House Rules: Crass Menagerie

The Campaign: Crass Menagerie uses a number of house rules in play, some of these are for ease of play but many are also aimed at a somewhat "grittier" adventure setting as that is what the party initially expressed interest in.

These are used in conjunction with the Variant Rules the campaign uses.

## Character Creation

The Player Character creation process follows a number of customizations detailed on the Character Creation Rules: Crass Menagerie page.

## Max HP First 3 Levels

**Rule**: The characters in this campaign do not have to roll their HP when leveling for the first three levels, instead using max HP rolls.

## Faster Attunement

**Rule**: Attuning to a magical item takes 1 action (6 seconds) to do. Unattuning to a magical item takes 10 minutes if done willingly. Otherwise attunement functions as described in the core rules.

**NEEDS REWRITE:** *Magic items that require attunement give off a magic connection, seeking to connect to something/someone. The players allow (most of the time) the magic of the item to wash over then and they are now attuned.*

*Most magic items take 1 Action to attune too.*

*Unattunement or severing the attunement takes 10 minutes if done willingly. Nicely this essentially sinks up with the +10 minute Ritual rule. Otherwise forced unattunement follows the rules as written taking 24 hours of a distance of 100 feet or more away.*

***This rule yaddie-yaddie, typically in D&D I don't like things that I cannot explain to myself (outside of warping reality with magic). 1 hour feels like for game mechanics, but what are you actually doing to attune? Not everyone meditates, not everyone is studious; just feels off.***

## Brutal/Truly Criticals

**Rule**: Instead of doubling damage dice for critical hits, the damage dice are maxed and then rolled again.

This was agreed upon in A Path Made. The justification is that rolling low on a critical hit can result in damage that is lower than a regular non-critical attack. Brutal criticals will always do more damage than non-critical hits even with the minimum damage rolls.

## Bonus Action Potions

**Rule**: Instead of requiring a full *Use an Object* action, quaffing a potion that is reasonably available for a PC only requires a bonus action.

This was declared/mentioned in A Path Made. The justification is that drinking a healing potion often will hardly even recover one round's worth of damage against a character, so requiring them to take their action on their turn to do so disincentivizes using healing potions. This house rule should make healing potions a more viable option.

## 15 ft Standing From Prone

**Rule**: Instead of using half your movement speed to stand from prone, all movement used to stand from prone is just 15 ft. *If a creature does not have 15 ft to stand up with, than it takes half it's movement speed to stand from prone.*

The normal rule was felt to punish high movement speed characters too much, as well as being counterintuitive: why would a quicker character require more movement to stand from prone?

## AoO when Standing from Prone

**Rule**: If a creature stands from prone within reach of another creature's melee then they provoke an attack of opportunity.

This applies to players, NPCs, monsters, etc. This helps make prone more significant and can help add a layer of tactics.

## Healer's Kit Dependency

**Rule**: A character can’t spend any Hit Dice after finishing a short rest until someone expends one use of a healer’s kit to bandage and treat the character’s wounds.

This rule is an optional rule from the Dungeon Master's Guide (Chapter 9, "Adventuring Options"). This makes for a grittier campaign, requiring players to have the appropriate supplies to heal any wounds or injuries they may incur. Combined with the Encumbrance variant rule that the campaign uses, this requires parties to resupply occasionally.

## Ration Dependency

**Rule**: In order to gain the benefits of a long rest, player characters must be fully fed according to the "Food" rules in the Player's Handbook in the "Adventuring" chapter.

This also makes for a grittier campaign, but with minimal bookkeeping.

## Hidden Death Saves

**Rule**: The Dungeon Master rolls all Death Saving throws, hidden to the players.

This rule was added to reduce the temptation to metagame players who were KO'd and to treat being reduced to 0 HP as a more urgent and dire situation than just a minor inconvenience. Along with some of the other house rules, this makes for a more gritty campaign experience.

## Intelligence Bonus Skills

**Rule**: A player character's Intelligence bonus confers a few additional benefits beyond the base rules.

 0
 +1
 +2
 +3
 +4
 +5

This was added to make Intelligence less of a "dump stat" for any class that didn't directly benefit from it.

## KO Exhaustion

**Rule:** When a player character is reduced to 0 HP, they accrue one level of exhaustion.

This rule was intended to discourage/combat "yo-yoing" where it was often an optimal strategy to only ever heal allies when they were knocked out. This imposes tangible lasting (but not permanent) effects from being knocked out. This works along with other house rules like the Brutal Criticals to encourage a grittier play style.

## Enhanced Exhaustion

**Rule:** The existing table of exhaustion effects is replaced with the updated table below.

 2
 3
 4
 5
 6

Compared to the Player's Handbook rules for exhaustion, this has unavoidable consequences at each level. With the PHB exhaustion rules, a single level of exhaustion was often a mere minor inconvenience and in situations like in combat was often irrelevant. In addition, even the PHB 3rd level of exhaustion was often mostly irrelevant to a large number of spellcasters as well since they could just use spells that avoided attack rolls entirely, The updated table imposes a disadvantage-equivalent negative to all rolls and imposed save DCs at the first level and a much harsher penalty at the third level.