I thought for the longest time healing word did take an action and was just a worse version of Cure Wounds. Now it makes sense why they are the same level spell.
From the original AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide: “It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule books upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game (Gygax, 1979, p. 230).”
And that's great. But the whole point is that some house rules are broken and wildly unbalanced, and people need to be careful about what they implement
Define Irony: D&D Players arguing they don't need to follow the letter of the book, by providing the letter of the book, which says they don't need to follow the letter of the book.
My fav house rule in my group: 5e healing potions: If you take a potion as an action, you get full healing. Because you are making sure you drink the whole thing by using your action. So 2d4+2=10 healing. If you take a potion as a bonus action, you roll like normal. Because you’re drinking it in a rush, so some could spill out rather than getting to drink all of it. Now you could still roll good, which is the equivalent of you drinking it fast but you managed not to spill any.
Found this one recently. Haven’t had much opportunity yet to use it (RP sessions, am I right?), but the next dungeon they delve into, I’m sure it’ll get its use
We do this, and include the rule that feeding a potion to another character is always a full action with the usual die roll. It’s harder to give it to someone else without spilling =)
I feel like it is a pretty commonly accepted thing when it comes to infinite ammo that you are adopting the 'we don't talk about it' approach. You don't bring it up, and I just assume you always have another arrow and filled up when you went to town last time. No shenanigans.
So here's the thing with that: arrow use stacks up FAST even at mid level. A ranger or fighter going for a machinegun build absolutely SHITS arrows. A quiver holds 20 (don't @ me about this number. Different editions use different numbers. I don't care). You have to have a quiver to shoot, so once you burn through 20 arrows, you either need another quiver which means unequipping this one, fumbling through your bag of holding for another one, and equipping another one. Further, the little hamlets and villages you travel through probably doing have 20 arrows they'd even be willing to part with. Arrows are a logistical headache. Arrow counting is specific to counting this sort of behavior.
I really only have one house rule, and that involves crits. I had some players complain that so many times when you crit and either roll double dice, or just multiply your dice roll by two, you get low rolls that are still worse than your average damage. So I implemented a rule that on a crit you calculate your maximum damage with modifiers, then roll your damage as normal and add them together. This way your crit is at least 1 more than your normal maximum, and it feels impactful. I also warned my players ahead of time that if they agreed to using this house rule, I would also be applying it to the enemies that they faced. So it's a boon for everyone. They agreed, and we have really enjoyed it so far.
@@mojojojoplus2 You would still calculate max damage for both sneak attack and smite, as both are dice rolls. Then roll their damage as normal, adding both together.
We use this as well. It makes them feel like they did a ton of damage. And it makes the Grave Cleric even more helpful when he cancels out my crits as the DM
My tables all have one house rule: We don't start on 1s. No matter how funny a fail can be, it really sucks to start the night on a 1 for a skill check. And then last night my players learned that it applies to the DM as well!
@@Maninawig It's usually just a reroll. We treat it as if the 1 never happened. It only applies to D20s, such as skill checks, and if it was at advantage or disadvantage, it only comes into play if both were 1s. Then it's only one die rerolled.
I've played with a DM whose house rules made me design a character specifically around not interacting with the rules he had. I dont want to have to roll to see if I run out of arrows 4 times in a turn as a fighter, or have to worry about buying random spell components every time I go to town. As a DM, some rules that I've used - If you counterspell a counterspell, all parties involved roll on the wild magic table. - If you make the DM laugh with viscous mockery, you add 1d4 damage - Cinematic advantage: in combat, if you do something cinematic (swing on a chandelier, intimidate an enemy with a flourish) accompanied with a successful appropriate ability check, you gain advantage on your next attack.
Very cool rules! i think the third would unfairly benefit rogues though, as they heavily rely on advantage and are great at skill checks(same goes for bards and sometimes rangers)
We have one that is similar to your Vicious Mockery one - if the player makes the DM laugh with it, the target autofails the save. We've also taken flanking away in favor of doing cool stuff for advantage, similar to your third rule.
Most people: House rules are controversial and need to be examined. Me and the other DMs in my group (about 1/2 of us): I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter them further* *After due discussion with players
Most people: My house rules are a slightly tweaked spell and +2 for something Me and the other DMs in my group: So the next game will be caster only, all cleric spells won't work because of the lore, I will add those two mechanics stolen from an entirely different system, all skills are changed, the progression will be gold for xp and the items and values will be from this homebrew book
my long time Gm implement a house rule that later came out as optional rules in later books. he was really happy that one of his house rules showed up in a book felt it proved him right.
A house rule I tried out some years ago in a campaign showed up in Pathfinder 2e. I was pleased to see it. (characters start with a racial HD worth of hit points on top of what the get for their 1st level class. It's no fun to have your character 1-shot-ed on the very first round of combat in the very first combat of that character's career. In practice, it just means that character's identical twin shows up, because basically no one wants to do the work of making another character that soon after the game starts).
@@jetvulcan2020 yea, I've been using that house rule basically since I started house ruling dnd. I always feel like it's a bit odd that we've kept the "everyone's basically a human" thing and still call different types of people races and then proceed to give people benifits based on their race. It'd be different if it was different species or cultures or something but we also roll culture up into race which is like, why?
My favorite and most common house rule is when you roll a natural 20 on a hit, you automatically do max damage and then roll damage and add modifiers. I absolutely hate it when I roll a critical hit but then roll low on the damage. This rule makes these hits actually feel damaging. And it applies to both players and the DM.
I do the same, because it sucks for a critical hit being like 7 damage. My question for you, is it just the base damage or is it additional damage say from sneak attack that is maxed too?
@@nebless-clem Now that is a challenging question that I don’t fully have an answer for. I’m still a relatively new DM who picked this rule up from my dad. For now, I think I’ll just keep it at base damage and work it from there.
@@nebless-clem The way I've seen it is that it applies to *all* dice, including Sneak Attack, Divine Smite, Hunter's Mark, etc. For example, suppose a level 3 rogue crits with a rapier and gets Sneak Attack damage. A normal hit would do 1d8 + 2d6 + Dex damage. Using this rule, a crit would do 8 + 6 + 6 + 1d8 + 2d6 + Dex.
This gets out of hand very quickly with crits from sources like divine smite that the player cannot miss, so I personally run the house rule as only the WEAPON damage dice is maximized. This is coming from me, a Paladin, critting for over 60 at level 3 and realising "wow this is kinda unfair" 😅
My problem with variant crit rules is that they get unwieldy when they interact with stuff like a barbarian's Brutal Critical or a half-orc's Savage Attacks, which add extra dice that *aren't* maxed. You have to work out the max of your normal dice, then roll them along with your extra dice, then add everything together. Much simpler to just build up a big handful of dice, chuck 'em, and add them up. And, even if you get some 1s and 2s, it's still fun to roll a whole load of dice.
My favorite house rule that I implement in my games after having another DM introduce it to me is: journal entries allow the player to start the session with Inspiration. Essentially players can write a journal entry from their characters perspective of things during the week (before the next session starts), which the DM and (usually) other players can view on an online forum of some sort. I love this because it helps me get to know the player's characters better, their intentions, plans, ambitions, as well as indirectly what the players themselves want to see happen in the game. Additionally it also allows the other players to also learn this and even figure out their own characters better. Granted it gives players with more time and investment an advantage (which seems fair to me lol).
@@obsidiannightwolfe13 Good luck! Hope they like it/use it. (And remember you can still give out Inspiration for other things, this is just a way for them to guarantee they get one at the start of the session).
My first dnd campaign I was ever in, one of the final fights took place on a frozen lake that was slowly melting and breaking apart. we were facing two scaled up were-polarbears and were on the brink of death for nearly the whole fight. The map was constantly changing and we had to plan our routes and move quickly before the ice broke too much to traverse and we all plunged into the frozen lake. It was an incredibly fun combat, and we felt so pwerful when we won.
Quiver of returning arrows (capacity 5) Bind 5 nonmagical arrows to this item, when these arrows are removed and fired, they are magically warped to the quiver once the attack is resolved. (5 slots in case arrows are broken or if you have multiple types of arrows) This solves so much and opens people's minds to the possible applications of archery based innovations.
Great for things like: Whistling arrow - sound signal Nonmagical burning/glowing arrow - light/tracer/signal Poison arrow - assassin's best friend? Armor piercing arrow - tough targets Serrated arrow - make em bleed Also great for Attachment deliveries - the arrow is returned, but something clipped to it is not... Darkness/fog cloud/silence pendant - hard CC Grappling hook - a classic Delayed fireball rune - an achievement Trip wire posts (twin arrow delivery)- traps at a distance! Teleport rune - now you're thinking with portals! Booming arrow - stun grenade anyone?
@@vn0688 I wouldn't put an arrow meant to be set aflame in this. It would warp back while still burning. Troublesome for the shooter and specifically for all the other arrows in the quiver. Also, while the serration would not help much (because the bleeding-inducing moment, i.e. the pulling out, is skipped), basically all of the arrows that would warp back would induce quite some bleeding (because the arrow acts as a stopgap in the wound, but would not do that in this case), but wouldn't be able to hinder the shot character's movement (because they aren't there). Also, might bring some issues with some kinds of Rapid Fire where 5 may very well not be enough, especially if only 1 or 2 were the standardly shot ones.
@@Alche_mist admittedly I thought of this being utilized more by a rogue... So 1 aimed shot typically... For a ranged fighter, yeah I would expect this to be for the special utility shots and whatever bog standard arrow they might want to spam would be carried in bundles with their own quiver. And the flame arrow, yes, treat with caution. I was imagining an oil rag tied to it, but the teleport would leave the rag behind... But I was imagining a bright fluorescent or neon glow from a non-flame source as possible light alternatives.
As someone who does a lot of homebrew (though not a ton of house rules) I found your tips to be ones that apply really well to homebrewing too, especially in terms of balancing. Great stuff, and really well researched.
I go over my house rules in Session Zero, and I explain why I have them. If adding a new house rule later on, I'll explain the idea to the players and we discuss it before we start actually playing D&D (in other words, I don't interrupt the game for this discussion.) If the players agree to the new rule, we'll "play-test" it for one or two sessions, then we'll discuss if the rule did what we expected, if it needs tweaked, or simply dropped.
I love Ginny so much. As a dm I find her videos informative and easy to follow and I suggest her to my players as the best place for easy to follow and creative tips and info ♡ I have a basic house rule - its for everyone, npc pc or enemy, if you roll their ac exactly you hit them. Also no really a rule more advice from a dm pov - but my player was looking for water so I made her a bag of sweets that replenished her fluids for 24 hours and rolled a dice to see how many sweets she got. She now has 5 days worth of water she can fit into a tiny pouch rather than having to carry 5 days worth of liquid around with her. My advice is - it's okay to use or modify existing things or create new things, at the end of the day as long as you are all having fun thats what matters. My player is level one so I also moded a animated armour to be so Rusty his move speed was 10ft and he can't move his arms more than 45% so he can't lift his arms due to rusting. You are not trying to kill your players right off the bat, let them earn their death. In our first session the player wanted to jump out a tree but the fall damage would have killed her right out so I didn't let her do it. If your players are new to dnd be forgiving while they learn the ropes. I've been into dnd for years but this is my players first campaign so I want to ease her in and in my opinion we will all get more out of the game this way. At the end of the day you are playing to have fun ♡ just enjoy yourselves.
Favorite house rule I've implemented at my table; flanking only gives advantage if the target is isolated (as in no other enemy is within melee range of either of the flankers or the target). In a big brawling battlefield, this rarely happens, but it incentivizes a tactical approach, and frequently gives them an edge against the bigger individual enemies where they need it.
The biggest thing about house rules is clearly and concisely explaining them at Session Zero. Walk through the house rules in very specific detail, that way everyone can voice their concerns. I think we talked about Choking for 30 minutes to understand how you can chocke or be choked.
So I once had an issue with my players being a bit wild at the table, and repeatedly rolling their dice off the table. So I came up with the Rodeo Dice Rule. You fumble your dice, you fumble your action, and get a natural 1 on that role.
Great video! I've personally started walking away from tables that are insistent on playing with the "roll a natural 1 on attack/skill checks and the gm takes liberty with extra negative consequences" house rule. Sounds fun until you realize your rogue with a billion points in slight of hand will trip over his own shoelaces trying to steal a pack of gum 5% of the time, or your fighter or monk actually gets penalized for leveling up/spending ki on flurry of blows. I forget the exact numbers but a high level fighter that spends an action surge to do two rounds of attacks had like a 33% chance of screwing up. I'm leary of any house rules that compromise the basic competency of your characters. Let your player characters at least be able to do the basic thing they've presumably trained to do their entire lives!
I've always seen it as, even the most well trained people can fuck up sometimes. I like to roll another d20 to see exactly how bad the nat 1 is, so it's only REALLY catastrophic and humiliating on a second nat 1 in a row, which is a much lower chance. Higher rolls might mean its not even the character's fault: "Your arrow sails through the air, but one of the feathers was crooked, and it takes a sharp turn into the dirt.", "You swing your axe, but the tough ogre bats it aside." "You throw the javelin, but in the heat of the moment, it awkwardly slips from your grasp, landing on the ground just below where you were aiming." Whereas not hitting the AC would involve the enemy dodging or parrying or blocking in some way.
My current house rules: Healing potions always heal full amount - they're valuable so can't have that many of them.. Still action to make it a more tactical choice in combat Flanking gives +2 to attack Multiple sources of advantage/disadvantage add +2 or -2 to attack Secret death saving throws (Curse of Strahd, fits the horror theme) Considering Medicine check to stabilize an unconcious player works like having them roll another Death Saving Throw, risking to make it worse or even get them back to alive with a nat 20 The rule you mentioned about hitting armor class giving resistance to the damage. Matthew Mercers rules for skill challenge to resurrect a dead PC
My major house rule I play with is the re-roll 1's on critical damage outcomes, as it feels bad that when you roll that Nat20, only to roll snake eyes for damage output. I do convey that this is a two-way road, and that enemies/NPCs will get this as well, but honestly I more often than not just leave their rolls as is. I also have a self-limiting rule to myself that NPC's will be at minimum 1 level lower than the players, just so it doesn't feel like I'm doing self-inserts and hogging the spotlight.
I guess the self-limiting NPC rules doesn't apply to characters that are intentionally above (often far above) the party in levels - Illuminati in RP sessions, Big Bad, Even Bigger Bad and other characters that are more of a Plot Device than a skill/dicerolling target (i.e. combat, persuasion, etc.). Because otherwise, those valuable story characters would be sorely missing. I know it's a different system, but just look at Elders and Methuselah in Vampire: the Masquerade. Most player characters get no chance at all against them, but they serve the story. Obviously, you must always be careful with such characters - you rightly identified that it's easy to make them Mary Sue with all the (harmful and dangerous) consequences.
the first house rule my brother established in the game he ran for our family was "the verbal component to magic missile is yelling magic missile in a silly voice and you have to do it or the spell doesn't work"
In the campaign I’m currently playing, the DM said to us we must add both a feat and an ability score improvement every time we reach the levels we must choose for one of those. Looking at it bluntly, that makes all the characters insanely overpowered if they go for a strong build, but the DM says he loves seeing strong characters in game. But we’ve had a lot of fun thinking of fun builds together with the DM, so I’d say it’s not a bad thing if we’re enjoying the game more because of it!
On the one about removing attacks of opportunity Interestingly PF2 almost does have no attacks of opportunity. The fighter and the champion (Paladin) get them and other martials can pick it up as a feat. Same goes for monsters, only usually "boss" monsters can attack of opportunity. I honestly prefer this 1000x. We get fights with players constantly running up slopes and diving over enemies, sliding past enemies down a hill, monks and rouges flipping over enemies etc. Absolutely love it
For the sake of anyone else reading this - only the Fighter gets it for free at level 1, every other martial can grab it as a 6th level class feat (but they typically have some pretty stiff competition at that level) and it’s not so much bosses that have it as mostly enemies who could be considered heavily-trained soldiers (Hobgoblin Soldiers have it, for example) but these are still in the considerable minority of enemies in the bestiaries. And I *love* this! There’s more design space for interesting Reactions, fights get more mobile since you’re no longer locked into melee for fear of getting smacked with an AoO, and just makes the fights more dynamic and lets the party more easily shift gears and react to changing circumstances.
@@michielbrouwer-cummins8703 If you mean the Disengage action in 5e, that's still costing either your action or your bonus action (and I'm pretty sure most 5e characters who aren't Rogues are stuck with the former). A PF2e character can spend one of their three actions to just walk away, then still have two more actions for other stuff (like casting a spell, making an attack, etc). Between this and the Action Economy you can do some proper hit-and-run tactics - one action to move in, second to strike, third to move away. Hell; it's actually a foundational tactic of a lot of Monks - stride into melee, one action for Flurry of Blows (to land two attacks), then one action to move away to safety before your turn ends.
my table is mostly casters and we decided to ignore required materials for spells, but materials they grab on the way can be used to expand a spell. our barbarian was in favor as well so it goes well for us. one player is a druid so she collects lots of fun things to use
We have the house rule of any healing spell or healing potion used out side of combat is at max healing. The theory is you are able to drink all the contents or take your time casting the spell.
What I do for a house rule, we play so if you have an inspiration point you add it to your dice before you roll. So if you roll a nat 20 than it would be a 21 so you get to roll another d20 and if that’s a nat 20 then It’s like the gods have chosen this to happen. So the power of rolling a 21 and then a 20 creates so much energy that it allows the player to make a super powerful weapon (with the dms approval)
At the table we play at, one of the major house rules is that if you are attacked and the opponent tolls a natural 1 you can use your reaction to get an attack of opportunity.
Man, I use so many houserules which I set out in a session 0 when appropriate, but your video did remind me that I had introduced one just yesterday to a home game (extending the audible range of thunder spells) without really talking it through with my players. Thanks for this video, reminding me to keep good practices, even with my home games.
90% of my “house rules” are things i misspoke or forgot about and then decided to make official lol. and it’s almost always in the players favor. Edit: I am now realizing this is a big problem. :/
My husband's house rule when he DMs is: "You describe your nat 20s; I describe your nat 1s." No matter the outcome, it's brought some serious laughs to our table!
Ginny, I love your dice. Also this is a great video. House rules are everything you’ve said here. They aren’t for all tables, they don’t apply everywhere, but can still be essential to balancing the game. Great job in making a difficult topic easy.
Got a house rule that players start with standard array, but get both ASI and Feats on appropriate levels. Going from 1-20 with the exact same stats feels weird. With the math, it works out fun! 🤗
I've been thinking about this but maybe with just 1 point. Really I would switch the characters to the 3.5 system of a feat every 3 levels and 1 stat point every 4 levels, but that's more complicated and people don't always pay attention. XD Maybe when they make new characters...
@@matthewlangley3089 for sure! I calculated it out, and even doing both you would at most get a player with two 20 stat scores by level 20. How it is with rolling stats is usually players already have a 20 stat at level 1. It's a better progression in my opinion I may make a video about it in a few weeks
In my game, I give out "Yippideedoos" when people do awesome stuff, rather like Inspiration. Collect 20, and you can trade it in for a Feat. When leveling up, we stick with the stat improvements, so a good player can have top-stat PCs AND great feats. Yes, I do have to adjust the balance in the modules, but it's so much more fun that way. People will do so much for a Yippideedoo.
A house rule I implement in most of my games is that regardless of the class and level I will allow a player to invent new things whether it be a spell (must be of a class and level your character has access to) or a weapon (same requirements as spells), or even a tool (trickier) however I require them to go over it with me so as to hopefully not break the game. I have had a bard player ask to combine a rapier and a lyre into 1 object that we added a few complications to and another time we made a spell to summon some constructs like any of the conjure lesser whatever spells. We also use the nat 1 random tables and nat 20 special effects (like make them blind for a couple turns by going for their eyes)
Whenever I find a house rule I think would improve the game, I have my players vote on whether or not we add it. They’re also free to suggest any house rules at the start of each session and feedback at the end
Most of my house rules are just "I've reviewed this subsystem someone made for XYZ and I'm using it". Like crafting, or harvesting dragon parts and what you can do with them.
I've always played more on the freeform side of Roleplay than D&D & others, but one time a DM changed the established rules was when an easter egg led to an incidental kaiju battle, and to make its more than spectators, the DM decided the area was overflowing with magic, so all our magical attacks would have +10d20 dmg. Throwing our whole pile of dices to laser the Kaiju was incredibly fun :3
I've been playing for long enough to see both sides of this spectrum, and sometimes it got ugly. I had a game that was more house rules than actual rules in Pathfinder, and that was an absolute mess. Anyone who knows Pathfinder knows why. But I had some very inconsequential but fun house rules come out, like that Tabaxi get darkvision or Tortles live the same length of time as dwarves
One idea I heard a while back was for the DM to make perception/investigation/stealth rolls for the players - makes it more realistic as if you personally were looking for something or trying to be stealthy, you wouldn't necessarily know how well you were doing and increases the tension because players won't know if they are being stealthy or if they missed an enemy up ahead on a bad perception roll.
This is actually how Pathfinder 2e handles that stuff by default. If you’re rolling a stealth check, the GM is the one who rolls the dice for you and you have no idea how stealthy you’re actually being outside of an educated guess from your modifier. Likewise if there’s some bad guys hiding up ahead in an ambush, the GM will roll their Stealth Checks against the party’s Perception DCs (think Passive Perception in 5e, PF2e tried to remove opposed rolls entirely) so the players don’t even know any checks were made.
I had a DM do this and it took away a lot of the fun for the players. It was frustrating to try to do something in game and just be told "you don't see anything". I think it's that thing of it being okay to fail something but it being upsetting when someone fails on your behalf. I also think that that particular DM used it far too frequently and potentially was sketchy about it, amongst other things, so we sort of lost faith in him 😬
I think this is only a good idea if you have problem players who meta-game perception information for their character's benefit. Good players will lean into failed perception checks and roleplay being at a disadvantage, rather than trying to game the system.
I absolutely despise the idea of the DM making rolls for my character. I wouldn't play in a game that did that, and I'm a Forever DM who jumps at any chance to play a character.
@@futuza I had to push that in a beginner's game when I was first learning 5e. I had played AD&D and some WoD before. I failed my Perception, and one of the players argued if I should be just walking into the room. I pointed out that everyone that had looked failed, and my character thinks it's safe. Someone has to set off the trap, and my character would be the normal choice to go first anyways. Immediately attacked by a Grey Ooze. But I saved us from several minutes of metagaming.
I made/found (don't remember which) a variation of the infinite non-magic ammo rule. Basically it added a clause of "within reason". This little clause does many little things to the rule. The primary one is it allows you to shut down the 4:39 example quickly by saying "Ok you sold the quiver of 100 arrows you currently have on hand. Don't expect to have any arrows for the next day's worth of encounters". It also allows the DM to create swarm encounters that the party is definitely suppose run away from by saying something along the lines of "After stopping the first 80 or so goblins your quiver starts feeling a bit empty as it starts running out of arrows". This is an example of a "give and take" homebrew balancing policy. I the DM give the player a way to enjoy the game without having to keep track of ammo, however, if they use the infinite ammo ruling they are doing so with the understanding of they give the DM control of saying when they are out of ammo. However, the Player can choose to keep track of their own ammo but they have to let the DM which variation they are using.
As a game design alumni who wants to go into TTRPG's eventually, homebrew rules are super important to me and my games. I have an entire channel in my D&D discord dedicated to my house rules, most of them are minor tweaks on RAW, like uncapping fall damage, variant attunement timing, and a different method for DM inspiration, but others are completely new mechanics like upcasting using a spell slot and levels of exhaustion combined to be able to cast a spell at the combined total's level (level 4 spell slot + 2 levels of exhaustion = level 6 spell slot). A few of the 18 rules in there right now are just explaining things like rule of cool, HDYWTDT, you can certainly try, that kind of stuff, cause my players are generally new and I find it helpful to write these things down for them. And any rule that's potentially too powerful in any direction (like the one that makes crits do max die damage + roll + modifier) are listed as subject to change and I have made it very clear I could get rid of or change them at any time if it feels unfair. Then even some rules are completely irrelevant during gameplay and deal with character creation like my own method of rolling for stats that makes the characters more powerful (meaning I can throw more challenging things at them and they can feel more heroic) and making Intelligence more useful outside of Artificers and Wizards, giving them proficiency and expertise in different skills based on their INT modifier. A lot of my house rules are really focused on empowering my players, now that I think about it. 😅 I also find that despite the fact that they're all listed and readily available, my players will often forget about the more obscure rules (which is to be expected, we play like once a month and they're mostly all new players), so it's invaluable that I remember them and can remind my players of them mid-game. If we played in person I'd probably make up a 10 commandments style graphic to hang on the wall about my homebrew rules lmao. (Also a lot of these rules are taken from XPtoLevel3, with some minor tweaks here and there)
Hi Ginny! You along with other D&D UA-camrs (tik tokers) have really helped me put learn and expand my knowledge of D&D house rules, homebrew designing (classes, subclasses, crafting, etc) and DMing! Thank you alot!!
I love this. One of my group's recent house rule additions is that when we roll initiative, natural 20's and natural 1's change things about the first round of combat for whoever rolled that. Nat 20's give advantage for the first action or attack that requires it, and nat 1's give disadvantage. This also works for the DM's monsters and villains too! We added it because it sucks to roll a nat 20 on initiative and not have any benefit other than going first, and the Nat 1's give everyone an opportunity to up their Role-play game in the first round, like playing that they were distracted or caught off guard in some capacity.
I've found that creative players can break anything in game. I absolutely love having them come up with something I didn't think of. Of course, I do have a house rule of veto rights. If something they want to do is way beyond scope I can say no.
One of my favorite house rules that I've used every game/group for ages. Critical hits do Max damage+a damage roll. So if you attack with a weapon that does D8 damage, and score a crit, you do 8+D8 damage, plus any other mods. This way a critical hit is always better than any regular hit could be. No chance of doing just 2 points of damage on a critical hit.
Love being the one who rolls death saves for my players. The tension they feel makes them act like an actual person would if a friend fell in combat rather than gaming the system and letting their friend continue to bleed out.
Since I play online, I have the opportunity to experience rolling my own death saves privately in the chat, but then keeping my mouth shut as my character slowly bleeds to death and the others are deciding what to do XD extra fun when I have my microphone muted and I can talk to them from my unconscious state without them hearing me.
GOD when I was a beginner DM I didn't understand how attack of opportunity worked so I was the jerk DM who got rid of it for the first few sessions... then I was able to connect the dots and felt SO BAD for getting rid of it!! g r o w t h
man, attacks of opportunity suck, though. they discourage tactical movement and usually slow the game down. very sad. well. not opportunity attacks full stop, but provoking them by moving away. if someone has a specific ability, they're always looking to use it, so there's no need to worry about that.
Great, really in depth video :) Thanks I've got a very important rule of thumb to add to the list. If or when you want to change something in the game, keep in mind that is is generally better to BUFF something than it is to NERF it. No one likes it if something is taken away from them, while helping someone who needs it is great for the entire table.
*It's so good that you're making this video! House Rules are awesome, but with great power, comes great ya know!* I want to share my fav one: HP - HeroismPoints, allowing the Heroes to do Heroic deeds! Its impossible for 8 hours of sleep to heal open wounds, that's why all HitPoints are replaced with HeroismPoints. No mechanics change, its only descriptive. Whenever a player would lose HitP. for some reason, he loses HeroismP. instead. For example, when he would be hit with a sword and lose 10 HP, his armor/shield/parry stops the blade, and he loses 10 HeroismP. instead. In place of breaking your legs jumping from 30ft, the Hero rolls forward dispersing the momentum, using up 3d6 HeroismP!
Ahhh yes! I've thought of using something similar too. I've always attributed it to running out of in-the-moment energy, since they're jumping around and swinging weapons and waving their arms around and using their magical resources all within a really short period of time. When they reach a low enough energy, they can't keep up fighting to the standard they normally would, which is when a fatal blow is dealt. Doesn't stop them from receiving minor scratches or burns, but definitely adds a really nice level of drama to combat! I think it's good for campaigns when characters have a reason to be competent. Doesn't make as much sense for a sorcerer who just discovered their powers a month prior to the adventure.
This was interesting, particularly your point that a house rule should benefit all players equally, which I must confess I don't always abide by. When one of my friends wants to play a sub-optimal sub-class because they have a character in mind or really like the flavour I'll often make adjustments to the class, in concert with the player in question and the table at large, to try and even the playing field and I guess I've always considered these adjustments to be houserules. An example I'm fond of is modifications to Berserker Barbarian's Frenzied Rage, allowing them to immediately attack as part of the bonus action when entering the frenzy and also giving them a saving throw similar to the Level 11 Barabarian feature Relentless Rage (DC10 Con, increasing by 5 for each success resetting on a long rest) to avoid the exhaustion from using Frenzy so that they have a decent chance of using their core ability more than twice in a day without crippling themselves.
For that arrow one, making it a magic quivver that provides unlimited arrows, but the arrows disappear 8 seconds after being removed, is what I would do. That way, they always have arrows to use, but can't use them for traps or sell them. (Note to self, make "Quiver of vanishing arrows")
Pretty much the only 2 house rules I currently use in my games are: healing potions can be drank as a bonus action (but still take a full action to administer to an ally); and standing from prone costs a flat 5 feet of movement. Both of these apply to bad guys as well as PC's.
At my table we have a rule in which whenever someone has to make a save check from an attack and you roll a nat 20 you automatically pass the save with no damage, but if you roll a nat 1, you end up getting double the damage.
I've used a few house rules in different campaigns ie. Dismemberment in a sea fairing campaign for the whole wooden limb, eye patch aesthetic Or Crit fails in the game I run for my little brothers for a sillier tone.
Here's some of my favorite Home rules :) 1. Making Intelligence more impactful, so players might consider not making it their dumb stat so often (as only Wizards and Artificiers [non Phb class] gain direct bonuses from it). In addition to its other bonuses, intelligence reduces the time your character needs to acquire new proficiencies and languages (250 days, each day costs 1 gold worth of equipment and consumables). +1 is equivalent to -25 days, +2 for -50, +3 for -75, +4 for -100, +5 for -125. It works vice versa for negative bonus in intelligence. So, a human with an intelligence score of 14 (+2), will need only 200 days to learn elvish as a new language, instead of 250. Intelligence also provides in identifying an item’s properties. During a short rest, you can use your Arcana skill once to study an item. Depending on the DC, after the check you learn some, none or all of the item’s properties and/or hidden secrets. 2. Advantage and Disadvantage stacking, in my opinion a simple way overall to pump up situations that lack other interesting factors, like terrain, weather and/or magic effects. Advantage and Disadvantage can stack, giving a +1 or -1 for each dis or adv more or less than equal (max +3/-3). For example, a prone creature which is also frightened has now -1 to attack rolls in addition to the disadvantage. 3.Critical hits. When you score a critical hit, your lower roll always counts as half of the original die (for example, roll 2d6 = 5, 1, treat ''1'' as a ''3''). Physical damage comes first as tiebreaker, then it’s on player’s call. I used to play like many people do, treating the first roll of critical hits as max damage and then adding the second roll, but when players reached higher levels it quickly became a problem, as some of their combos evolved a lot of rolls thus the higher chance of critical hits and that meant one shoting things. This can be solved however by giving them more difficult opponents and situations to deal with someone could argue, but from my experience I feel that the best way overall is avoiding big numbers and unnecessary math that slow the game down. 4. Languages. It is common in 5e, even for characters that have invested less in scholarship and education to acquire at least 2 to 3 languages beginning in level 1 (it is also completely doable for some to start the game knowing 5-6 languages depending on class and background, not even counting in feats!). This mostly doesn't pose any issues, since in most games DM and players don't pay much attention in the usage of multiple languages, likewise in ammunition, carrying capacity and nourishment. Everyone is typically using common and if the group finds some exotic tribe or old textures written in some forgotten script, one or two players might happen to know that exact language, so the diplomacy becomes way easier avoiding dramas and hiring/meeting some npc that his whole life might be translating particular texts, whom the players might be cool to depend on. Anyway, to make Languages a bit more interesting I use this Home rule: Language proficiency consists of being able to A.) Speak it and B.) Know how to write and read it. Use bonus languages that your race, class and background provide to you as currency to acquire full proficiency in a particular language (Example: Human fighter with Sage background gets Common and 3 languages of his choice. Player chooses 1 of its bonus languages to learn writing and reading of Common and 2 other to fully learn how to speak, write and read Elvish). If languages end up to an odd number, then player can speak that language, but not write or read it. 5. Shields. I feel like they deserve more, as they were usually used for offence also. Originally, they do 1d4 B. damage as improvised weapons if the character is proficient with them (because they don't fall on the weapon category in PHB, but on armor). I allow players to attack with shields (I also use variant shields as light [1 AC, 1d4 B dmg, light-for bonus action attacks], PhB shield [2 AC, 1d6 B dmg], heavy [3 AC, 1d6 B dmg]. But, attacking with shield loses the AC bonus until your next round, as hypothetically you leave yourself open to the enemy. On top of that, I ve introduced a tier II Shield Mastery feat, (requires for the player to pick the original first) providing: If you make an attack with your shield, you don't lose the AC until the start of your next turn. Shield Bash. If you take the attack action on your turn, you can use one of your shield attacks in an attempt to stun your opponent. Make a shield W.A. against an adjacent creature. If you succeed, target makes a CON STH (8 + your prof + your STR mod.), on a failure, target is stunned for 1 turn. On a success, target gets immunity being stunned from your shield attack until the end of his next turn. Thanks for reading and sorry for big text :)
Few house rules i like to play with: -bonus action healing potion -glancing blows (if roll to hit is exactly the AC of the target, damage is halved). More often then not, it helps players take less damage. Rules i don't like and think they make game worse: - Encumbrance variant rule. It just adds more book keeping and punishes players who likes to carry adventuring tools to often execute creative ideas. With this rule in action, most characters will have lowered movement speed just from their starting equipment. It also punishes players in heavy armour. That armour already have str requirement to cover for that as well as stealth disadvantage. And honestly, most many tables that run this rule, don't even bother tracking it once the game start. This reminds me people who come up with rules like weapon durability etc. Rules that just add more book keeping to the game but don't really add much to the game itself.
I have a friend who has a house rule that the DM rolls death saving rolls behind their screen, and then only tells the player if they've survived. He figured that it makes it more realistic, and the players need to decide if they heal that character or not, while not actually knowing how close they are to death. It ads a bit of excitement not knowing if this is the turn your character bites the dust
I played under a GM who was writing his own system inspired by several different game systems, and it seemed like every three sessions we would have an hour or two of "these are the new changes to your character". I was playing an illusionist+ weapons who ended up, three years later, a dual wielding combat machine with group-buffing skills.
Great points! A few over time with open discussion is best.Some houserules we currently use 1) Drinking a potion is a Bonus action, giving one is an Action 2) Brutal Critical hits (PCs and enemies) One set of all dice is maxed then roll all dice and add with modifiers. Ex. Scimitar critical with +2 mod = 8+1d6. 3) Enhanced variant encumbrance (changing the weight of certain gear that seems off) Plus being encumbered effects jumping. 4) New conditions Staggered and Terror 5) Free Arcana checks when spellcasting is occurring to identify the spell being cast (DC varies by how familliar the people attempting are with the spell- much lower DC if they Know the spell) 6) A few weapon powers and maneuvers added everyone proficient can use 7) Special d20 'lucky' rolls to determine some random things (flat d20 no modifiers) 8) Custom crafting and material/ingredient rules 9) custom poison gathering and use rules 10) Tons of homebrew mundane items, spells, magic items, monsters, player races, subclasses, and a few other options such as feats and backgrounds, etc. oh and 11) Can attempt some Actions as Bonus actions with an ability check roll (such as STR or DEX vs a DC)
My first D&D group in High School had a house rule we called the OptimusPrime/Megatron rule. This came from the era where you had to confirm critical hits (a 20 was a confirmed hit, but you had to roll again and beat the AC of the target in order to deal critical damage) and the rule was that if you rolled a 20 to confirm, you rolled a third time. If you rolled a 20 on that, you rolled an 'Optimus Prime' which insta-killed the target, no matter how improbable or seemingly impossible it was. One example was they were fighting a Lord of Hell and rolled 3 20s. An arrow that a party member had massively fumbled on from several campaigns ago had slipped through a hole in time and space and struck the demon right in the heart. The other side was 3 consecutive 1s. Rolling a 'Megatron' caused your character to die. A stroke, congenital heart defect, or a bizzare accident took them out. We eventually took this for any time someone rolled a 20 or a 1, even on verbal skill checks. If you got an Optimus Prime on a skill check, you received a permanent +1 bonus on that skill by discovering some new or novel way of approaching it. Rolling a Megatron caused a -1 on that skill as they develop a bad habit that impedes their successful execution of that skill.
In our game, during initiative rolls, if you roll a Nat 20 you get an extra action during the first round, and if you roll a Nat 1 you lose your action or bonus action for the first round. Adds a little fun when you roll a Nat 20 and still come in behind the rogue!
My table usually has a house rule where, if a caster learns a new spell they think will be cool or useful but then never finds an opportunity for it, they can drop it in favor of another spell. However, if they've used it even once, it's locked in since it's now "canon" to the campaign
A problem I had in a previous group was a DM who didn't so much use lots of house rules as "played fast and loose with the rules of the game without telling anyone." Needless to say, it caused some frustration at the table.
Most of our game’s house rules came from the dm mixing up his editions and when we realized the ruling was wrong he decided to keep for consistency. Biggest example is adding proficiency to damage in that campaign. Other things were choices. Basic potions are easier to brew just spending downtime in the woods and in camp because we were all nature characters with no healers. And drinking a potion is a bonus action, but feeding one to an unconscious person an action.
The two most common house rules I've encountered as a player are: not keeping track of ammo/common components and not tracking weight. Cause no one in my friend group wants to pause the story to do math. Lol Completely unrelated, I love your shirt.
I have a general rule of "your characters aren't idiots". Basically that these characters exist in this world, so they know how things work. They'll stock up on supplies when they're in town. They'll replace stuff that gets worn out or broken. etc So players don't have to waste time on trivial things and quest rewards get spent on interesting things rather than having to kill a bunch of gnolls just so you can afford lunch.
My biggest house rule experiment was a system mash-up. I was newly getting into Cypher Systems and there's 2 main mechanics that were a really hard sell for my table. One is spending effort as this was, in their eyes, spending HP. The other was using Cyphers, the system's ubiquitous one-shot magic items. The players were far more familiar with D&D-ish games and wanted to hoard every resource. I have a Drama Deck for Savage Worlds. This is a bunch of one-off effects and odd bonuses that the players had worked with before, and understood were very much use-it-or-lose it, while the Cypher system resources were more like "eh, easy come, easy go." So I sorted through this deck of weird features and bonuses and threw out the ones that just flat-out did not work. But kept in the "I know a guy!" or "Find the treasure" or "lucky!" sorts of things. And especially the cards that make a combat worse... but give everyone at the table more cards. The deck's an optional resource for savage worlds, but... seeing my players looking for excuses to get some value out of their cards was really positive. It gave this specific group permission in ways that we all struggled with for manipulating the narrative. Another group, where I was a player, had TORG's version of this... and we had a bit of a house rule with that where the "nemesis" card got retired after the same player played it on the same NPC in 3 separate sessions. I'm thinking my next game, I'll have a new variant for some of the plot-manipulating ones. I'm thinking "Ambitions" and just let the players choose which ones they want, and let them trade them or exchange them until they spend them. Because a romance card when you're in a dungeon crawl isn't great (although there's some animes about that). It's an idea, and I'll have to see how a few other systems do things like it before I make any decisions. But I want it to be obvious to players that they have permission to change the narrative... and maybe also to signal to me that "Oh, this is why they're doing this, I need to yes-and better here."
For the infinite arrow example I have a pretty simple solution: Referee your house rules (and official rules) as intended, not based off the specific wording. Also one of the benefits of games being run live is you can implement live bug fixes (although it is of course better to avoid the bugs in the first place.)
House rule: when rolling initiative a nat 20 will allow you to chose where you want to be in initiative. That way players can get excited by a nat 20 in initiative and it has some strategic elements.
An house rule we use: Mirror Image may grant sneak attack bonus damage if you roll the necessary d20 after your attack. Basically, if you're an arcane trickster who used Mirror Image, and currently have two images, if you roll 8 or higher with a d20, your target (who relies on sight) doesn't quite see where the attack is coming from, and you may apply your sneak attack bonus on a successful hit. The reason I allow this is because I have two players, a rogue and a wizard, and it helps with the balance.
as a recent dm, i made some meme rules to add spice to our (and my) STR dumping characters. all weapons can be dual weilded, and all weapons are versitile within reason. we have a goliath pc named tiffany with two greatswords. its been going well.
At my table, we have a House Rule regarding Critical Hits. Instead of rolling double the damage dice, you roll the normal damage dice and add the maximum. Crits are supposed to be huge, devastating blows, and I think this helps to show that. Nothing suck quite like scoring a crit and then rolling all 1s. Example: Crit with Longsword = 8 + 1d8 + Str Mod
We have two house rules. One modifies critical hits and one modifies rests. Crits: when you hit a critical hit, add once max damage for all the damage dice and a normal roll. So if the rogue crits on a sneak attack with a dagger (normal hit 1d4 + 5d6 + 5) they do 1*4 + 5*6 + 1d4 + 5d6 + 5 damage. This ensures that a critical hit always does more damage than a normal hit. Rests: we have a short rest, medium rest and long rest. Short rest gives all the benefits of RAW short rest but takes only 10 minutes. Medium rest takes 8 hours (same length as RAW long rest) and gives almost all the benefits of a RAW long rest except that it does not restore any health, and you recover only one hit die instead of half of them; you can roll hit dice to recover hit points like on a short rest, of which the first hit die always gives you max result, so if your hit die is a D10 you can basically exchange the one recovered hit die for 10 recovered hit points and add then roll more hit dice as needed. Long rest takes a full day of downtime and gives all the benefits of a RAW long rest, including recovering full hit points, but it will recover all of your hit dice instead of only half of them.
I have a couple that my players enjoy. Instead of inspiration I give out, I give out luck. It has no maximum and they roll 1d3 to get luck points. They can affect any check rolls (attacks, saves, skill checks) for a 1:1 basis. But they can affect mine but is 2:1 ratio. When they really want to get that check it adds that tension. Talk about pushing your luck!
I'm prepping to start DMing a campaign for the first time for my little sisters, and I have a couple of houserules I want to use, and one that I'm particularly looking forward to is a modification to how damage types work. There's so many fun damage types in D&D but unless they're coming from a spell that specifically mentions added effects, the damage alone is just flavour-I decided to write a list of bonus effects that can happen as a result of each damage type (other than bludgeoning/piercing/slashing). I wanted these to be fun but not every-time occurrances, and at first I started writing a system for how to determine when each effect would happen and then the target has to make a save against it and blah blah blah... and then I was like, "This is so freaking complicated, this doesn't feel like 5e. New idea: it just happens on a crit. Boom. Done." I'm much happier with it now, and every type of damage, on a crit, will apply a unique condition until the end of the target's next turn, and most of them have an extra effect if the crit effect kills the target (e.g. spellcaster crits on a Fire Bolt that kills the enemy, they burn to ash).
There were a few changes I made in my current campaign, but I'll just talk about three and why I made them: 1) Resurrection and other life restoring magic don't always work. I really wanted there to be some urgency and drama in the combats. If you can resurrect someone and it always works, I feel like a lot of that gets lost. I've been running for over a year and only one person has had to be raised, but I feel like it still impacts how the players play throughout. 2) I am one of the people you mentioned that use the exhaustion for being knocked to zero rule. I wanted to avoid the wack-a-mole effect and make combat a bit more challenging. 3) Asymmetrical advancement was the most controversial. The basic idea is that at the end of the session, I don't distribute xp or mark off milestones, I give out individual levels. The order of precedence for who get the levels is: #1 lowest level characters get a level first; #2 martial characters get levels before casters (three tiers: martial, partial casters, and casters ... so a ranger would be a partial caster) #3 random distribution for those who tie for precedence. Also, a character can only receive one level per session. There were a few things I was hoping to do with this one. First, I knew that rules one and two would affect martial classes more, so I wanted to give them something to balance things out a bit. Second, it gives a way for me to let the party advance almost every session without everyone leveling super fast. Third, it helps move the spotlight around since different people (normally) would get levels each session. Fourth, casters tend to get the coolest stuff with their levels, and I thought that giving martial classes a faster advancement would help offset that and give it a bit of an old school feel (xp charts were different for each class in 1st edition, allowing some of the more "basic" classes to advance faster). Most people were okay with it, some had concerns but were willing to give it a try. One player basically threw a fit over it. He was a martial class and didn't like the idea of being higher level than most of the other party members. Normally, I probably would have fought more for my ideas, but in the middle of a pandemic, working 12 hour shifts, I was tired so I gave up and let it go. It's been okay. I still would have liked to see how that would have worked out, and maybe someday I'll get a chance to really try that out.
I have a house rule that each of my players got to roll for a random feat when making characters. My game featured rival characters that I also rolled random feats for too. I used a table of feats to pick from. If the player rolls a feat that they can't use because of their race/class, they re-roll until they get one that they can use.
house rules the group i play with had are 1. Facing matters - makes positioning more important for flanking and attacks of opportunity 2. Fumbles end turn and grant disadvantage next turn 3. We don't confirm crits, if you roll in your crit range you crit(people rarely take improved crit in our group) 4. Death saves are rolled in secret behind the dm screen so the group doesn't know the results 5. Dragon alignment is not restricted by color(our main dm adopted this from when i dm)
The Star Wars campaign I've been in the past couple years had a house rule implemented after the first four months because of me. I had taken the observant feat, and so every perception check I did was with advantage. Since I was the best eyes/ears of the party, I did this very often and kept 2 D20s for quick grabbing to just roll at the same time with advantage. Now I, like many others, prefer to "charge" my dice. (For those out of the loop, this means I leave the maximum number on a dice facing upward). What happened pretty regularly was my two dice came up the same number. Which pretty much makes any roll of advantage useless. After seeing my disheartened response too many times, either another player or our DM mentioned how they had seen a house rule before where if you roll the same numbers when rolling advantage/disadvantage, your roll will count as a CRIT SUCCESS. After my double rolls happened a few more times, the DM decided to put it in, but we spent the next few sessions working out the finer details. I'll list them below. 1. When rolling dis/advantage, if you roll the same number on both dice, that's a CRIT SUCCESS and will be counted like when rolling d20s. 2. Conversely, if you roll 1 on both your dice, that is still a CRIT FAILURE (it might even be a worse failure than a CRIT 1, although I might be remembering that wrong). 3. Double rolls will not count as CRITS on either attack rolls or saving throws. The frequent ways this could be abused was too much and we all agreed that it wouldn't be fair to the DM. (I mean, I play a Rogue, I frequently roll with advantage and extra ways to CRIT will make my sneak attack dice way more over powered than they are already.) We included saving throws because it balanced the rule out even more, plus the Bless spell focuses on attacks/saving throws, so it was easy to group them in our mind. I don't remember if there were other rules to do with it (we've been on break for quite a while and it doesn't even come up every session), but that's the basics for how we balanced it. Since we've implemented the rule, I've gotten CRITS a bit more frequently, and so have the other players (and the DM once or twice as well). While my party doesn't freak out that much on NAT20s like the folks on Critical Role or Dimension 20 do, we go feral when someone pulls a surprise double CRIT. We're all having fun, and that's what's most important to my DM (hell, once I pulled off an awesome stunt and got a NAT20 sneak attack. After I rolled 7 dice for damage and 5 of them came up as 1s and 2s, he leaned forward past his screen, saw the dice, and told me to reroll them. Sure the dice tell the story, but a little nudge here or there makes the game a bit more fun)
My preferred arrow house rule: Keep count of your arrows used in an encounter After the encounter, if the party doesn’t have to flee or is pushed out of the area then all the arrows are assumed to be gathered by the user and recovered. Except subtract the number of Nat 1 missed shots that you made during that encounter because those arrows became damaged. If you or the party flee the area immediately after or during the combat, or the area is destroyed (lava, mudslide, flood, fire) then all the arrows fired are lost.
Worst one I had was after I'd rolled up a paladin as the only front line in a party, the DM decided to tell us that they were not only running the "exhaustion if you go down" rule but also that paladin's divine smite have to be declared before the attack and will burn the spell slot even on a miss, I suddenly found better things to do with my time than play that game
House Rules in any game system are also used to emulate specific setting needs. Even the publishers have done this on a regular Basis (ex: Original version of Nehwon/Lankhmar had no healing spells, since healing magic (and things like Resurrections) were not part of the original novels and short stories the setting was built for.
I haven't had a chance to DM a game yet, but I have played some games with house rules and I've come up with some house rule ideas of my own, so... this is gonna get long. 1. In my group's current campaign, we've got a couple of house rules. One is a variant initiative rule - it's more complicated, but the gist of it is that after your turn in an encounter, you can choose who goes after you, though players and enemies alike can interrupt after taking damage - which has turned out fun. I'd say for players using this, the most important thing is that held actions are much more important - if you hold your attack against the bad guy until another party member attacks, you basically attack at the same time; if you attack one after the other, the bad guy can interrupt the second person's attack if they take damage from the first. The other main house rule we have is that it takes a week in-game to get the full benefits of a long rest, which I would *not* recommend because we ended up having to tweak it anyway. It has some potential - it makes things more difficult, which can be more interesting - but it kind of goes too far in the other direction and makes things *too* difficult. 2. The first class I played was sorcerer, which I picked because I read the class description and got the impression that they had less spells than wizards but made up for that by being more flexible with them. When I actually played that character, though, I usually just ended up doing two cool things then spamming one cantrip over and over. I came up with a fix for this, which I haven't had a chance to try out yet: first, sorcerers regain some of their sorcery points on a short rest, second, sorcerers can change one of their metamagic options at the end of a long rest. 3. I find Plane Shift as a spell a bit overpowered, especially for the homebrew setting I'm working on, so I came up with a thing where Plane Shift can only be used in locations related to the plane you're trying to get to. Like, if you want to get to the fire plane, you have to go to a volcano. (The homebrew setting doesn't *have* a fire plane or any elemental planes, but that's the best example to illustrate what I mean.)
We had a game (modern-day) where you got a bonus if you physically made the action of pumping a round into your shotgun before combat, the drawback was we players kept forgetting we had already done that and ended up wasting ammo, we kept strick counts on ammo.
starting out in 'first edition' (1978), every DM I played with was the overlord and there were no expectations that anything in the book was canon. Everyone had different rules and even different invented creatures. There were simple and more complicated worlds and everything was new from one DM to the next. I do like the addition of skill points and other major changes. One of my sons has most of the rule limits and statistics for everything from character creation to sell specifics and weapon costs and damage output memorized in both 5th ed and 3.5.
As someone who house rules at the professional game developer level I must commend you for a very sober and sensible set of guidelines. The only thing I would even add is to watch out for adding unofficial books/material to your game. Even the few that have done a good job of developing their material (which is rare) they never line up well with your core game.
![Stop ignoring Inspiration points in D&D [DM Tips]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/SMzsbhq2GCM/mqdefault.jpg)
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congratulations of almost reaching 300k, just 1k to go!
I liked this video just off of the title, and I am sorry for what ever happens in the comments.
I thought for the longest time healing word did take an action and was just a worse version of Cure Wounds.
Now it makes sense why they are the same level spell.
I've already pledged. And figured you need some nice shiny math rock altars. *grin*
I love your dice....
From the original AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide:
“It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule books upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game (Gygax, 1979, p. 230).”
Hear Hear!
Was just having a conversation about this today and a friend cited this haha
If only the people who upheld older editions and RAW both as gospel hadn't skipped over that statement from the man himself, eh?
And that's great. But the whole point is that some house rules are broken and wildly unbalanced, and people need to be careful about what they implement
Define Irony: D&D Players arguing they don't need to follow the letter of the book, by providing the letter of the book, which says they don't need to follow the letter of the book.
My fav house rule in my group: 5e healing potions:
If you take a potion as an action, you get full healing. Because you are making sure you drink the whole thing by using your action. So 2d4+2=10 healing.
If you take a potion as a bonus action, you roll like normal. Because you’re drinking it in a rush, so some could spill out rather than getting to drink all of it. Now you could still roll good, which is the equivalent of you drinking it fast but you managed not to spill any.
I’m stealing this.
Found this one recently. Haven’t had much opportunity yet to use it (RP sessions, am I right?), but the next dungeon they delve into, I’m sure it’ll get its use
Just implemented this, it’s great. I combined with with drinking a healing potion is a bonus action (but no other potions)
We do this, and include the rule that feeding a potion to another character is always a full action with the usual die roll. It’s harder to give it to someone else without spilling =)
@@rmonogue Same here, it just makes sense. ☺️
I feel like it is a pretty commonly accepted thing when it comes to infinite ammo that you are adopting the 'we don't talk about it' approach. You don't bring it up, and I just assume you always have another arrow and filled up when you went to town last time. No shenanigans.
So here's the thing with that: arrow use stacks up FAST even at mid level. A ranger or fighter going for a machinegun build absolutely SHITS arrows. A quiver holds 20 (don't @ me about this number. Different editions use different numbers. I don't care). You have to have a quiver to shoot, so once you burn through 20 arrows, you either need another quiver which means unequipping this one, fumbling through your bag of holding for another one, and equipping another one.
Further, the little hamlets and villages you travel through probably doing have 20 arrows they'd even be willing to part with. Arrows are a logistical headache.
Arrow counting is specific to counting this sort of behavior.
My main house rule today is : "Ginny that shirt is AMAZING"
THANKS! It's from Morningwitch!
Very true
I want a shirt like that too, let's see if they sell it in mens pattern XXL ^^
Just went to the comments for this specifically, the hair-shirt combo is phenomenal 👌
It has strong bisexual energy and I want it
I really only have one house rule, and that involves crits. I had some players complain that so many times when you crit and either roll double dice, or just multiply your dice roll by two, you get low rolls that are still worse than your average damage. So I implemented a rule that on a crit you calculate your maximum damage with modifiers, then roll your damage as normal and add them together. This way your crit is at least 1 more than your normal maximum, and it feels impactful. I also warned my players ahead of time that if they agreed to using this house rule, I would also be applying it to the enemies that they faced. So it's a boon for everyone. They agreed, and we have really enjoyed it so far.
How does that interact with things like sneak attack and smite?
@@mojojojoplus2 You would still calculate max damage for both sneak attack and smite, as both are dice rolls. Then roll their damage as normal, adding both together.
I've used the same rule for a few years now. It works pretty well and makes crits feel more like CRITS!
I do the max weapon damage on a crit, but I don't make any other damage max, like sneak attack or smite.
We use this as well. It makes them feel like they did a ton of damage. And it makes the Grave Cleric even more helpful when he cancels out my crits as the DM
My tables all have one house rule: We don't start on 1s. No matter how funny a fail can be, it really sucks to start the night on a 1 for a skill check. And then last night my players learned that it applies to the DM as well!
That's a nice one! I will start using that at our table as well.
It became a nat 20 didn't it
More details please... Is it boosted to a 3? When does this apply?
@@satiricalsatyr9463 It did actually lol. It was perfect.
@@Maninawig It's usually just a reroll. We treat it as if the 1 never happened. It only applies to D20s, such as skill checks, and if it was at advantage or disadvantage, it only comes into play if both were 1s. Then it's only one die rerolled.
I've played with a DM whose house rules made me design a character specifically around not interacting with the rules he had. I dont want to have to roll to see if I run out of arrows 4 times in a turn as a fighter, or have to worry about buying random spell components every time I go to town.
As a DM, some rules that I've used
- If you counterspell a counterspell, all parties involved roll on the wild magic table.
- If you make the DM laugh with viscous mockery, you add 1d4 damage
- Cinematic advantage: in combat, if you do something cinematic (swing on a chandelier, intimidate an enemy with a flourish) accompanied with a successful appropriate ability check, you gain advantage on your next attack.
I LOVE the first two!
Very cool rules! i think the third would unfairly benefit rogues though, as they heavily rely on advantage and are great at skill checks(same goes for bards and sometimes rangers)
Maybe allow other classes expertise in 1 skill to balance it out?
I love all of these, adding them to my DM repertoire.
We have one that is similar to your Vicious Mockery one - if the player makes the DM laugh with it, the target autofails the save. We've also taken flanking away in favor of doing cool stuff for advantage, similar to your third rule.
"Ginny spells out good DM advice that it took me years to learn and I wish I'd known as a new DM" is my favorite genre of video.
Most people: House rules are controversial and need to be examined.
Me and the other DMs in my group (about 1/2 of us): I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter them further*
*After due discussion with players
I’ve always got a heckton of house rules in my games xD.
Most people: My house rules are a slightly tweaked spell and +2 for something
Me and the other DMs in my group: So the next game will be caster only, all cleric spells won't work because of the lore, I will add those two mechanics stolen from an entirely different system, all skills are changed, the progression will be gold for xp and the items and values will be from this homebrew book
my long time Gm implement a house rule that later came out as optional rules in later books. he was really happy that one of his house rules showed up in a book felt it proved him right.
Which rule
A house rule I tried out some years ago in a campaign showed up in Pathfinder 2e. I was pleased to see it. (characters start with a racial HD worth of hit points on top of what the get for their 1st level class. It's no fun to have your character 1-shot-ed on the very first round of combat in the very first combat of that character's career. In practice, it just means that character's identical twin shows up, because basically no one wants to do the work of making another character that soon after the game starts).
@@cyborglion4179 the racial stat bonus for years they thought it was limited and let players move the bonus to the stats they wanted for their class
@@jetvulcan2020 tbf its a good change in this day and age
@@jetvulcan2020 yea, I've been using that house rule basically since I started house ruling dnd. I always feel like it's a bit odd that we've kept the "everyone's basically a human" thing and still call different types of people races and then proceed to give people benifits based on their race. It'd be different if it was different species or cultures or something but we also roll culture up into race which is like, why?
My favorite and most common house rule is when you roll a natural 20 on a hit, you automatically do max damage and then roll damage and add modifiers. I absolutely hate it when I roll a critical hit but then roll low on the damage. This rule makes these hits actually feel damaging. And it applies to both players and the DM.
I do the same, because it sucks for a critical hit being like 7 damage. My question for you, is it just the base damage or is it additional damage say from sneak attack that is maxed too?
@@nebless-clem Now that is a challenging question that I don’t fully have an answer for. I’m still a relatively new DM who picked this rule up from my dad. For now, I think I’ll just keep it at base damage and work it from there.
@@nebless-clem The way I've seen it is that it applies to *all* dice, including Sneak Attack, Divine Smite, Hunter's Mark, etc. For example, suppose a level 3 rogue crits with a rapier and gets Sneak Attack damage. A normal hit would do 1d8 + 2d6 + Dex damage. Using this rule, a crit would do 8 + 6 + 6 + 1d8 + 2d6 + Dex.
This gets out of hand very quickly with crits from sources like divine smite that the player cannot miss, so I personally run the house rule as only the WEAPON damage dice is maximized. This is coming from me, a Paladin, critting for over 60 at level 3 and realising "wow this is kinda unfair" 😅
My problem with variant crit rules is that they get unwieldy when they interact with stuff like a barbarian's Brutal Critical or a half-orc's Savage Attacks, which add extra dice that *aren't* maxed. You have to work out the max of your normal dice, then roll them along with your extra dice, then add everything together.
Much simpler to just build up a big handful of dice, chuck 'em, and add them up. And, even if you get some 1s and 2s, it's still fun to roll a whole load of dice.
My favorite house rule that I implement in my games after having another DM introduce it to me is: journal entries allow the player to start the session with Inspiration. Essentially players can write a journal entry from their characters perspective of things during the week (before the next session starts), which the DM and (usually) other players can view on an online forum of some sort. I love this because it helps me get to know the player's characters better, their intentions, plans, ambitions, as well as indirectly what the players themselves want to see happen in the game. Additionally it also allows the other players to also learn this and even figure out their own characters better. Granted it gives players with more time and investment an advantage (which seems fair to me lol).
I'm gonna ask my players if they'd like to implement this one.
@@obsidiannightwolfe13 Good luck! Hope they like it/use it. (And remember you can still give out Inspiration for other things, this is just a way for them to guarantee they get one at the start of the session).
I give players inspiration at the start of a session for recapping the previous session for me, it makes players pay more attention to what happened.
My first dnd campaign I was ever in, one of the final fights took place on a frozen lake that was slowly melting and breaking apart. we were facing two scaled up were-polarbears and were on the brink of death for nearly the whole fight. The map was constantly changing and we had to plan our routes and move quickly before the ice broke too much to traverse and we all plunged into the frozen lake. It was an incredibly fun combat, and we felt so pwerful when we won.
Quiver of returning arrows (capacity 5)
Bind 5 nonmagical arrows to this item, when these arrows are removed and fired, they are magically warped to the quiver once the attack is resolved. (5 slots in case arrows are broken or if you have multiple types of arrows)
This solves so much and opens people's minds to the possible applications of archery based innovations.
Quiver magically produces non magical ammunition that disappear after 1 minute if it's more than 5ft from the quiver.
@@rarrmonkey Yeah, in game mechanic terms, I've made quivers and bullet pouches enchanted with creation to make temporary non-magical ammunition.
Great for things like:
Whistling arrow - sound signal
Nonmagical burning/glowing arrow - light/tracer/signal
Poison arrow - assassin's best friend?
Armor piercing arrow - tough targets
Serrated arrow - make em bleed
Also great for Attachment deliveries - the arrow is returned, but something clipped to it is not...
Darkness/fog cloud/silence pendant - hard CC
Grappling hook - a classic
Delayed fireball rune - an achievement
Trip wire posts (twin arrow delivery)- traps at a distance!
Teleport rune - now you're thinking with portals!
Booming arrow - stun grenade anyone?
@@vn0688 I wouldn't put an arrow meant to be set aflame in this. It would warp back while still burning. Troublesome for the shooter and specifically for all the other arrows in the quiver.
Also, while the serration would not help much (because the bleeding-inducing moment, i.e. the pulling out, is skipped), basically all of the arrows that would warp back would induce quite some bleeding (because the arrow acts as a stopgap in the wound, but would not do that in this case), but wouldn't be able to hinder the shot character's movement (because they aren't there).
Also, might bring some issues with some kinds of Rapid Fire where 5 may very well not be enough, especially if only 1 or 2 were the standardly shot ones.
@@Alche_mist admittedly I thought of this being utilized more by a rogue... So 1 aimed shot typically... For a ranged fighter, yeah I would expect this to be for the special utility shots and whatever bog standard arrow they might want to spam would be carried in bundles with their own quiver.
And the flame arrow, yes, treat with caution. I was imagining an oil rag tied to it, but the teleport would leave the rag behind... But I was imagining a bright fluorescent or neon glow from a non-flame source as possible light alternatives.
As someone who does a lot of homebrew (though not a ton of house rules) I found your tips to be ones that apply really well to homebrewing too, especially in terms of balancing. Great stuff, and really well researched.
I go over my house rules in Session Zero, and I explain why I have them. If adding a new house rule later on, I'll explain the idea to the players and we discuss it before we start actually playing D&D (in other words, I don't interrupt the game for this discussion.) If the players agree to the new rule, we'll "play-test" it for one or two sessions, then we'll discuss if the rule did what we expected, if it needs tweaked, or simply dropped.
I love Ginny so much.
As a dm I find her videos informative and easy to follow and I suggest her to my players as the best place for easy to follow and creative tips and info ♡
I have a basic house rule - its for everyone, npc pc or enemy, if you roll their ac exactly you hit them.
Also no really a rule more advice from a dm pov -
but my player was looking for water so I made her a bag of sweets that replenished her fluids for 24 hours and rolled a dice to see how many sweets she got. She now has 5 days worth of water she can fit into a tiny pouch rather than having to carry 5 days worth of liquid around with her.
My advice is - it's okay to use or modify existing things or create new things, at the end of the day as long as you are all having fun thats what matters.
My player is level one so I also moded a animated armour to be so Rusty his move speed was 10ft and he can't move his arms more than 45% so he can't lift his arms due to rusting.
You are not trying to kill your players right off the bat, let them earn their death.
In our first session the player wanted to jump out a tree but the fall damage would have killed her right out so I didn't let her do it.
If your players are new to dnd be forgiving while they learn the ropes.
I've been into dnd for years but this is my players first campaign so I want to ease her in and in my opinion we will all get more out of the game this way.
At the end of the day you are playing to have fun ♡ just enjoy yourselves.
Favorite house rule I've implemented at my table; flanking only gives advantage if the target is isolated (as in no other enemy is within melee range of either of the flankers or the target). In a big brawling battlefield, this rarely happens, but it incentivizes a tactical approach, and frequently gives them an edge against the bigger individual enemies where they need it.
The biggest thing about house rules is clearly and concisely explaining them at Session Zero. Walk through the house rules in very specific detail, that way everyone can voice their concerns. I think we talked about Choking for 30 minutes to understand how you can chocke or be choked.
Kinky
So I once had an issue with my players being a bit wild at the table, and repeatedly rolling their dice off the table. So I came up with the Rodeo Dice Rule. You fumble your dice, you fumble your action, and get a natural 1 on that role.
We have a house rule that you get to speak up to 10 words per round in combat! 10 words in 6 seconds also makes sens!
Great video! I've personally started walking away from tables that are insistent on playing with the "roll a natural 1 on attack/skill checks and the gm takes liberty with extra negative consequences" house rule. Sounds fun until you realize your rogue with a billion points in slight of hand will trip over his own shoelaces trying to steal a pack of gum 5% of the time, or your fighter or monk actually gets penalized for leveling up/spending ki on flurry of blows. I forget the exact numbers but a high level fighter that spends an action surge to do two rounds of attacks had like a 33% chance of screwing up.
I'm leary of any house rules that compromise the basic competency of your characters. Let your player characters at least be able to do the basic thing they've presumably trained to do their entire lives!
I've always seen it as, even the most well trained people can fuck up sometimes. I like to roll another d20 to see exactly how bad the nat 1 is, so it's only REALLY catastrophic and humiliating on a second nat 1 in a row, which is a much lower chance. Higher rolls might mean its not even the character's fault: "Your arrow sails through the air, but one of the feathers was crooked, and it takes a sharp turn into the dirt.", "You swing your axe, but the tough ogre bats it aside." "You throw the javelin, but in the heat of the moment, it awkwardly slips from your grasp, landing on the ground just below where you were aiming."
Whereas not hitting the AC would involve the enemy dodging or parrying or blocking in some way.
My current house rules:
Healing potions always heal full amount - they're valuable so can't have that many of them.. Still action to make it a more tactical choice in combat
Flanking gives +2 to attack
Multiple sources of advantage/disadvantage add +2 or -2 to attack
Secret death saving throws (Curse of Strahd, fits the horror theme)
Considering
Medicine check to stabilize an unconcious player works like having them roll another Death Saving Throw, risking to make it worse or even get them back to alive with a nat 20
The rule you mentioned about hitting armor class giving resistance to the damage.
Matthew Mercers rules for skill challenge to resurrect a dead PC
My major house rule I play with is the re-roll 1's on critical damage outcomes, as it feels bad that when you roll that Nat20, only to roll snake eyes for damage output.
I do convey that this is a two-way road, and that enemies/NPCs will get this as well, but honestly I more often than not just leave their rolls as is.
I also have a self-limiting rule to myself that NPC's will be at minimum 1 level lower than the players, just so it doesn't feel like I'm doing self-inserts and hogging the spotlight.
using sidekick rules from Tashas can be good for NPCs
I guess the self-limiting NPC rules doesn't apply to characters that are intentionally above (often far above) the party in levels - Illuminati in RP sessions, Big Bad, Even Bigger Bad and other characters that are more of a Plot Device than a skill/dicerolling target (i.e. combat, persuasion, etc.).
Because otherwise, those valuable story characters would be sorely missing. I know it's a different system, but just look at Elders and Methuselah in Vampire: the Masquerade. Most player characters get no chance at all against them, but they serve the story.
Obviously, you must always be careful with such characters - you rightly identified that it's easy to make them Mary Sue with all the (harmful and dangerous) consequences.
Our table for critical damage does max damage, then roll normally. So a greatsword would do 12 + 2d6
@@hannahcullen196 dam, brutal
Bonus Action healing is what makes in-combat healing worthwhile in my opinion. I can't imagine getting rid of it.
the first house rule my brother established in the game he ran for our family was "the verbal component to magic missile is yelling magic missile in a silly voice and you have to do it or the spell doesn't work"
In the campaign I’m currently playing, the DM said to us we must add both a feat and an ability score improvement every time we reach the levels we must choose for one of those.
Looking at it bluntly, that makes all the characters insanely overpowered if they go for a strong build, but the DM says he loves seeing strong characters in game. But we’ve had a lot of fun thinking of fun builds together with the DM, so I’d say it’s not a bad thing if we’re enjoying the game more because of it!
On the one about removing attacks of opportunity
Interestingly PF2 almost does have no attacks of opportunity. The fighter and the champion (Paladin) get them and other martials can pick it up as a feat.
Same goes for monsters, only usually "boss" monsters can attack of opportunity.
I honestly prefer this 1000x. We get fights with players constantly running up slopes and diving over enemies, sliding past enemies down a hill, monks and rouges flipping over enemies etc.
Absolutely love it
TIL 5e doesn't have the tumble mechanic to not provoke AoOs. I guess I'm adding a house rule for tumbling to avoid AoOs.
For the sake of anyone else reading this - only the Fighter gets it for free at level 1, every other martial can grab it as a 6th level class feat (but they typically have some pretty stiff competition at that level) and it’s not so much bosses that have it as mostly enemies who could be considered heavily-trained soldiers (Hobgoblin Soldiers have it, for example) but these are still in the considerable minority of enemies in the bestiaries.
And I *love* this! There’s more design space for interesting Reactions, fights get more mobile since you’re no longer locked into melee for fear of getting smacked with an AoO, and just makes the fights more dynamic and lets the party more easily shift gears and react to changing circumstances.
@@matthewlangley3089 disengage
My last comment was ment for @@procrastinatinggamer
@@michielbrouwer-cummins8703 If you mean the Disengage action in 5e, that's still costing either your action or your bonus action (and I'm pretty sure most 5e characters who aren't Rogues are stuck with the former). A PF2e character can spend one of their three actions to just walk away, then still have two more actions for other stuff (like casting a spell, making an attack, etc).
Between this and the Action Economy you can do some proper hit-and-run tactics - one action to move in, second to strike, third to move away. Hell; it's actually a foundational tactic of a lot of Monks - stride into melee, one action for Flurry of Blows (to land two attacks), then one action to move away to safety before your turn ends.
The shirt and the hair go PERFECTLY together.
Also cute shirt
my table is mostly casters and we decided to ignore required materials for spells, but materials they grab on the way can be used to expand a spell. our barbarian was in favor as well so it goes well for us. one player is a druid so she collects lots of fun things to use
We have the house rule of any healing spell or healing potion used out side of combat is at max healing. The theory is you are able to drink all the contents or take your time casting the spell.
What I do for a house rule, we play so if you have an inspiration point you add it to your dice before you roll. So if you roll a nat 20 than it would be a 21 so you get to roll another d20 and if that’s a nat 20 then It’s like the gods have chosen this to happen. So the power of rolling a 21 and then a 20 creates so much energy that it allows the player to make a super powerful weapon (with the dms approval)
At the table we play at, one of the major house rules is that if you are attacked and the opponent tolls a natural 1 you can use your reaction to get an attack of opportunity.
Man, I use so many houserules which I set out in a session 0 when appropriate, but your video did remind me that I had introduced one just yesterday to a home game (extending the audible range of thunder spells) without really talking it through with my players.
Thanks for this video, reminding me to keep good practices, even with my home games.
90% of my “house rules” are things i misspoke or forgot about and then decided to make official lol. and it’s almost always in the players favor.
Edit: I am now realizing this is a big problem. :/
My husband's house rule when he DMs is: "You describe your nat 20s; I describe your nat 1s." No matter the outcome, it's brought some serious laughs to our table!
Ginny, I love your dice. Also this is a great video. House rules are everything you’ve said here. They aren’t for all tables, they don’t apply everywhere, but can still be essential to balancing the game. Great job in making a difficult topic easy.
Got a house rule that players start with standard array, but get both ASI and Feats on appropriate levels. Going from 1-20 with the exact same stats feels weird. With the math, it works out fun! 🤗
Very interesting.
I've been thinking about this but maybe with just 1 point. Really I would switch the characters to the 3.5 system of a feat every 3 levels and 1 stat point every 4 levels, but that's more complicated and people don't always pay attention. XD
Maybe when they make new characters...
@@matthewlangley3089 for sure! I calculated it out, and even doing both you would at most get a player with two 20 stat scores by level 20. How it is with rolling stats is usually players already have a 20 stat at level 1. It's a better progression in my opinion
I may make a video about it in a few weeks
Sounds cool
In my game, I give out "Yippideedoos" when people do awesome stuff, rather like Inspiration. Collect 20, and you can trade it in for a Feat.
When leveling up, we stick with the stat improvements, so a good player can have top-stat PCs AND great feats.
Yes, I do have to adjust the balance in the modules, but it's so much more fun that way. People will do so much for a Yippideedoo.
A house rule I implement in most of my games is that regardless of the class and level I will allow a player to invent new things whether it be a spell (must be of a class and level your character has access to) or a weapon (same requirements as spells), or even a tool (trickier) however I require them to go over it with me so as to hopefully not break the game. I have had a bard player ask to combine a rapier and a lyre into 1 object that we added a few complications to and another time we made a spell to summon some constructs like any of the conjure lesser whatever spells. We also use the nat 1 random tables and nat 20 special effects (like make them blind for a couple turns by going for their eyes)
Whenever I find a house rule I think would improve the game, I have my players vote on whether or not we add it. They’re also free to suggest any house rules at the start of each session and feedback at the end
Most of my house rules are just "I've reviewed this subsystem someone made for XYZ and I'm using it". Like crafting, or harvesting dragon parts and what you can do with them.
I've always played more on the freeform side of Roleplay than D&D & others, but one time a DM changed the established rules was when an easter egg led to an incidental kaiju battle, and to make its more than spectators, the DM decided the area was overflowing with magic, so all our magical attacks would have +10d20 dmg. Throwing our whole pile of dices to laser the Kaiju was incredibly fun :3
I've been playing for long enough to see both sides of this spectrum, and sometimes it got ugly. I had a game that was more house rules than actual rules in Pathfinder, and that was an absolute mess. Anyone who knows Pathfinder knows why. But I had some very inconsequential but fun house rules come out, like that Tabaxi get darkvision or Tortles live the same length of time as dwarves
One idea I heard a while back was for the DM to make perception/investigation/stealth rolls for the players - makes it more realistic as if you personally were looking for something or trying to be stealthy, you wouldn't necessarily know how well you were doing and increases the tension because players won't know if they are being stealthy or if they missed an enemy up ahead on a bad perception roll.
This is actually how Pathfinder 2e handles that stuff by default. If you’re rolling a stealth check, the GM is the one who rolls the dice for you and you have no idea how stealthy you’re actually being outside of an educated guess from your modifier. Likewise if there’s some bad guys hiding up ahead in an ambush, the GM will roll their Stealth Checks against the party’s Perception DCs (think Passive Perception in 5e, PF2e tried to remove opposed rolls entirely) so the players don’t even know any checks were made.
I had a DM do this and it took away a lot of the fun for the players. It was frustrating to try to do something in game and just be told "you don't see anything". I think it's that thing of it being okay to fail something but it being upsetting when someone fails on your behalf. I also think that that particular DM used it far too frequently and potentially was sketchy about it, amongst other things, so we sort of lost faith in him 😬
I think this is only a good idea if you have problem players who meta-game perception information for their character's benefit. Good players will lean into failed perception checks and roleplay being at a disadvantage, rather than trying to game the system.
I absolutely despise the idea of the DM making rolls for my character. I wouldn't play in a game that did that, and I'm a Forever DM who jumps at any chance to play a character.
@@futuza I had to push that in a beginner's game when I was first learning 5e. I had played AD&D and some WoD before. I failed my Perception, and one of the players argued if I should be just walking into the room. I pointed out that everyone that had looked failed, and my character thinks it's safe. Someone has to set off the trap, and my character would be the normal choice to go first anyways. Immediately attacked by a Grey Ooze. But I saved us from several minutes of metagaming.
I made/found (don't remember which) a variation of the infinite non-magic ammo rule. Basically it added a clause of "within reason".
This little clause does many little things to the rule. The primary one is it allows you to shut down the 4:39 example quickly by saying "Ok you sold the quiver of 100 arrows you currently have on hand. Don't expect to have any arrows for the next day's worth of encounters". It also allows the DM to create swarm encounters that the party is definitely suppose run away from by saying something along the lines of "After stopping the first 80 or so goblins your quiver starts feeling a bit empty as it starts running out of arrows".
This is an example of a "give and take" homebrew balancing policy. I the DM give the player a way to enjoy the game without having to keep track of ammo, however, if they use the infinite ammo ruling they are doing so with the understanding of they give the DM control of saying when they are out of ammo. However, the Player can choose to keep track of their own ammo but they have to let the DM which variation they are using.
As a game design alumni who wants to go into TTRPG's eventually, homebrew rules are super important to me and my games. I have an entire channel in my D&D discord dedicated to my house rules, most of them are minor tweaks on RAW, like uncapping fall damage, variant attunement timing, and a different method for DM inspiration, but others are completely new mechanics like upcasting using a spell slot and levels of exhaustion combined to be able to cast a spell at the combined total's level (level 4 spell slot + 2 levels of exhaustion = level 6 spell slot).
A few of the 18 rules in there right now are just explaining things like rule of cool, HDYWTDT, you can certainly try, that kind of stuff, cause my players are generally new and I find it helpful to write these things down for them. And any rule that's potentially too powerful in any direction (like the one that makes crits do max die damage + roll + modifier) are listed as subject to change and I have made it very clear I could get rid of or change them at any time if it feels unfair.
Then even some rules are completely irrelevant during gameplay and deal with character creation like my own method of rolling for stats that makes the characters more powerful (meaning I can throw more challenging things at them and they can feel more heroic) and making Intelligence more useful outside of Artificers and Wizards, giving them proficiency and expertise in different skills based on their INT modifier. A lot of my house rules are really focused on empowering my players, now that I think about it. 😅
I also find that despite the fact that they're all listed and readily available, my players will often forget about the more obscure rules (which is to be expected, we play like once a month and they're mostly all new players), so it's invaluable that I remember them and can remind my players of them mid-game. If we played in person I'd probably make up a 10 commandments style graphic to hang on the wall about my homebrew rules lmao.
(Also a lot of these rules are taken from XPtoLevel3, with some minor tweaks here and there)
Hi Ginny! You along with other D&D UA-camrs (tik tokers) have really helped me put learn and expand my knowledge of D&D house rules, homebrew designing (classes, subclasses, crafting, etc) and DMing! Thank you alot!!
"Look, if she didn't want me to buy stuff, she shouldn't put her wallet in the same bag as her dice." Legendary! :D
Ginny's ads are so good and you got love the characters of pink and blue D20
I love this. One of my group's recent house rule additions is that when we roll initiative, natural 20's and natural 1's change things about the first round of combat for whoever rolled that. Nat 20's give advantage for the first action or attack that requires it, and nat 1's give disadvantage. This also works for the DM's monsters and villains too! We added it because it sucks to roll a nat 20 on initiative and not have any benefit other than going first, and the Nat 1's give everyone an opportunity to up their Role-play game in the first round, like playing that they were distracted or caught off guard in some capacity.
I've found that creative players can break anything in game. I absolutely love having them come up with something I didn't think of. Of course, I do have a house rule of veto rights. If something they want to do is way beyond scope I can say no.
Ranger: Time to become a infinite arrow salesman
DM: Did somebody say ingame Hyperinflation?
Infinite arrows? Cookfires and bonfires now require only one archer in the party!
Just have them disappear 2-3 minutes after leaving the quiver
One of my favorite house rules that I've used every game/group for ages. Critical hits do Max damage+a damage roll. So if you attack with a weapon that does D8 damage, and score a crit, you do 8+D8 damage, plus any other mods. This way a critical hit is always better than any regular hit could be. No chance of doing just 2 points of damage on a critical hit.
Love being the one who rolls death saves for my players. The tension they feel makes them act like an actual person would if a friend fell in combat rather than gaming the system and letting their friend continue to bleed out.
Since I play online, I have the opportunity to experience rolling my own death saves privately in the chat, but then keeping my mouth shut as my character slowly bleeds to death and the others are deciding what to do XD extra fun when I have my microphone muted and I can talk to them from my unconscious state without them hearing me.
GOD when I was a beginner DM I didn't understand how attack of opportunity worked so I was the jerk DM who got rid of it for the first few sessions... then I was able to connect the dots and felt SO BAD for getting rid of it!! g r o w t h
man, attacks of opportunity suck, though. they discourage tactical movement and usually slow the game down. very sad.
well. not opportunity attacks full stop, but provoking them by moving away. if someone has a specific ability, they're always looking to use it, so there's no need to worry about that.
Great, really in depth video :) Thanks
I've got a very important rule of thumb to add to the list. If or when you want to change something in the game, keep in mind that is is generally better to BUFF something than it is to NERF it. No one likes it if something is taken away from them, while helping someone who needs it is great for the entire table.
My favorite house rule is that on a nat 20 saving throw you take no damage. My first dm did that and I always implement it when I run games!
I replay this video again and again just to hear Ginny Di say "Today, I woke up and chose violence." It makes my day.😂
*It's so good that you're making this video! House Rules are awesome, but with great power, comes great ya know!*
I want to share my fav one: HP - HeroismPoints, allowing the Heroes to do Heroic deeds! Its impossible for 8 hours of sleep to heal open wounds, that's why all HitPoints are replaced with HeroismPoints. No mechanics change, its only descriptive. Whenever a player would lose HitP. for some reason, he loses HeroismP. instead. For example, when he would be hit with a sword and lose 10 HP, his armor/shield/parry stops the blade, and he loses 10 HeroismP. instead. In place of breaking your legs jumping from 30ft, the Hero rolls forward dispersing the momentum, using up 3d6 HeroismP!
Ahhh yes! I've thought of using something similar too. I've always attributed it to running out of in-the-moment energy, since they're jumping around and swinging weapons and waving their arms around and using their magical resources all within a really short period of time. When they reach a low enough energy, they can't keep up fighting to the standard they normally would, which is when a fatal blow is dealt. Doesn't stop them from receiving minor scratches or burns, but definitely adds a really nice level of drama to combat!
I think it's good for campaigns when characters have a reason to be competent. Doesn't make as much sense for a sorcerer who just discovered their powers a month prior to the adventure.
This was interesting, particularly your point that a house rule should benefit all players equally, which I must confess I don't always abide by. When one of my friends wants to play a sub-optimal sub-class because they have a character in mind or really like the flavour I'll often make adjustments to the class, in concert with the player in question and the table at large, to try and even the playing field and I guess I've always considered these adjustments to be houserules. An example I'm fond of is modifications to Berserker Barbarian's Frenzied Rage, allowing them to immediately attack as part of the bonus action when entering the frenzy and also giving them a saving throw similar to the Level 11 Barabarian feature Relentless Rage (DC10 Con, increasing by 5 for each success resetting on a long rest) to avoid the exhaustion from using Frenzy so that they have a decent chance of using their core ability more than twice in a day without crippling themselves.
For that arrow one, making it a magic quivver that provides unlimited arrows, but the arrows disappear 8 seconds after being removed, is what I would do. That way, they always have arrows to use, but can't use them for traps or sell them.
(Note to self, make "Quiver of vanishing arrows")
5:43 MY TONGUE IS DRY FROM REPEATING THIS SO MANY TIMES
Pretty much the only 2 house rules I currently use in my games are: healing potions can be drank as a bonus action (but still take a full action to administer to an ally); and standing from prone costs a flat 5 feet of movement. Both of these apply to bad guys as well as PC's.
At my table we have a rule in which whenever someone has to make a save check from an attack and you roll a nat 20 you automatically pass the save with no damage, but if you roll a nat 1, you end up getting double the damage.
Ooof, brutal! XD for both sides of that lol
I'm sure rouges love the exploding damage die rule, when you just roll ten million dice for sneak attack
I've used a few house rules in different campaigns ie. Dismemberment in a sea fairing campaign for the whole wooden limb, eye patch aesthetic
Or
Crit fails in the game I run for my little brothers for a sillier tone.
Oooo, how did you run losing limbs? I've only seen the grimhollow system for it.
Here's some of my favorite Home rules :)
1. Making Intelligence more impactful, so players might consider not making it their dumb stat so often (as only Wizards and Artificiers [non Phb class] gain direct bonuses from it). In addition to its other bonuses, intelligence reduces the time your character needs to acquire new proficiencies and languages (250 days, each day costs 1 gold worth of equipment and consumables). +1 is equivalent to -25 days, +2 for -50, +3 for -75, +4 for -100, +5 for -125. It works vice versa for negative bonus in intelligence. So, a human with an intelligence score of 14 (+2), will need only 200 days to learn elvish as a new language, instead of 250. Intelligence also provides in identifying an item’s properties. During a short rest, you can use your Arcana skill once to study an item. Depending on the DC, after the check you learn some, none or all of the item’s properties and/or hidden secrets.
2. Advantage and Disadvantage stacking, in my opinion a simple way overall to pump up situations that lack other interesting factors, like terrain, weather and/or magic effects. Advantage and Disadvantage can stack, giving a +1 or -1 for each dis or adv more or less than equal (max +3/-3). For example, a prone creature which is also frightened has now -1 to attack rolls in addition to the disadvantage.
3.Critical hits. When you score a critical hit, your lower roll always counts as half of the original die (for example, roll 2d6 = 5, 1, treat ''1'' as a ''3''). Physical damage comes first as tiebreaker, then it’s on player’s call. I used to play like many people do, treating the first roll of critical hits as max damage and then adding the second roll, but when players reached higher levels it quickly became a problem, as some of their combos evolved a lot of rolls thus the higher chance of critical hits and that meant one shoting things. This can be solved however by giving them more difficult opponents and situations to deal with someone could argue, but from my experience I feel that the best way overall is avoiding big numbers and unnecessary math that slow the game down.
4. Languages. It is common in 5e, even for characters that have invested less in scholarship and education to acquire at least 2 to 3 languages beginning in level 1 (it is also completely doable for some to start the game knowing 5-6 languages depending on class and background, not even counting in feats!). This mostly doesn't pose any issues, since in most games DM and players don't pay much attention in the usage of multiple languages, likewise in ammunition, carrying capacity and nourishment. Everyone is typically using common and if the group finds some exotic tribe or old textures written in some forgotten script, one or two players might happen to know that exact language, so the diplomacy becomes way easier avoiding dramas and hiring/meeting some npc that his whole life might be translating particular texts, whom the players might be cool to depend on. Anyway, to make Languages a bit more interesting I use this Home rule: Language proficiency consists of being able to A.) Speak it and B.) Know how to write and read it. Use bonus languages that your race, class and background provide to you as currency to acquire full proficiency in a particular language (Example: Human fighter with Sage background gets Common and 3 languages of his choice. Player chooses 1 of its bonus languages to learn writing and reading of Common and 2 other to fully learn how to speak, write and read Elvish). If languages end up to an odd number, then player can speak that language, but not write or read it.
5. Shields. I feel like they deserve more, as they were usually used for offence also. Originally, they do 1d4 B. damage as improvised weapons if the character is proficient with them (because they don't fall on the weapon category in PHB, but on armor). I allow players to attack with shields (I also use variant shields as light [1 AC, 1d4 B dmg, light-for bonus action attacks], PhB shield [2 AC, 1d6 B dmg], heavy [3 AC, 1d6 B dmg]. But, attacking with shield loses the AC bonus until your next round, as hypothetically you leave yourself open to the enemy. On top of that, I ve introduced a tier II Shield Mastery feat, (requires for the player to pick the original first) providing: If you make an attack with your shield, you don't lose the AC until the start of your next turn. Shield Bash. If you take the attack action on your turn, you can use one of your shield attacks in an attempt to stun your opponent. Make a shield W.A. against an adjacent creature. If you succeed, target makes a CON STH (8 + your prof + your STR mod.), on a failure, target is stunned for 1 turn. On a success, target gets immunity being stunned from your shield attack until the end of his next turn.
Thanks for reading and sorry for big text :)
Few house rules i like to play with:
-bonus action healing potion
-glancing blows (if roll to hit is exactly the AC of the target, damage is halved). More often then not, it helps players take less damage.
Rules i don't like and think they make game worse:
- Encumbrance variant rule. It just adds more book keeping and punishes players who likes to carry adventuring tools to often execute creative ideas. With this rule in action, most characters will have lowered movement speed just from their starting equipment. It also punishes players in heavy armour. That armour already have str requirement to cover for that as well as stealth disadvantage. And honestly, most many tables that run this rule, don't even bother tracking it once the game start.
This reminds me people who come up with rules like weapon durability etc. Rules that just add more book keeping to the game but don't really add much to the game itself.
I have a friend who has a house rule that the DM rolls death saving rolls behind their screen, and then only tells the player if they've survived.
He figured that it makes it more realistic, and the players need to decide if they heal that character or not, while not actually knowing how close they are to death. It ads a bit of excitement not knowing if this is the turn your character bites the dust
I played under a GM who was writing his own system inspired by several different game systems, and it seemed like every three sessions we would have an hour or two of "these are the new changes to your character".
I was playing an illusionist+ weapons who ended up, three years later, a dual wielding combat machine with group-buffing skills.
Sounds like watching a longer TV series where the writers keep adding/changing the characters as time passes.
Great points! A few over time with open discussion is best.Some houserules we currently use
1) Drinking a potion is a Bonus action, giving one is an Action 2) Brutal Critical hits (PCs and enemies) One set of all dice is maxed then roll all dice and add with modifiers. Ex. Scimitar critical with +2 mod = 8+1d6.
3) Enhanced variant encumbrance (changing the weight of certain gear that seems off) Plus being encumbered effects jumping.
4) New conditions Staggered and Terror
5) Free Arcana checks when spellcasting is occurring to identify the spell being cast (DC varies by how familliar the people attempting are with the spell- much lower DC if they Know the spell)
6) A few weapon powers and maneuvers added everyone proficient can use
7) Special d20 'lucky' rolls to determine some random things (flat d20 no modifiers)
8) Custom crafting and material/ingredient rules
9) custom poison gathering and use rules
10) Tons of homebrew mundane items, spells, magic items, monsters, player races, subclasses, and a few other options such as feats and backgrounds, etc.
oh and 11) Can attempt some Actions as Bonus actions with an ability check roll (such as STR or DEX vs a DC)
My first D&D group in High School had a house rule we called the OptimusPrime/Megatron rule. This came from the era where you had to confirm critical hits (a 20 was a confirmed hit, but you had to roll again and beat the AC of the target in order to deal critical damage) and the rule was that if you rolled a 20 to confirm, you rolled a third time. If you rolled a 20 on that, you rolled an 'Optimus Prime' which insta-killed the target, no matter how improbable or seemingly impossible it was. One example was they were fighting a Lord of Hell and rolled 3 20s. An arrow that a party member had massively fumbled on from several campaigns ago had slipped through a hole in time and space and struck the demon right in the heart.
The other side was 3 consecutive 1s. Rolling a 'Megatron' caused your character to die. A stroke, congenital heart defect, or a bizzare accident took them out.
We eventually took this for any time someone rolled a 20 or a 1, even on verbal skill checks. If you got an Optimus Prime on a skill check, you received a permanent +1 bonus on that skill by discovering some new or novel way of approaching it. Rolling a Megatron caused a -1 on that skill as they develop a bad habit that impedes their successful execution of that skill.
2 of my favorites: Crits gives you max damage + rolling the additional dice. Taking a health potion is a BA, feeding one to someone else is an action.
I would say Crit is Weapon ONLY max + regular damage roll.
In our game, during initiative rolls, if you roll a Nat 20 you get an extra action during the first round, and if you roll a Nat 1 you lose your action or bonus action for the first round. Adds a little fun when you roll a Nat 20 and still come in behind the rogue!
My table usually has a house rule where, if a caster learns a new spell they think will be cool or useful but then never finds an opportunity for it, they can drop it in favor of another spell. However, if they've used it even once, it's locked in since it's now "canon" to the campaign
A problem I had in a previous group was a DM who didn't so much use lots of house rules as "played fast and loose with the rules of the game without telling anyone." Needless to say, it caused some frustration at the table.
Most of our game’s house rules came from the dm mixing up his editions and when we realized the ruling was wrong he decided to keep for consistency. Biggest example is adding proficiency to damage in that campaign. Other things were choices. Basic potions are easier to brew just spending downtime in the woods and in camp because we were all nature characters with no healers. And drinking a potion is a bonus action, but feeding one to an unconscious person an action.
The two most common house rules I've encountered as a player are: not keeping track of ammo/common components and not tracking weight. Cause no one in my friend group wants to pause the story to do math. Lol
Completely unrelated, I love your shirt.
I have a general rule of "your characters aren't idiots". Basically that these characters exist in this world, so they know how things work. They'll stock up on supplies when they're in town. They'll replace stuff that gets worn out or broken. etc So players don't have to waste time on trivial things and quest rewards get spent on interesting things rather than having to kill a bunch of gnolls just so you can afford lunch.
My biggest house rule experiment was a system mash-up. I was newly getting into Cypher Systems and there's 2 main mechanics that were a really hard sell for my table. One is spending effort as this was, in their eyes, spending HP. The other was using Cyphers, the system's ubiquitous one-shot magic items. The players were far more familiar with D&D-ish games and wanted to hoard every resource.
I have a Drama Deck for Savage Worlds. This is a bunch of one-off effects and odd bonuses that the players had worked with before, and understood were very much use-it-or-lose it, while the Cypher system resources were more like "eh, easy come, easy go." So I sorted through this deck of weird features and bonuses and threw out the ones that just flat-out did not work. But kept in the "I know a guy!" or "Find the treasure" or "lucky!" sorts of things. And especially the cards that make a combat worse... but give everyone at the table more cards.
The deck's an optional resource for savage worlds, but... seeing my players looking for excuses to get some value out of their cards was really positive. It gave this specific group permission in ways that we all struggled with for manipulating the narrative. Another group, where I was a player, had TORG's version of this... and we had a bit of a house rule with that where the "nemesis" card got retired after the same player played it on the same NPC in 3 separate sessions.
I'm thinking my next game, I'll have a new variant for some of the plot-manipulating ones. I'm thinking "Ambitions" and just let the players choose which ones they want, and let them trade them or exchange them until they spend them. Because a romance card when you're in a dungeon crawl isn't great (although there's some animes about that). It's an idea, and I'll have to see how a few other systems do things like it before I make any decisions. But I want it to be obvious to players that they have permission to change the narrative... and maybe also to signal to me that "Oh, this is why they're doing this, I need to yes-and better here."
For the infinite arrow example I have a pretty simple solution:
Referee your house rules (and official rules) as intended, not based off the specific wording.
Also one of the benefits of games being run live is you can implement live bug fixes (although it is of course better to avoid the bugs in the first place.)
House rule: when rolling initiative a nat 20 will allow you to chose where you want to be in initiative. That way players can get excited by a nat 20 in initiative and it has some strategic elements.
An house rule we use: Mirror Image may grant sneak attack bonus damage if you roll the necessary d20 after your attack. Basically, if you're an arcane trickster who used Mirror Image, and currently have two images, if you roll 8 or higher with a d20, your target (who relies on sight) doesn't quite see where the attack is coming from, and you may apply your sneak attack bonus on a successful hit. The reason I allow this is because I have two players, a rogue and a wizard, and it helps with the balance.
as a recent dm, i made some meme rules to add spice to our (and my) STR dumping characters. all weapons can be dual weilded, and all weapons are versitile within reason.
we have a goliath pc named tiffany with two greatswords. its been going well.
At my table, we have a House Rule regarding Critical Hits. Instead of rolling double the damage dice, you roll the normal damage dice and add the maximum. Crits are supposed to be huge, devastating blows, and I think this helps to show that. Nothing suck quite like scoring a crit and then rolling all 1s.
Example: Crit with Longsword = 8 + 1d8 + Str Mod
We have two house rules. One modifies critical hits and one modifies rests.
Crits: when you hit a critical hit, add once max damage for all the damage dice and a normal roll. So if the rogue crits on a sneak attack with a dagger (normal hit 1d4 + 5d6 + 5) they do 1*4 + 5*6 + 1d4 + 5d6 + 5 damage. This ensures that a critical hit always does more damage than a normal hit.
Rests: we have a short rest, medium rest and long rest. Short rest gives all the benefits of RAW short rest but takes only 10 minutes. Medium rest takes 8 hours (same length as RAW long rest) and gives almost all the benefits of a RAW long rest except that it does not restore any health, and you recover only one hit die instead of half of them; you can roll hit dice to recover hit points like on a short rest, of which the first hit die always gives you max result, so if your hit die is a D10 you can basically exchange the one recovered hit die for 10 recovered hit points and add then roll more hit dice as needed. Long rest takes a full day of downtime and gives all the benefits of a RAW long rest, including recovering full hit points, but it will recover all of your hit dice instead of only half of them.
I have a couple that my players enjoy. Instead of inspiration I give out, I give out luck. It has no maximum and they roll 1d3 to get luck points. They can affect any check rolls (attacks, saves, skill checks) for a 1:1 basis. But they can affect mine but is 2:1 ratio. When they really want to get that check it adds that tension. Talk about pushing your luck!
I'm prepping to start DMing a campaign for the first time for my little sisters, and I have a couple of houserules I want to use, and one that I'm particularly looking forward to is a modification to how damage types work. There's so many fun damage types in D&D but unless they're coming from a spell that specifically mentions added effects, the damage alone is just flavour-I decided to write a list of bonus effects that can happen as a result of each damage type (other than bludgeoning/piercing/slashing). I wanted these to be fun but not every-time occurrances, and at first I started writing a system for how to determine when each effect would happen and then the target has to make a save against it and blah blah blah... and then I was like, "This is so freaking complicated, this doesn't feel like 5e. New idea: it just happens on a crit. Boom. Done." I'm much happier with it now, and every type of damage, on a crit, will apply a unique condition until the end of the target's next turn, and most of them have an extra effect if the crit effect kills the target (e.g. spellcaster crits on a Fire Bolt that kills the enemy, they burn to ash).
There were a few changes I made in my current campaign, but I'll just talk about three and why I made them:
1) Resurrection and other life restoring magic don't always work. I really wanted there to be some urgency and drama in the combats. If you can resurrect someone and it always works, I feel like a lot of that gets lost. I've been running for over a year and only one person has had to be raised, but I feel like it still impacts how the players play throughout.
2) I am one of the people you mentioned that use the exhaustion for being knocked to zero rule. I wanted to avoid the wack-a-mole effect and make combat a bit more challenging.
3) Asymmetrical advancement was the most controversial. The basic idea is that at the end of the session, I don't distribute xp or mark off milestones, I give out individual levels. The order of precedence for who get the levels is:
#1 lowest level characters get a level first;
#2 martial characters get levels before casters (three tiers: martial, partial casters, and casters ... so a ranger would be a partial caster)
#3 random distribution for those who tie for precedence.
Also, a character can only receive one level per session. There were a few things I was hoping to do with this one. First, I knew that rules one and two would affect martial classes more, so I wanted to give them something to balance things out a bit. Second, it gives a way for me to let the party advance almost every session without everyone leveling super fast. Third, it helps move the spotlight around since different people (normally) would get levels each session. Fourth, casters tend to get the coolest stuff with their levels, and I thought that giving martial classes a faster advancement would help offset that and give it a bit of an old school feel (xp charts were different for each class in 1st edition, allowing some of the more "basic" classes to advance faster). Most people were okay with it, some had concerns but were willing to give it a try. One player basically threw a fit over it. He was a martial class and didn't like the idea of being higher level than most of the other party members. Normally, I probably would have fought more for my ideas, but in the middle of a pandemic, working 12 hour shifts, I was tired so I gave up and let it go. It's been okay. I still would have liked to see how that would have worked out, and maybe someday I'll get a chance to really try that out.
I have a house rule that each of my players got to roll for a random feat when making characters. My game featured rival characters that I also rolled random feats for too. I used a table of feats to pick from. If the player rolls a feat that they can't use because of their race/class, they re-roll until they get one that they can use.
house rules the group i play with had are
1. Facing matters - makes positioning more important for flanking and attacks of opportunity
2. Fumbles end turn and grant disadvantage next turn
3. We don't confirm crits, if you roll in your crit range you crit(people rarely take improved crit in our group)
4. Death saves are rolled in secret behind the dm screen so the group doesn't know the results
5. Dragon alignment is not restricted by color(our main dm adopted this from when i dm)
The Star Wars campaign I've been in the past couple years had a house rule implemented after the first four months because of me. I had taken the observant feat, and so every perception check I did was with advantage. Since I was the best eyes/ears of the party, I did this very often and kept 2 D20s for quick grabbing to just roll at the same time with advantage. Now I, like many others, prefer to "charge" my dice. (For those out of the loop, this means I leave the maximum number on a dice facing upward).
What happened pretty regularly was my two dice came up the same number. Which pretty much makes any roll of advantage useless. After seeing my disheartened response too many times, either another player or our DM mentioned how they had seen a house rule before where if you roll the same numbers when rolling advantage/disadvantage, your roll will count as a CRIT SUCCESS. After my double rolls happened a few more times, the DM decided to put it in, but we spent the next few sessions working out the finer details. I'll list them below.
1. When rolling dis/advantage, if you roll the same number on both dice, that's a CRIT SUCCESS and will be counted like when rolling d20s.
2. Conversely, if you roll 1 on both your dice, that is still a CRIT FAILURE (it might even be a worse failure than a CRIT 1, although I might be remembering that wrong).
3. Double rolls will not count as CRITS on either attack rolls or saving throws. The frequent ways this could be abused was too much and we all agreed that it wouldn't be fair to the DM. (I mean, I play a Rogue, I frequently roll with advantage and extra ways to CRIT will make my sneak attack dice way more over powered than they are already.) We included saving throws because it balanced the rule out even more, plus the Bless spell focuses on attacks/saving throws, so it was easy to group them in our mind.
I don't remember if there were other rules to do with it (we've been on break for quite a while and it doesn't even come up every session), but that's the basics for how we balanced it. Since we've implemented the rule, I've gotten CRITS a bit more frequently, and so have the other players (and the DM once or twice as well). While my party doesn't freak out that much on NAT20s like the folks on Critical Role or Dimension 20 do, we go feral when someone pulls a surprise double CRIT. We're all having fun, and that's what's most important to my DM (hell, once I pulled off an awesome stunt and got a NAT20 sneak attack. After I rolled 7 dice for damage and 5 of them came up as 1s and 2s, he leaned forward past his screen, saw the dice, and told me to reroll them. Sure the dice tell the story, but a little nudge here or there makes the game a bit more fun)
My preferred arrow house rule:
Keep count of your arrows used in an encounter
After the encounter, if the party doesn’t have to flee or is pushed out of the area then all the arrows are assumed to be gathered by the user and recovered. Except subtract the number of Nat 1 missed shots that you made during that encounter because those arrows became damaged.
If you or the party flee the area immediately after or during the combat, or the area is destroyed (lava, mudslide, flood, fire) then all the arrows fired are lost.
Worst one I had was after I'd rolled up a paladin as the only front line in a party, the DM decided to tell us that they were not only running the "exhaustion if you go down" rule but also that paladin's divine smite have to be declared before the attack and will burn the spell slot even on a miss, I suddenly found better things to do with my time than play that game
House Rules in any game system are also used to emulate specific setting needs. Even the publishers have done this on a regular Basis (ex: Original version of Nehwon/Lankhmar had no healing spells, since healing magic (and things like Resurrections) were not part of the original novels and short stories the setting was built for.
thank you, miss professor ginny. I always learn so much about d&d from your videos. and it’s always stuff not touched on in most other d&d vids
I haven't had a chance to DM a game yet, but I have played some games with house rules and I've come up with some house rule ideas of my own, so... this is gonna get long.
1. In my group's current campaign, we've got a couple of house rules. One is a variant initiative rule - it's more complicated, but the gist of it is that after your turn in an encounter, you can choose who goes after you, though players and enemies alike can interrupt after taking damage - which has turned out fun. I'd say for players using this, the most important thing is that held actions are much more important - if you hold your attack against the bad guy until another party member attacks, you basically attack at the same time; if you attack one after the other, the bad guy can interrupt the second person's attack if they take damage from the first. The other main house rule we have is that it takes a week in-game to get the full benefits of a long rest, which I would *not* recommend because we ended up having to tweak it anyway. It has some potential - it makes things more difficult, which can be more interesting - but it kind of goes too far in the other direction and makes things *too* difficult.
2. The first class I played was sorcerer, which I picked because I read the class description and got the impression that they had less spells than wizards but made up for that by being more flexible with them. When I actually played that character, though, I usually just ended up doing two cool things then spamming one cantrip over and over. I came up with a fix for this, which I haven't had a chance to try out yet: first, sorcerers regain some of their sorcery points on a short rest, second, sorcerers can change one of their metamagic options at the end of a long rest.
3. I find Plane Shift as a spell a bit overpowered, especially for the homebrew setting I'm working on, so I came up with a thing where Plane Shift can only be used in locations related to the plane you're trying to get to. Like, if you want to get to the fire plane, you have to go to a volcano. (The homebrew setting doesn't *have* a fire plane or any elemental planes, but that's the best example to illustrate what I mean.)
We had a game (modern-day) where you got a bonus if you physically made the action of pumping a round into your shotgun before combat, the drawback was we players kept forgetting we had already done that and ended up wasting ammo, we kept strick counts on ammo.
I've just been getting into dnd for the past few weeks and lemme say, your videos are AWESOME. great stuff! :)
starting out in 'first edition' (1978), every DM I played with was the overlord and there were no expectations that anything in the book was canon. Everyone had different rules and even different invented creatures. There were simple and more complicated worlds and everything was new from one DM to the next.
I do like the addition of skill points and other major changes. One of my sons has most of the rule limits and statistics for everything from character creation to sell specifics and weapon costs and damage output memorized in both 5th ed and 3.5.
As someone who house rules at the professional game developer level I must commend you for a very sober and sensible set of guidelines.
The only thing I would even add is to watch out for adding unofficial books/material to your game. Even the few that have done a good job of developing their material (which is rare) they never line up well with your core game.