Homebrew Mechanics

The Advantage (and Disadvantage) dice roll modification can be gained in a large number of ways, usually resulting in multiple instances. To allow players to plan how to tackle difficult tasks as well as earning greater detriments through play, the table will use a 'floating' modifier of +/- 2 for each instance of Advantage or Disadvantage.

From Darker Dungeons:

A tool helps you do something you couldn't otherwise do—pick a lock, craft an item, forge a document. Some tools are basic enough to provide basic use without training—cook's utensils, painter's supplies, dice games. Most, however, require proficiency to use properly.

If you are proficient with a tool, you can add your proficiency bonus to any ability check made with it.

Tools & Skills: If you are proficient with both a tool and a skill—for example, an instrument with Performance, cook's utensils with Survival, a healer's kit with Medicine—you may add your proficiency bonus and make your roll with advantage.

Edited from Darker Dungeons:

Reaction speed is determined first-and-foremost by your thoughts—the faster you can think, the faster your brain can tell your body to act.
When rolling for initiative, you may choose whether to add your Dexterity modifier or your Intelligence modifier.
In the event of a tie, the two combatants roll a single d20 and the combatant with the higher result goes first in the order.

Edited from the published homebrew document:

Every adventurer worth his salt knows that life is cheap. To pretend otherwise is the height of foolishness. However, even characters on the brink of death are capable of great sacrifice and heroic last stands.

The Death's Door variant rules are designed to allow the players to participate in combat after they drop to 0, and to feel the stress of 'Fight or Flight'. While players will actually be slightly more difficult to kill, it creates the feeling of just barely surviving deadly situations.

Dropping to 0 Hit Points. When you drop to 0 hit points:

• You are considered Dying for the sake of communication
• You immediately fall prone
• Your concentration is broken
• You must make immediately make a death saving throw

Acting while Dying. Characters who are Dying are able to make actions, bonus actions, move and use items as usual, albeit with a penalty. They are able to take the Disengage and Dodge actions without this penalty, which follows.

If you choose to make an action, a bonus action, or otherwise exert yourself, you must first make a Death Saving throw.

Damage when Dying. If you take any damage while you have 0 hit points, you accumulate one failed Death Save - even if the damage is from a critical hit. This ruling does not alter the Massive Damage ruling of immediate death, which is still in effect.

Healing and recovery. If you receive any amount of healing when Dying, the character is no longer considered Dying and can act without these penalties. All Death Save failures remain and must be tracked until a long rest, of which every 6 hours where the character is not exerting themselves (such as travel, combat or exploration) removes one failure. Occasionally this can mean that resting and staying in a safe location such as a town for the evening and following day removes two failures.

Variant Rules for Healing et al. he Healer's Kit is intended to help stabilize dying characters, while the Healer feat and various spells are also supposed to deal with this situation. If the Death's Door rules creates a discrepancy in the language of the game, it should be presumed that stabilizing or healing will remove the Dying condition.

Further discrepancies can be solved through understanding the intent of the rule:

• In the case of a magical effect it will usually overcome the Dying condition
• In the case of a mundane action, only significant effort will overcome the Dying condition
• Other effects must be weighed in terms of the 'resources' used by the Player and whether it is enough to take priority over the 50/50 die roll (the Death Save)

Edited from Darker Dungeons:

Instead of tracking individual things such as ammunition or supplies remaining, represent these resources with a die that grows or shrinks in sides over time. Roll this die whenever you use the resource: if you roll too low, the die gets one size smaller. If your die downgrades from d4, you have only a single use left of the resource - plan carefully!

Edited from Darker Dungeons:

Magic is a powerful force that can rewrite the laws of reality—turn ice into fire, restore life to the dead, travel great distances in a heartbeat. Magic can grant unimaginable power, but it is not without risk—channeling raw energies can be deadly to the unprepared.

This introduces rules to make magic a little more dangerous and unpredictable for spellcasters.

Magical Burnout. Sometimes, the flow of magic turns against you. It's hard to shape, it's too chaotic, it's too powerful—whatever the reason, some magic energy lashes out during your spellcasting attempt and causes you some harm. This is called burnout and it can happen to any caster, whether arcane or divine. Magic is dangerous work, and the slightest distraction can be catastrophic.

Triggering Burnout. If you are a spellcaster, take a tracking die. Whenever you attempt to cast a magic spell, roll the Burnout die. On a low roll, the power is overwhelming and you trigger a burnout event—two things happen to you:

1. Your burnout die becomes one size smaller.
   As your die shrinks it becomes increasingly more likely that you will trigger further burnout in future—so be careful with your spellcasting
   
   
2. You suffer a consequence.
   If your spell is 1st-level or higher, roll a d100 and check the Burnout Consequences table to see what effect your burnout has. Consequences become increasingly more severe the higher your spell level, so beware. If a consequence doesn't fully apply to you, or doesn't make sense for the situation, the DM may reroll.

Burnout is not a Failure. Suffering burnout doesn't mean your spellcasting failed—it just means that you were hurt somehow during the attempt. Resolve your magic spell as normal and apply your burnout consequences only after you've finished resolving your initial spell effects.

Recovering from Burnout. Once a burnout die shrinks, it remains that size until you take a recovery action. There are a few means of recovering from burnout:

• Spend a hit die: You can spend a hit die during a short rest to grow your burnout die by one step. You don't gain any healing from hit die spent in this way.
• Get a good sleep: If you get a good night's sleep, your burnout die grows by one step. 
• Take a long rest: Once you complete a long rest, your burnout die is fully restored to d12.
• Consume a restorative: Some special consumables—magic, crafted, or otherwise—may help restore your burnout die when ingested.

Safe Magic. Not all magical abilities put your body at harm's risk. Some forms of magic are innate, controlled, or otherwise rendered harmless—these safe magics don't require a burnout roll when used:

• Class Features: Effects gained through class features—such as Channel Divinity or Lay on Hands.
• Racial Features: Spells gained through a racial ability—such as the tiefling's Infernal Legacy.
• Magic Items: Magic items—such as wands and weapons—channel their own arcane energies.
• Rituals: A ritual safely controls the flow of magical energy with complicated sigils and glyphs.
  

Spellcaster Ranks. Spellcasters vary in their dedication to the magical arts, coming in three basic ranks—full casters, half casters, and third casters. The more dedicated the spellcaster, the more burnout they can endure. Your maximum burnout die depends on your spellcasting rank—check the Spellcasting Ranks table below to see what your new maximum is.

* Note that for the purposes of spellcasting ranks and burnout, warlocks count as a full caster.

Multiclassed Characters. If you are multiclassed, use the maximum burnout die of whichever caster class you have the most levels in. In the case of a tie, use the largest.

Fall damage is both wildly inaccurate to reality as well as being overall a non-punishment at higher levels - consider the variability of hit points across some classes coupled with a maximum fall damage of 20d6 (of which the average is 70 and the maximum is 120). This variant keeps an appropriate scale of damage as well as retaining the danger of heights.

In short, fall damage is equal to the base height in feet, rounded down to the nearest 5, plus the usual amount of d6s up to 20. See the table below for the full amounts.

Reducing Fall Damage. If a character plans the fall or is able to recover the impact force, they should take less damage. In the case of a planned fall, the character can attempt an ability check such as Acrobatics for a dampening roll or Athletics for lessening the impact through the compaction of muscles - such crouching or grabbing a ledge.

In the case of an accidental or unplanned fall, a character should only be allowed an appropriate saving throw, usually dexterity or sometimes strength.

Fall damage can only be reduced by a check or saving throw down to one quarter of the original amount.

Impact Materials and Structures. Some materials to which a character (or object) can impact would change the damage received. For simplicity, softer materials may allow damage to be reduced down to one quarter, while significantly hard materials or a great height may not allow a reduction of damage at all except by magical or supernatural means.

Furthermore, there may be structures or objects that allow the character to reduce the damage, such as ledges to grab, a slope to slide down or objects to crash into. Consider that these situations may allow for different ability checks or saving throws to be made, or adjust the difficulty of them.

All Healing Potions (including flasks) now use the Hit Dice of a character, rather than the potion's listed dice. This change does not affect other methods of healing or items that provide healing.

The amount of items a character can Attune to equals their Proficiency Bonus. At lower levels, it is reduced to 2 while at higher levels it is as high as 6 - or even 7 in extreme cases.

Edited from Darker Dungeons:

In the face of certain death, a lucky adventurer might just find a way to cheat fate and live on to fight another day. Today is a good day to survive. This chapter introduces fate points for player characters and how you can use them in your game.

When you roll dice, chance can be cruel—even unfair—at times. Fate points give players a way to mitigate the meanest twists of luck without neutering the threat entirely.

If you would suffer a killing blow or fail your last death saving throw, you may spend a fate point to change the story in some fashion that doesn't result in the character's death. Perhaps you were knocked unconscious, or the scorpion's poison wasn't strong enough to finish you off, or it was just a flesh wound? Discuss with your GM exactly how it is you managed to survive your ordeal.

Gaining Fate. 1st-level characters start with one fate point—a reward for becoming an adventurer in the first place. You can hold up to three fate points at any one time, and fate points can't be exchanged between characters.

Beyond this, fate points are extremely rare. To gain fate, players must face—and defeat—the most dangerous monsters in your world. Dragons, liches, beholders—these fated monsters are significant threats to the party.

One Monster, One Point. A fated monster rewards only 1 fate point in total when defeated—the players must decide who among them is lucky enough to take it.

Spending Fate. When you spend a fate point, you take control of the narrative over the DM. Except for the most ridiculous, you can now tell the story about what happens to your character instead of what should have happened.

You may come across weapons, armour or items that have been crafted with an expert hand or through the use of magic, but are not enchanted - these items are a Masterwork.

Masterwork items are considered Magical for the sake of dealing damage and other effects, but do not have any abilities themselves. They are able to be enchanted as well as have Gemstones socketed in them. Some spells transform items into Magical versions, this can be considered the same fictional situation as a Masterwork item.

Edited from Darker Dungeons:

Dread. Powerful forces enact their will on the world, shaping reality to their whims. Gods, devils, archfey, sorcerer kings, old ones—these almighty beings inspire hope in their allies and dread in their enemies. But how do they enforce their power, and what happens when you try to defy them?

This chapter introduces malevolent forces and dread, and rules on how to include them in your campaign. Malevolent anchors serve three in-game purposes:

1. To flesh out the lore and theming of your dread zone.
2. To provide a narrative, physical representation of malevolvent power that players can experience and interact with.
3. To expose weaknesses in your Big Bad—weaknesses that your cunning players can exploit by hunting down and destroying these sidequest-friendly anchors.
   

When a powerful entity is working against you—or you are working against it—that entity becomes a malevolent force. A malevolent force creates dread wherever it has significant influence—dungeons, temples, towns, realms, etc. It can use this dread to trigger dreadful consequences, fuel dreadful attacks, and enforce dreadful edicts to maintain power and punish creatures—like you—that would dare to challenge it.

What is Dread? From a player's perspective, Dread is a similar mechanic to a monster's Legendary abilities or Lair effects, except over a larger, different, mobile or changing scale. A Dread Zone can move, grow and change at the will of its subjects and creator. It can be used to perform small effects such as preventing a door from being opened or restraining movement, or it can create massive powers that stop all healing, reduce sensory perception or degrade items.

Dread Points. A great Power gains an amount of Dread Points through tangible worships or similar deeds done in its name by servants. There is an upper limit of 100 Dread Points that a Power can have, and Points are gained over regular intervals as well as from singular acts. A small act may provide 5 points or an ongoing 1 point per week, and a significant act may provide 20 or 5 per week.

Dreadful Effects. A power is considered omniscient across its Zone and can make effects occur at will provided it has the Points to spend.

Dreadful Anchors. Malevolent forces typically maintain their powerful dread zones through special anchors—cursed rings, sinister cultists, arcane sigils, desecrated temples, etc. These anchors are a source of great strength and influence, but also great weakness—when an anchor is destroyed, a measure of dreadful power is forever lost.

To briefly cover the operation of an Anchor, it has various properties:

• Category: Item, People, Place
• Strength: Time to create and provides ongoing Dread Points
• Weakness: Damage, Purification, particular Events, People, etc

Hope. Not every powerful entity wants to see you fail—some may have a vested interest in your survival and success.  When these almighty beings smile on you, there is a chance you may be rewarded with some hope—a token of their gratitude and a defence against dread.

Hope can give your players a pro-active means of taking action to protect themselves against dread. However, it is in limited supply. A character can only gain an amount of Hope once per week.

As you perform services and duties for powerful beings—gods, archfey, old ones, etc—you may (depending on the generosity of your benefactor) be rewarded with one or more points of hope:

• Minor: You have performed some small or repetitive service to a greater power—a temple blessing, a minor sacrifice, a token offering, etc. You receive 1 hope.
• Moderate: You have performed beyond expectations in your efforts. Receive 1d4 hope.
• Major: You have performed a significant service to a greater power—completing a major quest, solving a large crisis, etc. You receive 2d4 hope.

Hope doesn't expire, but neither does it stack—when you are gifted with hope, you must decide whether to keep your old amount or gain the new one.

Spending Hope. When you are targeted by a dreadful consequence or attack, you can instead spend that many points of hope to protect yourself from the effect. You will know these situations by the DMs note that the situation is Dreadful.

Hope can also be spent to ask a single question to the patron that gifted it to you, and that patron must answer you. Usually the patron will answer truthfully or with good intent, but it is not required to.

In simplicity, we are observing Encumbrance as an 'honour system' for the players to be respectful of: Characters can only carry what makes sense.

Usually particular items such as a Bag of Holding will assist in carrying capacity, as well as appropriate vehicles, animals or magic.

Edited from Darker Dungeons:

Adventurers need to rest at some point, if only to catch their breath between action, treat wounds, and prepare for upcoming dangers. This chapter defines each of the rest periods, some basic activities you might undertake while resting, and how to set up camp for an overnight rest.

Taking a Breather. A breather is a short stop of only half an hour when characters can adjust chafing armour, have a snack, discuss their next plans or make small recoveries. 

• REGAIN CLASS/RACIAL FEATURES. If you have features that discuss amounts of uses per long rests, you may recover one of these uses.
• HEALING. A character may spend an amount of hit dice no more than half of their level for healing.

Taking a Short Rest. A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, in which characters sit down to perform a few basic tasks—such as eating, drinking, and treating wounds. During a short rest you can spend hit dice, bind your injuries, and consume some essential supplies—but anything more intensive will require you to settle down and set up camp for a longer stay.

• REGAIN CLASS/RACIAL FEATURES. Some classes and races regain powers after a short rest is completed. Others can choose to regain a use from 2 features or traits that your character has that term an amount between long rests. For example, a tiefling may be able to cast a spell a number of times between long rests. This character could regain 2 uses of that spellcasting feature, or 1 use and something else.
• RECOVER MAGICAL BURNOUT. If you are suffering from Magical Burnout, you can spend some hit dice to recover and—hopefully—prevent any dangerous burnout consequences in future. Use 1 Hit Dice to increase the Burnout Die size once.
• TREAT WOUNDS. If you are suffering from any lingering wounds, you can treat them if you have sufficient first-aid resources.
• HEALING. A character may spend as many of their hit dice for healing during a short rest.

Setting Up Camp. If you decide to rest for a prolonged period of time—or need to perform some complicated tasks—it's time to set up camp. Find a secure site, start a campfire, pitch your tents, and secure any animals, vehicles, or cargo. There are five basic steps to follow when trying to set up camp, of which many can be overlooked for the sake of brevity or when a party does not have much care for specifics.

1. Make Camp: Make Camping checks to see how well you set up camp—the more successes you have, the nicer or safer your camp site is.
2. Nominate the Lookout: The lookout is in charge of camp defense, keeping watch for any threats.
3. Perform Camp Activities: The same as short rest activities as well as downtime tasks such as crafting or healing. Some activities are performed at disadvantage due to perceived dangers.
4. Sleep: Try to get some rest for a few hours.
5. Recovery: All features are recovered, and all hit points are regained.
6. Pack Up: Pack up camp and prepare to move on

Having a Safe Rest. In certain situations, resting for a time may be dangerous. When staying in a guarded location where the perceived chance of danger is low, character mentality and restfulness is greatly improved. The following benefits are gained:

• Activities are usually performed at advantage, such as crafting or healing wounds or diseases.
• Characters can attempt a bigger ranger of Downtime activities, including activities to gain Hope.

There are several channels for magical powers, such as through deities or nature. Each spell and effect is classified into one of four types as well as a neutral type that no longer holds onto its source.

Usually a Class has access to only a particular source of magic, though a Character may be able to channel a variety of types. Furthermore, some subclasses may tend towards a different source rather than the usual - for example, the Celestial Sorcerer would be Divine, or the Soulknife Rogue would be Aberrant.

Classes that have a spell on their spell list may attempt to cast a spell with difficulty if it is from a Scroll, even if the spell is of a level currently above them. In this case, the caster must spend enough spell slots to equal the level of the spell they are attempting to cast.

In addition, a Class may attempt to cast a spell of their same Type from a Scroll even if it not on their spell list, however they cannot learn the spell and it must be of a level they can cast spells.