Worst house rule I ever encountered: One of the players in my group decided he wanted to GM a game of 3.5 (this was many years ago, before 4th ed or Pathfinder). We all started the usual party role discussion, and I decided I wanted to roll up a Wizard, as I was usually the BDF and wanted to try something new. So character creation proceeds, we all come up with reasonably solid characters, and then the GM decides to throw his arcane magic house rules at us: - All spells now have an inherent failure chance regardless of equipment (think it was something like 5% per spell level) - Whenever a spell is successfully cast, the GM rolls a percentile die. If the die rolls poorly, the spell fails anyways. - Whether the spell succeeds or not, the caster gets a backlash effect based on the GM's percentile die, which ranged from taking damage, to losing limbs, to outright death. FOR EVERY SPELL CAST. You'd think that, given the above, there would be an equivalent increase in the power of these spells to make them worth the risk, wouldn't you? Nah, the spells were still at par, just with these horrific downsides that had no explanation or justification beyond "I thought it would be a cool idea". Noped out of that game pretty hard. The GM kinda drifted out of the play group not too long afterward, think he was offended that we didn't all jump on board with his idea. Frustrating thing is, it wouldn't have been nearly as bad if he'd just been upfront with it BEFORE we had all rolled up characters. Could have been a cool idea for a low-magic world, but you can't jack-in-the-box that on someone who just finished building a damn Wizard of all things and expect them to appreciate the nuance of the sledgehammer you just nutshotted them with.
Fun thought. Enjoy the game and don't cast any spells. EVER. Be a "theoretical" mage. Watch his world and be sure to point out how rare mages are and how magic is broken. Any encounter with a powerful wizard, be sure to point out how they should be dead and force him to roll for every spell, make sure you can see the results. Only fair. Otherwise ignore his house rule and play however you want. Just ignore him if he says the spell backfires and you died. Just continue like nothing happened. Mention you hear a whisper of darkness but it is just jibberish and continue playing.
@@davidbeppler3032 You should absolutely not just ignore your DM or anyone at the table. If you don't like a rule or have a problem with the game then talk and communicate with people at the table and at the very least talk with the DM about it. Of he doesn't want to do anything about it then consider leaving, but don't an asshole and just ignore your DM.
@@224ryan I could punch him repeatedly until he is unconscious? That would be good too? Funny how you think I would be the asshole in that situation. I bet if your GF cheated on you, you would be mad at the other guy! lmao
Technically not a house rule: You Never Die No matter what craziness she threw at us, regardless of how bad the situation got, we would never die. She would always come up with some reason why we would survive. You take damage that would instantly kill you? Actually, half the damage was this one type that you are resistant to, so your just unconscious. Two powerful demons just showed up and are now fighting you? Just so you don't die, they are not going to use any of their legendary actions and a god dog is going to show up and solo both of them. It sucked all of the fun out of the game for me since there were litterally no stakes at any point(along with no plot, but that's for another video)
God I feel like I'm like this but accidentally- I'm new to DMing and have most of it down, but I cannot for the life of me design a hard encounter! Barely anybody ever takes damage and so far no one has been downed. I have gotten kinda close lately, though...
@@bee5440 yeah I feel ya, exactly the same thing here. The most we ever got was unconsciousness when our wizard gets hit hard or the orc warrior got a particularly nasty hit via magic. I dread the day I might have to kill one of my players chars, but that's life I guess lol.
I'd say a 'never dying' rule can work, but I'd say at least be honest about it (just have people be knocked out instead of fumbling damage) and it only works for certain types of campaigns (particularly story-centric ones)
@@TheGraveKnight it can really only work if there is a consequence to dying such as losing items or suffering penalties, like a -1 int after a couple of knockouts from blunt force trauma
Well for me is that I dm people who dm them self and know broken stuff they never use unless in a desperate situation. I mean 1 characters suddenly killed the bbeg by asking all player for guidance and 1 advantage on a charisma roll and rolled so high that way that although the roll was way too high to get is conventional ways to convince a part on the army against the bbeg wich worked cus how I discribed it. Another time the half elf or elf idk anymore shoots a volly of 6 bullets due how he made his character. To deal 178 damage
And then u take non-lethal damage for how ur wielding it slicing ur hands open...tis only 1-4 and non-lethal due to incidential harm not actual atk with blade
The Fear mechanic in the five-minute range actually sounds really cool, just made hard to implement at the lower levels due to being related to HP. Also, kudos to the poster for realizing the flaw and owning up to it/trying to make it workable, but honestly I think it was on the right track, it just needed to have a bit more tweaking (maybe make it just one point of fear per hit at lower levels, rather than a roll, and add a bonus to the fear "pool" based on one of the three mental stats, as a way to balance out against physical characters having more HP and thus able to take higher fear "damage" while still letting them get something off their best mental trait. Paladins would be nearly fearless, but that honestly feels right to me.
It has some rather obvious drawbacks depending on the system it was appended to. Like a fight with a housecat (3 attacks per round) being much scarier than a fight with a wolf (1 attack per round).
I was playing 5e with my DM as a Wizard. When I brought up the idea of using the cantrips minor illusion to hide me within an illusory object such as a box or barrel he decided to nerf the spell entirely making it as useless as true strike. He changed the mechanics so that every single person and creature would automatically make an investigation check against it at advantage. Even auditory illusions were not spared from this. So if a one off sound like a rock falling or a sneeze happens even when out of sight with no obvious magic happening they basically against all logic know it is an illusion.
Some DMs really hate illusions for some reason. Personally I love them... I don't understand why people are so against them I love spells that reward creativity. I mean some illusion spells are incredibly powerful to the point they can basically take out an enemy alone. Phantasmal force comes to mind....but I just find it great! If you can make a powerful enemy run head first out over a cliff to their doom then more freaking power to you! If you can make someone believe they are actually fighting you head on while everyone else just see this dude attempting to hit the air then that is just fucking hillarious....plus..I can use the spells against the players as well >:D
@@bibbobella I agree. When I was in middle school I was on love with Illusion magic (Jace Beleren anyone?). It is balanced by how bug brained you have to be for it to be effective (and even then a lot if the spells are situational). Unfortunately I noticed that I am not big brained.
@@snipperjoey1151 except, by the rules of the game, it is. Minor Illusion can create an object no larger than a 5 ft. cube. A barrel comfortably fits in that.
I once had a DM who thought Warlocks would be too strong if they could change spells. So i wasnt allowed to change spells upon level up as house rule. I never played Warlock again.
......Warlocks are WITHOUT A DOUBT the weakest when it comes to actual spell casting...why the fuck would he believe being able to change a few spells every level would be at all powerful when A: They have the fewest and honestly probably weakest spell list out of all casters (except maybe ranger?) B: They have so few spellslots so not even allowing them to change spells whenever they level up would mean their spells would be painfully outdated when they get to the higher levels even if their low level spells gets ramped up a bit. C: Druid and clerics can change their spells Every. Fucking. Long-rest as one of their main mechanics....Wizards can have HUNDREDS of spells they can change between in the higher levels if they have a good spellbook. If there is one class you shouldn't take away any power from it would be the Warlock....
@@bibbobella Eldritch Blast + Hex and invocations are the highlights of warlock. The spells are just bonus on top, and because they are automatically upcast to your highest spell level, even the initial choices stay relevant into the late game
@@CypherDND Really depends on your choice. Some spells do but A LOT of spells become easily outclassed at later levels. The teleport spells are a good example of that. Doesn't matter how high a level you cast it at one is simply the best option no matter what. I do agree with you though the best part about warlocks are the invocations....I wish they had some more actually useful cantrips that didn't get COMPLETLY outclassed by Eldritch Blast but I wasn't saying that warlocks arent fun to play. They are one of my favorit classes but they are also without any doubt the weakest of the casters if they go fullblown caster.
I played one session with the DM that, at the start of session, and not at any point prior, announced his house rule: that our backstories were going to be written by him, and he would be changing our characters to reflect those stories he wrote. None of our character choices mattered, none of our links and story relevant hooks were there, and none of us knew one another, despite the adventure basically hinging on the fact that we were all friends. He decided how we would play our characters because we didn't build them the way he would build them. Later on in the session, he would spend nearly half an hour talking up how easy an enemy we were coming across was, referring to them as the goblins of the sea. And how a child could be them easily enough. Cue actually fighting them, they got three attacks per round, had as much health as the player characters, and got pack tactics. The Cleric was downed in one round, and my fighter was on 2hp. The dm did not seem to understand why this was so upsetting, and ended up retconning the whole fight. And did I mention, he was two hours late to the game? The whole group vocalized our immense displeasure after the game ended for the night. Within the hour, without a word, he deleted the game server and roll20 game and blocked all of us on Discord.
"Later on in the session" what do you mean "session"? The moment a DM tells me I can't play a character I prepared there is no session. If he wanted us to play premade characters, he lays those out upon everyone agreeing to the game, and we all pick then and there. Not, show up and throw out your character, you pick what I give you.
A spell attack roll counted as casting a spell. Wanna cast scorching ray and make 3 spell attack rolls? Good luck doing only that over the next 3 turns. Wanna use your Archer form attack as a star druid. Can't cast any level spells this turn. Cast a damaging cantrip? No level spells this turn
One of my worst house rules was similar to the ear-ringing damage, but I only did the damage if the party was in a tightly closed space. I did it for realism in a modern day campaign. I scrapped the rule after 3 rounds (not 3 sessions, but 3 rounds of combat) because it was a chore to remember, and more of a hindrance to the NPCs than the PCs. The lesson I learned: don't let realism bog the game down.
If you wield a 2 handed great sword (or any other big 2 hand weapon) in a confined place, such as a low ceiling cave, or a narrow hallway, I House rule a -2 penalty to hit due to inability to swing the weapon.
@@marcar9marcar972 Yes, not fun playing a game with friends. Big sword is not fun for barbarian PC in tunnel, is great fun for rogue PC with short sword against barbarian NPC.
“It’s your job to ask me if I’ve changed how a spell works before you cast it, not my job to warn you” This was in a play-by-post campaign where everyone got two characters so that if someone was taking a while to respond, we could still do stuff with our other characters. Both my characters were full casters. And he wanted me to ask him if he had homebrew for every single spell that I cast
I actually enjoy the 4:00 minute house rule, that concept has a fleshed out table in the Grim Hollow book and it can be exciting and tense to roll on the tables - sometimes it can even be a boon like healing to 1HP. Sounds like his DM just didn't vary encounters to ever threaten the backlines.
Werewolf the Apocalypse had a similar rule for Battle Scars, which could accumulate penalties from very serious wounds (keeping in mind these were the hyper-regen type of werewolves, you can imagine how serious we're talking). They were balanced out, though, by being major sources of Renown, which was itself important for ranking up.
Not to mention it encourages you to not hit 0 HP. I always feel like that should be the goal moreso than just "make sure you can get them on their feet before their 2nd death save because that's when it's scary." OP also mentioned it was mostly scars so I assume the more extreme deformities were from more severe KO's. I can't speak for how it was incorporated, but I honestly like this rule. And would clearly be better if the DM knew how to pressure back-rank players so the tank isn't bullied. Or maybe the back-rankers were scaredy cats and didn't do *their* jobs since the tank was being over-pressured. Hard to say with such little context.
Inexperienced DM and players, playing Curse of Strahd. We didn't know about arcane focuses, druidic focuses, holy symbols, etc when we started the game since we are all pretty new. All our players can cast spells. So we had to look for materials in the woods to cast spells...DM decreed that no shops sell magical components. When I found out about focuses we continually brought it up to the DM who refused to start using them since 'that was how we'd been playing'. I suggested 'maybe we go on a side quest to obtain working arcane focuses or destroy Strahd's inexplicable control over them?'. Nope. So, for OVER A YEAR we've now been looking for batshit in the woods in order to cast fireball. Ugh. Now when we level up most of our players look for spells that don't use components, severely limiting themselves.
Wizards who collect components for their spells get bonuses. Example: Sleep, VSM, a pinch of sand, rose petals, or a cricket. If the Wizard gets a pinch of sand from the plane of earth, rose petals from an enchanted garden, or even goes so far as to only use live crickets the he spends time collecting himself. They get a bonus. Higher Save DC, longer duration, or more HD affected.
@@MrAnim8orVideos House. It should be RAW. Magic is wrong in D&D 5e. Magic should be stupid powerful. People should be afraid of someone who can make a building explode with a wave of their hands. Magic should be hoarded and controlled. Rare and Dangerous. Hard to learn and with people willing to torture you to get your spells. That would make a good system.
A terrible house rule I keep seeing for 5e: Heavy Crossbows need your Action to reload it. How the Loading propery works is that you can't mulit attack with those weapons unless you have an ability or item that lets you bypss that. A Heavy Crossbow deals 1d10 Damage and had less range than a Longbow, which does 1d8. The difference is so slight that this house rule just doesn't need to exist.
@@helgenlane Shoot, sling it on your harness, draw your sword and close the distance. Just like real life. Enemy is missing 1d10 hp before they get to you. Seems pretty solid to me.
@@davidbeppler3032 stowing a weapon is an object interaction. Pulling out a weapon is an object interaction. If you take out a crossbow and use it on the same turn, you can't put it away. If you put it away on the next turn, you have to use your action to unsheath a sword. A good way to fuck up your action economy.
Disagree. RAW is fine. Makes sense. 5D10 is much more damage than 5D8. Unless you math differently than I do. I think your GM should house rule that the Longbow only does 1D6, because 5D6 is basically the same as 5D10 anyway. Then the Crossbow makes more sense. Based on your comment. IMHO things are fine like they are. Use whichever works for you. Just remember, Longbow does not work underwater, Crossbow does.
I don't have any bad house rules so far. We have modified so whips do 2d4. Because we want to use sexy whips damnit. Also, changelings can use any 'natural' trait a race they turn into is usable. Tabaxi's natural weapons in their claws, halfings ability to hide thanks to their size, etc. We also modified shifters- they can just transform into their respective animal. Because shifters as they are suck. That is all. All very fun. All very good. I love our DM, he's great.
I did something similar, however I made it a feat. Bullwhip expert (PS. Don't remember the specific text, this is just the gist of what it said) When making the attack action using a whip you may add one additional d4 to the damage. Alternatively, on a hit you may remove up to 1d4 before rolling damage to do one of the following: -pull the target towards you by half your movement, or you towards the target if it is one size or greater bigger than you. Or -have it function also as a heavy weapon. This does not replace the light property, and creatures who would not normally be able to use heavy weapons suffer no such constraints with this weapon. (Why? Because rogues with heavy weapons)
in our game all weapons have unique features that someone can take feats to unlock, a whip does 1d4 damage but has reach and can be used to disarm, trip, bind, misdirect(change direction of a attack to a adjacant target) force a target to move or anything like that (our guide to weapon skills literally states with the whip to "be creative")
I... don't really think shifters suck, i love the wildhunt ones. Perfect race for druids. What made you think they suck, i'd love to see that perspective. :o
@@kairailthrail It's probably more to do with my playstyle than anything. I'm relatively new to Dnd. I haven't played all the classes or races yet. Most of my characters have been sorcerers, I just tried a warlock and I hate them, I've started playing my first ever martial class in a changling rouge/monk hybrid. I tried the shifter race a bit on a shadow sorcerer, but it felt rather lackluster(?) I don't really know how to explain it. I love roleplay and lycanthrope type things, but it just hasn't worked with any my campaigns so far. I've even had a few were shifters are just banned. So- eh. You say druids are good for shifters? Maybe I'll make my first ever druid a shifter. I want to like them, I really do. I don't even have a real argument against them other than just bad experiences so far. Which is a sad excuse I know. Hopefully, I can get back to you with better experiences with a druid shifter and our fresh group.
@@dovianempire1868 Yeah, the Wildhunt Variant is really good, but not so much if you're a moon druid, you wouldn't really be able to get much out of the shifted form. I played a star circle druid, and it fit really well. Beasthide Shifter could be a pretty good addition if you want a bit more survivability. Gives more temp hp and a +1 to ac. The only one i really think is useless... is the longtooth one, because the only thing you really get out if is "temporary natural weapons" - where you can bite as unarmed strikes for 1d6+str while shifted, but... if you want something like this, you could really just go any other race that has them naturally.
It was weird because my GM made a rule where every nat20 you had to kiss him. He also said we had to use the special 20 sided die with all 20s on it. Needless to say after 8 sessions I stopped going.
Not a big deal if you're talking Pathfinder or D&D 3.5 cantrips. Oh no, the level 14 fighter can clean his armor with a gesture and a few magic words instead of with a rag. Kind of a problem if it's 5e and the best ranged weapon for the ranger is his eldritch blast spell.
Soon, I'll be trying out what sounds like a pretty good house rule: I'm going to build a Wild Magic sorcerer. (I play Pathfinder, so our group is going to homebrew it) My GM has informed me that once per day, I'll be able to cast a spell without expending the corresponding spell slot . . . at the cost of causing a Wild Magic surge.
That is so cool. I always like the idea of wild magic sorcerers breaking magic. Like upcasting a spell using an “overload slot” that was a higher level than you can cast and have drawbacks like wild magic surges or using it to intentionally self destruct
Ive not heard of that feat. Plus u got bottlecaps for unusual/clever ideas in how to handle things. One such was teleporting a vampire to the elemental plane of fire.
As a DM, I allow rule of cool and I have a little neat rule that if I make a mistake pertaining to my players like getting one of their abilities mixed up, I allow their next roll to have advantage. We're here for a good time. If they thought of a way to get around with one of my encounters, I'm on board and try to help them out to make it work out in their favor. For example. Our party contains an Aasimar Paladin, Lythari Ranger, Dwarf Barbarian, Half-Elf Drow Sorcerer/Rouge, and an Aarakocra Rogue. Both the rogues weren't present so I had them look for the rogues in the cave/dungeon type deal. They encountered gargoyles and one of them was in the air flying about, the paladin wanted to YEET the dwarf at the gargoyles in the air. They roll perfectly and I got hyped! Through a way to make it work, I allowed the paladin to use his strength to pick up the dwarf and had the dwarf roll acrobatics to jump towards the paladin and the paladin threw the dwarf like a football. She failed on the attack roll to strike the gargoyle in the air, but I said "you may miss the attack, but that doesn't stop inertia, so you collide with the gargoyle, knocking him down to ground and you may do as you please!" I never heard any my players so hyped before.
And that folks, is how you should DM imo. Reminds me of the time my party's ship was ambushed by some fey creatures riding wyverns. While the rest was on the ship dealing with the few that boarded or sending spells/arrows/cannonballs fly at the flying ones, my Dwarven monk with sea legs decided it was a good idea to climb the mast, pick a target that was doing a fly-by and made a running leap onto the wyvern. (All movement and a bonus action dash if I recall correctly) Then used my action to kick of its rider, and used a sleep potion with high DC I had on the wyvern, makibg it fall on the deck where we quickly secured it and now we had one captured. I tried to tame it when it woke up and it worked for a little while until on the second to last roll I needed to tame it I rolled poorly. The wyvern almost knocked me off and flew away. Had to use my last magical potion to make it so depressed it would no longer want to fly and we crashed to the water from idk how high. Used my slow fall reaction to not take fall damage and our lizardfolk paladin with giant crocodile (find steed) came and recued us both. We sold the wyvern to animal traders back on land after that fiasco lol
We had to roll investigation to loot anything, including things we could clearly see. Orc was just attacking you with a greataxe a round before you killed it? Roll to loot it. 19? Not high enough, you find nothing. In hindsight, best theory is that the DM was trying to simulate randomized monster loot like an MMO.
Playing 3.5 and the DM was a major weeb. He decided that the spell Evards Black Tentacles would be piercing damage instead of bludgeoning damage, because reasons.
if it's gonna be used that way, then I would require a contested roll, and on success let it be true damage. Otherwise it fails to "pierce" and just bludgeons the area.
I've had a DM who has that work as "you can determine bludgeon, pierce, or force damage", explained as the caster shifting the tentacles form of attack (are they smashing the enemy? Stabbing into them by hardening the tip? Or coiling and crushing?)
I have a house rule that any player who gives ideas for world building, encounters, or hell, even just participates in crafting the world(have had a lot of uninvested players), they will gain 50xp per idea, to be added to any character they play in my games. I've had one person use this rule in six years. They did it twice.
To any character? so if they made a new lv 1 and started into a new game they'd start with 50-100 exp from the start while everyone else is at 0 exp? Just saying I would totally help if that was a thing.
I have a rule at my table that if you do something unusual and I ask 'Shall the fates intervene?', that's their cue that I could have something strange but sometimes rewarding happen. For example, a ranger was having trouble hitting a Gnoll with a crossbow, three turns in a row. He threw down his crossbow in anger before firing the forth shot, intending to go for his dagger. I said the line... And he was curious, so he said 'yes'. I rolled a percentile... And stated: "The loaded crossbow slams into the dirt, shocking it enough to fire. It flies true and strikes the approaching Gnoll right in the cherries. The other Gnolls that can see this gain the Fear status."
Had a game where the DM had a bunch of shitty house rules, but the one that made me the most pissed and eventually led to me quitting was "You cannot attempt to make a skill check unless you are proficient in that skill. Skill checks will be happening much less often and I will decide if you succeed or fail at most things." He told us this in the second session, after everyone had already chosen their skill proficiencies and he didn't let us change them. 4 of us had the Acolyte background + charisma based characters (sorcerer, warlock, 2 paladins) so we all had insight +some kind of charisma skill with much overlap. Same DM also said that you can only learn a new proficiency if you spend 400 days in game, spending 5gp and 12 hours a each day. When I showed him the rules from Xanathar's and the PHB, he disregarded both saying "This makes more sense in my world". Also, you were only allowed to miss 2 days out of all 400 or else you had to restart from the beginning. No amount of convincing with real life comparisons to learning new languages and such could convince him.
In my first ever session, where everyone except the DM was brand-new to D&D as a whole, even if you rolled high to do something, i.e. "I sneak through the trees to get a better look at what's going on without being spotted" and rolled a 14, if the DM decided that the course of action you were pursuing was not ideal, all that a high roll would get you is reduced consequences for your actions, i.e. "you move super loudly through the trees and are spotted basically instantly by the figure ahead of you, but manage to not trigger the trap in the underbrush that you weren't aware of. Roll initiative."
All half humans had to default to full humans in attack order, even if the full human was weaker or they're attack wouldn't have been useful in the situation. Facing a flying bat creature? The very much earthbound Paladin got first shot even if our half-elf wizard could summon an Imp army that would would take out the bat guys while the rest of us worked on the puzzle to get out of the dungeon.
2:33 both DMs are what are known as adversarial DMs especially the second one and it’s a miracle that the party didn’t just say fuck it to the second DM
Dm had a rule "science + logic" >" fantasy". Like for example you can cast a fireball for example but technically you are breaking apart water to hydrogen and oxygen and forcing combustion so that's how fireball work if there no moisture in the air the spell will always fizzle or is weaker i wasn't the mage who had to suffer when spells didn't work but it was sort of balanced some encounters were very easy given the right circumstances. Anyways some utility spell was called cut or something along those lines with basically the description said the range is what you can clearly see so around 100ft but larger if you got a magnifying glass or whatever. Welp mage decided to use cut on an atom and bbeg got nuked most anti-climactic end to a campaign.
There is a rule, not a houserule, that (I think) is from first edition of where if you drink too many potions at once they can mix in your stomach and cause unintended side effects. They could be anything from really bad, roll a 1 you explode or roll a 100 and you get a permanent +1 to a stat. I just really liked this rule, and it also could punish those who just hook a potion IV to their arms and effectively become immortal to normal damage.
I like that too! Had a DM once that would "call audibles" that weren't necessarily house rules, but made sense in the context of what was happening, and it made things really fun! For example, our party inherited a keep, but one of the towers was basically rubble. Our wizard started using a cantrip to rebuild the tower one cubic foot at a time, and the DM imposed that the monotony of the task had a chance of dealing psychic damage every hour he was at it. The wizard rolled to resist for each instance, and it was just a D4 of potential damage, but it was just enough flavor to make sure we thought about what we were doing!
My DM used something similar for our 5e campaign. If you drank even one more non-healing potion while under the effects of another, you rolled the d100. On a 100, the first potion's effects became permanent. I remember at least one party member getting permanent cloud giant strength that way. We were already lv 16, so it didn't really break the campaign thankfully.
I think the Blunt Weapon Rule is a holdover from the first editions- something like "Gygax thought priests and clergy and holy people don't wield knives." Which is technically true, but I think if my local youth pastor was trying to kill Tiamat he might forego that commandment too. Different situations call for different measures.
Our current DM is running white box fantasy game rpg, basically D&D 1st edition. He decided that he won't award any XP until after we have completed an entire module, so basically we've been at it 6 sessions with maybe 2 more to go and all at level one. It's a premade module that wasn't designed to be played at level 1 the whole way through and we have already lost player characters thanks to all being squishy enough to be 1-shot by any of the npcs. Holding all XP until players are between major plot archs is just a functionally bad idea.
Yeah, GMs on power trips are just like that. My best suggestion would be to find another GM or if you can't for some reason, do it yourself. It's not that hard and you get better the more you do. And I'm willing to bet that the other players are rather willing to support you then to endure whatever horror GM you had before. Technically I never encountered any "bad" house rules because I usually was the GM, but I once was a player in a group with a GM who read the rules while we're playing, because he never read them. He wrote a story and wanted us to play it out (with his GF as the "Star", huge red flag) and did not know anything of the basics. He rolled for treasures everytime we found something, and one of the first things my char (D&D2nd Fighter/Thief) found was a sentient +4 bastard sword with the ability to cast spells of it's own and to fight independently from it's owner even before hitting level 2! When we fought the campaing villain, our ranger (not his GF) killed him in one turn, by nailing him to a wall with 72 arrows shot in ONE ROUND.
I had a DM who was VERY strict on magic users. All components were used up in casting and unless you specifically bought pockets full of guano... you can't cast your spell. So he changed his rule halfway through so you no longer needed components, but "mana stones" instead. Big whoop. But it was for ALL spells and these stones were rare and expensive, casting a 1st level magic missile consumed a 25gp mana stone. They came in different "flavors" too, which meant you could only cast a lvl2 illusion spell with a lvl2 illusion stone. Oh, did I mention it still consumed spell slots?Sorry, no hoarding and spamming strong spells. When we killed our BBEG all we got was 2 of these damn stones (we used more to kill him) and they we lvl2 stones at most. Thank god I was a barbarian that campaign!
Wizards who collect components for their spells get bonuses. Example: Sleep, VSM, a pinch of sand, rose petals, or a cricket. If the Wizard gets a pinch of sand from the plane of earth, rose petals from an enchanted garden, or even goes so far as to only use live crickets the he spends time collecting himself. They get a bonus. Higher Save DC, longer duration, or more HD affected.
It's maybe not the worst house rule, but it is the one that's the most prevalent: guns. If your campaign doesn't have them, or you wanna make them rare, that's one thing. But for the love of Jim, stop making it so only humans can be gunslingers, or you have to be level 8+ to take a level in fighter if you intend to go gunslinger, or you don't get gun proficiency unless you've spent hundreds of h- I don't care that it's not realistic, it's a fucking GAME. it's only vaguely more powerful than other weapons, and the Gunslinger is underpowered as FUUUUUUUCK. Give. Me. A. Break.
I've had a DM who's held a stern house rule that instead of using regular passive perception rules, your passive perception just equals your wisdom score. There's a lot of very clear problems with this and how it makes taking the perception skill much less valuable.
For the second one, I like the idea of having to keep track of your components and such, and it would be pretty cool to have all of the mats priced out so that you can hand a shopping list to the DM to pick out. Though, this would work best in a game where bonus gold is given out, and assuming that the player is down for it and also has extra spending cash for it. 90% of the time spell casters save their money for the random magic item that is in the magic shop anyways, so taxing 5 GP here and there isn't going to break the bank! Technically Indentify already does this, but it's a single investment. You could even argue you can buy enough components until you are in town again.
Here is an advice to be good at your DM job: You're not there to win. If you try to TPK the party at all costs or make them lose at all costs, you're essentially losing the game. You can only win by having fun AND ensuring the party has fun.
wow listening to this video has made me realize why all of my players have told me they enjoy my DnD game more then any other they have played before. I never realized other DMs did crap like this lol, the whole point of DnD is to have fun and foster a cool and interesting story with your players. DMs like this have some serious personal problems 0_0
The GM's job is to determine Economy and Ecology. Then just describe to players what their PCs, see, hear, ,smell, taste, and feel. That is all. That is the job. The PCs do all the heavy lifting. They build a game. I just get to watch and enjoy.
Doom Points is a thing in other systems, mainly the 2d20 system from Modiphius, but it works in that system because it is baked into the rolls and the players have the ability to control the magnitute of Doom Points, and are more able to overcome it. Just.. slapping it onto 1d20 sounds like a recipie for disaster.
My party (1 fighter, a fight-wizard, fight-paladin, rogue-wizard, cleric, druid) was fighting one of the big bosses, a huge turtle, so I took out a homebrew item the dm made: a crystal containing a water-elemental elephant, which would come out if the crystal is broken, loaded it into my crossbow, fired it, fired again and hit and broke the crystal mid-air, and suddenly the turtle got hit in the face with an elephant going at 204mph.
Biggest problem here is that Crossbows have the Loading property, and thus can only be fired once per round, regardless of multiattack/bonus action/reactions...
Worst house rule I can recall off the top of my head - Since elves were a wise, elder race, if an elf told you ANYTHING, a non-elf had to make a Will save (3e) or you'd believe it, no matter how stupid it was. Elf tells you the sky is plaid? "There must be something wrong with my eyes."
I once had a DM who got 2 houserules: * You get 1 point of exhaustion if you drop below half hp, 2 points if you drop below a quarter, ect. If you add in the factor that every single encounter would make your average deadly encounter seem easy, it was not fun. * Rogues could not sneak attack if the enemy knew where the rogue was. This paired with some ungodly perceptive skills on every monster even knowing where invisible characters were.
My roomate has never Dmed and she believes that tolling too well should be a penalty and her fiance and I both were trying to explain why that rule is bs. The point of the game, and emphasis on the word game, is to have fun and you as the dm want to make it fun for your players. If your players are suffering and you're gonna punish them for rolling high and low then it makes you not wanna play
depends, think it would be funny for example "kick in the door" if you roll super well the door goes flying off its hinges and smashes into the goblins or whatever on the other side.
My second DM went wacky with the 2e rules and decided for every level casters have they could cast spells one tier higher. So if a character is ninth level they can cast 9th level spells. I didn’t play with him for long especially after the Paladin tpk’d at level two when he got a god hammer and used it to blow up the mountain while we were in it.
Had a DM that would let his monsters make a con save against critical hits. It also didn’t work both ways, and we couldn’t make the save against enemy attacks.
Played in a D&D game with 8 players, so I'm sure you all can already see that this one is going to be a blast. In order to stop the party from splitting AT ALL, the DM ruled we all had to be within 100 feet of this one player who we were all "soul-bound" to (more on that later) or we would start taking tons of d10s of psychic damage. We were below level 10 the entire campaign so that still had a chance to be deadly, especially at the beginning. He also had a bunch of other really dumb house rules, such as needing a "sleep check" in order to take a long rest. I think it was a CON check DC 20, reduced by the amount of hours your character had been awake. Those with low CON among the group often rolled around with at least one level of exhaustion. We were also in a school setting (think Hogwarts or something) where he forced our characters to start at age 12, even if we had built adult characters, The end of the campaign involved a forced PvP scenario where the leader of our group, the dude we were "soul-bound" to, was the leader of one faction and another person (who was leader dude's IRL WIFE) could un-bind people from him and give them some sort of "backstab" damage bonus in combat. And yes, the DM knew about their IRL relationship and still chose to give the two of them those abilities. And those are just the worst of the worst. Suffice it to say that DM probably won't be running any more games for us.
I'm 690% implementing that last house rule. But it's expanded to when totals add to 69, or if a 6 and 9 are rolled consecutively. If a player declares "nice" when any of those conditions are not met, an enemy creature will have inspiration instead.
The idea of a DM forcibly changing how a PC Paladin's damage type is makes no sense to me. As a DM, you need to work around it by designing YOUR encounters, not the player character.
The one of giving the enemies devil sight was a case of good DMing done badly. It’s good to have your encounters evolve to challenge your players to the same level, but it has to be reasonable and logical within the game
Got told that if a dice fell off the table mid-roll, it would be considered a nat-1.... but not when we started or anything, no, literally mid-fight. Dude tried to have my character eaten by a giant by way of this rule that was sprung upon me at past the last second.
Not my story but the worst I've heard is the following: Be me Neckbeard Not very smart Fairly clumsy GM decides to start new campaign Get to his house Tells me to run on a treadmill and he times me Tells me to lift some weights Gives me a questionnaire about personality Gives SAT questions for me to complete At the end, GM declares our stats are all based on results. MFW have the worst stats of all the group
The Protection fighting style didnt use reaction.. it was just active.. always. permanent disadvantage if you were close to the echoknight warforged with 2 shields. 23 AC. this was fine, but DM started upping monsters to hit because he was having a hard time fighting us. But was also not a fan of giving money. I'm a Level 6 OoC paladin with chainmail literally getting shredded everyfight because the Echoknight doesnt frontline most battles. He sits back protecting bard for RP reasons while only using echo to fight. add to that the fact he made ALOT of the monsters immune to fear because it "made more sense" to him. Im sitting with a useless subclass unable to get a decent enough AC to stand a chance. even if I did get fear off, it made no difference cause They already would have disadvantage from protection. The Echo knight then recieved a God hood buff that gave him more ASI and resistance to non magic S/P/B because of how strong he was in fights. homebrew can be fun, powerful characters can be fun. But stacking it all on one person makes the game unbalanced. Add to that he took shield master and knocking people prone meant you would always crit if prone. I tried the same tactic, shove then attack. Was immediately punished by 3 enemies doing it to me and then him saying after fact. you cannot use an attack to shove prone without shield master because it'd be broken.... warforged is using multiple attacks to knock multiple people prone... not even just his bonus action.
I hate whenever firearms are introduced into a dnd world that many GM feel the need to punish players using them. but taking thunder damage is the worst, at that point you may as well just flat out tell the players they can't use them. Depending on the firearms system used. the players already has to deal with Misfires or complexity of creation. Adding more cons is just a spit in the face. I knew one GM who knew what the meaning of Risk/Reward meant. He made it so that firearm's used enemy's touch AC if fired at their optimal range. Pistol at close, Rifles at 20 ft+. Scatterguns didn't get this but they always hit point blank range. the was countered by the fact that only a few races had firearms and they were rare on top of the dangers of misfire, having flammable ammo on you when so many fire effect attacks exist...etc.
The DM in the gunsligner story was clearly new. "ear ringing damage"? if you wanted the player to take damage from the loud noise, just make it thunder damage. Thunder damage is DnD's equivilent to sound based attacks. and newer players tend to mistake it for lightning damage.
GM: Teleportation magic out of the World's Largest Dungeon doesn't work. Me: Can we still cast summoning spells? GM: Yes, but they creatures won't leave and aren't helpful after the spells ends. They might even be hostile. Me: Sweet, that means we can summon livestock and kill them before the spell ends so we never have to worry about food. Or use Handle Animal to tame them! GM: ...you can't summon anything bigger than size Small. Would have been better if he'd just said they disappeared like normal.
I briefly kicked around a house rule wherein you had to more or less learn spells to know what save to make. It would function similar to skill proficiencies. Non casters would start with knowing a number of spells equal to player level+INT+proficiency bonus. While casters and half casters replace INT with their spell casting ability and also add the spells they learn through their classes. The spell level initially available depends on player level, a level 1 fighter would recognize at least 2 first level spells. But a level 14 fighter could recognize up to 6th level. The idea is that if let's say the farmer turned fighter didn't know The fireball spell, they may not know that dexterity is required and might try to tough it out with strength or constitution, which would naturally fail miserably. But moving forward they would know the spell and be able to recognize it. A caster can spend 1 hour imparting knowledge of one spell to one creature in order to encourage RP and other interactions. But it's a lot to keep track of and very vulnerable to meta gaming. I've since more or less abandoned the idea.
The worst house rule I've ever encountered was the following: when combat was initiated, the DM would assign a number to each of the players (in our case 1~3). Whenever an enemy attacked, they would roll a dice (d3) and attack the character whose number was rolled. On more than one ocasion an enemy would teleport behind me and "nothing personal, kid" my squishy mage, despite being very far away and tangled up in combat with the other two party members.
@@randus7053 Yeah, I got worried at the start because I use the same system (assigning numbers to the players and then rolling to see who's being attacked), but I only do that at the start of combat, and I only count PCs who are in range. The players know this and the frontliner can make sure that they are the first character melee enemies encounter. Why the hell would someone randomly change targets in the middle of a fight and attack someone on the other side of the battlefield?
@@Ceracio at best, someone's misguided attempt to be 'fair' by being random, or maybe to be 'fair' by having it so that people at the back got attacked as well.
There were times me and my friends considered making DM a paid position under certain contractual obligations in order to keep things on track, kind of the way you'd pay a subscription service. In the end we all just quit tabletop RPGs because despite most of us maturing there was always perhaps one out of every five players who seemed to actually be maturing in reverse.
Played in a theatre of the mind dnd 5e game. I played a mystic. GM would ask the player on their turn to make a perception check to see the enemy. If the check failed (proficiency scales like dog shit in this system unlike pathfinder or 3.5); you would do nothing on your turn, unable to percieve what was going on in combat. I have played in a couple theatre of the mind games later on. Can't stand it. It's hard to gauge what is happening without a grid map or a hex map. Note: I don't play 5e anymore. Everytime I play 5e with people (friends, family, and randos); it always goes wrong.
I dislike theatre of the mind combat too, though in my case it's because my spatial visualisation skills are awful and I can't hold a map mentally in my head. This sucks for the GM as well, since I have to pester them (and sometimes other players too) with questions about what is where every single time it's my turn. For that reason, ie not needing the hassle for myself OR them, I generally don't run theatre of the mind unless it's a very minor encounter and I avoid playing in games where it's the norm.
1:34 here's an idea, or atleast what i do, try play testing by just throwing what you think would work at them and rolling with whatever happens, and then later changing it with a new encounter. i'm a dm in training and often make mistakes, i just roll with them and do better next time, making sure to note the mistake and explain it later.
The going unconscious and getting a flaw thing is actually a pretty good idea, just blown way the fuck out of the water. A temporary debuff like exhaustion or a black eye would be way more logical
I didn’t actually have this DM, but my ex did, and we both agree it’s a dumb rule (D&D 5e, Not PF or SF with trained skills) Essentially, you can’t roll a check for something that you don’t have proficiency in. Doesn’t sound ALL that bad right? Until you realize that this includes Stealth, Perception. Investigation, All Charisma skills, History, Etc. I’m a fighter/artificer main. This serious hurt every martial class in the party. We tried it for one session as a joke and stopped halfway through because of how bad it limited our options. (Barbarian can’t roll athletics or intimidation, Paladin or cleric can’t roll religion, Ranger can’t roll survival, Druid can’t roll nature, and so on
The "spells only do what they say in the description" is entirely valid, otherwise there's no clear line when to stop, and players take the most liberal and convoluted wordings. Spells are already super powerful, and creativity comes from taking a tool and finding a new use for it, not just deciding the tool does whatever you want.
Allergic to cat saliva. DM has cats, I play digitally for my notes ect and use an iPad with a keyboard attachment. DM had a spray water bottle for when they got upset with us for interrupting or de railing. Cat starts chewing on my $400 keyboard attachment, I shoo them away gently "don't be mean to my cat" sprays me and my iPad repeatedly with water. Never returned.
As a wholehearted cat-lover, I say DM was an arse. Honestly, if I had a player allergic to cats, I'd suggest we played somewhere other than my house (even though that would be more hassle for me) because I love my cats but I also really don't want my D&D game to be a miserable experience for my players. If that wasn't possible, I'd clean as best I could and keep my cats away from them. Also, they're horribly irresponsible if they're letting their cat chew your stuff. Also, a spray bottle for players??? Good grief.
4:03 I pointed out this same issue with the LMoP "hardcore" campaign on World of Io's channel. All it did was punish the people for doing the smart thing of protecting the squishier members of the party. Which, ironically, would result in way more of them were they to ever go "heck with this!" and start playing selfishly. It does nothing but make the game more miserable, not add challenge. Not only that, they had a rule that players who lost a character had to make their new character at 0exp and a level below the others. So, when the tank died doing his job to the end, he was rewarded with not just nothing but multiple penalties on his new character. I don't blame him one bit for getting frustrated with his DM for that.
The idea of when you get knocked uncoscious you get a scar or something could be modified to be useful, if you get knocked out from a sword or something you might get a scar that would give you a small boost to intimidation or something
Oh where do I even begin: Smite has to be called BEFORE the attack Needs materials and we for some reason can never find them Spell focuses are banned It goes on
i kind of find it weird to not get scars on your characters. like,,,this pc 1v1ed a prince of hell and comes out with technically only scrapes? i think its fun to go through a characters portfolio and see how their appearance changes, new scars, missing teeth or hair, (thats one thing i hated until i dmed,,,when my character would start balding. but dang its fun to let one of yer idiots know that they can see the reflection of a flank attack on the head of another pc) i had a rogue character who, after finally getting to a wish spell, had to wish for his fingers back because the five-finger-discount only works ten times(if youre caught, anyway. dont bully my dumb shitty rongue please LOL he had 11 choppings. someone only took half a finger one time so he lost the rest of that next time he was caught,,,,same session). his patron gave him an extra finger on each hand
The only current house rule we have was caused by my character. Basically I wanted to have my character be possessed by a demon, having an internal mental battle with it. And so now everytime I wake up I roll a wisdom save. If it's below 10 I mark it down as a Possession Point. If I reach 30 before my party manages to get rid of the possession... I am become death destroyer of my party. If I kill my party I'll add an update.
Im testing out what may become my worst house rule. Rule of equivelent exchange. No material component cost of revivy or similar spells but you have to give another life in exchange.
Seems legit. Wanna bring back the paladin? You have to sacrifice a high ranking Cleric. Good luck. The king died? He stays dead unless you can sacrifice a powerful ruler of another kingdom. Now Nobles don't live forever. Good rule.
I can actually understand that if it's a balancing tweak for the specific campaign, rather then a general rule; though I do prefer to just talk with the player and discuss other options to limit the effect.
I don't run a ton of houserules in the games I DM but I did do one that I sometimes love and sometimes have regretted. Crits in 5e can occasionally feel underwhelming if you roll a 1 for damage. So I decided to have crits do a full die of damage plus a roll. that way they always speed combat up and feel like big swings for either the monster or the party. I may end up changing it to function like some sort of crit confirm for the extra damage roll and just have it be baseline max damage on the die.
Worst set of house rules were some for mass combat. Our DM wanted us to command this massive army for a battle. (Note: emphasis on "our DM wanted us to") We basically got a handful of tokens and were told "each of these is 500 guys". The map was scaled up to match. Movement was reduced to 1 tile at a time (because each tile was like 100 feet or something), and ranged attacks had half "normal" range (like, if you could hit something 12 tiles away normally, the range was reduced to 6 because of the scale). Every attack hit except nat 1s hit, but rolling lower than the AC meant half damage. There were no crits on nat 20s, because a coordinated crit of 500 men was a statistical impossibility. Spells were scaled up so they basically functioned normally (aside from any reduced range). Units were basically 1 stat block with the HP multiplied by the number of people in the unit, and damage was multiplied by the same thing. I'm sure there's more nuance, but I checked out pretty fast. We had just leveled up and wanted to try out our new stuff. This was the slowest session imaginable. Our party had basically no impact on a massive battle that we didn't care about.
i took the feat that allows eldritch blast to shove the target 10 feet away. DM decided if i missed, my pathetically squishy sorlock instead would be pushed 10 feet away... .. Tried to use this to jump over some Problems and he decided he didn't like it anymore.
Had a DM who wouldn't allow you to move through another players square once combat started without an acrobatics check or an athletics checked. If you failed either check you fell to the ground, if you succeeded on an athletics check you knocked the other person down. So if you're a caster/ranged character who's in the middle of the party and roll before your meat shields can move you can literally do nothing. Or if you're retreating in a hallway you either have to stop at any person in front of you or risk them or yourself on the floor.
That first house rule is an overly complicated way to keep your party weak. My DM has a much more efficient and annoying way of handling it: we don't get enough money to hit that first rule's magic cap. Level 18 with ~1,100 gp in +1 gear. Been complaining about barely being able to afford Revivify and struggling to scrape together enough for Greater Restoration to de-petrify a player's character after a bit over a year IRL (he played a backup during this time). Good thing I'm a Life Domain cleric, because I couldn't afford material costs for the scrying-types of spells.
Many moons ago I stumbled onto a game where XP was awarded to who got the kill shot. I showed up with a support class. Session one was me setting every encounter up on a platter and getting 0 xp for it. Session two I essentially converted my cleric's alignment to evil and played who can kill steal most efficiently. Literally ignored a dying party member in favor of doing damage to the near dead BBEG. We had a normal XP split by the 3rd session and I actually co DM'd with the guy for years. He was super creative and open to suggestions, just new.
Looking at your phone at the table resulted in your character being afflicted with a quirk called angry pooper. What this entailed was that whenever you were affected by rage or strong anger your character would release their bowels. I remember the guy who always played the barbarian ended up with this almost every character.
Worst house rule I ever encountered:
One of the players in my group decided he wanted to GM a game of 3.5 (this was many years ago, before 4th ed or Pathfinder). We all started the usual party role discussion, and I decided I wanted to roll up a Wizard, as I was usually the BDF and wanted to try something new.
So character creation proceeds, we all come up with reasonably solid characters, and then the GM decides to throw his arcane magic house rules at us:
- All spells now have an inherent failure chance regardless of equipment (think it was something like 5% per spell level)
- Whenever a spell is successfully cast, the GM rolls a percentile die. If the die rolls poorly, the spell fails anyways.
- Whether the spell succeeds or not, the caster gets a backlash effect based on the GM's percentile die, which ranged from taking damage, to losing limbs, to outright death. FOR EVERY SPELL CAST.
You'd think that, given the above, there would be an equivalent increase in the power of these spells to make them worth the risk, wouldn't you? Nah, the spells were still at par, just with these horrific downsides that had no explanation or justification beyond "I thought it would be a cool idea".
Noped out of that game pretty hard. The GM kinda drifted out of the play group not too long afterward, think he was offended that we didn't all jump on board with his idea.
Frustrating thing is, it wouldn't have been nearly as bad if he'd just been upfront with it BEFORE we had all rolled up characters. Could have been a cool idea for a low-magic world, but you can't jack-in-the-box that on someone who just finished building a damn Wizard of all things and expect them to appreciate the nuance of the sledgehammer you just nutshotted them with.
Fun thought. Enjoy the game and don't cast any spells. EVER. Be a "theoretical" mage. Watch his world and be sure to point out how rare mages are and how magic is broken. Any encounter with a powerful wizard, be sure to point out how they should be dead and force him to roll for every spell, make sure you can see the results. Only fair. Otherwise ignore his house rule and play however you want. Just ignore him if he says the spell backfires and you died. Just continue like nothing happened. Mention you hear a whisper of darkness but it is just jibberish and continue playing.
Don't mind me, just writing down that last sentence.
sounds like badly imported warhammer fantasy magic
@@davidbeppler3032 You should absolutely not just ignore your DM or anyone at the table. If you don't like a rule or have a problem with the game then talk and communicate with people at the table and at the very least talk with the DM about it. Of he doesn't want to do anything about it then consider leaving, but don't an asshole and just ignore your DM.
@@224ryan I could punch him repeatedly until he is unconscious? That would be good too? Funny how you think I would be the asshole in that situation. I bet if your GF cheated on you, you would be mad at the other guy! lmao
Excuse me that last house rule is pure gold and should be included in the next PHB
Nice
Nice
Nice
Nice
Nice
Technically not a house rule: You Never Die
No matter what craziness she threw at us, regardless of how bad the situation got, we would never die. She would always come up with some reason why we would survive.
You take damage that would instantly kill you? Actually, half the damage was this one type that you are resistant to, so your just unconscious.
Two powerful demons just showed up and are now fighting you? Just so you don't die, they are not going to use any of their legendary actions and a god dog is going to show up and solo both of them.
It sucked all of the fun out of the game for me since there were litterally no stakes at any point(along with no plot, but that's for another video)
God I feel like I'm like this but accidentally- I'm new to DMing and have most of it down, but I cannot for the life of me design a hard encounter! Barely anybody ever takes damage and so far no one has been downed. I have gotten kinda close lately, though...
@@bee5440 yeah I feel ya, exactly the same thing here. The most we ever got was unconsciousness when our wizard gets hit hard or the orc warrior got a particularly nasty hit via magic. I dread the day I might have to kill one of my players chars, but that's life I guess lol.
I'd say a 'never dying' rule can work, but I'd say at least be honest about it (just have people be knocked out instead of fumbling damage) and it only works for certain types of campaigns (particularly story-centric ones)
@@TheGraveKnight it can really only work if there is a consequence to dying such as losing items or suffering penalties, like a -1 int after a couple of knockouts from blunt force trauma
Well for me is that I dm people who dm them self and know broken stuff they never use unless in a desperate situation. I mean 1 characters suddenly killed the bbeg by asking all player for guidance and 1 advantage on a charisma roll and rolled so high that way that although the roll was way too high to get is conventional ways to convince a part on the army against the bbeg wich worked cus how I discribed it. Another time the half elf or elf idk anymore shoots a volly of 6 bullets due how he made his character. To deal 178 damage
3:49 fun fact: long swords can be be use like a hammer, holding the blade and hitting them with the hilt.
And then u take non-lethal damage for how ur wielding it slicing ur hands open...tis only 1-4 and non-lethal due to incidential harm not actual atk with blade
@@intheftin2861 it's called half swording, it's a medeval technique Skallagrim on UA-cam does a barehanded demonstration
Sorry i was imagining the same thing as a paper slices ur hand xD
@@intheftin2861 no problem, I understand holding the blade you would think it would cut the hands
In terms of D&D 5e it's just an improvised weapon at this point. Might as well throw a chair at the DM and have the same effect.
The Fear mechanic in the five-minute range actually sounds really cool, just made hard to implement at the lower levels due to being related to HP. Also, kudos to the poster for realizing the flaw and owning up to it/trying to make it workable, but honestly I think it was on the right track, it just needed to have a bit more tweaking (maybe make it just one point of fear per hit at lower levels, rather than a roll, and add a bonus to the fear "pool" based on one of the three mental stats, as a way to balance out against physical characters having more HP and thus able to take higher fear "damage" while still letting them get something off their best mental trait. Paladins would be nearly fearless, but that honestly feels right to me.
I really didn't hate that. Would work good for a gritty survival or horror campaign.
It has some rather obvious drawbacks depending on the system it was appended to. Like a fight with a housecat (3 attacks per round) being much scarier than a fight with a wolf (1 attack per round).
@@Kurgosh1 in what game system does a housecat get 3 attacks per round?
I was playing 5e with my DM as a Wizard. When I brought up the idea of using the cantrips minor illusion to hide me within an illusory object such as a box or barrel he decided to nerf the spell entirely making it as useless as true strike. He changed the mechanics so that every single person and creature would automatically make an investigation check against it at advantage. Even auditory illusions were not spared from this. So if a one off sound like a rock falling or a sneeze happens even when out of sight with no obvious magic happening they basically against all logic know it is an illusion.
Some DMs really hate illusions for some reason.
Personally I love them...
I don't understand why people are so against them I love spells that reward creativity. I mean some illusion spells are incredibly powerful to the point they can basically take out an enemy alone. Phantasmal force comes to mind....but I just find it great!
If you can make a powerful enemy run head first out over a cliff to their doom then more freaking power to you! If you can make someone believe they are actually fighting you head on while everyone else just see this dude attempting to hit the air then that is just fucking hillarious....plus..I can use the spells against the players as well >:D
@@bibbobella I agree. When I was in middle school I was on love with Illusion magic (Jace Beleren anyone?). It is balanced by how bug brained you have to be for it to be effective (and even then a lot if the spells are situational). Unfortunately I noticed that I am not big brained.
They should've just pointed out that a barrel capable of covering a whole creature is anything but 'minor'.
@@bibbobella as a dm for my group, I agree with you. The game is all about creativity. The more creative the better.
@@snipperjoey1151 except, by the rules of the game, it is. Minor Illusion can create an object no larger than a 5 ft. cube. A barrel comfortably fits in that.
I once had a DM who thought Warlocks would be too strong if they could change spells. So i wasnt allowed to change spells upon level up as house rule. I never played Warlock again.
......Warlocks are WITHOUT A DOUBT the weakest when it comes to actual spell casting...why the fuck would he believe being able to change a few spells every level would be at all powerful when A: They have the fewest and honestly probably weakest spell list out of all casters (except maybe ranger?) B: They have so few spellslots so not even allowing them to change spells whenever they level up would mean their spells would be painfully outdated when they get to the higher levels even if their low level spells gets ramped up a bit. C: Druid and clerics can change their spells Every. Fucking. Long-rest as one of their main mechanics....Wizards can have HUNDREDS of spells they can change between in the higher levels if they have a good spellbook.
If there is one class you shouldn't take away any power from it would be the Warlock....
@@bibbobella Eldritch Blast + Hex and invocations are the highlights of warlock. The spells are just bonus on top, and because they are automatically upcast to your highest spell level, even the initial choices stay relevant into the late game
@@CypherDND Really depends on your choice. Some spells do but A LOT of spells become easily outclassed at later levels.
The teleport spells are a good example of that. Doesn't matter how high a level you cast it at one is simply the best option no matter what.
I do agree with you though the best part about warlocks are the invocations....I wish they had some more actually useful cantrips that didn't get COMPLETLY outclassed by Eldritch Blast but I wasn't saying that warlocks arent fun to play. They are one of my favorit classes but they are also without any doubt the weakest of the casters if they go fullblown caster.
I played one session with the DM that, at the start of session, and not at any point prior, announced his house rule: that our backstories were going to be written by him, and he would be changing our characters to reflect those stories he wrote. None of our character choices mattered, none of our links and story relevant hooks were there, and none of us knew one another, despite the adventure basically hinging on the fact that we were all friends. He decided how we would play our characters because we didn't build them the way he would build them.
Later on in the session, he would spend nearly half an hour talking up how easy an enemy we were coming across was, referring to them as the goblins of the sea. And how a child could be them easily enough. Cue actually fighting them, they got three attacks per round, had as much health as the player characters, and got pack tactics. The Cleric was downed in one round, and my fighter was on 2hp. The dm did not seem to understand why this was so upsetting, and ended up retconning the whole fight. And did I mention, he was two hours late to the game? The whole group vocalized our immense displeasure after the game ended for the night.
Within the hour, without a word, he deleted the game server and roll20 game and blocked all of us on Discord.
there's dms who actually want to write a book, and then there's this guy who apparently really wanted to write a radio drama with y'all as his cast
So what you're saying is he did you an immense favor
@@yaqbulyakkerbat4190 he definitely did, but I wish you would have saved us those five and a half hours we wasted on him
@@nlrexx1 The fact I haven't means my time machine is a failure. Curses.
"Later on in the session" what do you mean "session"? The moment a DM tells me I can't play a character I prepared there is no session. If he wanted us to play premade characters, he lays those out upon everyone agreeing to the game, and we all pick then and there. Not, show up and throw out your character, you pick what I give you.
A spell attack roll counted as casting a spell. Wanna cast scorching ray and make 3 spell attack rolls? Good luck doing only that over the next 3 turns. Wanna use your Archer form attack as a star druid. Can't cast any level spells this turn. Cast a damaging cantrip? No level spells this turn
I play spellcasters almost exclusively, and this horrified me
Queue rogue-ranger-fighter assassin doing 200 damage in one turn while wizard only gets to cast magic missiles
One of my worst house rules was similar to the ear-ringing damage, but I only did the damage if the party was in a tightly closed space. I did it for realism in a modern day campaign. I scrapped the rule after 3 rounds (not 3 sessions, but 3 rounds of combat) because it was a chore to remember, and more of a hindrance to the NPCs than the PCs. The lesson I learned: don't let realism bog the game down.
If you wield a 2 handed great sword (or any other big 2 hand weapon) in a confined place, such as a low ceiling cave, or a narrow hallway, I House rule a -2 penalty to hit due to inability to swing the weapon.
@@davidbeppler3032 Then you should let the players make an improvised attack as piercing damage, thrusting the weapon instead of slashing.
@@AnaseSkyrider Did I say they could not attack? Sorry, I said they could not use the weapon effectively. Do you think a great axe has a great poke?
@@davidbeppler3032 problem is it doesn’t sound fun
@@marcar9marcar972 Yes, not fun playing a game with friends. Big sword is not fun for barbarian PC in tunnel, is great fun for rogue PC with short sword against barbarian NPC.
“It’s your job to ask me if I’ve changed how a spell works before you cast it, not my job to warn you”
This was in a play-by-post campaign where everyone got two characters so that if someone was taking a while to respond, we could still do stuff with our other characters. Both my characters were full casters. And he wanted me to ask him if he had homebrew for every single spell that I cast
I actually enjoy the 4:00 minute house rule, that concept has a fleshed out table in the Grim Hollow book and it can be exciting and tense to roll on the tables - sometimes it can even be a boon like healing to 1HP. Sounds like his DM just didn't vary encounters to ever threaten the backlines.
Werewolf the Apocalypse had a similar rule for Battle Scars, which could accumulate penalties from very serious wounds (keeping in mind these were the hyper-regen type of werewolves, you can imagine how serious we're talking). They were balanced out, though, by being major sources of Renown, which was itself important for ranking up.
Not to mention it encourages you to not hit 0 HP. I always feel like that should be the goal moreso than just "make sure you can get them on their feet before their 2nd death save because that's when it's scary."
OP also mentioned it was mostly scars so I assume the more extreme deformities were from more severe KO's. I can't speak for how it was incorporated, but I honestly like this rule. And would clearly be better if the DM knew how to pressure back-rank players so the tank isn't bullied. Or maybe the back-rankers were scaredy cats and didn't do *their* jobs since the tank was being over-pressured. Hard to say with such little context.
Inexperienced DM and players, playing Curse of Strahd. We didn't know about arcane focuses, druidic focuses, holy symbols, etc when we started the game since we are all pretty new. All our players can cast spells. So we had to look for materials in the woods to cast spells...DM decreed that no shops sell magical components. When I found out about focuses we continually brought it up to the DM who refused to start using them since 'that was how we'd been playing'. I suggested 'maybe we go on a side quest to obtain working arcane focuses or destroy Strahd's inexplicable control over them?'. Nope. So, for OVER A YEAR we've now been looking for batshit in the woods in order to cast fireball. Ugh. Now when we level up most of our players look for spells that don't use components, severely limiting themselves.
Wizards who collect components for their spells get bonuses. Example: Sleep, VSM, a pinch of sand, rose petals, or a cricket. If the Wizard gets a pinch of sand from the plane of earth, rose petals from an enchanted garden, or even goes so far as to only use live crickets the he spends time collecting himself. They get a bonus. Higher Save DC, longer duration, or more HD affected.
@@davidbeppler3032 Is that a house rule or a standard one?
@@MrAnim8orVideos House. It should be RAW. Magic is wrong in D&D 5e. Magic should be stupid powerful. People should be afraid of someone who can make a building explode with a wave of their hands. Magic should be hoarded and controlled. Rare and Dangerous. Hard to learn and with people willing to torture you to get your spells. That would make a good system.
A terrible house rule I keep seeing for 5e: Heavy Crossbows need your Action to reload it. How the Loading propery works is that you can't mulit attack with those weapons unless you have an ability or item that lets you bypss that. A Heavy Crossbow deals 1d10 Damage and had less range than a Longbow, which does 1d8. The difference is so slight that this house rule just doesn't need to exist.
What even is the purpose of a heavy crossbow after that? Just use it once, drop on the ground and forget it exists?
@@helgenlane Shoot, sling it on your harness, draw your sword and close the distance. Just like real life. Enemy is missing 1d10 hp before they get to you. Seems pretty solid to me.
@@davidbeppler3032 stowing a weapon is an object interaction. Pulling out a weapon is an object interaction. If you take out a crossbow and use it on the same turn, you can't put it away. If you put it away on the next turn, you have to use your action to unsheath a sword. A good way to fuck up your action economy.
Disagree. RAW is fine. Makes sense. 5D10 is much more damage than 5D8. Unless you math differently than I do. I think your GM should house rule that the Longbow only does 1D6, because 5D6 is basically the same as 5D10 anyway. Then the Crossbow makes more sense. Based on your comment.
IMHO things are fine like they are. Use whichever works for you. Just remember, Longbow does not work underwater, Crossbow does.
@@davidbeppler3032 you need to be level 18 or something before you can make that many attacks a turn though
I don't have any bad house rules so far.
We have modified so whips do 2d4. Because we want to use sexy whips damnit.
Also, changelings can use any 'natural' trait a race they turn into is usable. Tabaxi's natural weapons in their claws, halfings ability to hide thanks to their size, etc.
We also modified shifters- they can just transform into their respective animal. Because shifters as they are suck. That is all.
All very fun. All very good. I love our DM, he's great.
I did something similar, however I made it a feat.
Bullwhip expert
(PS. Don't remember the specific text, this is just the gist of what it said)
When making the attack action using a whip you may add one additional d4 to the damage.
Alternatively, on a hit you may remove up to 1d4 before rolling damage to do one of the following:
-pull the target towards you by half your movement, or you towards the target if it is one size or greater bigger than you.
Or
-have it function also as a heavy weapon. This does not replace the light property, and creatures who would not normally be able to use heavy weapons suffer no such constraints with this weapon.
(Why? Because rogues with heavy weapons)
in our game all weapons have unique features that someone can take feats to unlock, a whip does 1d4 damage but has reach and can be used to disarm, trip, bind, misdirect(change direction of a attack to a adjacant target) force a target to move or anything like that (our guide to weapon skills literally states with the whip to "be creative")
I... don't really think shifters suck, i love the wildhunt ones. Perfect race for druids. What made you think they suck, i'd love to see that perspective. :o
@@kairailthrail It's probably more to do with my playstyle than anything. I'm relatively new to Dnd. I haven't played all the classes or races yet. Most of my characters have been sorcerers, I just tried a warlock and I hate them, I've started playing my first ever martial class in a changling rouge/monk hybrid.
I tried the shifter race a bit on a shadow sorcerer, but it felt rather lackluster(?) I don't really know how to explain it. I love roleplay and lycanthrope type things, but it just hasn't worked with any my campaigns so far. I've even had a few were shifters are just banned. So- eh.
You say druids are good for shifters? Maybe I'll make my first ever druid a shifter. I want to like them, I really do. I don't even have a real argument against them other than just bad experiences so far. Which is a sad excuse I know. Hopefully, I can get back to you with better experiences with a druid shifter and our fresh group.
@@dovianempire1868 Yeah, the Wildhunt Variant is really good, but not so much if you're a moon druid, you wouldn't really be able to get much out of the shifted form. I played a star circle druid, and it fit really well. Beasthide Shifter could be a pretty good addition if you want a bit more survivability. Gives more temp hp and a +1 to ac. The only one i really think is useless... is the longtooth one, because the only thing you really get out if is "temporary natural weapons" - where you can bite as unarmed strikes for 1d6+str while shifted, but... if you want something like this, you could really just go any other race that has them naturally.
It was weird because my GM made a rule where every nat20 you had to kiss him. He also said we had to use the special 20 sided die with all 20s on it. Needless to say after 8 sessions I stopped going.
8 sessions? Must have really been a good kisser.
@@fluorideinthechat7606 just awful, but I had rolled really good stats on my bard.
Oh no, 4chan is leaking 😂
"Everyone can use a cantrip as a bonus action"
Entire party was martials with cantrips
Not a big deal if you're talking Pathfinder or D&D 3.5 cantrips. Oh no, the level 14 fighter can clean his armor with a gesture and a few magic words instead of with a rag. Kind of a problem if it's 5e and the best ranged weapon for the ranger is his eldritch blast spell.
Soon, I'll be trying out what sounds like a pretty good house rule: I'm going to build a Wild Magic sorcerer. (I play Pathfinder, so our group is going to homebrew it) My GM has informed me that once per day, I'll be able to cast a spell without expending the corresponding spell slot . . . at the cost of causing a Wild Magic surge.
A house rule my DM came up with was a bottlecap. If u roll a natty 1 u spend a bottlecap u reroll and get the better roll. U only get 3 so use wisely
That is so cool. I always like the idea of wild magic sorcerers breaking magic. Like upcasting a spell using an “overload slot” that was a higher level than you can cast and have drawbacks like wild magic surges or using it to intentionally self destruct
@@intheftin2861 Isn't that just the Lucky feat?
Ive not heard of that feat. Plus u got bottlecaps for unusual/clever ideas in how to handle things. One such was teleporting a vampire to the elemental plane of fire.
@@intheftin2861 The lucky feat is one of the most common feats chosen by players??? It lets you reroll a d20 on any roll, not just Nat 1s.
As a DM, I allow rule of cool and I have a little neat rule that if I make a mistake pertaining to my players like getting one of their abilities mixed up, I allow their next roll to have advantage. We're here for a good time. If they thought of a way to get around with one of my encounters, I'm on board and try to help them out to make it work out in their favor.
For example. Our party contains an Aasimar Paladin, Lythari Ranger, Dwarf Barbarian, Half-Elf Drow Sorcerer/Rouge, and an Aarakocra Rogue. Both the rogues weren't present so I had them look for the rogues in the cave/dungeon type deal. They encountered gargoyles and one of them was in the air flying about, the paladin wanted to YEET the dwarf at the gargoyles in the air. They roll perfectly and I got hyped! Through a way to make it work, I allowed the paladin to use his strength to pick up the dwarf and had the dwarf roll acrobatics to jump towards the paladin and the paladin threw the dwarf like a football. She failed on the attack roll to strike the gargoyle in the air, but I said "you may miss the attack, but that doesn't stop inertia, so you collide with the gargoyle, knocking him down to ground and you may do as you please!"
I never heard any my players so hyped before.
And that folks, is how you should DM imo. Reminds me of the time my party's ship was ambushed by some fey creatures riding wyverns. While the rest was on the ship dealing with the few that boarded or sending spells/arrows/cannonballs fly at the flying ones, my Dwarven monk with sea legs decided it was a good idea to climb the mast, pick a target that was doing a fly-by and made a running leap onto the wyvern. (All movement and a bonus action dash if I recall correctly) Then used my action to kick of its rider, and used a sleep potion with high DC I had on the wyvern, makibg it fall on the deck where we quickly secured it and now we had one captured.
I tried to tame it when it woke up and it worked for a little while until on the second to last roll I needed to tame it I rolled poorly. The wyvern almost knocked me off and flew away. Had to use my last magical potion to make it so depressed it would no longer want to fly and we crashed to the water from idk how high. Used my slow fall reaction to not take fall damage and our lizardfolk paladin with giant crocodile (find steed) came and recued us both. We sold the wyvern to animal traders back on land after that fiasco lol
We had to roll investigation to loot anything, including things we could clearly see. Orc was just attacking you with a greataxe a round before you killed it? Roll to loot it. 19? Not high enough, you find nothing. In hindsight, best theory is that the DM was trying to simulate randomized monster loot like an MMO.
Another one of those? *facepalm*
Playing 3.5 and the DM was a major weeb. He decided that the spell Evards Black Tentacles would be piercing damage instead of bludgeoning damage, because reasons.
if it's gonna be used that way, then I would require a contested roll, and on success let it be true damage. Otherwise it fails to "pierce" and just bludgeons the area.
I don't get what's so bad about changing the damage type of one spell.
@@Nukestarmaster he did it specifically for the "hentai" aspect of it
@@skylance21 I think its kinda funny lol
I've had a DM who has that work as "you can determine bludgeon, pierce, or force damage", explained as the caster shifting the tentacles form of attack (are they smashing the enemy? Stabbing into them by hardening the tip? Or coiling and crushing?)
I have a house rule that any player who gives ideas for world building, encounters, or hell, even just participates in crafting the world(have had a lot of uninvested players), they will gain 50xp per idea, to be added to any character they play in my games.
I've had one person use this rule in six years. They did it twice.
Not a lot, I know, but hey, every little bit helps.
To any character? so if they made a new lv 1 and started into a new game they'd start with 50-100 exp from the start while everyone else is at 0 exp? Just saying I would totally help if that was a thing.
The last time I was this early, I still had a paper character sheet.
I had a good laugh at some of these, and some of them made me glad I never encountered those house rules... yet!! *suspense music* OAO
I have a rule at my table that if you do something unusual and I ask 'Shall the fates intervene?', that's their cue that I could have something strange but sometimes rewarding happen.
For example, a ranger was having trouble hitting a Gnoll with a crossbow, three turns in a row. He threw down his crossbow in anger before firing the forth shot, intending to go for his dagger.
I said the line... And he was curious, so he said 'yes'.
I rolled a percentile... And stated:
"The loaded crossbow slams into the dirt, shocking it enough to fire. It flies true and strikes the approaching Gnoll right in the cherries. The other Gnolls that can see this gain the Fear status."
That's amazing
Had a game where the DM had a bunch of shitty house rules, but the one that made me the most pissed and eventually led to me quitting was "You cannot attempt to make a skill check unless you are proficient in that skill. Skill checks will be happening much less often and I will decide if you succeed or fail at most things." He told us this in the second session, after everyone had already chosen their skill proficiencies and he didn't let us change them. 4 of us had the Acolyte background + charisma based characters (sorcerer, warlock, 2 paladins) so we all had insight +some kind of charisma skill with much overlap. Same DM also said that you can only learn a new proficiency if you spend 400 days in game, spending 5gp and 12 hours a each day. When I showed him the rules from Xanathar's and the PHB, he disregarded both saying "This makes more sense in my world". Also, you were only allowed to miss 2 days out of all 400 or else you had to restart from the beginning. No amount of convincing with real life comparisons to learning new languages and such could convince him.
Sounds bloody awful. Yeesh. Good job on getting out of that.
remember folks, if DMs have these houserules, it's morally correct to break their nose and leave.
In my first ever session, where everyone except the DM was brand-new to D&D as a whole, even if you rolled high to do something, i.e. "I sneak through the trees to get a better look at what's going on without being spotted" and rolled a 14, if the DM decided that the course of action you were pursuing was not ideal, all that a high roll would get you is reduced consequences for your actions, i.e. "you move super loudly through the trees and are spotted basically instantly by the figure ahead of you, but manage to not trigger the trap in the underbrush that you weren't aware of. Roll initiative."
All half humans had to default to full humans in attack order, even if the full human was weaker or they're attack wouldn't have been useful in the situation. Facing a flying bat creature? The very much earthbound Paladin got first shot even if our half-elf wizard could summon an Imp army that would would take out the bat guys while the rest of us worked on the puzzle to get out of the dungeon.
2:33 both DMs are what are known as adversarial DMs especially the second one and it’s a miracle that the party didn’t just say fuck it to the second DM
Dm had a rule "science + logic" >" fantasy". Like for example you can cast a fireball for example but technically you are breaking apart water to hydrogen and oxygen and forcing combustion so that's how fireball work if there no moisture in the air the spell will always fizzle or is weaker i wasn't the mage who had to suffer when spells didn't work but it was sort of balanced some encounters were very easy given the right circumstances. Anyways some utility spell was called cut or something along those lines with basically the description said the range is what you can clearly see so around 100ft but larger if you got a magnifying glass or whatever.
Welp mage decided to use cut on an atom and bbeg got nuked most anti-climactic end to a campaign.
There is a rule, not a houserule, that (I think) is from first edition of where if you drink too many potions at once they can mix in your stomach and cause unintended side effects.
They could be anything from really bad, roll a 1 you explode or roll a 100 and you get a permanent +1 to a stat.
I just really liked this rule, and it also could punish those who just hook a potion IV to their arms and effectively become immortal to normal damage.
I like that too! Had a DM once that would "call audibles" that weren't necessarily house rules, but made sense in the context of what was happening, and it made things really fun! For example, our party inherited a keep, but one of the towers was basically rubble. Our wizard started using a cantrip to rebuild the tower one cubic foot at a time, and the DM imposed that the monotony of the task had a chance of dealing psychic damage every hour he was at it. The wizard rolled to resist for each instance, and it was just a D4 of potential damage, but it was just enough flavor to make sure we thought about what we were doing!
My DM used something similar for our 5e campaign. If you drank even one more non-healing potion while under the effects of another, you rolled the d100. On a 100, the first potion's effects became permanent. I remember at least one party member getting permanent cloud giant strength that way. We were already lv 16, so it didn't really break the campaign thankfully.
DM 2 sounds like they love to purposely be hostile and feed the "GM Vs Players" Mindset
I think the Blunt Weapon Rule is a holdover from the first editions- something like "Gygax thought priests and clergy and holy people don't wield knives." Which is technically true, but I think if my local youth pastor was trying to kill Tiamat he might forego that commandment too. Different situations call for different measures.
1st one is a bad houserule but props on the DM for handling it equally and having it benefit the players for once.
Our current DM is running white box fantasy game rpg, basically D&D 1st edition. He decided that he won't award any XP until after we have completed an entire module, so basically we've been at it 6 sessions with maybe 2 more to go and all at level one. It's a premade module that wasn't designed to be played at level 1 the whole way through and we have already lost player characters thanks to all being squishy enough to be 1-shot by any of the npcs. Holding all XP until players are between major plot archs is just a functionally bad idea.
Yeah, GMs on power trips are just like that. My best suggestion would be to find another GM or if you can't for some reason, do it yourself. It's not that hard and you get better the more you do. And I'm willing to bet that the other players are rather willing to support you then to endure whatever horror GM you had before.
Technically I never encountered any "bad" house rules because I usually was the GM, but I once was a player in a group with a GM who read the rules while we're playing, because he never read them. He wrote a story and wanted us to play it out (with his GF as the "Star", huge red flag) and did not know anything of the basics. He rolled for treasures everytime we found something, and one of the first things my char (D&D2nd Fighter/Thief) found was a sentient +4 bastard sword with the ability to cast spells of it's own and to fight independently from it's owner even before hitting level 2! When we fought the campaing villain, our ranger (not his GF) killed him in one turn, by nailing him to a wall with 72 arrows shot in ONE ROUND.
I had a DM who was VERY strict on magic users. All components were used up in casting and unless you specifically bought pockets full of guano... you can't cast your spell. So he changed his rule halfway through so you no longer needed components, but "mana stones" instead. Big whoop. But it was for ALL spells and these stones were rare and expensive, casting a 1st level magic missile consumed a 25gp mana stone. They came in different "flavors" too, which meant you could only cast a lvl2 illusion spell with a lvl2 illusion stone. Oh, did I mention it still consumed spell slots?Sorry, no hoarding and spamming strong spells. When we killed our BBEG all we got was 2 of these damn stones (we used more to kill him) and they we lvl2 stones at most. Thank god I was a barbarian that campaign!
Wizards who collect components for their spells get bonuses. Example: Sleep, VSM, a pinch of sand, rose petals, or a cricket. If the Wizard gets a pinch of sand from the plane of earth, rose petals from an enchanted garden, or even goes so far as to only use live crickets the he spends time collecting himself. They get a bonus. Higher Save DC, longer duration, or more HD affected.
It's maybe not the worst house rule, but it is the one that's the most prevalent: guns. If your campaign doesn't have them, or you wanna make them rare, that's one thing. But for the love of Jim, stop making it so only humans can be gunslingers, or you have to be level 8+ to take a level in fighter if you intend to go gunslinger, or you don't get gun proficiency unless you've spent hundreds of h- I don't care that it's not realistic, it's a fucking GAME. it's only vaguely more powerful than other weapons, and the Gunslinger is underpowered as FUUUUUUUCK.
Give. Me. A. Break.
I'm fine with adding a bunch of side-effects and requirements for guns, but I also bulk their damage and stuff because THEY'RE FUCKING GUNS.
I've had a DM who's held a stern house rule that instead of using regular passive perception rules, your passive perception just equals your wisdom score. There's a lot of very clear problems with this and how it makes taking the perception skill much less valuable.
Thanks for all the great ideas, I can use in the next game session.
For the second one, I like the idea of having to keep track of your components and such, and it would be pretty cool to have all of the mats priced out so that you can hand a shopping list to the DM to pick out. Though, this would work best in a game where bonus gold is given out, and assuming that the player is down for it and also has extra spending cash for it. 90% of the time spell casters save their money for the random magic item that is in the magic shop anyways, so taxing 5 GP here and there isn't going to break the bank! Technically Indentify already does this, but it's a single investment. You could even argue you can buy enough components until you are in town again.
Here is an advice to be good at your DM job: You're not there to win. If you try to TPK the party at all costs or make them lose at all costs, you're essentially losing the game. You can only win by having fun AND ensuring the party has fun.
wow listening to this video has made me realize why all of my players have told me they enjoy my DnD game more then any other they have played before. I never realized other DMs did crap like this lol, the whole point of DnD is to have fun and foster a cool and interesting story with your players. DMs like this have some serious personal problems 0_0
The GM's job is to determine Economy and Ecology. Then just describe to players what their PCs, see, hear, ,smell, taste, and feel. That is all. That is the job. The PCs do all the heavy lifting. They build a game. I just get to watch and enjoy.
@@davidbeppler3032 You are allowed to have fun and have a say in the story. God, you make dm-ing sound like a job.
@@MRJTD99 Yes, very hard. No planning, no prep, free food and friends. So hard. I just do economy and ecology. They do the rest.
Doom Points is a thing in other systems, mainly the 2d20 system from Modiphius, but it works in that system because it is baked into the rolls and the players have the ability to control the magnitute of Doom Points, and are more able to overcome it. Just.. slapping it onto 1d20 sounds like a recipie for disaster.
My party (1 fighter, a fight-wizard, fight-paladin, rogue-wizard, cleric, druid) was fighting one of the big bosses, a huge turtle, so I took out a homebrew item the dm made: a crystal containing a water-elemental elephant, which would come out if the crystal is broken, loaded it into my crossbow, fired it, fired again and hit and broke the crystal mid-air, and suddenly the turtle got hit in the face with an elephant going at 204mph.
Biggest problem here is that Crossbows have the Loading property, and thus can only be fired once per round, regardless of multiattack/bonus action/reactions...
@@WhizzerdSupreme I had a custom feat that allowed me to ignore that.
@@WhizzerdSupreme crossbow expert exists
@@VimyGlide So do other systems than 5e where this might not be a problem at all, or might be a completely different set of mechanical problems.
Worst house rule I can recall off the top of my head - Since elves were a wise, elder race, if an elf told you ANYTHING, a non-elf had to make a Will save (3e) or you'd believe it, no matter how stupid it was. Elf tells you the sky is plaid? "There must be something wrong with my eyes."
I once had a DM who got 2 houserules:
* You get 1 point of exhaustion if you drop below half hp, 2 points if you drop below a quarter, ect. If you add in the factor that every single encounter would make your average deadly encounter seem easy, it was not fun.
* Rogues could not sneak attack if the enemy knew where the rogue was. This paired with some ungodly perceptive skills on every monster even knowing where invisible characters were.
My roomate has never Dmed and she believes that tolling too well should be a penalty and her fiance and I both were trying to explain why that rule is bs.
The point of the game, and emphasis on the word game, is to have fun and you as the dm want to make it fun for your players. If your players are suffering and you're gonna punish them for rolling high and low then it makes you not wanna play
What is tolling?
@@rogerwilco2 i believe he meant "rolling"
depends, think it would be funny for example "kick in the door" if you roll super well the door goes flying off its hinges and smashes into the goblins or whatever on the other side.
My second DM went wacky with the 2e rules and decided for every level casters have they could cast spells one tier higher. So if a character is ninth level they can cast 9th level spells. I didn’t play with him for long especially after the Paladin tpk’d at level two when he got a god hammer and used it to blow up the mountain while we were in it.
Had a DM that would let his monsters make a con save against critical hits. It also didn’t work both ways, and we couldn’t make the save against enemy attacks.
What some DMs seem to forget is that YOU ARE NOT PLAYING AGAINST THE PLAYERS, YOU ARE PLAYING WITH THEM. GUHHHHH
played a dnd game where the dm didn't add abilitiy modifier to attack rolls.
Played in a D&D game with 8 players, so I'm sure you all can already see that this one is going to be a blast. In order to stop the party from splitting AT ALL, the DM ruled we all had to be within 100 feet of this one player who we were all "soul-bound" to (more on that later) or we would start taking tons of d10s of psychic damage. We were below level 10 the entire campaign so that still had a chance to be deadly, especially at the beginning. He also had a bunch of other really dumb house rules, such as needing a "sleep check" in order to take a long rest. I think it was a CON check DC 20, reduced by the amount of hours your character had been awake. Those with low CON among the group often rolled around with at least one level of exhaustion. We were also in a school setting (think Hogwarts or something) where he forced our characters to start at age 12, even if we had built adult characters, The end of the campaign involved a forced PvP scenario where the leader of our group, the dude we were "soul-bound" to, was the leader of one faction and another person (who was leader dude's IRL WIFE) could un-bind people from him and give them some sort of "backstab" damage bonus in combat. And yes, the DM knew about their IRL relationship and still chose to give the two of them those abilities. And those are just the worst of the worst. Suffice it to say that DM probably won't be running any more games for us.
I'm 690% implementing that last house rule. But it's expanded to when totals add to 69, or if a 6 and 9 are rolled consecutively. If a player declares "nice" when any of those conditions are not met, an enemy creature will have inspiration instead.
The idea of a DM forcibly changing how a PC Paladin's damage type is makes no sense to me. As a DM, you need to work around it by designing YOUR encounters, not the player character.
Thanks for the suggestions!
The one of giving the enemies devil sight was a case of good DMing done badly. It’s good to have your encounters evolve to challenge your players to the same level, but it has to be reasonable and logical within the game
Got told that if a dice fell off the table mid-roll, it would be considered a nat-1.... but not when we started or anything, no, literally mid-fight. Dude tried to have my character eaten by a giant by way of this rule that was sprung upon me at past the last second.
Not my story but the worst I've heard is the following:
Be me
Neckbeard
Not very smart
Fairly clumsy
GM decides to start new campaign
Get to his house
Tells me to run on a treadmill and he times me
Tells me to lift some weights
Gives me a questionnaire about personality
Gives SAT questions for me to complete
At the end, GM declares our stats are all based on results. MFW have the worst stats of all the group
The Protection fighting style didnt use reaction.. it was just active.. always. permanent disadvantage if you were close to the echoknight warforged with 2 shields. 23 AC. this was fine, but DM started upping monsters to hit because he was having a hard time fighting us. But was also not a fan of giving money. I'm a Level 6 OoC paladin with chainmail literally getting shredded everyfight because the Echoknight doesnt frontline most battles. He sits back protecting bard for RP reasons while only using echo to fight. add to that the fact he made ALOT of the monsters immune to fear because it "made more sense" to him. Im sitting with a useless subclass unable to get a decent enough AC to stand a chance. even if I did get fear off, it made no difference cause They already would have disadvantage from protection. The Echo knight then recieved a God hood buff that gave him more ASI and resistance to non magic S/P/B because of how strong he was in fights.
homebrew can be fun, powerful characters can be fun. But stacking it all on one person makes the game unbalanced. Add to that he took shield master and knocking people prone meant you would always crit if prone. I tried the same tactic, shove then attack. Was immediately punished by 3 enemies doing it to me and then him saying after fact. you cannot use an attack to shove prone without shield master because it'd be broken.... warforged is using multiple attacks to knock multiple people prone... not even just his bonus action.
I think I'm gonna start using that last one.
I hate whenever firearms are introduced into a dnd world that many GM feel the need to punish players using them. but taking thunder damage is the worst, at that point you may as well just flat out tell the players they can't use them. Depending on the firearms system used. the players already has to deal with Misfires or complexity of creation. Adding more cons is just a spit in the face. I knew one GM who knew what the meaning of Risk/Reward meant. He made it so that firearm's used enemy's touch AC if fired at their optimal range. Pistol at close, Rifles at 20 ft+. Scatterguns didn't get this but they always hit point blank range. the was countered by the fact that only a few races had firearms and they were rare on top of the dangers of misfire, having flammable ammo on you when so many fire effect attacks exist...etc.
No gunpowder. Smoke powder. Guns are expensive. Ammo is expensive. Powder is expensive. Only Nobles should have guns. 10 gp for 5 shots.
The DM in the gunsligner story was clearly new. "ear ringing damage"? if you wanted the player to take damage from the loud noise, just make it thunder damage. Thunder damage is DnD's equivilent to sound based attacks. and newer players tend to mistake it for lightning damage.
GM: Teleportation magic out of the World's Largest Dungeon doesn't work.
Me: Can we still cast summoning spells?
GM: Yes, but they creatures won't leave and aren't helpful after the spells ends. They might even be hostile.
Me: Sweet, that means we can summon livestock and kill them before the spell ends so we never have to worry about food. Or use Handle Animal to tame them!
GM: ...you can't summon anything bigger than size Small.
Would have been better if he'd just said they disappeared like normal.
Ok, I summon 1 small pig. Food for a week.
These just exemplify appaling DM vs Player mentality
I briefly kicked around a house rule wherein you had to more or less learn spells to know what save to make. It would function similar to skill proficiencies. Non casters would start with knowing a number of spells equal to player level+INT+proficiency bonus. While casters and half casters replace INT with their spell casting ability and also add the spells they learn through their classes. The spell level initially available depends on player level, a level 1 fighter would recognize at least 2 first level spells. But a level 14 fighter could recognize up to 6th level. The idea is that if let's say the farmer turned fighter didn't know The fireball spell, they may not know that dexterity is required and might try to tough it out with strength or constitution, which would naturally fail miserably. But moving forward they would know the spell and be able to recognize it. A caster can spend 1 hour imparting knowledge of one spell to one creature in order to encourage RP and other interactions. But it's a lot to keep track of and very vulnerable to meta gaming. I've since more or less abandoned the idea.
That's actually pretty neat. Makes learning adventuring in a guild a good idea
The worst house rule I've ever encountered was the following: when combat was initiated, the DM would assign a number to each of the players (in our case 1~3). Whenever an enemy attacked, they would roll a dice (d3) and attack the character whose number was rolled. On more than one ocasion an enemy would teleport behind me and "nothing personal, kid" my squishy mage, despite being very far away and tangled up in combat with the other two party members.
Yeah that's dumb, I understand DM's picking a target a random if multiple players are in range, but to ignore a monster's speed is dumb.
@@randus7053 Yeah, I got worried at the start because I use the same system (assigning numbers to the players and then rolling to see who's being attacked), but I only do that at the start of combat, and I only count PCs who are in range. The players know this and the frontliner can make sure that they are the first character melee enemies encounter. Why the hell would someone randomly change targets in the middle of a fight and attack someone on the other side of the battlefield?
@@Ceracio at best, someone's misguided attempt to be 'fair' by being random, or maybe to be 'fair' by having it so that people at the back got attacked as well.
There were times me and my friends considered making DM a paid position under certain contractual obligations in order to keep things on track, kind of the way you'd pay a subscription service.
In the end we all just quit tabletop RPGs because despite most of us maturing there was always perhaps one out of every five players who seemed to actually be maturing in reverse.
Played in a theatre of the mind dnd 5e game. I played a mystic.
GM would ask the player on their turn to make a perception check to see the enemy. If the check failed (proficiency scales like dog shit in this system unlike pathfinder or 3.5); you would do nothing on your turn, unable to percieve what was going on in combat.
I have played in a couple theatre of the mind games later on. Can't stand it. It's hard to gauge what is happening without a grid map or a hex map.
Note: I don't play 5e anymore. Everytime I play 5e with people (friends, family, and randos); it always goes wrong.
I dislike theatre of the mind combat too, though in my case it's because my spatial visualisation skills are awful and I can't hold a map mentally in my head. This sucks for the GM as well, since I have to pester them (and sometimes other players too) with questions about what is where every single time it's my turn. For that reason, ie not needing the hassle for myself OR them, I generally don't run theatre of the mind unless it's a very minor encounter and I avoid playing in games where it's the norm.
1:34 here's an idea, or atleast what i do, try play testing by just throwing what you think would work at them and rolling with whatever happens, and then later changing it with a new encounter. i'm a dm in training and often make mistakes, i just roll with them and do better next time, making sure to note the mistake and explain it later.
The going unconscious and getting a flaw thing is actually a pretty good idea, just blown way the fuck out of the water. A temporary debuff like exhaustion or a black eye would be way more logical
Homebrew rules either have to make sense to the players and me, or make the fails more funny than tragic. For me, that is
6:07
That DM is basically: "Tell us you don't shoot guns
without telling us you don't shoot guns."
I didn’t actually have this DM, but my ex did, and we both agree it’s a dumb rule (D&D 5e, Not PF or SF with trained skills)
Essentially, you can’t roll a check for something that you don’t have proficiency in. Doesn’t sound ALL that bad right?
Until you realize that this includes Stealth, Perception. Investigation, All Charisma skills, History, Etc.
I’m a fighter/artificer main. This serious hurt every martial class in the party. We tried it for one session as a joke and stopped halfway through because of how bad it limited our options. (Barbarian can’t roll athletics or intimidation, Paladin or cleric can’t roll religion, Ranger can’t roll survival, Druid can’t roll nature, and so on
your cantrips only get the damage boost at levels if you are a full caster
Haven’t watched it but I know it’s great.
The "spells only do what they say in the description" is entirely valid, otherwise there's no clear line when to stop, and players take the most liberal and convoluted wordings. Spells are already super powerful, and creativity comes from taking a tool and finding a new use for it, not just deciding the tool does whatever you want.
4:53 I actually really like the concept for this one. Glad they didn't completely throw it away.
Allergic to cat saliva. DM has cats, I play digitally for my notes ect and use an iPad with a keyboard attachment. DM had a spray water bottle for when they got upset with us for interrupting or de railing. Cat starts chewing on my $400 keyboard attachment, I shoo them away gently "don't be mean to my cat" sprays me and my iPad repeatedly with water. Never returned.
As a wholehearted cat-lover, I say DM was an arse. Honestly, if I had a player allergic to cats, I'd suggest we played somewhere other than my house (even though that would be more hassle for me) because I love my cats but I also really don't want my D&D game to be a miserable experience for my players. If that wasn't possible, I'd clean as best I could and keep my cats away from them. Also, they're horribly irresponsible if they're letting their cat chew your stuff. Also, a spray bottle for players??? Good grief.
4:03 I pointed out this same issue with the LMoP "hardcore" campaign on World of Io's channel. All it did was punish the people for doing the smart thing of protecting the squishier members of the party. Which, ironically, would result in way more of them were they to ever go "heck with this!" and start playing selfishly. It does nothing but make the game more miserable, not add challenge. Not only that, they had a rule that players who lost a character had to make their new character at 0exp and a level below the others. So, when the tank died doing his job to the end, he was rewarded with not just nothing but multiple penalties on his new character. I don't blame him one bit for getting frustrated with his DM for that.
The idea of when you get knocked uncoscious you get a scar or something could be modified to be useful, if you get knocked out from a sword or something you might get a scar that would give you a small boost to intimidation or something
I am just thinking the tank will never have any scars... but the wizard will be missing arms, eyes, and look like a mess after a dozen games.
Oh where do I even begin:
Smite has to be called BEFORE the attack
Needs materials and we for some reason can never find them
Spell focuses are banned
It goes on
4:12 We're using Crit Tables. Party's only tank, Chuckles "I'm in danger"
I give my players scars when they fall unconscious. But it's purely for flavor, and I let them decide the nature of the scar.
i kind of find it weird to not get scars on your characters. like,,,this pc 1v1ed a prince of hell and comes out with technically only scrapes? i think its fun to go through a characters portfolio and see how their appearance changes, new scars, missing teeth or hair, (thats one thing i hated until i dmed,,,when my character would start balding. but dang its fun to let one of yer idiots know that they can see the reflection of a flank attack on the head of another pc) i had a rogue character who, after finally getting to a wish spell, had to wish for his fingers back because the five-finger-discount only works ten times(if youre caught, anyway. dont bully my dumb shitty rongue please LOL he had 11 choppings. someone only took half a finger one time so he lost the rest of that next time he was caught,,,,same session). his patron gave him an extra finger on each hand
On that final note, in BOTH of my groups we consider the 69 on a D100 as a crit success.
4:04 Given, that every time your character sleeps they fall unconscious I was about ready to call this DM an absolute sadist.
The only current house rule we have was caused by my character. Basically I wanted to have my character be possessed by a demon, having an internal mental battle with it. And so now everytime I wake up I roll a wisdom save. If it's below 10 I mark it down as a Possession Point. If I reach 30 before my party manages to get rid of the possession... I am become death destroyer of my party.
If I kill my party I'll add an update.
So, worst case scenario you have to be rid of your possession once a month. Doesn't seem too awful.
Im testing out what may become my worst house rule. Rule of equivelent exchange. No material component cost of revivy or similar spells but you have to give another life in exchange.
Seems legit. Wanna bring back the paladin? You have to sacrifice a high ranking Cleric. Good luck. The king died? He stays dead unless you can sacrifice a powerful ruler of another kingdom. Now Nobles don't live forever. Good rule.
That the Life Domain's healing boost doesn't effect goodberries.
I can actually understand that if it's a balancing tweak for the specific campaign, rather then a general rule; though I do prefer to just talk with the player and discuss other options to limit the effect.
I don't run a ton of houserules in the games I DM but I did do one that I sometimes love and sometimes have regretted. Crits in 5e can occasionally feel underwhelming if you roll a 1 for damage. So I decided to have crits do a full die of damage plus a roll. that way they always speed combat up and feel like big swings for either the monster or the party. I may end up changing it to function like some sort of crit confirm for the extra damage roll and just have it be baseline max damage on the die.
I specifically am the only player at the table that is not allowed to multiclass since I tend to have grandiose characters
Worst set of house rules were some for mass combat. Our DM wanted us to command this massive army for a battle. (Note: emphasis on "our DM wanted us to") We basically got a handful of tokens and were told "each of these is 500 guys". The map was scaled up to match. Movement was reduced to 1 tile at a time (because each tile was like 100 feet or something), and ranged attacks had half "normal" range (like, if you could hit something 12 tiles away normally, the range was reduced to 6 because of the scale). Every attack hit except nat 1s hit, but rolling lower than the AC meant half damage. There were no crits on nat 20s, because a coordinated crit of 500 men was a statistical impossibility. Spells were scaled up so they basically functioned normally (aside from any reduced range). Units were basically 1 stat block with the HP multiplied by the number of people in the unit, and damage was multiplied by the same thing. I'm sure there's more nuance, but I checked out pretty fast.
We had just leveled up and wanted to try out our new stuff. This was the slowest session imaginable. Our party had basically no impact on a massive battle that we didn't care about.
Scars for being knocked out seems kinda cool, but crippling them is way too aggressive.
i took the feat that allows eldritch blast to shove the target 10 feet away. DM decided if i missed, my pathetically squishy sorlock instead would be pushed 10 feet away... .. Tried to use this to jump over some Problems and he decided he didn't like it anymore.
Experience is split by who kills the creature and after many level gaps the people at the bottom can’t catch up.
Had a DM who wouldn't allow you to move through another players square once combat started without an acrobatics check or an athletics checked. If you failed either check you fell to the ground, if you succeeded on an athletics check you knocked the other person down. So if you're a caster/ranged character who's in the middle of the party and roll before your meat shields can move you can literally do nothing. Or if you're retreating in a hallway you either have to stop at any person in front of you or risk them or yourself on the floor.
That first house rule is an overly complicated way to keep your party weak. My DM has a much more efficient and annoying way of handling it: we don't get enough money to hit that first rule's magic cap. Level 18 with ~1,100 gp in +1 gear. Been complaining about barely being able to afford Revivify and struggling to scrape together enough for Greater Restoration to de-petrify a player's character after a bit over a year IRL (he played a backup during this time). Good thing I'm a Life Domain cleric, because I couldn't afford material costs for the scrying-types of spells.
Many moons ago I stumbled onto a game where XP was awarded to who got the kill shot. I showed up with a support class. Session one was me setting every encounter up on a platter and getting 0 xp for it. Session two I essentially converted my cleric's alignment to evil and played who can kill steal most efficiently. Literally ignored a dying party member in favor of doing damage to the near dead BBEG.
We had a normal XP split by the 3rd session and I actually co DM'd with the guy for years. He was super creative and open to suggestions, just new.
Looking at your phone at the table resulted in your character being afflicted with a quirk called angry pooper. What this entailed was that whenever you were affected by rage or strong anger your character would release their bowels. I remember the guy who always played the barbarian ended up with this almost every character.