## Bonus Action Potions Common house rule to allow the drinking of a potion that was easily accessible on your person as a bonus action, making them more useful generally. ## Brutal Criticals When a critical is rolled, instead of rolling a second set of damage dice, the damage roll gets a bonus of the maximum value of those dice. For example, if a normal weapon attack would be 1d6 + 4, a normal critical would be 2d6+4, while a brutal critical would instead be 1d6 +10. The maximum value is the same, but the brutal critical guarantees a solid critical success rather than the chance of rolling, say, two 1s. **Example**: Fighter is striking someone with a longsword held in two hands: * Normal weapon damage: 1d10 + 6 (Avg 12) * Critical weapon damage: 1d10 + 6 + 1d10 (Avg 18) * Brutal critical weapon damage: 1d10 + 6 + 10 (Avg 22) This rule does unevenly boost critical hits for abilities like Sneak Attack, so adjustments can be requested at session zero if desired. ## Enhanced Skill Checks - **Garbage in, Garbage out**: In an effort to make actions more descriptive. If you want to “search a room” or “search a body” the DC will be high and the results limited. If you want to "search the body for suspicious wounds", or "search his pockets for a key", or "check the walls of the room for seams that might indicate a hidden door", those tasks will be easier and more guaranteed to yield definitive binary results (yes/no). The more specific you are with the thing you'd like to do and how you're doing it, the better for you. - **Partial successes**: A bit of a devil's bargain, where sometimes if you miss a check DC but not by that much, the DM will offer you the chance to succeed, but describe a consequence that will take place as well. - **Blind Checks**: If you choose, you may have me roll checks for which knowing the roll might make not metagaming challenging for you, or which might be more exciting to play out without knowing. You can opt for this when I ask for the check, and tell me your modifier when asking. Good examples of this are Insight or Perception checks. We shouldn't make this the norm (I have enough things to roll :D ), but occasionally it makes for a fun result. - **Example**: When talking to the bartender, the player who plays a mage notices something odd in the results and suggests his disbelief, and is asked to roll an Insight check. He counters by asking the DM to roll it, and that his modifier is a +4. The DM rolls behind the screen and adjudicates the result: "His tone and body language doesn’t seem off to you - as far as you can tell, in any obvious way at least, he’s not lying". That is what you get, and you don't know if that's because you rolled good, or rolled bad, or if it would have been the same either way. ## Exhausted Spellcasting Sometimes a spell caster may be out of the spell slots needed to cast a certain spell. A spell caster who normally uses spell slots has the option to use their own life force to power their spells instead of spell slots. Such a caster may attempt to cast a spell without expending a spell slot. They must make a Constitution saving throw, with a DC equal to 10 + the spell's level. On a failure, the caster suffers a number of levels of exhaustion equal to the spell's level. On a success, the caster suffers half as many levels of exhaustion (minimum 1). **WARNING**: This means that attempting this as a character with no previous levels of Exhaustion for a level 6+ spell *could* result in death, and would *definitely* result in crippling consequences. ### Exhaustion Level Effects 1. Disadvantage on ability checks 2. Speed halved 3. Disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws 4. Hit point maximum halved 5. Speed reduced to 0 6. Death ## Fumbles Rolling a one on an attack roll results in a fumble, result rolled by the DM on a chart and adjudicated. Fumble results would be often frustrating or amusing, occasionally even cause danger, but normally not would not be drastic or dramatic. They would range from dropping your weapon, to striking a random nearby target instead, to simply missing.