July
13
Variant Long Rest Healing for D&D 5E
This may be a throwback to D&D 3.5e mechanisms where getting all of your precious HP back was a little more difficult and took more than a snooze and a sammich. Taking a rest and fully recovering from the day’s multiple battles, critical hits, traps, and mishaps in 5th edition feels like the toll of adventuring has really no lingering effects. Being that I’m usually the DM, this may suggest to readers that the 5e long rest rules are a sore point for me, however it was feedback from some of my players that was the inspiration for this variant rule. So I thought of a way to handle the long rest rule that might cause heroes to feel the pinch if they over extend themselves in battle.
For my campaign, I wanted to make a villain that the players really wanted to destroy. Yet I wanted him to have qualities that the players could sympathize with at the same time. Not that I was expecting them to have a moral or ideological conflict as they pursued the villain, but I wanted them to at least intuitively understand how and why the bad guy came to be bad. I also wanted him to be the kind of villain where it would be entirely unthinkable to support his cause.
My last major D&D project was a campaign that spanned about three years. I was fortunate to have a stable group of core players who were exploring a persistent and evolving world. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I anticipated that the story would last for so long. But looking back, I can see some of the things that made it all work.
For this idea, I was thinking about cursed items and that it might be interesting to create one that could be useful to a player. After all, if you know a cursed item’s secrets, it could still be useful, you just have to use it differently. After all, the most useful items at a DM’s disposal are things that have multiple applications in a story. Why should the DM have all the fun? This item could give a player the opportunity to mess with the NPCs a little bit. Adjust values for this item as appropriate to your game system and the quest level you’re playing at.
The Memory Prison was an idea that I intended as more of a role playable experience rather than anything else. It isn’t a physically dangerous trap. Nevertheless, it can pose serious peril depending on how the DM decides to implement it.
One of my favorite things to do when creating magical items is to take a familiar item out of the source books and re-purpose it while leaving the original function intact. The Immovable Sword in this case is exactly what it sounds like: a sword that also functions just like an immovable rod! Fun!