I’ll be DMing some more 5e soon and I want to take the opportunity to try some different ways of playing (I’ll post my own suggestions as comments so they can start their own discussion threads). What alternate rules have you tried that you thought worked well? They can be larger changes to the game or little QoL tweaks (though if you can respond to the suggestion with “at this point just play [different game] instead” then that’s probably more than what I’m looking for!)
Idea: extra XP triggers
There are plenty of grumbles about experience points only being awarded for killing things, and the rules for arbitrarily giving out more for completing tasks are pretty vague. Does anyone have any suggestions to improve this other than “just use milestones”?
I’m tempted to borrow some ideas from PBtA/BitD and give everyone some per-session XP triggers, e.g.
- The barbarian solved a problem with violence or intimidation
- The wizard pursued their magical studies
- The character struggled with their Flaw
- The character acted in a way that lived up to their Ideal
I have tried doing XP triggers before and I found it a little difficult to keep it fair between characters. If I were to do it again I would award the whole party XP when an individual fulfills a trigger.
