[RPG] Would this house-rule that treats advantage as a +1 to the roll instead (and disadvantage as -1) and allows them to stack be balanced

advantage-and-disadvantagednd-5ehouse-rulesopen-legendstacking

I've been playing Open Legend RPG and I love that the Advantage in that game can be stacked. I love it when players try to strategize and stack as much advantage as possible.

I want to do this in D&D, but triple advantage doesn't really differ much from normal advantage. So, I was thinking of giving a +1 modifier for advantage instead of a double roll. This way players can stack +1 for every clever thing they do.

Will this work or will this throw D&D off balance? Any idea?

PS. Disadvantage could stack as well with -1s.

Best Answer

This is going to be difficult to balance

Having advantage on a roll is roughly equal to having +5 to your roll, and having disadvantage is roughly equal to having -5 on your roll, as suggested by applying advantage and disadvantage to passive checks.

Your suggested change would require somebody to have 5 different sources of advantage to get the same bonus as they do now, which seems extremely difficult to get unless you start also house-ruling a lot of ways to get advantage.

And once you start houseruling a lot of ways to get advantage, to try and make up for advantage now being weaker, you're making special abilities that only work when you have advantage a lot stronger.

By changing just this one thing, you're very likely going to have to make a lot of extra changes that will break other parts of the balance.

Some things that come to mind that you might break:

  • You might break the bounded accuracy concept 5e uses, if you give out too many +1s.
  • Spells that give advantage, such as Faerie Fire, are not going to be worth the spell slots anymore. Giving a reroll on all attacks is huge, giving a +1 on all attacks is basically a worse version of Bless.
  • You'll be indirectly nerfing classes that give advantage. For example, some classes can hand out Advantage as a bonus action. This will go from incredible to pretty mediocre.
  • You'll be buffing classes that need advantage for some reason. Once you start handing out advantage left and right, your rogue will basically never not be able to sneak attack.
  • You'll basically be removing some ability's choices from the game. A Barbarian's Reckless Attack is, as it currently stands, a risky move to use all the time. Once it becomes a flat +1 to your attacks and their attacks, it's really not as risky to use it anymore.
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