D&D: Five House Rules From ‘Critical Role’ Campaign 4 You Can Use To Up Your Game
Ten episodes in, and Critical Role, Campaign 4 has already unveiled a bunch of house rules that can make your game dramatic.
If you’ve been watching Critical Role’s Campaign 4, DM’d by Brennan Lee Mulligan, you are doubtless aware of the house rules the group is using for the latest campaign. To keep spoilers mild, they make the fights a lot more interesting. I haven’t been this on the edge of a die roll in an AP for quite a while.
So if you’re curious and want to try them for yourself, or even if you just like knowing what other DMs are trying (so you can steal your own version), here are five house rules from Campaign 4 that might be worth checking out.
Level Up For The Drama
This is my favorite House Rule – as a player. You can get the full breakdown of it in the “leveling up” video above. But what it boils down to is that once the players have “earned” a level up, they can go ahead and figure out what they want to take/would take ahead of time, and basically do the math – everything but actually update the sheet, and then at some point when it feels dramatically appropriate (even in the middle of a fight, even in the middle of a single attack roll) they can actually take the level. Lock in that feat/spell/ability choice, mark it on the ol’ character sheet and go from there.
As a player, I love it for the drama of it. It leans in to giving you those epic, mid-battle power-up moments. You know the kind that normally, stopping to roll your hit points, go through the spel llists and so on, would take the momentum from if done in the middle of everything. But while keeping the drama and impact of the level up immediately at the forefront of the action.
It’s a very cool change, and I like the idea of not having to lock in the level up choices until the story calls for it. It can make a difference between taking say, Durable (in a moment when you need to) and taking something like Slasher, which maybe would give you more damage overall – but boy, do you wish you had the ability to heal a little. Or whatever.
Desperate Measures – Make Being Bloodied A Gamble
This is another fun house rule for players, but also for DMs. It evokes the Devil’s Bargain from Blades in the Dark to my mind, and it plays particularly well to my sensibilities. It’s essentially letting you take big risks for immediate rewards.
The way it works is, once you are bloodied (at or below half hit points), you can choose to pre-fail a number of Death Saves in exchange for a benefit while you’re still up. For instance, you can choose to have one failed save to gain a +5 bonus to a D20 Test (attack roll, skill check, or saving throw) or immediately Dash and Disengage. Or for two failed death saves, a character can instead deal max damage on a single damage roll. And for three failed death saves, a character can immediately take a extra attack or magic action, or regain an expended spell slot of levels 1-5.
Again, this is diabolical. You get a powerful bonus for being bloodied. But also if you drop to 0 hit points, you have that many failed saves, potentially even immediately dying if things don’t go your way. I love the gamble, personally. But I like my games to be a little more “there are no guarantees your heroes will live to see the end of the campaign.”
Death And Consequences
But what really ratchets up the tension of the previous house rule is another house rule introduced even earlier. At the outset of the campaign, we learn that because of the way the world is, resurrection magic doesn’t work. That means no Revivify, no Resurrection, no nothing. If you die (with three failed death saves) you die. Roll up a new character.
This isn’t a new house rule, nor is it unique to Critical Role. But if you like a grittier game, it’s like playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on Honour Mode. You put it all on the line there, no takebacks.
Down But Not Out
Speaking of death saves, there’s another house rule that involves being at 0 hit points and making death saves. Because the world is so harsh, you don’t have to gamble every time. If you are at 0 hit points and have at least a single death save success (and no failures) you can choose to automatically stabilize.
Or you can choose to give Heroic Inspiration to another character within line of sight. You still make your save as normal. A single failure means you can’t do this – so now those Desperate Measures options start to interweave.
No Scaling
Finally – this is sort of a house rule, and sort of a campaign style. Again, it’s not unique to Critical Role, I like to run my games this way, but it bears mentioning that the world isn’t level-scaled. There’s often an assumption that wherever you go, whatever you run into, you’re going to face down threats that your party is capable of dealing with. No matter what. A level 1 party will fight goblins.
A level 5 party might still fight goblins but will probably also fight Ogres and maybe a Wyrmling and its disciples. The whole Monster Manual and DMG has a guide to balancing encounters. But in Campaign 4? As DM Brennan Lee Mulligan has said, repeatedly, Araman is a dangerous world. There are high-level areas and powerful figures who move in the world independently of the player characters. I love this approach because it makes the world feel more real. It makes it feel like you’re in a fantasy world with gods and monsters and tyrant-kings and the like. Some things are more powerful than you can handle – at least at first. And if you want to see what that looks like, just watch Episode 10.
Happy adventuring!
