Aquatic Adventures

The rules for adventures in aquatic environments in D&D 5E are a bit disjoint, scattered across multiple books and multiple sections within those books.  I've tried to draw them together in a two pager for my own reference and spell out some of my interpretations (house rules).

The PDF can be found on my Google Drive: D&D 5E Aquatic Encounters.

Moon Druid Wild Shape - Buff at Higher Levels

Moon Druids are a popular choice in many games.  At low levels they have huge effective hit point pools from two animal shapes and then their natural amount.  They make great tanks at certain levels.  Debatable they are too good at these major step levels.  There big power steps are:

• Level 2 -- First access to wild shape
• Level 4 -- Swimming forms
• Level 6 -- CR2 Wild shapes
• Level 8 -- Flying forms 
• Level 10 -- Elemental forms

They receive bumps to wild shape at 9, 12, 15, and 17 when more shapes become available, but those bumps are smaller because of narrow choices (there just aren't a lot of beasts in high CR categories) and they fall behind other melee attackers on the accuracy front.

In this post I will look at two homebrew rules that buff these relative weaknesses.

Character Creation (Borrowed from Dungeon Dudes)

Character creation is both one of the most fun, exciting, tedious and potentially dooming events of many campaigns.  A long running campaign where one or two characters are head and shoulders above others makes it hard to avoid situations where the spotlight shines excessively on the high-stat characters.

I just watched a Dungeon Dudes video that delves into some house rules that they use that address this and a few other issues.  I think all the rules they suggest have some merit.  I'll go over them in this post.

Casting Higher Level Spells from Scroll

I have been wrestling with the case of a multi classed caster trying to cast higher level spell from scroll.  For an example, assume a 4th level wizard / 1st level cleric and a Fireball scroll (3rd level).

TL;DR: Must be able to cast the appropriate level spell or make ability check.

Five Simple House Rules — Dungeon Dudes

I just watched a video recommended to me (thanks Jon) titled Five Simple House Rules for Better Combat in Dungeons and Dragons 5e by the Dungeon Dudes.  In it they lay out five house rules that they like to use and I wanted to crystalize my thought on them.  So, here we go.

First, the house rules in summary:

1. Critical Hits: Maximize First Set of Die Results
2. Healing Potions: Maximize Healing Potions
3. Flanking:  Provides +2 to hit not advantage
4. Bloodied: Use Bloodied condition defined in D&D 4E
5. Minions: Use 1HP minions essentially from D&D 4E