For this month’s Unearthed Arcana, we’re showing off a few variant rules that you can use in your campaigns.

Up for discussion are the options of having the players make all the die rolls at the table; using vitality points to better reflect the wear and tear a character suffers during combat; and creating a customized alignment system specific to your campaign. Some of these options should be familiar to players of earlier editions of the D&D game, as they’ve been presented as variants in those prior editions.

You can think of the material presented in this series as similar to the first wave of the fifth edition playtest. These game mechanics are in draft form, usable in your campaign but not fully tempered by playtests and design iterations. They are highly volatile and might be unstable; if you use them, be ready to rule on any issues that come up. They’re written in pencil, not ink. For these reasons, material in this column is not legal in D&D Organized Play events.

The material presented in Unearthed Arcana will range from mechanics that we expect one day to publish in a supplement to house rules from our home campaigns that we want to share, from core system options to setting-specific material. Once it’s out there, you can expect us to check in with you to see how it’s working out and what we can do to improve it.

UNEARTHED ARCANA: VARIANT RULES