Not so much tried-and-true house rules, but a few tips.
-Monitor your players' wealth carefully, and favor rewards for completing quests and objectives other than gold. A provincial town that deals primarily in copper and silver does not secretly have ten thousand gold to hand out to adventurers who slay basement rats for them. Rewards for Saving The Day could be room and board (Modest lifestyle pro bono), a strong new mule to help carry the party's goods, letters of praise and recommendation from the town mayor, and other things such a place would naturally have on hand. If your players are in the Big City they're more likely to receive straight cash for doing Adventuring Things, but they're also going to have expenses, and if you're Gritty Realism-ing, you should be tracking those expenses. Which leads to:
-Make the characters pay their lifestyle fees. You'll want to adjust the cost of a given lifestyle based on where the campaign is happening and how tightly you're controlling wealth, but characters need to eat and they need a place to sleep. Both of those things cost money, and/or Adventuring Favors. The characters might need medical attention; could be that a long rest to recover from injuries only applies if the characters can receive medical treatment during that seven-day period, which also costs money. Normal D&D adventurers are paid unimaginably lavishly for their work and also tend to be comped everything because what's room and board at the local flophouse when you're already giving these people two thousand gold every time they tromp back into town? Stop doing that, and your game immediately becomes much more gritty.
-Sickness. It's a thing. Any time an adventurer suffers injury whilst grubbing around in a filthy goblin den, or while chasing smugglers through a swamp, or while...basically doing anything that counts as an adventure, note it. When next they short rest, roll a Con save for anybody who suffered an open wound; if someone treats the wound, roll it with advantage. Scale the DC based on how disease-riddled whatever area you're in is. If they fail, they contract an infection. Don't TELL them this. Let it stew for a bit, then start describing symptoms as they appear. Sickness and disease were rampant in the eras these stories take place in, and doing sweaty, dirty, nasty work in foul environments against foes with filthy weapons means your adventurers should be catching shit. Let the players know this is a thing you're doing; the characters would be aware of the risk of disease and could work to mitigate it.
In that vein:
-Make mundane, nonmagical point healing more readily available. Consider allowing anyone with Medicine proficiency to also take the Healer feat out of progression (because **** off with making Healer a feat instead of a basic function of the damned healer's kit, Wizards), and modify healer's kits to allow someone to use a use to treat open wounds to help that disease roll thing. If magical healing is going to be extremely rare and rest-based recovery is effectively eliminated, the characters should be able to overcome this to some degree with medical supplies and field first aid, just the same way modern campers/hikers/soldiers/Other-Adventurer-Analogues do. Medicine is a criminally underutilized proficiency in basic D&D and the base-rules healer's kit is useless. If you're using these gritty realism rules, you also have a chance to allow your players the option of becoming ELS/combat medics, which is a trope surprisingly missing from most D&D and which I've seen a lot of players lament not being able to really do.
I am trying to get my group to lean more towards using this type of game play. I already feel like this edition of D&D is less High adventure then the other editions, IE you get less magic, less feats ect.. so more low fantasy IMO. so just go the little extra and make it more grim and real. I think it will add to the game. thanks
I find 5E to be too high fantasy. At least for my taste. I have the gritty realism on deck as the format for my next game and am really looking forward to it. The amount of combat, type of combat, amount of magic and "supernatural resources" used really puts a damper on the game for me.
One thing I noticed about a lot of DnD games where people complain about how the game is too “fantasy” or not gritty enough, don’t use the rules as applied to begin with. These standard rules have an incredible impact on the game:
1) Downtime is a HUGE money suck. Research, crafting items, and even finding magical items shops, is expensive and difficult. But instead, you’ll see DMs showering their PCs with money and magical items. Magical Item costs in the DMG are exorbitant - give your PCs *some* magical items, but make them buy the others.
2) Monsters hitting people while they’re down is a good thing and totally normal. Instead, DMs will come up with increasingly complex reasons as to why they won’t (or PCs start arguing why they shouldn’t), fundamentally making healing for 1HP the best spell in the game and wrecking most of the grittiness the base game provides.
3) Use Spell Components. Because of Downtime, money becomes an issue again. And every Find Familiar spell, Revivify, etc spell is another drain on those resources. In a straight-laced game, these will be heavy costs for any party.
A few tips that you can try before going “full grit”. 🙂
For me, the thing that 5e does that goes against the 'Gritty' playstyle is Resting. One Long Rest and some guy who literally DIED yesterday is up to full health? HUH?
I've seen lots of ways to change this including making Short Rest take 4 hours and Long Rest is 24 hours. You get to roll your HP dice every Long Rest so someone with 10 hit dice who rolls poorly might take 3-4 DAYS to completely heal up. Of course, if there is Healing magic around then it's not usually an issue but many parties don't have a 'dedicated Healer' these days.
And none of that take a long rest and the effects of life drain, strength drain, whatever drain go away. Nononono you need a Restoration spell for that. Don't have it? Pay a priest.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
One thing I like to do for this is to allow additional options for Inspiration, so it counts like an additional resource that they can earn (this is usually reroll instead of advantage, because advantage is too damn easy to get, and a more bespoke use like a Dragonborn recharging their breath with it).
You'll need to nip yoyo healing in the bud if you want to get that gritty feel going, my personal appraoch for this is:
-The first time you drop to 0hp and get back up you have a level of exhaustion, this first level goes away on a short rest
-For each additional time you go down, you gain an additional level of exhastion, the moment you hit level 2 all the levels take a long rest to get rid of as standard
-Failed Death saves don't reset until a rest
-You can't feed someone unconscious a Goodberry, nor can you spam it like a healing snack, one a day is normal any more berries consumed within the same day require a Con save (increasing DC for each subsequent berry) on a fail you throw up all the berries (losing the hp benefits) and you're poisoned for the rest of the day. One berry is meant to fill you up for the day, anymore should be like serious magical over eating.
Also consider allowing the additional of lesser healing items like poultices and salves that can have their ingredients foraged but are far less effective than a healing potion and spoil over time.
Good luck with your game and keep us updated on it!
So I'm looking to Run a campaign using the Gritty realism rest rules variant from the DMG
Does anyone have other rule variants or house rules I can add to the campaign to accentuate the longer rest times and slower gameplay?
Use variant encumbrance, track food and water, come up with a very solid wandering encounter system, track time. All of this will double down on the time it takes in between rests. Making it tough, dangerous, and more strategic.
Tracking food and water can be very useful, if it’s taking days to heal you either need to have a large food supply/forage ability or you may be returning to civilization wounded to heal up and return introducing lots of encounter opportunities. A war and of Orcs out raiding may not be problem at full strength but when your at half hit points to start and maybe down a level of exhaustion with your casters spell slots limited by lack of rest and exhaustion that same band could spell real trouble. Gritty realism is an entirely different style of play but many of us really enjoy it.
2) Monsters hitting people while they’re down is a good thing and totally normal. Instead, DMs will come up with increasingly complex reasons as to why they won’t (or PCs start arguing why they shouldn’t), fundamentally making healing for 1HP the best spell in the game and wrecking most of the grittiness the base game provides.
.....
In my game we have a homebrew rule for this where everytime a character wakes up from being knocked unconscious, they get 1 level of exhaustion. It really makes them reconsider the "Wack-a-mole" healing strategy and prioritize not going down in the first place.
This has led to the inside joke at our table: "Exhaustion is a resource" after my warlock hit level 5 exhaustion because the druid wouldn't let me just stay down lol
-Sickness. It's a thing. Any time an adventurer suffers injury whilst grubbing around in a filthy goblin den, or while chasing smugglers through a swamp, or while...basically doing anything that counts as an adventure, note it. When next they short rest, roll a Con save for anybody who suffered an open wound; if someone treats the wound, roll it with advantage. Scale the DC based on how disease-riddled whatever area you're in is. If they fail, they contract an infection. Don't TELL them this. Let it stew for a bit, then start describing symptoms as they appear. Sickness and disease were rampant in the eras these stories take place in, and doing sweaty, dirty, nasty work in foul environments against foes with filthy weapons means your adventurers should be catching shit. Let the players know this is a thing you're doing; the characters would be aware of the risk of disease and could work to mitigate it.
In that vein:
-Make mundane, nonmagical point healing more readily available. Consider allowing anyone with Medicine proficiency to also take the Healer feat out of progression (because **** off with making Healer a feat instead of a basic function of the damned healer's kit, Wizards), and modify healer's kits to allow someone to use a use to treat open wounds to help that disease roll thing. If magical healing is going to be extremely rare and rest-based recovery is effectively eliminated, the characters should be able to overcome this to some degree with medical supplies and field first aid, just the same way modern campers/hikers/soldiers/Other-Adventurer-Analogues do. Medicine is a criminally underutilized proficiency in basic D&D and the base-rules healer's kit is useless. If you're using these gritty realism rules, you also have a chance to allow your players the option of becoming ELS/combat medics, which is a trope surprisingly missing from most D&D and which I've seen a lot of players lament not being able to really do.
In a similar vein, disease is too quickly dispatched in 5E. A single uncontested-roll 2nd level spell or a quick Lay on Hands from a 1st level Paladin cures virtually ANY sickness that isn't specifically magical. If you want gritty realism, make any attempt to cure a disease something to they have to roll against. DC 10 to DC 18 depending on the source of the illness and how deadly it would be IRL or based on how high level the caster of the magical disease was. Give the party bonuses to this roll based on A) whether the healing spellcaster/Medicine skill user hss done any extra legwork to investigate the disease's origins and B) whether the sick person has been eating well and getting frequent short rests in between strenuous activity. Suddenly, health isn't just a bunch of abstract hit points. Now they have to think about maintaining it and making an effort to get better. (And incidentally give the Ranger something useful to do with those Survival and Nature checks on a more frequent basis.)
One thing that you should look at with gritty realism is spell durations. I'm not saying you need to necessarily change anything, but the altered timescale can make certain types of spells or abilities weaker or stronger and it's something to think about.
Long duration buffs and class features with limited durations like an artillerist's turret become much weaker under this variant, while permanent and very short duration effects remain relatively unchanged.
No ability bonus to damage I can see, but to hit? It’s certainly gritty, but realism? That’s what dexterity and practice are really all about for gunslingers - building the hand-eye coordination and hand speed. No bonus to damage make sense your ability has no effect on the damage the bullet does, only on what part of the body it does it to.
No ability bonus to damage I can see, but to hit? It’s certainly gritty, but realism? That’s what dexterity and practice are really all about for gunslingers - building the hand-eye coordination and hand speed. No bonus to damage make sense your ability has no effect on the damage the bullet does, only on what part of the body it does it to.
imo that eye-hand coordination you're talking about has more to do with initiative imo than being able to hit better because your fast. I've spent days on end staring through a scope to the point where one side of my face was bright-red sunburned and the other was my natural ghosty-white...and shot more pistol rounds at moving/stationary targets than I could possible count. It has nothing to do with str or dex, its just pure training...which is D&D's proficiency. I think your thoughts are focused on a subclass, not weapons in general...and maybe that subclass gets a double proficiency / expertise bonus...but the idea that dex lets you hit better is silly - all imo.
Weapons changed humanity's pecking order because they're an equalizier, doesn't matter how big, small, smart, stupid, slow or fast you are...you shoot, you hit, you hurt.
So I'm looking to Run a campaign using the Gritty realism rest rules variant from the DMG
Does anyone have other rule variants or house rules I can add to the campaign to accentuate the longer rest times and slower gameplay?
The Dungeon Dudes on Gritty Realism
The Dungeon Dudes made a video about the Gritty Realism variants. They're very knowledgeable when it comes to D&D.
Not so much tried-and-true house rules, but a few tips.
-Monitor your players' wealth carefully, and favor rewards for completing quests and objectives other than gold. A provincial town that deals primarily in copper and silver does not secretly have ten thousand gold to hand out to adventurers who slay basement rats for them. Rewards for Saving The Day could be room and board (Modest lifestyle pro bono), a strong new mule to help carry the party's goods, letters of praise and recommendation from the town mayor, and other things such a place would naturally have on hand. If your players are in the Big City they're more likely to receive straight cash for doing Adventuring Things, but they're also going to have expenses, and if you're Gritty Realism-ing, you should be tracking those expenses. Which leads to:
-Make the characters pay their lifestyle fees. You'll want to adjust the cost of a given lifestyle based on where the campaign is happening and how tightly you're controlling wealth, but characters need to eat and they need a place to sleep. Both of those things cost money, and/or Adventuring Favors. The characters might need medical attention; could be that a long rest to recover from injuries only applies if the characters can receive medical treatment during that seven-day period, which also costs money. Normal D&D adventurers are paid unimaginably lavishly for their work and also tend to be comped everything because what's room and board at the local flophouse when you're already giving these people two thousand gold every time they tromp back into town? Stop doing that, and your game immediately becomes much more gritty.
-Sickness. It's a thing. Any time an adventurer suffers injury whilst grubbing around in a filthy goblin den, or while chasing smugglers through a swamp, or while...basically doing anything that counts as an adventure, note it. When next they short rest, roll a Con save for anybody who suffered an open wound; if someone treats the wound, roll it with advantage. Scale the DC based on how disease-riddled whatever area you're in is. If they fail, they contract an infection. Don't TELL them this. Let it stew for a bit, then start describing symptoms as they appear. Sickness and disease were rampant in the eras these stories take place in, and doing sweaty, dirty, nasty work in foul environments against foes with filthy weapons means your adventurers should be catching shit. Let the players know this is a thing you're doing; the characters would be aware of the risk of disease and could work to mitigate it.
In that vein:
-Make mundane, nonmagical point healing more readily available. Consider allowing anyone with Medicine proficiency to also take the Healer feat out of progression (because **** off with making Healer a feat instead of a basic function of the damned healer's kit, Wizards), and modify healer's kits to allow someone to use a use to treat open wounds to help that disease roll thing. If magical healing is going to be extremely rare and rest-based recovery is effectively eliminated, the characters should be able to overcome this to some degree with medical supplies and field first aid, just the same way modern campers/hikers/soldiers/Other-Adventurer-Analogues do. Medicine is a criminally underutilized proficiency in basic D&D and the base-rules healer's kit is useless. If you're using these gritty realism rules, you also have a chance to allow your players the option of becoming ELS/combat medics, which is a trope surprisingly missing from most D&D and which I've seen a lot of players lament not being able to really do.
Please do not contact or message me.
I am trying to get my group to lean more towards using this type of game play. I already feel like this edition of D&D is less High adventure then the other editions, IE you get less magic, less feats ect.. so more low fantasy IMO. so just go the little extra and make it more grim and real. I think it will add to the game. thanks
I find 5E to be too high fantasy. At least for my taste. I have the gritty realism on deck as the format for my next game and am really looking forward to it. The amount of combat, type of combat, amount of magic and "supernatural resources" used really puts a damper on the game for me.
One thing I noticed about a lot of DnD games where people complain about how the game is too “fantasy” or not gritty enough, don’t use the rules as applied to begin with. These standard rules have an incredible impact on the game:
1) Downtime is a HUGE money suck. Research, crafting items, and even finding magical items shops, is expensive and difficult. But instead, you’ll see DMs showering their PCs with money and magical items. Magical Item costs in the DMG are exorbitant - give your PCs *some* magical items, but make them buy the others.
2) Monsters hitting people while they’re down is a good thing and totally normal. Instead, DMs will come up with increasingly complex reasons as to why they won’t (or PCs start arguing why they shouldn’t), fundamentally making healing for 1HP the best spell in the game and wrecking most of the grittiness the base game provides.
3) Use Spell Components. Because of Downtime, money becomes an issue again. And every Find Familiar spell, Revivify, etc spell is another drain on those resources. In a straight-laced game, these will be heavy costs for any party.
A few tips that you can try before going “full grit”. 🙂
Decide, right now, what you are going to do with goodberry.
In a previous game I was in, that spell has caused more heated words that anything else impacted by 7-day long rests.
For me, the thing that 5e does that goes against the 'Gritty' playstyle is Resting. One Long Rest and some guy who literally DIED yesterday is up to full health? HUH?
I've seen lots of ways to change this including making Short Rest take 4 hours and Long Rest is 24 hours. You get to roll your HP dice every Long Rest so someone with 10 hit dice who rolls poorly might take 3-4 DAYS to completely heal up. Of course, if there is Healing magic around then it's not usually an issue but many parties don't have a 'dedicated Healer' these days.
You could always go old school.
You heal back 1 hp per day of light activity. 2 hp per day if you get bedrest. Con modifier up to the GM.
You die at -10 hp. No death saves, no you have to be hit for double your max hp BS. You get to -10, you're dead.
If you reach 0 hp, you bleed at 1 hp per round until you die. Unless some kind soul binds your wounds or casts a heal on you.
Long and Short Rest cooldowns on abilities not changed but you don't heal.
If you die, and you get raised, you permanently lose a point of Con. Unless True Resurrection was used.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
And none of that take a long rest and the effects of life drain, strength drain, whatever drain go away. Nononono you need a Restoration spell for that. Don't have it? Pay a priest.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
One thing I like to do for this is to allow additional options for Inspiration, so it counts like an additional resource that they can earn (this is usually reroll instead of advantage, because advantage is too damn easy to get, and a more bespoke use like a Dragonborn recharging their breath with it).
You'll need to nip yoyo healing in the bud if you want to get that gritty feel going, my personal appraoch for this is:
-The first time you drop to 0hp and get back up you have a level of exhaustion, this first level goes away on a short rest
-For each additional time you go down, you gain an additional level of exhastion, the moment you hit level 2 all the levels take a long rest to get rid of as standard
-Failed Death saves don't reset until a rest
-You can't feed someone unconscious a Goodberry, nor can you spam it like a healing snack, one a day is normal any more berries consumed within the same day require a Con save (increasing DC for each subsequent berry) on a fail you throw up all the berries (losing the hp benefits) and you're poisoned for the rest of the day. One berry is meant to fill you up for the day, anymore should be like serious magical over eating.
Also consider allowing the additional of lesser healing items like poultices and salves that can have their ingredients foraged but are far less effective than a healing potion and spoil over time.
Good luck with your game and keep us updated on it!
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Use variant encumbrance, track food and water, come up with a very solid wandering encounter system, track time. All of this will double down on the time it takes in between rests. Making it tough, dangerous, and more strategic.
Tracking food and water can be very useful, if it’s taking days to heal you either need to have a large food supply/forage ability or you may be returning to civilization wounded to heal up and return introducing lots of encounter opportunities. A war and of Orcs out raiding may not be problem at full strength but when your at half hit points to start and maybe down a level of exhaustion with your casters spell slots limited by lack of rest and exhaustion that same band could spell real trouble. Gritty realism is an entirely different style of play but many of us really enjoy it.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
In my game we have a homebrew rule for this where everytime a character wakes up from being knocked unconscious, they get 1 level of exhaustion. It really makes them reconsider the "Wack-a-mole" healing strategy and prioritize not going down in the first place.
This has led to the inside joke at our table: "Exhaustion is a resource" after my warlock hit level 5 exhaustion because the druid wouldn't let me just stay down lol
In a similar vein, disease is too quickly dispatched in 5E. A single uncontested-roll 2nd level spell or a quick Lay on Hands from a 1st level Paladin cures virtually ANY sickness that isn't specifically magical. If you want gritty realism, make any attempt to cure a disease something to they have to roll against. DC 10 to DC 18 depending on the source of the illness and how deadly it would be IRL or based on how high level the caster of the magical disease was. Give the party bonuses to this roll based on A) whether the healing spellcaster/Medicine skill user hss done any extra legwork to investigate the disease's origins and B) whether the sick person has been eating well and getting frequent short rests in between strenuous activity. Suddenly, health isn't just a bunch of abstract hit points. Now they have to think about maintaining it and making an effort to get better. (And incidentally give the Ranger something useful to do with those Survival and Nature checks on a more frequent basis.)
One thing that you should look at with gritty realism is spell durations. I'm not saying you need to necessarily change anything, but the altered timescale can make certain types of spells or abilities weaker or stronger and it's something to think about.
Long duration buffs and class features with limited durations like an artillerist's turret become much weaker under this variant, while permanent and very short duration effects remain relatively unchanged.
if using firearms, no ability bonuses to hit/dmg. That's just ridiculously unreal. Prof bonus to hit only.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
No ability bonus to damage I can see, but to hit? It’s certainly gritty, but realism? That’s what dexterity and practice are really all about for gunslingers - building the hand-eye coordination and hand speed. No bonus to damage make sense your ability has no effect on the damage the bullet does, only on what part of the body it does it to.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
imo that eye-hand coordination you're talking about has more to do with initiative imo than being able to hit better because your fast. I've spent days on end staring through a scope to the point where one side of my face was bright-red sunburned and the other was my natural ghosty-white...and shot more pistol rounds at moving/stationary targets than I could possible count. It has nothing to do with str or dex, its just pure training...which is D&D's proficiency. I think your thoughts are focused on a subclass, not weapons in general...and maybe that subclass gets a double proficiency / expertise bonus...but the idea that dex lets you hit better is silly - all imo.
Weapons changed humanity's pecking order because they're an equalizier, doesn't matter how big, small, smart, stupid, slow or fast you are...you shoot, you hit, you hurt.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks