League of Legends Keystone Runes in D&D 5E (Player Mechanics)

Project Overview

This project is a homebrew draft of League of Legends Keystone Runes as potential features in D&D 5th Edition. It serves as a list of powerful boons, usually combat-oriented, that the DM can award the players or add to an enemy for a more challenging combat encounter!

Inspiration

As an avid player of both games, I’ve always found the Keystone Rune system to be standout design in terms of flexibility and promoting different playstyles. I felt compelled to recreate that in D&D, as another way to customize a character in combat outside of Feats.

Design Goals

Fantasy > Balance

For this project, I was less worried about the balance, but focused on giving players the same fantasy in the D&D system as they would have in a League of Legends game. This shaped many design decisions, one of which was most obvious in the First Strike rune.

Simplicity > Accuracy

I chose to prioritize simple mechanics over accuracy to the Rune scalings in LoL. D&D characters already have many abilities starting from Tier 2 play, and I didn’t want the Runes to increase mental load to the point of exhaustion. The best example of this would be in the Dark Harvest Rune.

General > Specific

While many Keystone Runes in LoL are extremely good on certain characters while borderline non-viable for others, I tried to design the them to be more even across the board and allow most characters to use them regardless of their Class. This can be seen in the design for Grasp of the Undying; while it is commonly used by tanks in LoL, it is a viable choice for most, if not all, Classes in D&D.

Initially left out the gold generation part of the rune
Playtester mentioned that it wouldn’t feel like the First Strike players loved from LoL
I made it generate a small amount of gold, which is mechanically trivial to keep the thematic consistency in a fun way.

Damage initially scaled with the number of enemies killed in that combat
I made it scale off only the highest CR enemy the player had killed, to make it less mentally taxing to track while keeping the theme

Damage and healing scales with Constitution and hit die, which favors certain classes
Characters with lower hit dice may struggle to stay alive, so the rune provides more value for them
Allowing ranged characters to use the rune at full potential doesn’t break the game in D&D, and not nerfing it for ranged attacks allows even wizards to use it.