Long Dormancy, New Gamable Ideas!

I haven't posted in a while, mainly due to a high workload in my job. My shift is going to change in the near future, however, and I have been thinking about running a game on Saturdays once I'm freed up. One of the ideas floating around is a D&D 5E-based pirate game.

I've got some ideas, but one of the things I did to prep was to actually start reading the PHB. I was heavily involved in the year-and-a-half long playtest, and I've realized that my "knowledge of the rules" is more a hodgepodge of rules/interpretations/snippets from several iterations of the playtest documents, rather than a knowledge gained from reading the book cover to cover. Heck, there's some older edition interpretations that I'm still using.

Anyway, in reading the PHB, I'm seeing more and more where it looks like a product that was not fully playtested before it hit the shelves. During the playtest, they kept back a lot of content, only releasing the core races/subraces and classes/subclasses to the general public, probably to maintain release sales figures. The result was some classes (like the ranger) didn't get nearly enough testing. Berserker barbarians are subpar compared to Totem Warriors; likewise Champion fighters compared to Battle Masters. Beast Master rangers devote their subclass choice to getting a companion not even as useful as a familiar a mage gets from the simple first-level find familiar spell.

The upshot is that I'm realizing my preferred play at my tables involves a sizable number of tweaks, expansions, variations, and fixes. Enough that it probably makes sense to prepare a document with just those options, to speed up character creation.

I'm going to compile a list of changes other people have done to make "my version of the PHB." Originally I was going to do this on a message board, but they're a little unfriendly over there. This seems like a good place to do so. A lot of these are from Reddit, especially the excellent /r/UnearthedArcana subreddit.

Races:
Dragonborn: expanded Draconic Ancestry options from /u/Methaneus

Classes:
Barbarian: Berserker: fixes from /u/KibblesTasty

Fighter: Variant Fighter from /u/layhnet
Ranger: Consensus Ranger from /u/zipperondisney

Rules:
Two-Weapon Fighting: fixes by Brandes Stoddard

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