D&D: Five (Sub)Systems People Love To Add
Whether it’s a way to measure reputation, or more complex rules for crafting magic items, here are five things people love to add to D&D.
The rules for D&D 5.5E cover a great many things. But they by no means cover everything that can or even will come up in a game. That’s what homebrewed rules and 3rd-party titles are for. Because for one reason or another, people love to have rules that make their world “feel more alive” or “more reactive” despite the fact that we’re all making up everything.
And one of the best ways to catch that feeling is to have some kind of system or subsystem of rules that does a little something extra. Maybe it’s tracking how much the people love or hate you. Or how many different NPCs you’ve brought to your town to grow it. But here are five extra systems people seem to love to add to D&D.
Reputations
People love a reputation system. I think it tends to be popular because it’s a mechanized way of representing something that otherwise feels very soft or narrative. You can tell that the people love or hate you because your reputation score is at X level.
You see this a lot for campaigns/modules with a lot of factions. But sometimes it feels like people just bring in the ol’ BioWare sliding scale of morality too. Whatever the case, if you want your world to feel like it’s paying a little more attention to players, some kind of reputation tracker seems to be a good way to go.
Faction Rules
This is something that’s been houseruled into D&D dozens of times throughout the editions, sometimes by the people officially making D&D. You get to a certain level and there’s just something about saying, ‘yeah you’re all 10th level or so, you should have your own army/kingdom/town/mercenary company/guild’ or whatever.
So people first make rules for tracking how many people you have joining your faction. And then it’s a small step to saying “well what do they all do?” Then you start having faction turns that take place over weeks or whatever as major powers in the world shift. Again, it’s a way of trying to make the mechanics of the world feel like they’re reacting to ‘natural events.’
Level 0 Systems
For Captain Ahab, there was Moby Dick, the white whale. For some DMs, there’s a campaign that starts with a party of characters that don’t have a class or levels at all – they’re ordinary folk in the truest sense; folks who don’t have proficiencies or spells, maybe even literal children. But then as you play, you discover the characters and start assigning things until at last, you have the makings of a first-level character. Maybe slightly more.
And for that? It’s rules for starting at level 0. Or for tracking how and when to gain the class features of a level 1 character. It can be a real fun way to play, provided you know that’s what you’re in for.
A Secret Seventh Stat
If you know D&D at all, you know there are six stats that define the breadth of your character. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. But what if those weren’t the only ones? What if there was a secret seventh stat? Well if you tried to answer that question you’d be in good company.
The history of D&D is littered with examples of companies and designers and home games that have added another stat. Maybe they took a cue from Call of Cthulhu and added a sanity stat. Or maybe they measure something like ‘corruption’ to track the warping influence of the Abyss or some other kind of ruinous power. Maybe it’s a stat like Ascension which represents an awakening divinity. Whatever the case, a seventh (or more) stat can often add a new wrinkle to the game. Though if you don’t do much with it, it will quickly lie forgotten, so you might want to tie it to one of the other systems here.
Magical Item Crafting Rules
If there is one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that the rules for making your own magic items as written by WotC are kind of boring. Look at the countless D&D expansions on Kickstarter or BackerKit, expanded crafting rules is almost always among the first things you see.
And I get why: making a magic item is such a cool fantasy story. It seems almost puzzling that WotC hasn’t done more with the concept (except that they don’t want to make anything dependent on people having magic items, because they want to leave whether or not characters have magic items largely up to the DM). So you’ll find examples of people who think “gather rare ingredients” or who maybe think “wait for magically powerful events like the solstice” and then you start hewing together a system for making cool things.
Happy Adventuring!
