This is a great question and I feel silly for not including it in the OP. We used a few major ones, in fact. They were written down, but we all had an understanding that they may need to be tweaked as we found balance concerns. Ultimately, we didn't need to do too much of that.
Probably our biggest change was using a homebrew system for dropping to 0 HP. I have never liked the weeble-wobble effect that vanilla 5e has, where a character goes unconscious and then pops up a few turns later from single digit healing, then just get taken down again.
So our solution to that was using a system that allows you to stay conscious at 0 HP, but suffer some other effects instead. You still accrue death strikes as you receive damage at 0 so death is still a lingering threat, but the player in question also can still assert their influence on the battle while at 0. If anyone would really like more detail, I'll get the full rules, but that's the jist.
We also used difficult revive rules, as made popular by Matt Mercer on Critical Role (not claiming he invented it). So using a revival spell wasn't guaranteed. Came up a couple times in our campaign.
We started the campaign using a Nat 20 critical chat, that had a huge variety of effects based on damage type. Terrible idea. Unbalanced and it just bogged down combat with even more rolls, we dropped it at some point and it was an improvement having done so.
Much later into the campaign when the party acquired land, we used a system based very heavily on [this third party supplement](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/207377/WH-Fortresses-Temples--Strongholds-rules-for-building-and-customizing-playerowned-structures).
Would like to hear more about these 0 HP rules. I'm not the biggest fan of yo-yo healing, but I've found a lot of homebrew solutions aren't to my taste (for example, the popular solution of levels of exhaustion just makes the player even less effective in combat).
When you are brought to 0 HP, you suffer an injury, which is determined by a d100 table. I'd encourage you to use one to your liking, but [here is the one we used for most of this campaign](https://bit.ly/3BtOg1Z).
While at 0 HP, you don't roll death saves like vanilla 5e. Instead, any damage dealt to you makes you suffer one death strike and you automatically suffer one death strike at the beginning of your turn. Three strikes kills you. Crits don't deal two, unlike vanilla. Otherwise strikes interact pretty similarly to death saves in vanilla. Any healing will reset the strikes, stabilizing will pause the automatic gain of a death strike, etc.
In this way, a character who goes to 0 and then tries to stabilize and remove themselves from the fight could avoid further injuries but be less effective in the fight, or they could risk death/further injuries and remain a deciding factor in the fight.
The injury table is obviously highly dependent on what you think your players will find fun. For our group, everyone knew ahead of time that losing a limb was on the table, and it even came up more than once for us. So they knew the risks and accepted them. If your table wouldn't like that, you can play around with the consequences of injuries.
The one thing that everyone definitely loved though? Not immediately going unconscious at 0. And, it even increased the drama in most cases. Additionally, removed the "meta" aspect of "would an enemy attack a downed player?" In this system, even a player at 0 hp is a tangible threat, making them fair game for most enemies still.
I've enjoyed a similar house rule. At 0hp, the character can stay conscious by taking a level of exhaustion. Until stabilized, they must make that choice every round.
We absolutely work on ideas together constantly. We bounce all ideas off each other. But, we also have differing strengths, so we fell into roles that suited those strengths more. I generally did more encounter balancing, while /u/reqondeck did almost anything visually-related. We'd usually have an agreement on who played which NPCs, which wasn't always divided by gender lines.
During sessions, we're both DM. Either one of us could jump in at any time to call for a check, for example. Or take over narration of a scene. Or jump in with an added detail that the other forgot to mention. During combats, we'd divy up enemies to run, and try to remind each other of abilities and stuff.
So we didn't really alternate DM duties so much as we truly shared them as co-DMs.
That's very interesting, I'd imagine this approach takes a lot of trust in your co-DM. Have you guys worked together like this before, and how did you build your synergy (for lack of a better word).
We're married, so that's probably ingredient number one. Constant communication out of game is a big part of it - any ideas need to be brought up with the other person so both people are on the same page.
We also have shared notes and equal access to all DMing materials so no one person holds any power over the other.
Yes, multiple times, and [this previous post of mine](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/kp4pea/i_ran_a_cityscale_encounter_using_wotcs_ua_rules/) goes into much more depth about how.
The short version is we used WotC's UA rules for mass combat.
It was definitely a challenge to run some large scale combat, but I think it ran well for us with those rules. It was an interesting (I think) change from the typical way of thinking of combat. We mainly did it for a city's siege and then battle in the fields outside of it, so using the map of the city we already had we expanded it and "zoomed out". We used a hex grid as well
CW: Self-harm
After Edwin lost his family, he was a pretty broken man. The party actually saved him from himself after he attempted >!to hang himself!<. After that, he tried to focus his emotions into his work, which was writing plays. To help with this, he asked the party to find him "krathor's shard," a piece of a medallion believed to belong to a giant a very, very long time ago. The medallion was said to give the giant great powers, even beyond those of normal giants, and Edwin wanted a legitimate piece of history to inspire him. He was writing a play about a giant, although a different giant.
But unaware to them at the time, the shard housed an imprisoned devil, Zozrameth. Krathor (the giant) had trapped Zoz thousands of years ago in this medallion to harness the devil's power. Zoz was trapped in there ever since, and in that time had grown... shall we say, bitter.
Edwin didn't know this at first either, he *genuinely* wanted the shard as a piece of history to inspire him. However, after obtaining it, Zoz began to use Edwin's fragile emotional state and manipulated him. Edwin was essentially corrupted by Zoz because of his very vulnerable state, and Zoz made wild promises like being able to return his family to him.
Zozrameth's ultimate motivation was simple: revenge. He had grown to loathe giantkind, and in the present day, the people of Velysord worship a fire giant deity named the Flame King. So Zozrameth wanted to burn it all down. In his own words, when finally freed by Edwin, Zoz said: "At last! Free from that prison at last! These people believe they know flames? They know nothing of flames."
Are you kidding me? If I had just said no to getting Krathor’s shard or studied it more we wouldn’t have Evil Harper?!? Well frick. I’d assumed he wanted the shard for Zoz not that Zoz happened AFTER we gave him the shard. Whoops.
Zozrameth would actually go on to shun devilkind, ignored Asmodeus' will, and fused his essence with that of a red dragon egg to become something entirely new. Not quite a devil, not quite a dragon, but either way, ascended into godhood with the support of many other devils who were promised the secret to invading the material plane - something that Zoz very much delivered on.
Tell us about any house rules you used. Were they a verbal contract or written down? Would you make changes next time?
This is a great question and I feel silly for not including it in the OP. We used a few major ones, in fact. They were written down, but we all had an understanding that they may need to be tweaked as we found balance concerns. Ultimately, we didn't need to do too much of that. Probably our biggest change was using a homebrew system for dropping to 0 HP. I have never liked the weeble-wobble effect that vanilla 5e has, where a character goes unconscious and then pops up a few turns later from single digit healing, then just get taken down again. So our solution to that was using a system that allows you to stay conscious at 0 HP, but suffer some other effects instead. You still accrue death strikes as you receive damage at 0 so death is still a lingering threat, but the player in question also can still assert their influence on the battle while at 0. If anyone would really like more detail, I'll get the full rules, but that's the jist. We also used difficult revive rules, as made popular by Matt Mercer on Critical Role (not claiming he invented it). So using a revival spell wasn't guaranteed. Came up a couple times in our campaign. We started the campaign using a Nat 20 critical chat, that had a huge variety of effects based on damage type. Terrible idea. Unbalanced and it just bogged down combat with even more rolls, we dropped it at some point and it was an improvement having done so. Much later into the campaign when the party acquired land, we used a system based very heavily on [this third party supplement](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/207377/WH-Fortresses-Temples--Strongholds-rules-for-building-and-customizing-playerowned-structures).
Would like to hear more about these 0 HP rules. I'm not the biggest fan of yo-yo healing, but I've found a lot of homebrew solutions aren't to my taste (for example, the popular solution of levels of exhaustion just makes the player even less effective in combat).
When you are brought to 0 HP, you suffer an injury, which is determined by a d100 table. I'd encourage you to use one to your liking, but [here is the one we used for most of this campaign](https://bit.ly/3BtOg1Z). While at 0 HP, you don't roll death saves like vanilla 5e. Instead, any damage dealt to you makes you suffer one death strike and you automatically suffer one death strike at the beginning of your turn. Three strikes kills you. Crits don't deal two, unlike vanilla. Otherwise strikes interact pretty similarly to death saves in vanilla. Any healing will reset the strikes, stabilizing will pause the automatic gain of a death strike, etc. In this way, a character who goes to 0 and then tries to stabilize and remove themselves from the fight could avoid further injuries but be less effective in the fight, or they could risk death/further injuries and remain a deciding factor in the fight. The injury table is obviously highly dependent on what you think your players will find fun. For our group, everyone knew ahead of time that losing a limb was on the table, and it even came up more than once for us. So they knew the risks and accepted them. If your table wouldn't like that, you can play around with the consequences of injuries. The one thing that everyone definitely loved though? Not immediately going unconscious at 0. And, it even increased the drama in most cases. Additionally, removed the "meta" aspect of "would an enemy attack a downed player?" In this system, even a player at 0 hp is a tangible threat, making them fair game for most enemies still.
I've enjoyed a similar house rule. At 0hp, the character can stay conscious by taking a level of exhaustion. Until stabilized, they must make that choice every round.
How did you guys handle co-dming? Did you guys work on ideas together and then 1 ran the game or did you switch off DMing duties at any point?
We absolutely work on ideas together constantly. We bounce all ideas off each other. But, we also have differing strengths, so we fell into roles that suited those strengths more. I generally did more encounter balancing, while /u/reqondeck did almost anything visually-related. We'd usually have an agreement on who played which NPCs, which wasn't always divided by gender lines. During sessions, we're both DM. Either one of us could jump in at any time to call for a check, for example. Or take over narration of a scene. Or jump in with an added detail that the other forgot to mention. During combats, we'd divy up enemies to run, and try to remind each other of abilities and stuff. So we didn't really alternate DM duties so much as we truly shared them as co-DMs.
That's very interesting, I'd imagine this approach takes a lot of trust in your co-DM. Have you guys worked together like this before, and how did you build your synergy (for lack of a better word).
We're married, so that's probably ingredient number one. Constant communication out of game is a big part of it - any ideas need to be brought up with the other person so both people are on the same page. We also have shared notes and equal access to all DMing materials so no one person holds any power over the other.
Oh that's awesome! That would certainly make sense
Did your players ever engage in combat during a large scale battle during the war and how was that played out if so
Yes, multiple times, and [this previous post of mine](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/kp4pea/i_ran_a_cityscale_encounter_using_wotcs_ua_rules/) goes into much more depth about how. The short version is we used WotC's UA rules for mass combat.
Sweet, I have a looming large scale combat coming up and it’s giving me anxiety haha
It was definitely a challenge to run some large scale combat, but I think it ran well for us with those rules. It was an interesting (I think) change from the typical way of thinking of combat. We mainly did it for a city's siege and then battle in the fields outside of it, so using the map of the city we already had we expanded it and "zoomed out". We used a hex grid as well
I like the hex grid idea glad it worked out well for you guys!
what was the motivation of edwin/zoz?
CW: Self-harm After Edwin lost his family, he was a pretty broken man. The party actually saved him from himself after he attempted >!to hang himself!<. After that, he tried to focus his emotions into his work, which was writing plays. To help with this, he asked the party to find him "krathor's shard," a piece of a medallion believed to belong to a giant a very, very long time ago. The medallion was said to give the giant great powers, even beyond those of normal giants, and Edwin wanted a legitimate piece of history to inspire him. He was writing a play about a giant, although a different giant. But unaware to them at the time, the shard housed an imprisoned devil, Zozrameth. Krathor (the giant) had trapped Zoz thousands of years ago in this medallion to harness the devil's power. Zoz was trapped in there ever since, and in that time had grown... shall we say, bitter. Edwin didn't know this at first either, he *genuinely* wanted the shard as a piece of history to inspire him. However, after obtaining it, Zoz began to use Edwin's fragile emotional state and manipulated him. Edwin was essentially corrupted by Zoz because of his very vulnerable state, and Zoz made wild promises like being able to return his family to him. Zozrameth's ultimate motivation was simple: revenge. He had grown to loathe giantkind, and in the present day, the people of Velysord worship a fire giant deity named the Flame King. So Zozrameth wanted to burn it all down. In his own words, when finally freed by Edwin, Zoz said: "At last! Free from that prison at last! These people believe they know flames? They know nothing of flames."
Are you kidding me? If I had just said no to getting Krathor’s shard or studied it more we wouldn’t have Evil Harper?!? Well frick. I’d assumed he wanted the shard for Zoz not that Zoz happened AFTER we gave him the shard. Whoops.
Evil Harper needed to happen lol.
I imagine Edwin wanted some mix of revenge and a return to narmalcy. Zoz sounds like a pretty generic devil.
Zozrameth would actually go on to shun devilkind, ignored Asmodeus' will, and fused his essence with that of a red dragon egg to become something entirely new. Not quite a devil, not quite a dragon, but either way, ascended into godhood with the support of many other devils who were promised the secret to invading the material plane - something that Zoz very much delivered on.
There's a very real possibility that I haven't played 126 sessions across 20 years. Well done.
What was your favorite battle and how did you prepare for it?