My Never Finished 5e Variant - Fast and Heroic

28 Aug, 2026

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on a side project to build my own version of 5e D&D, that captured the heroic super-fantasy of 2014 5e and its many variants, while streamlining it to make it run smoother and leaner like a game like Shadowdark. Basically I wanted to create something I could put in front of my invested 5e players, that lets them feel as cool as they do playing 5e while making things like combat faster and encouraging the players to improvise during exploration and interaction (rather than look for paper buttons to push).

I’ve not been able to make the time. I could have, but I’m prioritizing other things in my life and frankly the last year has sapped a lot of my free time creative energy. So when I have time to be creative, I’m focusing it on prepping and running the D&D I have, rather than working on a new game variant that I know I’d still have to playtest. So I figured why not just drop my ideas here, for anyone who is interested. Feel free to grab these concepts, use them, adapt them, forget them, and/or laugh at them.

The ideas below are heavily based on the 5.1 SRD creative commons documents. Others are inspired by my experience with Shadowdark, though I don’t think I’ve actually pulled any mechanics from Shadowdark, just the concepts like that of a single action per player turn. The rest I think I came up with on my own, so any cases of copying of someone else’s work are either accidental or a case of convergent evolution. Except there’s one thing I lifted from Sentinels of the Multiverse / Sentinel Comics RPG.

Here are my core design goals

A bright, heroic and “cool” vibe.
Compatible mechanically with 2014 5e where possible

a GM could grab any combat/exploration/interaction challenge designed for 5e2014 PCs and not have to adjust anything
uses 6 attributes, AC, skill list, saves etc.
power level is roughly equivalent.

Simplified combat

only d20 rolls, static damage, and one action per turn

Open-ended descriptions of equipment and powers

To support Player creativity while not requiring it.

In no particular order, here are the mechanics I was working on:

Ability Modifiers

PCs are built with a standard array of Ability Modifiers. No scores. In my opinion, there’s no difference from the player’s perspective 99% of the time, and zero time wasted explaining why a 15 in Dexterity is a +2 but a 14 in Dexterity is also a +2.

Proficiency Bonus

does not exist (it does, but the math will still be in the background when it is used, but it will not be player facing as a concept)

Saving throws

Where a 2014 PC had proficiency, instead they now have advantage. All the players need to know is their ability modifiers. I figure the slight bump in the average math outcome, at Tier 1 especially, of advantage over 2014’s +2 Proficiency is worth the gameplay speed at the table.

Skills and Tools

Again there’s no proficiency bonus math. Instead there are three levels of training in each skill and/or tool. Any source of training from background, class etc (that in 2014 would have provided proficiency or expertise) instead is one level of training. If you have no training, you don’t list that skill/tool down on your character sheet. You are considered Untrained and roll d20 + attribute modifier determined by the GM. If you have training, it is one of the following three levels:

Trained = roll d20 w/ advantage + attribute modifier
Expert = as Trained, but treat any dice roll of 1-9 as a 10 +modifier
Master = as Expert, but minimum dice result 15 + modifier
The DM, at their discretion, can use this scale to take into account multiple sources of training and/or situational advantage and disadvantage. For example, a PC trained in Survival who is also trained in Land Vehicles might be treated as an Expert for the purposes of rolling to drive a cart through a treacherous forest path. Or an expert Animal Handler trying to soothe a wolf during a thunderstorm might roll with just a Trained level.

This skill system does a few things, I hope:

it lowers the ceiling of high results and focuses more on consistency and competency. My hope is this streamlines play by focusing on the success of the attempt, as in my experience players with absurdly high bonuses start attempting things that are essentially magic and then point rolling a 32 as proof they can do anything.
it means the Expert and Master trained characters don’t need roll as much, as the GM can see that an expert with +3 on the ability score is going to beat DC 12 so they can just say in response to “I search for traps” with “as soon as you take the time to look, your sharp eyes instantly notice a thin tripwire” and move on with the game. A GM with a cheat sheet of everyone’s training would really speed things up.
It means that players at Level 1 can build a skill-based power fantasy if they have multiple sources (background, species or class) for training on the same thing. Your wood elf ranger at level 1 could be an Expert at Perception and Survival, never rolling less than a 10. That’s cool.

Combat

One Action per round, plus movement speed. No bonus actions. To keep things going, you get to do one thing on your turn. Bonus actions are instead absorbed into features that are linked to your one action. This isn’t described in player facing terms as a per-turn action. Rather it is “something cool”.
Here’s my silly draft text for this: “On your turn, you can take one action and move up to your speed. Some abilities may let you augment your turn by doing something cool. Remember, it isn’t cool to take up a lot of time trying to figure out if you have something cool to do on your turn. Not every turn has to be the coolest, there’s a quiet dignity in accepting you don’t always have to be coolest every turn, just bashing or burning something evil, and passing the turn to keep the action going is pretty cool of you.”
What this looked like in PC design was that some abilities and spells were labelled as “cool attack” or “cool move”, etc. Which meant it was something you add on to your action or movement speed. For example, Second Wind was: “As part of your action, you can make it a cool action to heal 6hp+your character level”. Healing Word was “As part of your action, you can spend a spell slot to make it a cool action and heal yourself or a nearby ally 3hp+your Wisdom”. Cunning action was “As part of your movement, you can make it a cool movement to either double your movement speed this turn or try to hide”. I’m not sure how well this delivers on my attempt to speed up the game, it might just be a Bonus Action by any other name wastes just as much time. I was aiming to focus the character on the action, and just make bonus actions modifiers or augments to that core action.

What about actions with multiple roles like multi-attack?

When a 2014 PC would use multi-attack (or equivalent abilities like using action surge to do an extra attack), they instead only roll one attack and do double damage on a hit, half damage on a miss (except natural 1s, which is 0 damage). In math terms, a hit emulates the damage output of two successful attack rolls, a miss emulates a 2014 hit and a miss, and a 1 emulates 2 misses in 2014 gameplay. So at Tier 2, the martial PCs are still fast to run, but start to just wear down enemies with guaranteed damage. I never planned this game beyond Tier 2, so didn’t get around to solving 3 or 4x multi-attack.

What about spells with multiple attack roll targets?

Caster does one roll to resolve them all.

Weapons

Weapon damage is static, there are no damage rolls. Instead weapon damage is equivalent to static damage. Instead of caring about specific equipment, the class of each PC determines their weapon damage by type, based essentially on the best possible weapon of each type they could wield. A cleric might be proficient in melee 4 (aka d6) versatile weapons (+1 damage if two handed), and thrown 3 (d4) weapons. The class determines the weapon damage, so if the player wants to say their cleric is wielding a pointed stick or a slapping fish, the base damage done by two clerics is the same (+str or dex as applicable). Critical hits are double damage. The proficiency bonus is hidden in the character building process, that just says to use your Str/Dex, plus 2 when figuring out attack bonuses. At level 5, the increases by another 1.

Improvising and trying things with your equipment and the environment

Tools and other adventuring gear are deliberately abstract. In particular, packs have things to cover general types of situations. No need to keep track of whether or not the PC has a crowbar. If carrying a dungeoneer’s pack, which includes the items one would expect to need in a dungeon, then a crowbar is a reasonable thing to have and the GM will say how that helps with a given check (such as auto-success, or increasing the proficiency on a roll by one level). If a player doesn’t know what useful thing a pack might have, they can ask fellow players or the GM for suggestions.
This is less of a simulation, think of it more as a movie or TV show where a hero pulls out the right equipment at the right time, even if the audience didn’t see them packing that gear before they left home. As long as the idea doesn’t break the immersion of the fiction (ie: in trying to free an ally from prison, the fighter rummages in their explorer’s pack and pulls out documents, apparently signed by the villain, ordering the release of the prisoner), PCs can try just about anything they can imagine.

Dying Heroically

This I lifted from Sentinels. As long as you are dying, your heroic sacrifice bolsters your allies. Each other party member that isn’t dying adds +1 to all of their rolls for each dying ally. If you die, this bonus is permanent until the dead character is replaced or revived, or a long rest. The goal is to elastic band in cases of the action turning against the heroes, while making the knocked out character feel like they are contributing. I had considered, but hadn't developed, giving each class a unique 'out' ability.

Final hit

After hitting with a weapon or damaging spell attack (or an enemy fails a save against a damaging spell), that would not normally defeat the enemy, they are defeated if they have remaining hp equal to or less than the PC’s level.
For example a skeleton with 10hp is hit by a level 3 PC for 8 damage. As the skeleton would only have 2hp left, they instead are defeated. A fire giant with 25hp succeeds on save against the level 10 party member’s lightning spell, which would have done 40 damage but only does half (20) because the giant succeeded. The giant has only 5hp left, so is not defeated, because they succeeded on their save, even though they now have hp lower than the party level. The goal of this design was to give everyone a scaling ability that speeds up combat and gets rid of those unheroic “it isn’t quite dead” moments after hitting a monster.

Spells

My plan was to have fewer spells. Most combat spells will have a specific combat effect, but also have abstract suggestions for out of combat. So fireball is a regular fireball in combat, while out of combat it could be used to melt a section of ice, or superheat the stones of a secret door to cause it to pop open. Spells, like weapons, have static damage.

Rests

Short Rest - still 60 mins. No hit dice, simply heal half of max HP and reset some abilities. Long rest - full heal

That’s all I have today.

I did start working on the DM side of things too, but it was largely going to be a hack of the Forge of Foes monster math, with aspirations of replacing Challenge Rating label with a 4e-style label (ie: level # coded to the PC level) that made encounter building more intuitive. I might pull that together in a later post.