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House Rules from Various 5es

by Mike on 20 April 2026

I've talked about the beautiful mess of 5e before. With so many different 5e-based RPGs and supplements available, we can build our own ideal 5e from the components of several systems and hundreds of supplements. I recently ran what I call my “3x5e” game which included characters from D&D 2014, D&D 2024, and Level Up Advanced 5e running in a single 1st to 20th level game. It worked fine but I don't recommend it. Instead, pick a core 5e system to use as your baseline and then include components from other systems or supplements to augment your core 5e rules.

Each of four big 5e systems (D&D 2014, D&D 2024, Level Up Advanced 5e, and Tales of the Valiant) have their own take on the core 5e rules and each system has components we might want to bring to our game.

Today we're going to look at some modular components from these systems you might slide into your own 5e game, whatever version you happen to be using.

Luck from Tales of the Valiant

Tales of the Valiant has my favorite take on the core mechanic of inspiration — "luck". You can read about Luck on page 130 of the Black Flag system reference document for Tales of the Valiant.

Characters gain luck, once per turn, when they fail an attack roll or saving throw. Characters with luck can spend one or more luck points to add +1 to a D20 roll for each luck spent or spend three luck points to re-roll a D20 roll. If you acquire more than five luck points, you have to roll 1d4 and reset your luck points to the result.

Bringing luck into a system that expects inspiration (or heroic inspiration as it’s called in D&D 2024) might take a little tweaking. Generally, if a character gains heroic inspiration, give them three luck instead.

Luck is completely player-facing which means it takes the whole question of inspiration out of the GM's hands. I've used it now in all my 5e games for years and I love it.

Doom from Tales of the Valiant

Doom is a cheat card for GMs to ensure monsters and villains meet their intention in the fiction of a game. I renamed them into "Dreadful Blessings" in my own games but they do the same thing. In my games, particular villains start with some number of Dreadful Blessings. The GM can spend a Dreadful Blessing to break some aspect of the rules – giving the villain an extra action, removing a debilitating effect, shattering a wall of force, recharging and re-using a breath weapon, and so on. GMs shouldn't use Dreadful Blessings to simply negate a character's agency, the villain only has so many of them, and they're visible to the players so even though they’re a great big cheat tool, they still have limits.

I've used dreadful blessings in dozens of 5e games now, all the way to 20th level. Not only do they take a huge amount of weight off of my shoulders as a GM, allowing me to tune monsters on the fly, but players actually like watching them get burned down as they battle the monster. I swear by them.

Supply from Level Up Advanced 5e

Resource management isn't a huge part of 5e, being a more heroic to super-heroic fantasy RPG. Eventually characters get ways to handle all the food and water they need.

If you want to add a more realistic element of resource management to your 5e game, A5e's "supply" works well. On top of their normal equipment, characters can carry a number of days worth of supplies equal to their strength score. They may find ways to acquire more supply as they travel, but they expend a supply for each day's travel they take.

This feature doesn't remove characters' abilities to acquire supplies magically, but it's a good and easy way to manage rations and resources without a lot of overhead.

Havens from Level Up Advanced 5e

In Level Up Advanced 5e, a "haven" is a safe place to rest without risk of being attacked and the only place you can recover from two or more levels of exhaustion. We can expand this concept, however, to make it clear that there are good places to rest and bad places to rest. You might state that characters can only take long rests in places of reasonable safety — a "haven". Even spells like tiny hut might not provide enough safety in a truly dangerous place — enemies will set up all sorts of traps and fire them off the minute the hut drops.

Requiring a safe place to rest is an expansion of how havens work, but thinking of different degrees of restful places is a good way to have a dial on the pacing of the game.

Exhaustion from D&D 2024

The D&D 2024 exhaustion rules are, for me, a vast improvement over the finicky and cliff-like exhaustion rules of original 5e. The new rules are easy to understand: you take a penalty to D20 checks equal to 2x your level of exhaustion, lose 5 feet of movement per level of exhaustion, and die if you hit six levels (I bet players would prefer a character death instead of -12 on an attack roll). Exhaustion is severe this way. You could make a lighter-weight version of exhaustion, customizing it into its own status effect, and having it be only -1 per level of exhaustion. You could even give exhaustion-like effects to specters and vampires to make them feel a little more like the old-school versions that drained levels.

Surprise from D&D 2024

Surprise in most 5e games gives the surprising group an entire extra round of actions, often with advantage. Given the high impact of the action economy in 5e already, an entire round of extra actions can trivialize many battles before they begin. D&D 2024 simplifies surprise by giving the surprising group advantage on initiative. It’s a simple and elegant solution that doesn’t trivialize battles but still gives the surprising adversaries a good leg up in a fight.

Variable Ability Checks from D&D 2014

D&D 2024 switched over to a more rigid action structure for most ability checks. There are "search" actions and "hide" actions – each with a standard DC of 15. Tool-use also focuses on specific DCs. This change makes it easier to adjudicate these checks but removes the situational application of difficulty classes baked into 5e. Instead, you can ignore these base DCs and stick to the old way of just picking a DC based on the situation and having players roll against that number.

Hiding is a good example, the new D&D 2024 hide rule requires making a DC 15 check to hide from anything. This check doesn't make a lot of sense if you're in the forest by yourself. The old way had you roll your stealth check and note the number to match against the passive Perception of nearby monsters. That made more sense to me and it's easy to slide back into our own rules.

Just a Taste

These examples are just a taste of the sorts of things we can bring into our 5e games from any 5e system. You can harvest species, spells, magic items, subclasses, backgrounds, feats, monsters, and more from your favorite 5e systems and supplements and build the 5e that works best for you and your group.

Build your ideal 5e.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Last week Michelle and I took a much needed vacation so there’s no new videos or podcast links from last week.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Scale boss monsters with the number of characters by increasing hit points and numbers of actions.
Show players conflicts between multiple NPC or monster factions.
Set up scenes as situations in which the characters can involve themselves in several ways.
Expose heroic tales and folklore through monuments and ancient decorations.
Prepare a named NPC the characters can meet and talk to in each scene — even combat. Who’s the likely survivor?
Reward magic items that extend the characters’ capabilities and options instead of boosting the one thing they’re already good at.
Use visuals whenever you can to draw players into the world and make it feel real.

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