Know Your Options: 5E Variant Rules Guide

Author: Icebrick1

As the Dungeon Master, you are the ultimate arbitrator of the rules, and it’s up to you to decide how to run your game. There are a number of official variant and optional rules available, this guide looks into a couple of these rules and provides guidance on if they might be a good fit for your game.

Generating Ability Scores

There are three official ways of producing ability scores for player characters: rolling, standard array, and point buy. There isn’t one objective answer for which one is best, though we do believe that point buy is the option that is the most balanced for the game and the one that will be the most fun in most games.

Rolling for Stats

This is the default option presented in the Player’s Handbook (PHB). Rolling for stats is somewhat exciting, you might be able to make a unique build if you roll particularly well and there is some fun to be had in discovering what your character will be like as you roll. That being said, there are some significant downsides to rolling. The quality of a player’s final character is totally random with no balancing: they might end up with an array that has no stats below 12 and two 18’s, or they might get an array with all 8’s and one 13. Even a very non-competitive player will likely feel a little bad if they’re stuck with a bad array while in the same party as someone with an amazing array.

Additionally, rolling for stats gives players less control over their characters. Maybe a player didn’t imagine their character as being incredibly uncharismatic, but they rolled a 5 and had to put it somewhere. Or maybe they did imagine their character as being fairly uncharismatic, but ended up with a lowest stat of 14. Of course ability scores don’t control how a character has to be played, but there is going to be a disconnect if a character of apparently average Charisma has to roll a persuasion check with a -3 modifier.

Point Buy

Point buy is the main alternative to rolling. It allows you to create your own array by buying scores with points. This avoids most of the downsides of rolling, as every player will have the opportunity to build characters of equal strength, and the player will have control over how their stats are allocated, allowing you to build your character exactly how you wanted. It’s worth noting that on average the array generated by rolling is stronger than one that can be created using point buy. This is our preferred way of deciding ability scores since it gives players control over their character and ensures no players will have a permanent advantage due to better luck while rolling stats.

Standard Array

Standard array is similar to point buy, but with a set specific array that everyone must use. This has the same benefit as point buy of giving every player equal opportunity, but reduces choice. It’s not a bad option, but aside from being simpler, it doesn’t really have any advantages over point buy. Before Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (TCE), this could result in some awkward final ability scores for certain races, but Customizing Your Origin (the ability to swap racial ability score bonuses during character creation) has reduced this downside considerably.

Patches for Rolling for Stats

Many fans of rolling for stats are aware of the potential downsides, and there are a number of homebrew methods that help improve rolling, such as rerolling if the total of all your ability scores is less than 70, allowing players to use point buy if they want after rolling, or having all the players use the same rolled array.

Most of these do help reduce the downsides of rolling by preventing truly terrible characters from being created, but due to the nature of random generation, it will ultimately still reduce player choice. If you have enough safety nets that player characters are falling into the same stat range anyways, you should consider just using a form of point buy. Be it with more points or not, players will have more choice without needing a convoluted rolling system.

Feats and Multiclassing

Two very commonly seen optional rules are feats and multiclassing. We recommend allowing both. These greatly expand the amount of options available, allowing players to build more interesting characters.

Feats

Feats give more options to characters, which is good, and they actually improve the class balance of the game. While there are some desirable feats for casters, such as War Caster and Resilient (Constitution), feats benefit martial characters much more. In particular Crossbow Expert, Sharpshooter, Polearm Master, and Great Weapon Master are all very strong feats that boost martial damage significantly. 

Some people feel discomfort about the idea that the strongest martial character is one who uses a hand crossbow, and that almost all optimized martial characters will take two of the listed feats. This is understandable: it’s far from ideal for hand crossbows and polearms to outclass other weapons so much, especially when the main noticeable difference between weapons is their damage, and the damage increase with these feats is so dramatic it makes them feel almost like a requirement.

With these feats, martials will at least have their niche of being able to deal high damage to a single target. Using the concept of Flavor is Free might help players who aren’t that interested in those specific weapons. Without feats, there’s little reason to play a martial at all.

Multiclassing

We recommend multiclassing for the breadth of character options it offers, despite the potential for some pretty severe balance problems. Without multiclassing, the mechanical choices for building your character after level 1 are very linear.

Multiclassing changes the power dynamic of your game, making it easy for already strong classes like Wizard to become even better, such as by taking a single level in a class like Artificer, Cleric, or Fighter for armor proficiency and other good features like Peace Domain Cleric’s Embolding Bond.

In particular, combining good armor with the shield spell and other defensive spells like absorb elements can make characters with incredible defenses at a low opportunity cost. It’s easy to reach 19 AC with half plate and a shield, which goes up to 24 AC with the shield spell. Builds without access to medium armor, a free hand to hold a shield, or the spell slots for shield will struggle to compete with those that do. Additionally, while multiclassing does benefit martials, particularly by allowing them to branch out when many martial classes have especially underwhelming later levels, it is not nearly as impactful as it is for spellcasters.

Another downside of multiclassing is that it’s hard for inexperienced players to use. A player who doesn’t understand the mechanics and multiclasses poorly can produce a terribly weak character, even weaker than normally possible without multiclassing, especially when compared to a character who uses multiclassing to their advantage. The gulf between an experienced player and an inexperienced player can be larger in games where multiclassing is permitted.

However, even with all these downsides, we still recommend multiclassing. It exponentially increases the number of character options, allowing for far more mechanically diverse characters. There are tons of interesting and fun concepts that are possible only with multiclassing—take for example our Ghostlance build. Without multiclassing, options for character building are essentially just race, class and subclass, Ability Score Improvements or feats, and maybe spells, while many races will play pretty much the same as each other.

Of the recommendations in this article, this is the most tenuous one. If your players are not especially invested in the options multiclassing provides, it might be a good idea to disallow it.

Playing on a Grid vs Theatre of the Mind

Most of the rules in D&D revolve around combat, and sometimes you’ll spend a majority of your session in initiative. For this reason, we think it’s important that combat in your game should be as smooth and enjoyable as possible. There are two main ways of running combat: describing the battle (also known as Theatre of the Mind) and playing on a grid. Using a grid is technically a variant rule, but we highly recommend using a grid for combat. 

Using a grid can speed up gameplay. For example: a player looking to cast fireball without a grid has to ask the DM: “How many goblins can I hit with a fireball?” With a grid, they can simply look at the map and say that they cast fireball at a certain location. It increases the tactical depth of the game as the exact distance and location of creatures is more important. Good positioning is rewarded, which can lead to highlights like when you spot the perfect angle to Repelling Blast someone off a cliff.

With a grid, you can state with objective certainty how many enemies an AoE can hit and if it requires hitting any allies. Without a grid, it’s mostly down to the DM’s opinion on how many enemies you can hit and if you can avoid friendly fire since it’s near impossible to keep track of what exactly the battlefield looks like without visual aid. The DMG has some guidance for deciding how many creatures an AoE will hit which might help, but still lacks a lot of accuracy and precision. For example, it says that lightning bolt and fireball both hit four creatures, when fireball hits many more creatures than lightning bolt does in actual play.

Players may feel slighted if they don’t interpret the DM’s description the way the DM imagined it. Most players appreciate the feeling of objectiveness a grid provides, and your group can avoid unnecessary arguments when the battle scenario becomes more complex.

That’s not to say a grid is always necessary. For very simple and short combats, it might just be easier to narrate that encounter rather than break out the battle mat. If it’s your preference, there’s also nothing wrong with running a more narrative game where things are more freeform and less precise. (However, you may want to consider looking into other systems, since so much of 5E’s content is focused on tactical combat.)

Variant Encumbrance

Encumbrance is an alternate system in the PHB for tracking how much a character can carry with them while adventuring. You might be tempted to use encumbrance to give your game a more realistic feeling and to make Strength more valuable. Unfortunately, while it does make Strength more valuable for characters who previously didn’t care about Strength at all, it actually punishes Strength-based characters more than others, while strengthening casters in comparison who generally don’t need to carry too much equipment. The main problem is that heavy armor is heavy, meaning Strength based martial characters will either have a tiny carrying capacity or will have to lower their AC.

For comparison, let’s look at how much different types of characters can carry beyond their most basic equipment: A Strength based Fighter with 16 Strength can carry 80 pounds before becoming encumbered, if they have plate armor and a greatsword, they only have 9 pounds to spare before their speed is reduced. A spellcaster with 10 Strength wearing common clothes and carrying a component pouch has 45 pounds to spare. A Dexterity based Fighter with 10 Strength, a breastplate, a hand crossbow, and 100 crossbow bolts has 20.5 pounds to spare.

Now, in fairness, you’ll notice that the sample character with medium armor used a breastplate rather than half plate. Medium armor users will now have to invest in at least 10 Strength if they want to use half plate and a shield without being encumbered and their remaining carry capacity will be about equal to the Strength users. This is a good change, as medium armor proficiency on casters often comes with proficiency in shields as well, which problematically pushes their AC to generally be even higher than that of martial characters (because optimized damage-dealing martials don’t have a hand free to equip a shield)— and that’s without taking the shield spell into account!

It’s worth noting, however, that there are some tools spellcasters can access for dealing with encumbrance, unlike martial characters. Most notably, Tenser’s floating disk and the Artificer’s ability to create bags of holding. Meanwhile, most traits like Orc’s Powerful Build racial feature provide no benefit for variant encumbrance as written.

Additionally, if you look at when a character will become heavily encumbered, the Strength based characters are coming out ahead, and the gulf will increase overtime as their Strength becomes higher. However, 10 times your Strength score should be plenty of carrying capacity most of the time, meaning a higher heavily encumbered carry weight isn’t a very large boon. 

Overall, while variant encumbrance does make armor choices slightly more interesting by making players consider raising their strength or selecting lighter armor, we believe the detrimental effect it has on heavy armor users isn’t worth it.

Flanking

Of the optional rules from the Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG), flanking is probably the most popular. Perhaps that’s because it makes perfect sense that defending yourself is harder if you were surrounded by enemies. However, flanking has a fairly large negative impact on the game. For one, it devalues advantage. If someone is in melee, the Barbarian’s Reckless Attack or the Kobold’s Pack Tactics isn’t providing much when the character could just stand in a particular spot instead.

Flanking also adds little tactical depth, unlike what’s advertised. Usually, there is little opportunity cost to using it, especially when one side heavily outnumbers the other. Flanking can also lead to “conga lines” as creatures sort themselves in alternating lines so they can all obtain advantage. There are some situations where flanking might present an interesting choice, for example taking an opportunity attack to gain advantage, but these situations are usually less common than they might appear and often have a best course of action that is easy to identify.

While it may not be obvious, flanking actually favors the monsters more often than the players. Assuming you’re facing enemies who make use of flanking, and that enemies are more numerous than the melee player characters (they generally should be), flanking will make it easier for the enemies to have advantage than the players. As ranged combat is already generally stronger than melee, more incentives to use ranged instead shouldn’t be introduced.

Flanking also favors some of the already most damaging spells in the game: conjure animals and animate objects. These create enough creatures that they should almost always be able to surround the target, granting all their attacks advantage. This further increases the damage potential of spellcasters compared to martials.

Potential Fixes

Similar to rolling for stats, there are some house rules that can be used to improve flanking. Changing flanking from advantage to a +2 bonus to attack lets it stack with advantage, meaning it no longer devalues other types of advantage, though it doesn’t fix the problem of making melee player characters a little worse.

Another commonly suggested change is to make it so a flanked creature can’t benefit from flanking. This prevents the aforementioned “conga lines” of creatures flanking each other from forming, but this increases the probability that the often outnumbered melee characters will be unable to use flanking, more often that not making this change an overall downgrade.

Firearms

The DMG has a number of firearms available. These might make fine special rewards, essentially serving as a magic item, but surprisingly, despite being guns many of these weapons aren’t the strongest weapons available already. It may be perfectly balanced to allow your players to start with one of these as if they were just normal weapons.

The Renaissance weapons are basically crossbows with +1 damage at the expense of range. In most situations, the musket will be worse than a hand crossbow user with Crossbow Expert, but there are some interesting builds which can use muskets. The modern weapons are more questionable, but surprisingly all weapons except the hunting rifle still perform worse than a hand crossbow, and the hunting rifle only wins with Extra Attack. Only when you reach futuristic items, not including the laser pistol, do firearms finally handily outperform the humble hand crossbow.

To summarize, there’s actually nothing unbalanced about allowing a character to start with a musket or pistol, and in theory you could even make modern weapons available and only hunting rifles would be stronger than the hand crossbow. It’s worth mentioning as well that stronger weapons help martials more than spellcasters.

Customizing Your Origin

These rules from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything give players greater control over their character, allowing them to alter a race’s Ability Score Increases to what suits them and swap their proficiencies for other ones. Most likely, this will overall increase the variety of races you see at the table as it encourages players to use race-class combinations that might’ve been previously unappealing due to a mismatch between the class’s required ability scores and what the race provides.

This is a fine rule to add, though it is a somewhat mixed bag due to making some already strong races like Aarakocra even better. If you want a detailed look at how the races compare after TCE, you could take a look at our race guide.

Falling onto a Creature

This rule from TCE may seem innocent enough, especially as falling onto another creature seems like it should be an uncommon occurrence, but the rule was written imprecisely and can easily be abused. For one, the rule requires that the impacted creature make a Dexterity saving throw or be knocked prone, even if the fall was not far enough to cause any falling damage. By flying or jumping less than 10 feet repeatedly a creature could force another creature to make a large number of Dexterity saving throws. By summoning creatures above an enemy by commanding those creatures to fly above the enemy and fall, this rule can be used to deal a huge amount of damage.

For example, you could turn conjure animals into conjure airstrike by summoning 8 flying beasts 60 feet above an enemy who then fly up 60 feet by dashing. This a low estimate, since a 30 foot fly speed is the slowest speed a flying beast can have. The 8 beasts would then fall and deal a total 96d6 damage spread across multiple DC 15 Dexterity throws, divided between the beasts and the enemy. Even accounting for the fact the damage will be halved, and assuming the enemy succeeds on half of the Dexterity saving throws, it still deals more damage than disintegrate does on a failed save! You shouldn’t use these rules as written, and there isn’t really an easy fix that can’t still be exploited by flying creatures.

Optional Class Features

The last optional addition from TCE are the optional class features. These provide small buffs for a number of classes, mainly to improve their quality of life. Since these open up some interesting options, such as giving Monks new ways to spend Ki, and don’t have any major impact on class balance, we recommend these rules. The optional class features especially helped Paladin and Cleric subclasses that previously only had very situational Channel Divinity options.

One subset of optional class features that was introduced was additional spells, with every spellcaster class sans Artificer getting a handful of new spells to their spell lists. Bards made it out the best here, getting access to a number of desired spells, such as command, aid, and heroes’ feast, among others. Bards struggled heavily in situations that involve constructs and undead, due to them being immune to a lot of the Bard’s proactive spells (that inflict the charmed condition). Their new spell list alleviates this considerably.