5 Cuts To 5e That Make The Game More Interesting

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated tabletop gaming chap

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TL;DR:

5e works best when players feel real pressure on their resources, but several rules quietly remove that tension. Dropping or rewriting things like Darkvision, Goodberry, huge carry limits, arcane focuses, and certain healing tools restores challenge, creativity, and the classic dungeon-crawling feel that the system was built for.

Introduction

Now then! Opinions incoming - you’ve been warned, and you’re allowed to disagree!

I know I'm gaining a bit of a reputation as someone who doesn't like 5e, but the truth of the matter is that I actually think that there's a very solid game there, it’s just hidden under layers of interdependent ill-considered bloat.

The problem isn't just that bloat adds unnecessary complications to a fairly elegant core system, but that unless the designers are willing to kill their darlings, they can end up neutering their own system with their well-intentioned unfettered ideas.

The way I see it, the core gameplay loop for D&D 5e is to repeatedly face the expeditioning party with challenges which cause them to gradually consume their limited resources, bringing them to a weakened state before hitting them with a big challenge.

That limitation is key, as it forces players to make trade offs and use their creativity to find unique ways of accomplishing things - the very facets which define the genre.

The key restrictions that the game places upon players are with inventory, spell slots, hunger, HP, and the Action Economy.

So with that in mind, given my group plays 5e more than anything else: here's the fat that I like to trim from the game to stop it from undermining itself, without unintended consequences to other sub systems:

Darkvision & The Light Cantrip

Darkvision allows a creature to see in dim light as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. A creature with darkvision sees in shades of gray rather than color in darkness and cannot see in magical darkness unless the ability specifies otherwise. The range for darkvision is often 60 feet, but can vary case to case.

The Light cantrip causes a touched object (no larger than 10 feet) to shed bright light in a 20-foot radius and dim light for an additional 20 feet for up to an hour.

Is there a more evocative image of dungeon crawling than a band of adventures cautiously exploring the haunted stone corridors of some long forgotten tomb by torchlight?

The rules for fighting or exploring in the darkness make you so much more vulnerable - imposing disadvantage on checks and attacks, or even preventing them altogether. Obviously it's something to be avoided at all costs.

It is in fact, a great problem for players to solve, so when the game hands them two zero-cost solutions in the form of the light cantrip and darkvision it's seems like the designers have just robbed the players of an interesting challenge to overcome.

Goodberry

The Goodberry spell creates ten magical berries that each restore 1 hit point and provide a day's worth of nourishment when a creature uses its action to eat one.

Whilst in theory we should be grateful that this is not a cantrip, the problem with Goodberry is that players aren't going to be using it for its rubbish health recovery properties - but more as a source of food for the whole party.

For this functionality it is incredibly over powered for the cost of one first level spell slot. All a magic user needs to do is hold one level one spell slot back per game day, which is easily done when hex or point crawling, and then cast Goodberry before bedtime to ensure the party is fed.

If your game involves any amount of wilderness exploration, you can drop any ideas you might have about them hunting and foraging for food, or balancing inventory management with rations. Those game elements are made redundant. Apologies to any Rangers…

Base Carry Capacity & Bag of holding

Your base carrying capacity in lb is your STR score multiplied by 15. The Bag of Holding grants an additional 500 lb and 64 cubic feet of storage.

Near unlimited storage space. This is possibly the worst idea for a magic item in the entire game.

As players, simply spend your vast wealth (that you can carry in near infinite amounts) in town on multiple copies of every possible thing you could ever need, and then sit back in sheer boredom as you proceed to solve every in-game problem by pulling the perfect item out of your extra dimensional bag.

Yawn. Ditch it.

And it’s not like base carry capacity is much better, if we take the basic STR value of 10, that becomes 150 lb of carry capacity, to help you visualise that - it’s nearly 70 bags of sugar. That’s ridiculous, and even more so as you have characters invest in their STR stat above 10.

Not only do I get rid of these rules, I replace them with a much better inventory system lifted from Mausritter.

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Arcane focuses

An arcane focus replaces material spell components that do not have a listed gold cost. To cast a spell with a focus, you must hold it in one hand, which can also be used for somatic components.

Spells in D&D have one or more components which are indicated by the acronyms VSM which stand for Verbal, Somatic, and Material. Most spells have material components which in game terms reflects a balancing element - aspiring casters must have the requisite materials on their person in order to cast the spell.

Unfortunately, Arcane Focuses do away with this in most cases - allowing casters to replace the material requirement for items that ‘do not have a cost’ with the possession of a non consumable artefact representing an arcane focus.

That shattering crescendo you hear is the sound of intentionally designed internal character balance being launched through the window.

Honorable Mentions

Healing Word

Like Goodberry before it, the utility of Healing Word is not the amount of HP that it recovers, but rather for the fact that it brings someone back from death saving throws cheaply. Consider the combination of the following three elements:

• It can be cast at distance - characters do not need to be adjacent to their target.

• It can be cast as a bonus action - characters do not need to make a choice about sacrificing their main attack or restoring their ally.

• It’s a level one spell - casters have immediate access to it and as the game progresses with upcasting, have an abundance of slots with which to cast it.

As it is, I keep Healing Word in my games, and as GM I compensate by having vicious or intelligent enemies perform a “double tap”. The first attack takes a character down, and the second performs the coup de gras grâce (Ed. Thanks Dries!). I should mention that I don’t do this because I'm particularly sadistic or competitive (honest!) but rather to keep the game enjoyably challenging.

Fortunately this works for my group, but some people might find it too brutal or even ‘unfair’. In these cases, it might be worth dropping Healing Word instead.

Long Rest

Long Rest restores your character’s HP and Spell Slots to full, and often nullifies the effect of exhaustion effects and some status changes. It’s meant to represent the party recovering inbetween expeditions, however it is unfortunately frequently misused by GMs allowing the party to take a long rest every few encounters - essentially allowing them to approach nearly every challenge with the mindset of going nuclear.

It should be obvious that this undermines the vast majority of resource management, however rather than removing Long Rests from the game entirely, I ensure and introduce the following:

• Wandering monster rolls with a high percentage of hitting for when the Players want to take a rest in a place that is teeming with danger - like a dungeon. These interrupt a Long Rest and nullify the benefits.

• I house rule that for a Long Rest to provide any benefit, each character must additionally be in possession of a comfortable place to sleep (bed, bedroll, even a pile of hay) and some form of meal. That way, I’ve introduced a resource cost to the act, so even if players get away with a long rest in a dangerous area, it has still cost them valuable inventory space.

Conclusion

Have you considered the impacts of these 5e elements before, and how do you handle them? Let me know in the comments below if you think I’ve missed a trick here.

Additionally, Velocitree has linked their own blog response to my five cuts, which is well worth a read if you want an alternative take!

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running! If you’ve still got some time to kill, Perhaps I can persuade you to click through below to another one of my other posts?

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D&D’s Best Intro Campaign? I ran Lost Mine of Phandelver For My Group

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated tabletop gaming chap.

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TL;DR: Lost Mine of Phandelver starts strong with tight early dungeons and a solid onboarding for new players, but quickly loses focus. The villain is forgettable, the pacing drifts, and structural choices teach new DMs bad habits like railroading and pulling punches. I rebuilt huge sections and turned it into a spaghetti western, giving the BBEG presence, adding time pressure, and replacing the green dragon with a recurring ancient red. The result was decent enough, but only because of heavy rewrites.

Run it as written and you’ll learn the hard way.

Introduction

Belch, Duncath, Twig, Diego, and Nasbo fire up the Forge of Spells.

From the shadows: slow clap. “Well done…” says the Black Spider, stepping into the dim light. “You have been my pawn from the start…”

Her skin tears away. Her back splits. The Black Spider crumples, replaced by an ancient red dragon — Dragos, the Destroyer of Worlds.

“Bow before me… or burn in this place!”

What is the Lost Mine of Phandelver?

Lost Mine of Phandelver (LMoP) is the first D&D 5e starter set adventure. Released in 2014, LMoP is an event driven campaign for 3 - 5 players, taking characters from level 1 - 5.

It took me several months of play to finish this, you could probably do it faster but we’re limited to 2-3 hours sessions twice a month.

That’s right folks, it’s another review from Jimbo about a product that’s been out for chuffin’ ages already! Wooo.

Spoiler Warning

As written, the adventure is set on the Sword Coast, near Neverwinter, this dwarf dude named Gundren Rockseeker has found the legendary Wave Echo Cave (WEC), and the valuable Forge of Spells (FoS) within. He's recruited you to help him clear the place out and get it up and running.

The only problem is that en route to the frontier town of Phandalin, near WEC, Rockseeker is kidnapped by the Cragmaw Goblins, leaving you and your fellows to pick up the pieces.

The bulk of the adventure then follows the PCs as they attempt to find and rescue Rockseeker, discover the location of WEC for themselves, and thwart the various factions who're standing… sometimes in their way, and sometimes just off to the side.

This all ends with a fight against a BBEG you’d be forgiven for forgetting about called The Black Spider, who's been orchestrating all the local problems from the shadows like some moustache twirling villain out of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Ok, that's you all caught up.

So, What's it trying to do differently?

LMoP is a starter set, so it's trying to teach new DMs and players how the game works over the course of a strictly Event Driven Campaign (EDC). Emphasis on strictly, because all modules sit somewhere on a scale between sandbox and railroad. Well, this adventure sits at 90% railroad and IMO that’s too much for something that’s meant to set expectations.

The big problem here is that the EDC structure is a rigid sequence of set pieces where the players are nudged from one scene to the next. In my opinion, that’s a rubbish exposure to how an adventure should look for a new DM, and it’s a big reason you see so many online complaints about railroading from players regarding their lack of agency, and from burnt out DMs begging for help over their stress trying to force the flow of the game towards the predefined solution.

What does it do well?

Cragmaw Hideout in act 1 is a neat and concise little dungeon that does a good job teaching players about stealth, traps, competing factions, multiple paths and solutions. Aside from being too verbose, (which I’ll get to later) the dungeon presents a nice little challenge to the players, and is easy enough to run for the DM.

Redbrand Hideout too, is a little bigger but still very well designed and reinforces those lessons about multiple routes, traps, and adds rewards for extra exploration. It also includes a cool encounter with a Nothic which can lead to fun shenanigans - like sucking the skin off a willing dragonborn’s finger!

Finally I can confirm that this adventure contains both dungeons and a dragon, which at the very least earns it points for correct advertising.

Unfortunately that's about as much as I can honestly say that I thought was legitimately good. Everything else is 'meh' at best.

Yikes, I've got some beef. What didn't I like?

Deep breath.

Teaching the Wrong Lessons

Ok, so, as it's meant to be played the first encounter is a forced combat, seemingly 'balanced', and yet it's so deadly that any DM playing the ambushing goblins with any degree of tactical nouce should cause a TPK within a few turns. This is a terrible lesson - forced combats are bad enough, but making brand new DMs fight with one hand tied behind their back to give the fledgling players half a chance sets a bad precedent about expecting fudged rolls for both parties.

The text should acknowledge the deadliness here, and then give very specific guidance on what to do as DM if the player’s do not win.

Much later, Cragmaw Castle offers a false dichotomy. You see, players can go in the front door but that's obviously trapped, but if they do then it leads to several routes through the dungeon until the end and a potentially satisfying experience.. However, because of the aforementioned trap, the players do a quick bit of recon, and discover that they can just walk around the outside the castle and go in through the prominently placed side door with a simple pick lock check. After that they can chance upon skipping the entire dungeon by turning right on a whim and walking straight to the boss room with Gundren.

The game is trying to teach players that there are multiple paths and choices, but if one of those choices is obviously the right answer, then that's no choice at all - all we’re left with is an anti-climax.

Terrible Layout

Man alive, I hate long form text! If you want to run from the book (because, you know, that's why you bought a book in the first place) without having to spend hours rewriting and summarising it, then the DM is required to parse long form prose over several pages then flip back to a map for reference. This is no way to design an adventure, and it makes running scenes slow and easy to mess up.

Below is just 2 pages from the 9 page WEC dungeon. Can you imagine trying to read that at the table, under pressure, and then articulate it back to your players? And those read aloud text boxes - my player’s would be asleep!

Half-baked “Story”

Gundren, the whole game is about rescuing Gundren, but other than a single boring real-aloud text box which mentions him at the start of the game - the players never meet him or have any genuinely gripping reason to care that he’s missing other than an underwhelming amount of GP offered as a reward.

In truth, the game comes with pre-gen characters that we didn’t use, and one or two of them have some tertiary connections to Gundren and Phandalin, but you don’t meet his brothers until the end so they’re not pressing you forwards, and the relationship Gundren has with Sildar is only mercantile, so why should he bust a nut begging for your help?

Then there’s the Black Spider. A BBEG that players just don't care about. As written, you never meet the Black Spider until the end, and you barely learn anything about them, their motives, or even that they're particularly evil or just misunderstood. That's a real kicker when you consider that this is so story driven - what's the point of a baddie if the players don't have an opinion about them?

It feels like ancient wisdom to say that a dragon that most players will never meet is no dragon at all. If a dragon falls over in the woods but no PC is there to hear it - does it still make a noise? Well, said dragon lives in Thundertree, which is so far removed from the main quest that I can't see many players naturally finding it without heavy DM fiat. What a waste of the game's only dragon!

Important DM Skills Completely Ignored

The game doesn't give you any tools to address pacing. Gundren has been kidnapped, but time might as well be standing still for days on end whilst you side quest. This should be used to teach DMs about driving urgency and hammering the game forwards with a simple GM facing timeline of steadily worsening events that happen if the PCs fail to act.

Speaking of act - after you finish up with the Redbrands, act 3 suddenly opens up into a sandbox which sends jarring messages about the game becoming a hex crawl. There’s only the most cursory guidance given to teaching DMs this new skill, and when the players have just experienced two acts teaching them that the game is a railroad about a time sensitive rescue mission, the sudden lack of direction brings the game screeching to a whiplash inducing halt.

Then, in act 4, WEC is such a large and boring dungeon that even the designers feel obliged to acknowledge as much. To combat this, rather than equipping the DMs with detailed knowledge about how to run a procedural dungeon crawl, the game settles for a quick paragraph about rolling a d20 on a random monster table according to GM fiat. This is not sufficient, not even close.

How did I run it?

I'm an experienced GM so after giving the game a cursery read through and seeing a tonne of things both objectively and subjectively bad, I had lots of work cut out for me to make a bunch of changes.

Some of those changes were quite experimental and not all of them worked as I'd hoped. We lives and learns, don’t we precious?

Setting

To start with - old forgotten mines, gangs, a frontier town... come on - this is a western, and yet, the game seems to forget this. Barely anything else nods towards this as the game defaults again and again to generic European fantasy land. Bugger that. So I reskinned it into a spaghetti western, including house-ruling in sixshooters. Much better.

Then, given my aforementioned loathing of long form prose at the table, I went through every dungeon and rewrote every room out for brevity and utility. Check out this post if you want to learn how to do this.

Goblin Arrows

This was really experimental, I ran act 1 as a lvl 0 gauntlet - each player had a cast of 4 characters each and whoever survived until after Cragmaw Hideout got to level up to 1, gain a class and became their primary character. This worked pretty well, but if you try it yourself make sure your players fully understand what's going to happen, as most of their characters will die by design and the players are expected to embrace this. It worked for me, just about - but you do you.

Phandalin

The cast of Phandalin got pruned down to just a few memorable NPCs. One of Gundren’s brothers was dead from the start, murdered by the Redbrands to push that conflict to the front. Sister Garaele became possessed by Agatha the Banshee, forcing the party to solve that before they could get her help.

I got rid of Thundertree as well, it's too far away from the adventure site and has absolutely nothing to do with anything. I also swapped out the young green dragon who lives there with an ancient red dragon; Dragos, Destroyer of Worlds, and I had him turn up every now and then as this ever present threat to extort treasure from the players. Man, they hated that dude!

The Black Spider was given presence. Introduced early under the guise of a serving girl at the Sleeping Giant Inn, I had her and the party competing to secure a lockbox (Thanks Matty P) containing a vital key to the Forge. She even kidnapped a beloved NPC, turning her from an abstract villain into someone the players actively hated.

The Spider’s Web

In Act 3, I tried expanding Old Owl Well into a full “funhouse” dungeon, and even though it was cool, it heavily distracted from Gundren’s rescue and confused the group about what mattered. The lesson there was clear: trying to add sandbox elements into a strict railroad just muddies both.

By the end of the Old Owl Well thread my players had pretty much forgotten all about Gundren, so I very quickly abandoned the idea of the exploratory sandbox, and swiftly provided more clues to guide the players towards his rescue where I made liberal use of progress clocks to make sure my players knew what was at stake. That alone is responsible for rescuing the Cragmaw Castle session from being a massive anticlimax due to it's bad dungeon design. If you want to learn about how and why to use progress clocks, check this post.

Wave Echo Cave

Wave Echo Cave was rebuilt into something tighter and easier to run. The maze became a tense skill challenge instead of a drawn-out slog.

At the climax, I revealed that the Black Spider was actually Dragos all along, which was a nice twist. One of my players even sided with the ancient red dragon whilst the others chose to fight, which gave me the opportunity to finish a campaign my favourite way - with a massive PvP monster bash.

You see, I placed 5 pilotable stone golems in the FoS chamber, and when battle commenced, the players used these in their combat against Dragos (who was controlled by the player who sided with him) - it was awesome and played out like the finale of an episode of Power Rangers, whilst I got to sit back and watch this really tightly fought match between titans.

What do other commentators say?

Matty P over on YouTube really likes LMoP, and I took a lot of his tips to heart about improving the story and trimming some of the fat, over the course of his full playlist . Definitely worth watching if you're planning on running it.

Conclusion

In the end, I have mixed feelings about LMoP, but I'm unfortunately leaning towards it being a bit pants. I really enjoyed acts 1 and 2, but the adventure rapidly drifts away from focus in act 3. additionally, for a game all about a prewritten story, said story requires a major rewrite to make it satisfactory.

Also, as a starter set to introduce new players and DMs to D&D, I think it probably does more harm than good if I'm being honest. I'd like to try to excuse it's flaws by saying it's really old, but frankly, there are starter adventures for earlier editions that have existed for much longer and nail it - Keep on the Borderlands anyone?

I guess I enjoyed myself running it, but only because I enjoying playing games with my friends, and maybe that's enough for you too? That said - I would have enjoyed myself even more running something better.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running!

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Exploding dice: Make combat faster and more exciting with this one simple house rule

Word up my dice squirrels. Todays tip is short and sweet, like a caramel coated Gimli son of Gloin.

A common complaint about crunchy tactical combat games like 5e and Pathfinder is that battles can become a slog.

There are a number of things that you can do about this, such as using more interesting situations for combat encounters, lowering everyone's HP, unbalancing the encounters, and telegraphing monster attacks. But I also have a neat little house rule I use that's really simple to incorporate.

Damage dice explode, for everyone

When you roll the highest number in a given dice for damage or healing, you get to roll another dice of equal value. This stacks, meaning every time you roll max damage, you roll another die, potentially indefinitely.

This adds an element of unpredictability to combats, and it's a more satisfying critical hit than the traditional natural 20 approach. It also means that it's technically possible, though very unlikely to one shot something big and hairy, with unlimited possible exploding dice.

In fact, we also use the traditional house rule that a natural 20 equates to max damage, this compliments my rule because max damage neatly triggers the exploding dice house rule too.

Nothing beats the moment a player rolls an exploding die, then another, then another - the whole table erupts. And just when they think they've peaked, BOOM, another max roll! No one stays in their seat when that happens. But of course, the dice gods giveth and taketh away. The first time a goblin crits and it suddenly snowballs into a knock down? That’s when the real fear sets in.

There's another benefit too, it further differentiates the weapons in a satisfying way. Big weapons with bigger dice do more damage on average, but smaller weapons like a dagger are more swingy because they have more chance of an explosion, not only is this really thematic and satisfying, it also keeps these smaller weapons very relevant.

Conclusion

And that's it, I did tell you it was simple! Give it a go, I think you'll love the effect, and be sure to tell me how it went!

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.