House Rules

Unless there are unique circumstances, all of the Tales of Home game sessions rely on these house rules.

There are a few notes with respect to character creation.

Unless you talk with the Dungeon Masters first, please construct your character using only the Player’s Handbook (2024) (“5.5”).

Choose attributes using the point-buy system or the standard array.

Players are welcome to use the Custom Background option offered on page 55 of the DMG. We've decided that we'd like to allow this option in addition to the normal 16 backgrounds available, with one caveat.

If you are going to use a Custom Background, you must submit it to us! Find a list of player-created background here. To submit a Custom Background, please use the following template, as per the DMG;

• Background Name
• Background description paragraph
• Three ability choices
• Origin feat choice
• Two skill proficiencies
• One tool proficiency
• 50gp worth of basic equipment not including martial weapons

Once complete, please send us this information in a ticket, using the one you may already have open with us, or going to ⁠create-a-ticket to make a new one for your submission.

Characters begin play with the starting equipment that comes from making a new character using the 2024 Player's Handbook.

Alignment is dead. Unless it is important for your character to have one, please feel free to choose “Unaligned” as your characters' alignment.

Player characters will all advance in level based on the real-world date as the campaign progresses. On specific dates, the level all players have and the gold piece rewards for each session will increase. A schedule of these advances can be found below:

The campaign will conclude on the week of 04/14/2026.

Every time an adventurer becomes unconscious as a result of dropping to 0 hit points, they suffer one level of Exhaustion.

Rests shouldn't end the momentum of a game. We've made some changes to the rules for short and long rests to maintain that. Find the updated texts of these rules below with the changes in bold:

A Short Rest is a period of Downtime, at least ten (10) minutes long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds.

A character can spend one or more Hit Dice at the end of a Short Rest, up to the character’s maximum number of Hit Dice, which is equal to the character’s level. For each Hit Die spent in this way, the player rolls the die and adds the character’s Constitution modifier to it. The character regains Hit Points equal to the total. The player can decide to spend an additional Hit Die after each roll. A character regains some spent Hit Dice upon finishing a Long Rest, as explained below.

A character can’t benefit from more than one Short Rest in an 4-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits.

A Long Rest is a period of extended Downtime, at least eight (8) hours long, during which a character sleeps or performs light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than two (2) hours. If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity - walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity — the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.

At the end of a Long Rest, a character regains half their lost Hit Points. The character also regains spent Hit Dice, up to a number of dice equal to half of the character’s total number of them (minimum of one die). For example, if a character has eight Hit Dice, he or she can regain four spent Hit Dice upon finishing a Long Rest.

A character can’t benefit from more than one Long Rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits.

For many games, the player characters may find that it is nearly impossible to get a long rest away from civilization. Be warned.

This campaign world uses a twist on the flanking variant rules that follows the 3e flanking rules rather than the 5e alternate rule.

When making a melee attack, you get a +2 bonus to hit if your opponent is threatened by a character or creature friendly to you on the opponent’s opposite border or opposite corner.

When in doubt about whether two friendly characters flank an opponent in the middle, trace an imaginary line between the two friendly characters’ centers. If the line passes through opposite borders of the opponent’s space (including corners of those borders), then the opponent is flanked.

Exception: If a flanker takes up more than 1 square, it gets the flanking bonus if any square it occupies counts for flanking.

Only a creature or character that threatens the defender can help an attacker get a flanking bonus.

Creatures with a reach of 0 feet can't flank an opponent.

When you score a critical hit, you add the maximum value possible on the dice rolled for the attack’s damage against the target, then add any relevant modifiers as normal.

For example, if you score a critical hit with a dagger, roll 1d4 for the damage, add 4 (the max on all the dice) and then add your relevant ability modifier. If the attack involves other damage dice, such as from the rogue’s Sneak Attack feature, you add the maximum of those dice as well.

Be warned, player characters die in D&D games. Players of dead characters are welcome to help play monsters or NPCs for the remainder of the session. However, at their first opportunity, the player may choose to create a new player character. In these cases, we'll probably have a cut scene introducing the new player character to explain their arrival.

Please use only the spells from the 2024 Player's Handbook.

Unless otherwise outlined in an Spell Scroll's description, the spell attack bonus of a Spell Scroll is equal to +4 plus the spell level. For example, cantrips would be +4 / DC 12. First level spells are +5 / DC 13. Second level are +6 / DC 14. Please refer to the table below for more information.

Please feel free to purchase any non-magical equipment found in the 2024 Player's Handbook you want between game sessions. For simplicity, we assume that any user of a spell that requires consumption of components has stocked them in advance, and will instead charge after for the use of said components.

Dungeon Masters will ask that their tables just use common sense with respect to Hiding and Invisibility in the D&D 2024 rules. If this becomes an issue in the future, the house rules found on the Alexandrian are designed to slot into the existing D&D 2024 rules as cleanly as possible, while being built around a simple mental-mechanical model in which characters are either hidden, pinpointed, or not hidden.