies so all you can look at is the written notes that you happened to bring with you (everything that’s in the online forums for this game is considered written notes that you brought with you).
The GM Has A Problem With D&D Short and Long Rests
- For some reason, the authors of the D&D rules believe that player characters are invested by some sort of miraculous self-healing field such that a character can be battered into a coma and be clinging so desperately to life that he or she is obliged to make a series of what are called “death saves” only to, after a period of 8 hours (only 6 of which must be spent sleeping!), find him or herself entirely healed and ready for another day of fighting and near-death experiences. You and I, being trained medical professionals, know that this is bullshit and we shall not stand for it. To wit,
- In this game, the D&D 5.5/5E rules on a “short rest” with regard to recovery of hit points and hit dice are changed to require 24 hours of rest (i.e., neither fighting creatures nor marching places nor guzzling booze; something like riding undisturbed in a wagon for 24 hours or engaging in some of the more relaxing downtime activities described in the rules would be fine).
- The D&D 5.5/5E rules on a “long rest” with regard to recovery of hit points and hit dice are changed to require 7 days of rest; again, sans fighting, marching, or guzzling. Reading, riding in a wagon, working on puzzles, designing (but not testing!) a catapult, the more relaxing downtime activities described in the rules, etc. is ok.
- The D&D 5.5/5E rules on the effects of a “short rest” and a “long rest” in terms of recovery of spells, special abilities, etc. remain unchanged. Only the parts having to do with recovery of hit points or hit dice are changed.
- If a long rest is interrupted before the full 7 days are complete, your character will have recovered an amount of hit points/dice in proportion to the fraction of the full 7 day rest achieved. In order to regain the remainder, another long rest will have to be embarked upon (see GM for details/examples).
- Furthermore, the credulous authors of the D&D rules also believe that a character can be JUST ONE HIT POINT shy of entering the state where SERIAL DEATH SAVES are required but still, in all other respects, be functioning at their normal state. We also know this is bullshit and we shall not stand for this either.
- Characters who are at 30% or less of their full hit points must subtract one from all their rolls (saving throws, ability checks, rolls to hit, rolls to cause damage, etc., etc.).
- Characters who are at 20% or less of their full hit points must subtract two from all their rolls.
- Characters who are at 10% or less of their full hit points must subtract three from all their rolls AND suffer an acute sense of their own impending mortality as gleefully narrated by the GM. These characters are also unable to maintain concentration as they’re already busy concentrating on how much blood they’re leaking all over the ground.
- In all cases, a natural 20 on an attack roll will still be treated as a natural 20. Even though you have just one hit point left, you can still make a buzzer-beating swish shot from half-court to win the division championships, I suppose.
- Your adversaries will abide by the same rules (unless they don’t).
Optional 5E Rules That Will Be Enforced
Since much of this adventure is about players figuring out a way to succeed against overwhelming odds despite being handicapped by tremendous limitations, the following rules will be enforced,
Lifting and Carrying and Encumbrance (5E Player’s Handbook page 176) (in the game, you may have the need to carry a huge amount of stuff with you but then you’ll have to figure out where to get the money to rent a horse and cart… and how to defend it against attackers… and what to do if it breaks a wheel… and so on and so forth).Edit – once we switched to the 5.5E rules, we decided to follow the Encumbrance rules listed there which are much more forgiving.- Eating and Drinking (and the consequences of forgetting to do either).
- Lighting (and the consequences of forgetting to bring a torch or lantern)
- Expending ammunition such as arrows and crossbow bolts (including recovering 50% of ammunition expended by spending a minute searching the battlefield after your inevitable victory).
- Sleeping rules from the 5E Xanathar’s (pages 77-78) are modified for this campaign,
- Whenever you end a 24-hour period without a race-appropriate rest/sleep period, you must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or suffer one level of exhaustion. It becomes harder to fight off exhaustion if you stay awake for multiple days. After the first 24 hours, the DC increases by 5 for each consecutive 24-hour period without a long rest. The DC resets to 10 when you finish a race-appropriate rest/sleep period.
- Sleeping in light armor has no adverse effect on the wearer, but sleeping in medium or heavy armor makes it difficult to recover fully during a short rest. When you finish a short rest during which you slept in medium or heavy armor, you only spend one quarter of your spent Hit Dice (minimum of one die) to restore your Hit Points. If you have any levels of exhaustion, the rest doesn’t reduce your exhaustion level.
- Players are reminded that the 5E Player’s Handbook states that donning and doffing a shield requires one action (page 146). Please keep this in mind when planning out how your character is going to switch from using a shield and a one-handed weapon to a two-handed weapon in the middle of a fight. Also, as long as you’re on page 146, you might take note of the fact that doffing heavy armor requires five minutes which could pose difficulties should your character plunge unexpectedly into deep water.
- Characters cannot automatically identify a magic item during a short rest. Experimentation, research, or a spell like Identify is required.
Getting Non-Player Friends Involved
- Our friends who are interested in the game but not able to participate fully may participate as “pen-pals of the player characters”. They can assume the role of your friends back in the capital or some other safe place and you can write to them and they can write back to you.
- In order to do this, your character must acquire pen, paper, and Archean Postal Service stamps (available at low, low prices at a wide variety of noble Archean business establishments!). In addition, you must not spend ALL of your time in the boonies because there aren’t any postal boxes out there so it would be impossible to keep up a correspondence.
- Once this is accomplished, your friend can have read-only access to the forums and you may email/talk with them as you like regarding the various puzzles and situations you run into during the game.
- Your friend can make suggestions, comments, etc. as s/he sees fit. But they should be made in the voice of a fictional character because, c’mon, we’re doing roleplaying here!
- Another way our time-constrained friends can participate is as a “Special Guest Antagonist” (SGA). This could be as,
- Someone who shows up to play the opposing side during sessions where the Player Characters (PC’s) are involved in a large or lengthy battle. In this case it would be the PC’s vs the SGA with the GM serving merely as a referee for the battle or,
- Someone who plays the role of one of the currently behind-the-scenes antagonists. This would be via email where the GM lets the SGA know what their goals, resources, and obstacles are and the GM and SGA together play out over email how the SGA manipulates events from behind the scenes to ensure their rise to power. The GM would let the SGA know if anything the PC’s did affected their interests and vice versa but generally the SGA and the PC’s would be on two different game tracks until the moment comes when they learn of one another’s conflicting interests and finally collide!
- Finally, our time-constrained friends can join us for sessions from time to time and play one of the NPC’s travelling along with the PC’s.
Players Are Enjoined From Learning Punjabi
- As long as we are playing this game, you must not attempt to learn Punjabi from any source outside of the game. Should you inadvertently learn some Punjabi through some non-game source, you must report this lapse to the GM who will shake a stern finger at you. If you happen to know some Punjabi prior to the start of the game, you must report this fact to the GM so that he can substitute some other language that you don’t know (probably Dari).
Players Are Urged To Avoid Tedious Tasks
- Sometimes characters have to do tedious things. Since we’re all very busy people with busy lives, it’s important that when your character does tedious things, that does not mean that you, the player, do tedious things. Therefore, you may use a calculator/spreadsheet/computer (or ask the GM to use them on your behalf) to do things that your character could do in a few hours… but NOT things that would take your character years to do!
- For example, Ben is playing a character named Melvin the Tedium-Tolerant. Melvin wants to know how many times the letters “A”, “B”, “C”, etc. occur in a two-page encrypted document. Ben writes a short computer program to do the counting and advises the GM that he has done so. The GM says “Good job. And, of course, you could have asked me to do that for you.”
- However, let us say that Ben is playing a character named Thomas Rulebender and Tom wants to brute force crack an encrypted document by trying 1 x 10^30 key combinations. Ben writes a program to do this, runs it on a powerful cloud computer, and advises the GM that he has done so. The GM frowns and promptly banishes Tom to an alternate dimension where he will remain until he checks all 1 x 10^30 combinations by hand at the rate of 1000 combinations per second (which will take a bit more than 317 quintillion years; even longer if he is allowed to take bathroom breaks).
The Tray of Ambiguous Outcomes
Often in roleplaying games, a character will check an area for traps and roll a “1” and be told by the GM that there aren’t any traps. Although the characters have no idea that they rolled a “1”, the players know and they immediately stop, light torches, have each of the other characters check for traps, and cast all manner of spells to find that trap that the first character presumably missed.
That’s an example of a problem in roleplaying games where the players know the outcome of a roll that the characters would not. To resolve this, whenever this situation arises in the game, the GM will have you roll a number of variously colored D20’s onto the Tray of Ambiguous Outcomes. Behind his screen, the GM will have a piece of paper with a number of colored patches on it, each patch corresponding to the color of one of the D20’s. Before you roll, the GM will place his finger on one of the patches and after you roll, he will take note of the result on the same-colored die that he’s got his finger on. He’ll then tell you what happens in the game but you will have no idea which of the D20’s you rolled was the one that “counted”.
Of course, this isn’t just for trap checks—it might apply to Insight rolls when trying to detect lies, Arcana checks when deciphering runes, or any time where a false sense of security could be meaningful.
This puts the players more directly into the shoes of the characters and should help the game feel a bit more realistic. Plus it gives the DM an excuse to own an object called “The Tray of Ambiguous Outcomes,” the importance of which should not be underestimated.
Should The Tray of Ambiguous Outcomes be unavailable, the GM will simply roll for the player and not tell the players what number came up.
Magic
- Comprehend Languages and other language translation spells only work on languages that are still “living” – that is, on those languages that are spoken by a reasonably large number of people in the world. Scholars believe that this is because translation spells gather up some of the world-wide knowledge of a language and make it temporarily available to the caster and if very few people in a world know a language, then the spell is unable to gather sufficient knowledge to be useful. The number of people who have to know a particular language for translation spells to work is unknown but Parminder et al. cite examples suggesting that the number is likely to be greater than 10,000. Incidentally, it’s believed that this is the reason why Comprehend Languages and similar spells cannot be used to read encrypted documents – it’s just that not enough people know how to read the encryption for the spell to work!
- The infamous Tiny Hut remains but with the following modifications,
- In all respects other than what is in the spell text (and noted below), the dome acts as if it were an inch thick dome of iron. That means it weighs about 51,000 pounds, conducts both heat and electricity, and melts at 2,800 F.
- When the spell is cast, the walls of the hut displace the air in the volume that the walls will occupy. They, however, will not displace anything denser than that – such as rock, water, etc. Instead, the walls will run right up to the outline of the obstruction – so a tiny hut cast next to a wall of rock will have walls that run right up to the wall of rock but not inside or beyond it.
- Spells that are of higher level than the spell slot used to cast the Tiny Hut CAN cross the walls of the hut – in either direction! Non magical weapons, however, cannot… unless they’re being carried (not fired or wielded!) across the wall of the hut by a person authorized to enter/leave. Magical weapons might penetrate the wall of the hut depending on whether the DM thinks the magic in the weapon is of higher level than the hut.
- The hut actively pumps heat and humidity in either direction to maintain the interior of the hut at the ideal climate for the caster (I’m going to have the devil’s own time enforcing conservation of matter and energy in the D&D universe!).
- There are no teleportation spells because no one in the world you live in has figured out how to do it yet – teleportation remains one of the Great Unsolved Magical Mysteries of your times. That means no Blink, no Teleport, no Teleportation Circle, etc., etc. In the words of one of the most pre-eminent mages of your times, “Making things disappear is easy. It’s the reappearing part that drives us crazy.”
- If you’re interested in a spell that involves teleportation such as Thunderstep and have an idea of how to change it so that it doesn’t involve teleportation but is still cool, kindly consult with the GM. Otherwise, such spells will be presumed to have their full effect minus the teleportation part.
- In addition, this world has no spells that create ordinary food (water is OK). The scholars of your world have a large number of contradictory theories as to why this isn’t possible but, frankly, none of them make any sense. The one thing they all agree upon, however, is that it’s entirely impossible. So spells like Create Food And Water and Goodberry do not produce food that meet the game’s daily food requirement. Create Food And Water still makes water and the berries created by Goodberry still heal 1 hp each; it’s just that neither creates food for sustenance.
- Again, if you have any ideas about how to modify a food-creating spell so that it can continue not to produce life-sustaining food but still be cool, consult with the GM.
Pre-Combat Maneuverings
Unlikely though it may seem, it is possible for two parties to meet in the D&D world without a fight breaking out immediately. When this happens, the concept of an “escalation ladder” comes up. The rungs of the ladder are,
- Relaxed posture – the swords are sheathed, the bows remain in their usual carrying positions, and shields are not being held up.
- Defensive posture – the swords are out but pointed at the ground, the bows have arrows nocked but the strings haven’t been pulled back and the bows aren’t pointed at a specific person, but the shields are upright.
- Fighting posture – Shields are deployed, swords are upright and ready for use, bows are pointed at targets, spells are ready to go, etc.
If a fight breaks out, the party highest up on the escalation ladder has a +2 on their initiative roll for every rung they are above the other party.
Combat
- Since combat is a chaotic and fast-paced event with little time for rational thought, when it’s your character’s turn in combat, you must announce what your character is going to do immediately.
- Alternatively, you can immediately ask a clarifying question about rules or about what you see/hear/etc. and then, upon receiving the answer, immediately announce what your character is going to do.
- If you wish to communicate with your friends during the battle, shouting out whatever is on your mind will be free (not just a free action but free) but you may not speak for more than 6 seconds (the duration of the round itself!).
- Hopefully this will put us all in the proper frame of mind for fighting which is a series of desperate, poorly connected, barely articulated half-thoughts that leads to either truly boneheaded moves or spectacular feats of improvisation. Ideally when we finish with a combat, you’ll be half out of breath and wondering what in the hell just happened.
- Given this rule, your group may want to hash out potential battle plans in advance. I guarantee that all your potential adversaries have already done so!
- The rules as written exempt a creature from suffering an opportunity attack if they are involuntarily moved away from being next to an enemy creature. As the perfect time to stab someone is when they’re suddenly being involuntarily moved away, we’ll revise this rule to permit opportunity attacks whenever a creature moves away from an enemy, whether voluntarily or not. The only exception will be if the GM rules that the movement happened so suddenly that there wasn’t time for any stabbing (e.g. a creature suddenly being hurled backwards at the speed of sound).
- During combat, you may have two large objects and one small object at hand at all times. Large objects are objects such as weapons or a shield while small objects are objects such as a spellbook or an amulet. You can spend a free action to switch between these three objects during your round. Dropping any of these three objects to the ground is free (not a free action; you get only one free action per round whereas free is just free).
- For instance, Clara the Cleric wants to have her bow, her shield, and her mace within easy reach during a fight. This counts as three large objects so she will have to choose which one of them will be stowed in her pack during the fight.
- She decides to go into battle with her mace, her bow, and her amulet (a small item) at hand. Switching between the two weapons is a free action. Dropping the mace so that she can use the bow with both hands is free (not a free action).
- Equipping a shield costs an action (as per the rules). Retrieving any item from your backpack (ie any object that isn’t the two large and one small object you chose up front) also costs an action. Picking an item up from the ground (e.g. the mace that Clara dropped) is a free action.
- If you are encumbered/heavily encumbered, you may wish to drop your pack just prior to entering combat. This will cost an action. If, later on, you are in the same space where you dropped your backpack, you can pick it up and put it back on at the cost of an action.
- If you hold the high ground while making a melee attack on someone, you can take a +1 to your roll to hit. On the other hand, if you are making a melee attack on someone who is higher than you are, you will suffer a -1 to your roll to hit.
- All attacks (including missile attacks) on a creature that’s flanked are made at advantage EXCEPT if one of the flankers is, himself/herself flanked (e.g. is involved in a “Conga Line of Death”. Then the “flanked flanker” does not have advantage. For instance, if PC represents a player character and an E represents an enemy and two PC’s and two enemies are arranged like so, PC E PC E, then the middle enemy and middle PC do not have advantage in their attacks because they themselves are also flanked. The outer PC and outer enemy, however, still have advantage.
Miscellaneous
- All cryptography used in the game will be “classical cryptography” and not “modern cryptography”. The only language used in cryptograms will be English. And maybe Punjabi.
- There will be a calendar in the game but to keep things simple for all of us, it will be the same as our calendar with new moons, full moons, etc. occurring as would be expected on our calendar. The usual physical constants from our world (radius of the world, density of the world, charge of an electron, speed of light in a vacuum, etc.) will also carry over to the game world. Unless they don’t.
- Players are encouraged to exercise due diligence before making using of any mysterious magical items that they may come across. The Adventurer’s Guild is available, at a reasonable cost, to assist your efforts in investigating a newly acquired magical item.