5e Rule Cards and House Rules

5th edition D&D is a well packaged and streamlined machine. Its rules are simple and straightforward, which makes it very easy to tightly package reminders for our players. The attached images are ones I give to my players for our 5th edition games to remind of what actions they can take in a combat round, and to keep house rules easily accessible. 

The first card, the one that says Actions, tells our players what actions they can perform in a normal combat round. The card that says Combat and Movement calls out specific optional rules being used or house rules that have been added. We'll talk about most of these below. The card labeled Resting Rules (it's intended as a pun so please read it that way) we will discuss at length below since it has sometimes proved controversial with viewers who have put a little (and only a little) thought into the game mechanics. 

So, on with the show!

Disengage
Rules as written, a character may disengage and run through a whole enemy formation without suffering any attacks. This is a problem. Disengage should be for retreats, not advances.

Flanking
Positioning is fun, and this particular rule is ripped right from the DMG.

Surprise, dex based AC, shield based AC
My biggest gripe about 5th edition is simplified AC system. An incapacitated creature, rules as written, still gets AC bonuses for shield and dexterity. We're here to add a little more granularity into AC calculations. Anytime you might not be able to move well, you shouldn't get AC adjustments for Dex. Anytime you might not be able to use your shield arm, you shouldn't get AC adjustments for shields. Personally I think that you should still get AC adjustments for Dex when restrained specifically against the one creature restraining you, but it's difficult to condense that down into a tiny blurb and it brings up more edge cases: What if you're restrained by more than one creature, for example. In the end, I went with "no AC when restrained" to fit with the simplifications of 5e.

Cover from other creatures
This comes up from time to time in dungeons, hallways, and formations. Using the preexisting 5e cover rules works very well here.

Suffocating
Arcadia, the world in which I run my games, tries to blend 5e and 2e D&D, which can be difficult. 2e has really nice rules for holding your breath, and so I'm adapting them over here. 

Dashing
Rogues get dash as a bonus action at 2nd level, and can then move, action dash, and bonus action dash wherever they go. This makes them impossibly fast, and creates all sorts of wackiness. Allowing only 1 dash per turn really solves that problem. The only other change we need to make is to allow Expeditious Retreat to break this new house rule so that it can still function well. 

Swimming
This is meant to mean that if your encumbrance is less than or equal to your strength score, you can swim. If it is more than your strength score, but less than twice your strength score, you can tread water. If you are carrying more than twice your strength score in encumbrance, you sink. Please do not tie weights to yourself and jump in a pool to test this, you will die. 

Resting
5e D&D power balance is built around a number of encounters per long rest. For such a critical topic, it gets very little verbiage in the books. If you refer to page 84 in your DMG, you'll see the following passages.

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

...

This provides a rough estimate ... for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a Long Rest

What is being said here is that a party should have 6-8 medium or hard encounters between long rests. If a long rest happens once a day, then a party should have 6-8 such encounters in 1 day. But if your pace of game is slowed down such that they are only likely to have that many encounters in a week, then a long rest should happen roughly once a week. 

My games do have this slower pace of action. It'd be a very rare thing for so many encounters in a single day, and so I've adjusted the pacing of resting to match the pacing of our adventures. This maintains the rough balance of power, and brings the 5e version of the world a little closer to the 2e version of the world. 

To add a little more grit and granularity, I've also adjusted how hit dice are restored. Rather than getting half of your max hit dice back on a long rest, characters regain 1 hit die per short rest, creating a slow but steady healing process. If you want to get super technical, martial characters get a mild buff until level 16 via this system, but since parties travel together this buff isn't actually realized in any meaningful way.

Lastly, there are lots of edge cases regarding what constitutes rest, and so I've come up with 3 new sub optimal resting states to cover these. 

• Negative Rest / All Nighter underscores that people simply can't push themselves forever, and the party that decides to march all night long will find themselves exhausted rather quickly.
• No Rest means the party (or character) isn't working through the night, but they also aren't sleeping. Trying to stay awake without physically exerting yourself runs the risk that you just fall asleep though, and even if you are successful you'll be exhausted the next day. 
• Rough Rest is for when characters are traveling through dangerous areas and need to rotate watches, or when the environmental conditions are unfavorable. No benefits, no penalties. Rough rest is a nice tool to help underscore the difference between actually recovering from something and just maintaining where you are.

I expect that most adventuring days that end sleeping outside will be in the Rough Rest category, unless the party goes out of their way to bring blankets, bed rolls, and tents, or is in a very mild climate and isn't too concerned about keeping watch. This also helps to underscore the value of returning to town, and gives players an incentive to not piss off innkeepers, a classic pastime of D&D characters. 

With these tools available as handouts on Roll20 (my platform of choice, for now), it should be a breeze for players to look up the core rules on their own without having to rifle through books, bookmarks, or google searches.