In this article, we will explore a homebrew rule that encourages your players to flesh out their characters, develop their backstories, and present you with potential plot hooks to customize your game for your players and the characters they play.

This piece is going to cover some of the theory behind how medieval banking works, but is mostly going to be tangible, applicable systems to include in your settings. Let’s get stuck in.

Let’s start here. It’s already well established that in D&D 5e Hit Points are an abstraction of health. It’s not ‘how many times can you be stabbed before you die?’, it’s more ‘how much punishment can your body go through before it gives out?’.

Backstories are meant to reflect what you want out of the game. They are your character’s foundation and provide the tools your character uses to interact with their environment. But they also showcase who the character is and what they are possibly capable of.

There are a lot of articles giving advice on how to balance encounters for satisfying combat: how to avoid killing your party, while still giving them a challenge, or how many fights per rest they should get, and how to challenge specific classes.

This post is going to discuss what I’m calling the ‘active’ dungeon and the ‘passive’ dungeon, how they differ, how to approach designing them and why you might want to use one or the other.