Untested

As D&D Next, 5th Edition went through extensive public and private playtesting before its official release as the new edition. But there are parts of the rules where it seems like enough groups opted out of using them that those parts didn’t really get tested. Namely, most of the rules involving survival skills and hidden doors.

According to the official rules, hidden doors are supposed to have their own static DC. When a character enters a room with a hidden door, they’re supposed to automatically detect it if their Passive Perception score is high enough. A Dungeon Master could ask everyone to actually roll their Perception skill instead… but then all the players will be suspicious and may try to find the door anyway.

Relying only on static numbers with neither side rolling dice creates a situation where some characters will never notice a door while others will always notice a door, defeating the whole point of hiding it in the first place. So for that reason, I think it makes more sense as the DM to roll for the door. If an adventure has a DC written for a hidden door, subtract 10 and then whatever’s left is added as a modifier to your roll for the door. You can think of it as rolling to see how well the dungeon’s builders disguised it. I’d say it’s probably best to only roll once for the door, unless something significantly changes the characters’ odds of noticing it, such as something crashing into the door or coming back to the room after a long rest.

5th Edition’s rules for wilderness survival are a lot harder to fix, which is a shame because otherwise it could be a lot of fun to create a sandbox and have fun exploring it. It’d also give the troubled Ranger class a chance to shine, where as right now subclasses like the Arcane Archer or Scout probably do the Ranger’s job better.

Right away, the biggest problem is how much food and water characters need out in the wild. The official rules say a character can go a number of days equal to their Constitution modifier plus 3 before they have to worry about taking on levels of exhaustion. If they eat a full day’s worth of food (defined as one pound of food) the timer resets. So in other words, a character with a modifier of +0 only needs to eat every third day, yet that’s still somehow “one day’s worth” of food.

Rules for water are stricter, saying they need an entire gallon per day. Not only is that a lot of water, but your typical waterskin in all the basic kits only holds about half that. If they’re already suffering the effects of exhation or dehydration, then each level of exhaustion they fail to save against counts for double. That creates the potential for them to meet a very quick end if they somehow — somehow — don’t meet those very-easy to-meet basic needs.

One solution would be to say that if characters don’t get “enough” food / water / sleep / heat / etc. in a day, they have to make Constitution saves for each unmet need at the start of the next day. Exhaustion from separate sources does stack, but they don’t double up like before. It’s already in the official rules that a long rest can remove one level of exhaustion.

Now to the next problem: foraging for food and water is ridiculously easy. Characters roll against a DC set based on the environment they’re in, and then they get a D6 worth of food, in pounds. The official rules aren’t clear on how often they get to do this, but if they get to forage each time they travel (regardless of the distance travelled) that adds up to a lot of food. If a ranger’s foraging, they find twice as much, and if they have the Outlander background, they find food automatically. These effects stack. So your characters could basically retire from adventuring and sell food full time as rations.

A potential fix is if you say a character has to forage for at least eight hours a day before they find anything. They can forage while traveling or search around camp. They can also break it up into sections rather than spend eight hours straight. But as in the official rules, only one character can make the roll, though another can help to give them advange. Hopefully, those limits will keep them from stockpiling too much food and keep some challenge in wilderness exploration, especially if they’re going to be camped out at a dungeon for a day or two.