"It's too complex to explain to the likes of you" Yeah I've heard that crap before. It *ALWAYS* means "I'm full of shit and trying to shame you into submission".
“If sneak attack is kept intact, you would take out a body part with every successful attack.” Okay, so let them do that! That sound like the perfect way to separate a rogue from another martial class in this system. Sneak attacking is already flavored as an opportunistic attack, so why shouldn’t it be better at disabling opponents? If you’re just home brewing for friends, then balance really isn’t a huge deal. It’s not like this VATS-esque thing is getting published or anything.
There's also the fact, that since the total HP of enemies is apparently divided across each body part (from my understanding of what was written/said in the story), if an additional d6 of damage, combined with a d4, d6, d8, or d12 worth of damage is enough to disable a single limb, even on targets with higher HP to be divided...then maybe the DM should bump up the HP? Cause like, if I'm fighting the Tarrasque under this system, and I'm playing a Rogue/Fighter Multiclass, allowing for extra attack, and I target both legs of the Tarrasque with a Shortbow, doing 1d6 Piercing Damage + 1d6 Sneak Attack Damage to both legs, for a maximum of 24 damage between both legs, and the Tarrasque becomes paraplegic from 24 damage...then maybe the system is flawed
The D&D hitpoint system is in no way realistic and would need to be replaced wholesale to implement such a system. And as I've said elsewhere, if you're going to change it that much, why not start with a system that is closer to what you want to end with?
Its funnier when you find out its based on Fear and Hunger. Which has a lot of skills the player can use that are broken. So nerfing skills is laughable.
@@fred_derf True, I'm pretty sure a Barbarian for example would probably be dead after taking like...200 Arrow Wounds to the back, if things were realistic. Like I'm sorry, I don't care how "built different" someone is as a human, 200 arrows in the back, is 200 arrows in the back. You'd die of blood loss. But under D&D, the Barbarian lives cause Rage Resistance, and each arrow might only deal 1 damage, compared to the Barbarian's like 300+ HP
Listening to the whole limb/bone system, I get the impression the DM had played way too much Fear and Hunger and really wanted to build a campaign around it
not always if the game was built around it and not half baked homebrew with games like Warhammer Fantasy RPG and Cyberpunk 2020/Red as good example of well made "realistic" combat
I feel like this is a survivorship bias thing. We hear about the bad "more realistic" stories because they're bad and someone wants to rant, while good RPG stories with more realism might not even bring that up
This is why DM keeps all Homebrew rules in our discord channel in a small tab that's easy to find and, if anything is changed to make it more balance, everyone is told ahead of time before the rule goes into effect.
I still dislike the idea of modding things too heavily. If you turn the game on it's head, then nothing in the system will remain usable as everything is tested with RAW in mind not your homebrew. Big changes lead to a downward spiral forcing you to rethink everything from the ground up when you could've just played a different system. Like pathfinder. I also do homebrew, but I make monsters, items, and a few feats. Sometimes I'll funk around with creation rules and have my players start with a feat for flavor (like chef, charger, or something else that's rarely picked) to encourage them to go 'off-meta' since my table is a bunch of war-game peeps. I stay as close to RAW as possible.
@@yourbiggestfan395Bold of you to assert that 5e is in any way balanced 😂 For real though, I don't think I've ever played any system fully RAW, there's always a few tweaks at a minimum, and a full overhaul can be easier on some groups than getting them to try a whole new system.
@@Ontomancer There are classes, races, and subclasses, that are better than others. However, the game is, in fact, very balanced. The CR system when ran correctly allows for fun and challenging encounters without too much strain. Death is rare in 5e unless your DM fucking hates you or your fucking stupid. A lot of people don't respect the RAW encounter rules. I can math out my party's DPR and I know how long any encounter will take them no matter what. I know their chances at winning, and everything runs through spread sheets and tables before my players ever see it. All of the tools needed to math out items, encounters, and traps, are all in the DMG and it all is fair and smooth. There's a reason it's the most popular TTRPG, but it sounds like you have a different pet favorite. Monsters don't use the same tools as players and when they do, they tend to still have features that monsters have and are still weighed by CR by their defensive and offensive CR.
@@yourbiggestfan395 Most of the rules changed are just to make things more fun or to save on resources. Like, because healing potions can be so expensive and we have few healers, DM ruled we can use either an action or bonus action to use them. By using an action, we get the full benefit from the healing potions. But we have to roll for the amount of health if we use a bonus action instead. Or, when making a character, if you use your starting gold to buy a tool, you're automatically proficient in that tool. It's not too many big changes. I think the biggest change he made is that you can use both an action and bonus action level spells on the same turn because it's dumb you can cast a cantrip as an action and then a leveled spell as a bonus action when it takes up the same amount of time. Or how like you can't use a bonus action cantrip if you've used your action to cast a leveled spell. It makes combat more fun and restricts spell casters less.
@@potatofairy8535 I have the same thing in my games! Allowing more than one leveled spell to be cast on a turn is fun. Everything you listed though is inside the DMG as optional content and some aren't even rule changes. The prices of items aren't hard-set, they are just examples the DMG provides.
@@CyborgCharlotte Maybe they adapted closer to how it was in Fallout 1 to Tactics. You can target an enemy in general, but using VATS allows you to target a limb with a accuracy penalty, automatic weapons couldn't be used with VATS
@@CyborgCharlotte look up how RIFTS or battletech does it. It requires it to be baked at least 1/2 way into the hit roll often with different dice (think they do a 1d20 and a d100 so people can't do the "I hit with this set of dice so thats what is the hit roll") that can be rolled along with the attack roll.
@@CyborgCharlotte The one from Modiphius absolutely does have a hit location system. The game itself is a little messy, but interesting and is definitely faithful to the source material.
"Don't surprise players with random rules you're inconsistent with." I bet called shots/injury levels would be fine if not effectively brought out of nowhere.
The antidote here is to write down all the home rules as he comes up with them, and then bring them up like fucking case law whenever a contradiction happens a few sessions of playing under his own garbage Homebrew and being held to it, they'll cut the crap
Yeah; if there’s walls then record the location of the walls for future reference, don’t just say “we don’t know where the walls are they’re invisible we’ll address them as we go”
Yeah, I always felt like combat could have been done better in 5e, but then I read other systems, heard stories, and attempted some changes for one shots, and I began to see why it is the way it is.
The main takeaway from this for new DMs (really any DMs) is: *write your rule changes down!* When you make a ruling during a game make a note of it so you can add it to your home-brew rules. If you don't write your home rules down you WILL end up frustrating your players.
I started playing in AD&D 2e and one of the things we had there was called shots. You could choose take a penalty to your roll in order to aim for specific body parts and different things would happen based on where you hit and how much damage. Whatever damage done still was subtracted from the whole, they were not divided like this guy. It was official rules and I’m thinking of adjusting it to my new 5e game. I’m new to 5e so I’m waiting to see
For our game our DM uses a called shot system AC increases to call a shot (like +2 for a limb +4 for an eye). On a hit there is an affect but some times less damage...like hitting a leg might reduce movement or a shot to the chest might be leave the target stunned. A critical increases the severity/duration. It's been interesting I find when I play my barbarian I play a bit more strategically using reckless attack to take called shots at advantage in hopes of getting one of these effects.
I imagine they were going for a “Fear and Hunger” kind of thing with the striking body parts, but with that you ran the risk of missing depending on the body part since it’s a little harder to hit arms and legs compared to the torso, and way harder to hit the head in an attempt to one shot things. But it’s not that hard to implement without nerfing abilities lmao
@@ShowerCurtain1 I mean to be honest I actually have less of a problem with a character dying in a funger campaign then a regular one, it may be because of how mainstream representation has effected my perception but a character dying on an epic quest feels a little unsatisfying in some ways while a character dying in the cruel world of funger sorta comes with the setting with someone dying without ever getting to the end fitting with the type of world funger is
The first story reminds me of when my friends and I in high school would joke about a ridiculously complex system, and we'd get affects like "Hypothalmus efficiency decreased 11%"
Oh I see that the DM might be a massive Fear and Hunger fan cause in the game you have to target enemy limbs to cripple and the Torso for the main HP that's my theory of the DMs hombrew.
"Every limb had a different armor class" So if you shoot 10 arrows point blank, only the arms will take damage while the shots deflect off everything else? "These rules are meant to be realistic!"
I assumed that the idea was that armor would cover different parts of the body. So a chest plate would grant AC to your torso, but not to your limbs. Don't know how it worked in practice. But that's what I assumed.
@@RickJaeger Exactly. That's what makes most sense. Going for the most protected region is not very logical unless you're a heavy damage dealing type. An arm is not very protected and is the most important for attacks so go for that. It's a pretty good system actually.
a more accurate description would be "only the arms take damage and the rest of the arrows deflect or miss (whichever is appropriate) remember that AC is a combination of sturdiness, mobility, AND size
There's realism in my games; gravity pulls you down, you need food and definitely water multiple times a week, fire will burn you if you touch it, and there are some things you can't do with your hands full. There should be enough realism that players' actions and options feel like they make sense consistently. Beyond that you're just imposing limits
realism my game: you may get disease or leprosy for being dirty, some weapons like the kusarigama or chain weapons needs dexterity checks or fail and you hit yourself
This sounds like someone playtesting a new game system they're designing without telling their friends, but "keeping the rules in their memory" is insane. I mean, everything about the system is crazy, but trying to keep all of that in one's head while also running a game is just nuts.
It would've been completely different had he told them beforehand. "Guys I'm testing some big changes to the system, please be beta testers and bear with me as I might adjust them as we go to keep things balanced" Obviously, he'd still need to keep everything written down and ask the players for feedback. It's not impossible or crazy, but it needs to be agreed upon before starting.
@@00r0ryyeah. But also at that point just make your own game designed around that since a lot of clases get nerfed and buffed. All of a sudden, fireball is even better. Or smite. At that point, you would have to rebalance so many numbers and stuff its not even worth it. Shits getting close to f.a.t.a.l with them "realistic mechanics🤓👍"
“The grid was turned into hexes” that’s not even homebrew some people just do that. I do like the what you calls VATS in D&D system. It implies piecemeal armor as well, which is pretty cool. If it can be abstracted it sounds fun and not too disruptive. How I would do it is not how he’s doing it, like health should be one pool, limbs being destroyed should only be on massive damage or maybe crits, and just keeping the piecemeal limb based system seems fine. Ideally I’d either make or find a system for that because it would be more integrated into the system that way instead of slapped on top.
D&D started out using hexes, I've never been a fan of the switch to squares. Hexes just work better calculating distances etc. You don't need special rules for moving, firing, casting on the diagonal (for example) as there aren't any diagonals.
@@fred_derf OD&D used hexes for overland travel but aways used squares for interiors. Mainly because the thing they got overland travel rules from used hexes. But I do agree it’s better I’m also one to forgo the grid entirely and just measure distance, wargaming style
@@kaylaa2204, writes _"OD&D used hexes for overland travel but aways used squares for interiors."_ I've been playing since the Red Box and we always used a hex battle grid. I had a roll up one you could draw on using white board pens.
@@fred_derf I ain’t saying that’s a bad thing, I just always used squares for interior even if I’m using hexes, since it makes more sense for rooms, or just forgo a grid entirely Hexes don’t really fit well trying to place it over a square room but it works great for like caverns or outdoor areas Personal preference though
@@kaylaa2204, writes _"Hexes don’t really fit well trying to place it over a square room but it works great for like caverns or outdoor areas"_ Squares don't really fit well unless the room is some sort of rectangle and each wall is a multiple of 5 feet. So it's pretty much six of one, half-a-dozen of another.
Jaw-dropping story, but also the DM needs friends who are willing to have an honest conversation about what is and isn't working, rather than ranting about it on the internet.
True. I was dissapointed in the gnome player since i was waiting for him to go full nerd mode and tell him his system sucks because of its inconsistent rule set. Sometimes u need direct criticism to improve, its gonna anger or sadden u at the beginning, but its for the better. Dnd its a story that needs to be written by both dm and players, and as such, it needs both parties to be on the same page. The dm wanted fear n hunger but the players wanted core dnd.
Truuuuue. A lot of RPG horror story OPs need to hear this imo. I get that it's hard, I have social anxiety myself, but you really need to try that, at least before complaining online
HE IS BACK :3 Honestly, your videos man have helped me get into DMing and what to avoid doing, and I am happy, and I have a group of players that are helping me on my learning journey.
Go go gadget all of your bones are broken. Go go gadget you're inside out now. Go go gadget all of your thoughts and memories are fake. Go go gadget I am your mother. Go go gadget compassion for fellow man.
im personally planning on having a very merciful limb cutting system for my campaign first: the weapon has to be heavy second: there's a second roll which halves modifiers and it does nothing if it rolls below 17, but if it rolls higher or the same, say goodbye to your arm or whatever was targeted third: if you defend you cannot get limbs cut off fourth: you can get limbs back by making a sacrifice (doesnt have to be anyone in the party, could be 10 mice if you want) ik it's unrealistic but if everyone became potatoes from one enemy with big sword then that would be a bit unfun
yeah fr, the whole point of games like this is to be living in a fantastical setting whether it's high fantasy or not.. it's not meant to be realistic.. you can add realistic elements, sure, like if you take too much damage that knocks you unconscious, you are left with scarring depending on what knocked you unconscious, but to say a rock fell on your leg and now you can't move until you get a new leg?? that's a little unfun and takes the entertainment out of the game that is supposed to be enjoyable for everyone..
@@pumpkibee Actions are worthless if they don't have consequences. It seems that the reason the gnome mage got hurt is because he didn't dodge correctly while everyone else did, as in the player didn't take enough time to dodge carefully. Setting up that kind of system is good and immersive. I fundamentally disagree that the players are supposed to win. That's a game made for babies. The players are supposed to be able to win if they play correctly and die if they play incorrectly. They should have left the gnome mage behind and ran. That was the best course of action.
@@icebox1954 "I fundamentally disagree that the players are supposed to win. That's a game made for babies." Bro what the fuck is this argument. If you think that a RPG campaign is a DM vs players thing, you are a bad DM. Imagine a long campaign, that takes 10+ sessions, for everyone to die to the BBEG at the very end because the DM "doesn't agree with the players winning". Another thing "That was the best course of action", and also the least fun for everyone. As the guy in the video said, the role playing aspect was really good, and abandoning someone just because it's the best thing to do, doesn't mean it's the thing the characters would do; If you go that route, every lawful good paladin/cleric that risks his life to save a wounded person is being dumb and playing incorrectly. Also "he didn't dodge correctly while everyone else did" This makes no sense when it was not the gnome fault since the DM was the one to make the convoluted rules to what was happening
@@leonardocoutomaciel4997 1. It was totally the gnome's fault. It was a skill issue. 2. If you're so childish that you think you should win automatically then you are unworthy of my time. Whatever campaign you're doing is devoid of value and beneath me. 3. Being a paladin doesn't mean being stupid. You don't automatically die for nothing. If a boss can't be beaten then living to fight another day is the correct way for a paladin to play.
@@icebox1954 wow, thankfully my DM is not you lol. Have fun with your players with your, idk, superiority? lol beneath me. This anwser feels like a bait but thanks for the laugh either way
I feel for that DM, I understand what it's like to want to homebrew some stuff and then it goes wrong. It's cool to see a story where a DM made an honest mistake and didn't mean for things to go badly. Mad respect to him for recognizing he messed up and giving everyone a way out. Hope they can laugh about it now and have some good DnD games, love seeing the friendship preserved.
any time a dm says the rules are totally redesigned and there are too many changes to explain, you should assume he's making shit up as he goes along until proven otherwise, lol.
That cerberus could've built so much suspence too and the slight of could've even been made interesting. First thing is that I'd say the door in is like 6-7ft high max so the run could feel like a good idea, but I don't know how to fit it in with tbis idea As you enter the room you see a three headed hound asleep, from your estimates at least twice your heights and thrice your widths. Behind the beast is a large tree with pods seemingly filled with glowing liquid which could only be your remedy. "After OP gets there" the pods are quite large and seem as if they'd be tough to pluck from the tree, how would you like take them off (If they use a dagger they make it 2 points easier on slight of hand to silently move them and require a very low dex throw to cut them). They actually have reason to roll 5 times as these are cumbersome and hold liquid which makes noise. "Upon the first fail" You know you created too much noise and as you silently stare at the beast you can see its ears perc up waiting for another sound, after what feels like minutes the creatures ear goes back down. "Upon the second fail" You witness the creature raise to its feet its size larger than you imagined. It still seems half asleep and you imagine that youd have at least several seconds before it notices you. What would you like to do?
Excellent example! As I said somewhere else, nothing against multiple rolls in situations like this, but only if you're deft enought to both explain the need for them and take advantage of them to raise tension. Save-or-suck is already troublesome enough as it is, and repetitive tasks can easily become teedious in inexperienced hands, even with the implied tension of "there's a monster over there".
Dracule did it correctly. If you set up your people to fail outside of amazing luck then it becomes forced. Give them one fail chance and let the second one be the determining one. Also, have the room's exit be smaller than the beast and explain before this that the beast was put here to guard the treasure quite a while ago and the master either died of old age or something and the faithful hound eagerly protects it over anything else. This gives the heroes a chance to attack the tree to make the hound back off so they can escape or something and the smaller exit makes the hound unable to follow. This is how I'd have done it.
Honestly, the fact that Gnome was injured could have made for a great moment. The Cerberus could have been awake, but taking slow steps towards the party, so the party can actually run away and try desperate shots against the Cerberus. Something dramatic happened, and the game is not ended because the DM wanted a dramatic showdown but everybody is bleeding but the DM/cerberus is reluctant to kill people.
4:07 wait wtf that’s-yes, yes! Do that! That’s great! I’d LOVE that kind of gameplay! 13:07 “I do an advantaged sneak attack on the sleeping Cerberus’s back, crippling its legs and spine, and I use the opportunity to grab a handful of leaves from the tree” Like the thing about Fear and Hunger is _you_ can set traps _for the enemies to run into_
My favorite limb targeting/damage system so far is from the warhammer roleplay and rogue trader ttrpgs. To hit rolls line up with one of the limbs or torso with roughly a 15% chance to hit an arm or leg and a 40% to hit the body. Once you hit zero you apply an effect from a critical chart on a -1 to -10 scale with -10s being essentially a narratively gruesome death based on the weapon type being used on said section of the body. And -1s to 9s doing cosmetic damage and adding escalating debuffs that were curated by the developers very well imo. Very intuitive and benign and adds some nice aesthetic flavor and understandable mechanical nuance to the games without causing too much clutter. I found it relatively easy to convert the d100 system that those games use to homebrew it into my D&D campaigns and it has become one of my players favorite parts of combat with everyone getting excited to see what kind of critical hits they pull off and even enjoying getting critted because the battle scars add flavor to their character progression.
I've never played DnD before, and have a very non-DnD-ish homebrew, but the second I heard "There are too many rules, we'll just adress them as they come up", multiple loud klaxon blares went off in my head. My world has 'too many rules' as well, but I have an in-depth guide to all of them that I always keep available to my players, and, I give mercy to players who bump into a rule that screws them over, if it wouldn't have had they known about it.. Though typically I stay within the policy of just not having any rules that screw over a player, if they don't know about it.. I prefer my player's failures to be caused by backlashes they were fully aware of prior to causing. Especially since my world/scenario plays a huge amount around a "Guilty pleasure" aspect. Doing things you know are wrong or that may damn you, but doing them anyway because you were tempted into doing them, or simply couldn't resist the urge to.
So many Red Flags here right from the start - the claim of "More Realistic" would have been enough by itself to have me run screaming from the room. The DM might have been a friend, but he was also a #$%^& idiot - if you MUST go Homebrew, then consistency and clarity are absolutely essential, and this "system" had neither. Given the DM;s resistance to providing notes, etc., I can only surmise that most of this was being pulled out of his @$$. Gnome might have had some negative traits, but he wasn't the problem here. The DM and his alleged system was.
+7thesealord888, writes _"the claim of "More Realistic" would have been enough by itself to have me run screaming from the room."_ I couldn't agree more.
Nah the gnome sounds an asshole overall , same for op And as many pointed out a big part of the system seems to be taken from the video game "Fear and Hunger" and the dm probably felt weird or embarrassed to admit it And keep in mind that overall all the sessions op said that everything else was great which means that he wasn't being a control freak and forcing them into situations or something.
Dm here, I use a heavily homebrewed world. If you want custom stuff I'll build it with you. Race? I'll work it in. Class? Ehh I'm working to that. Backstory? Yes! If it fits more please! But I don't go control freak
As a new DM starting a game for inexperienced players, I told them they could use anything they found in the rulebooks and I'd help them set up their sheets, with homebrew open for consideration. Fortunately nobody went crazy with it
@@joelrobinson5457 honestly could be great. One of the things I do with races is just separate mechanics from thematic outright. So there are "humans" with the stat block of an Orc because they're just that tough etcetera. I find it opens things up well without requiring the oversight that Homebrew races do so saves some time/effort. Ofc sometimes things need to be Homebrewed regardless but races aren't too hard
4:23 I think the Jenga analogy is slightly flawed. You can remove one bottom block and have the tower standing perfectly fine. Two, however, and depending on the blocks pulled from the bottom, it’s either falling over or else very unsteady. What the GM of this story essentially did is yank out the third bottom block and then tried to replace them as the tower was collapsing.
It's more like instead of taking out a jenga block, the DM shoved a TP roll in there with his body parts houserules and was hoping the tower would somehow remain standing.
@@MisterNightfish That’s a lot closer, actually, and it even gets to why it’s a bad idea. If you’re allowed to introduce random objects, are you even playing Jenga anymore?!
@@zacharysieg2305, writes _"If you’re allowed to introduce random objects, are you even playing Jenga anymore?!"_ Oooo, that sounds like it could actually be a fun game... you start with a pile of differently shaped blocks and you either have to take one from the pile and add it to the tower (building it) or remove one from the pile and add it elsewhere.
There’s one beautiful little thing that can help make limb damage mechanics go so much more smoothly: hit location dice. Players didn’t call their shot? No problem! As long as they hit, they will do damage. The die just determines where that damage is going. I’ve run Fallout RPG before, and that die made for some very funny encounters. I swear, it had its days where it just decided that NOBODY gets to have arms/legs/heads!
I like how Earthdawn does it. Along with having Unconsciousness Ratings and Death Ratings for how much damage you can take, you also have Wound Thresholds, all based off of the same Toughness (Constitution) score. That determines how much damage you can take in a single hit before you take a serious injury, which can add up to wound penalties to both actions and recovery. Even still, single Wounds aren't too big a deal (unless they keep adding up), but double or triple wounds from a single attack can be. You can also make Called Shots with an accuracy penalty to land exactly where you want to hit if you still connect, potentially bypassing damage-reduction armor, and Wounds to specific parts can have reasonable effects. It therefore becomes totally reasonable for a Thief (Rogue) to sneak up, make a Called Shot to the throat with enough bonuses to cancel out penalties, and with a high enough success the person is probably lethally injured despite having half their HP left unless they have some sort of healing option. If players are scared of that, then some sort of neck armor like a gorget can help peace of mind a lot. The system can be dangerous, but since I'm not trying to actively murder my party's characters and they may or may not wish to kill their enemies, it works out well. It also means that on the few times when an antagonist shows up actively weaponizing this system, it immediately ramps them up several notches on the threat scale for players.
This actually reminds me of the German system my playgroup uses. It also has targeted hits with individual body parts applying different attack modifiers when targeted. The difference is though: That system isn't mandatory, you may just as much simply "attack" - which in my experience is indeed the default for most players. Only in very specific circumstances, against specific enemies (or similar), announcing targeted attacks is really worth it.
The problem with targeted attacks, is it's very much a TV / Movie trope and has no basis in real life. In real combat you hit the body part that's available to hit at the moment. In a melee what you hit is going to be determined far more by what your opponent gets in your way (such as their shield or weapon) then by "what you target". Your "targeting" is going to be determined by what opening they leave you. Their shield is a bit high? Great, strike at his legs. His shield is low? Go for the head. They've over extended their swing? Go for their sword arm. etc. With ranged weapons, you aim for "the body", no one is accurate enough to target specific body parts when in combat with moving targets. The only thing that could be used to target specific body parts is _Magic Missile_ as it "unerringly hits its target" but even that would have to be homebrewed.
This is the kind of RPG horror story I like. I don't think the DM here was malicious. They just were way over-confident in their abilities with house rules. I feel like it's easy for people to think "I can remember all this in my head. It will be fine." But it's way harder than it sounds.
+Zulk_RS, writes _"I don't think the DM here was malicious"_ I think Arrogant would be a better term than Malicious. But they did exhibit some Rail Roady tendencies so they're at least a little malicious.
@@fred_derf I am willing to give them a charitable interpretation here. I don't think they wanted to railroad. I think they might have had trouble dealing with their own unwieldy and half-remembered rules that he created. Definitely Arrogant though.
@@Zulk_RS, writes _"I don't think they wanted to railroad."_ Making the character roll checks until they woke up the Cerberus with the only option being run away (or die) _is_ railroading. There was clearly no scenario there to allow them to get past the Cerberus. But as i said, it was Rail Roady, not a full out Rail Road.
@@fred_derf I agree with you. It WAS a rail road. My point was that I don't think they did it on purpose. Like on paper, someone who has not have had much experience behind the DM screen might think that "Oh making them roll multiple times make sense." not realizing just how drastically it raises failure chance. Then they might have thought "Okay. No problem. They can easily run away from the Cerberus" but because they have so many BS homebrew rules, they themselves forgot that "running away" is easier said then done. Lastly there is a core problem with the rules that I think the DM themselves didn't realize: The Death Spiral. When the PCs decided to stay and fight, the DM waived a few of the rules thinking it would stack the odds in the PCs favor but they forgot completely that the more damage the PCs take, they worse their chance actively get, which leads to more damage which leads to bigger penalties which lead to more damage. The DM didn't realize the absolute shit show the rules would create. And when he finally did realize it, he basically soft ended the campaign.
@@Zulk_RS I agree with pretty much everything you've written. However I do think there was an element of "I'm going to show them how D&D should be played" to the DM's mindset so, as I sad, they're at least _a little_ malicious.
I run a heavily homebrewed campaign with my own tabletop group that has been on a hiatus for a while. In order to prepare, I had taken notes of everything: The NPCs The player character's stats and HP (I don't believe they'd cheat, but as the DM I do want to keep myself in check as well. My players have even told me damage I forgot about and had to apply, so I'm happy to have such trusting and trustworthy players) The basic rules of combat The basic details of any random items we make up off the top of my head The events that happen during certain actions in the story I even recap what happened last session ready for the next. My players have LOVED my campaign, because of this attention to detail and willingness to build a story and put the players in the limelight. Any mention of intense themes (School attacks, mass unaliving, self-deletion) is treated as tastefully and tactfully as possible. Players' creative diplomacy and problem solving is either rewarded with graceful description or (when it's something that will have negative consequences) punished appropriately (Smashing a chest with your sword and rolled a 20 *specifically* to apply all force to it? You broke the chest, but cleaved the equipment inside, severing the magic enchantment it had. It's still very fashionable though and can sell for a healthy price.) I feel that's where the DM is going wrong. Improv CAN work, but you need to have the basics detailed to maintain consistency. My players used to have a very power-gaming foreverDM that made their games unenjoyable at most times and made them untrusting to DMs. But when they learned how I did things, they were quick to even admit to their low rolls, and every 1 they roll has been thrilling because the high rolls that happen afterward are HYPE as all get out. I love my group.
This sounds more like how limb damage works in Monster Hunter, but the thing about Monster Hunter is that limb damage isn't just subtracted from total damage done, there's actual separate formulae for how it calculates limb breaking beyond just your raw damage output. The other thing, though, is I think D&D just has too low of health pools for this to be a viable system, since in most games with these types of limb damage the fights are longer, enough that they give more room for genuine strategizing with the system as limb damage debuffs are around long enough to be actually important and useful
Most important, most of games with limb damage are mecha games where even if a limb gets replaced or permanently destroyed you can replace it in short term instead of permanently losing a huge part of your contribution to the fight because your opponent rolled high enough damage on your main systems.
"We discussed among ourselves if we're supposed to run or fight" that right there would be a signal to a good DM that they'd messed up - the players aren't discussing whether to run or fight, they're discussing which one they're *SUPPOSED* to do.
So separate AC for limbs, HP for limbs, etc? So he turned D&D 5e into RuneQuest? Then play RuneQuest! (This old Grognard shakes his head and walks away mumbling)
I have a body part hit system, buts its reserved for critical hits to make them more, well, critical. One crit can end an encounter with a humanoid from full HP. Or you may only severely wound them. They say where they want to hit and they do so. They can also call a shot which gives disadvantage but allows to roll the table if hit. It's also optional, not enforced, but we've been pretty happy with it as a group.
I was going to say "if you want to play a lethal system play call of cthulhu" but even call of cthulhu is very straightforward in the way combat works, some systems are made to make combat heroic and survivable so you can multiply them without losing PCs, others are made to make combat chaotic and lethal to make any fight a dramatic scene, with a whole spectrum in-between, but for the love of god choose a system made for the spirit you want for your campaign.
As a DM I only ever use any kind of limb based shit if it makes a lot of sense, for example if you have a fucking boulder dropped on your legs they probably won’t work as well as before until you heal up
I'd love to point out that hexes aren't that weird. A lot of game mats have hexes, and it's actually mathematically easier to do diagonal movement. That's why I use them.
I love playing with called shots like "I aim for his head, or sword arm." It's a home-brew rule I use in every game I run, but the way I do it is a +6 for headshots, often being insta-kills, +5 for hand, neck, foot, think small body parts here, and if it's just "I aim for their arm," nothing specific, a +4. A shot to the dome, if it doesn't kill them, causes stun for 2D4 rounds, 10% chance of bleeding effect for 1D4/round till end of combat. Head wounds irl are no joke. Legs and feet - disadvantage on movement checks, with a 10% chance to reduce movement speed by 10ft. Arms - disadvantage on attacks. Hands, a 50% chance to drop their weapon with a 10% chance that they can no longer fight with hand, having to use their non-dominant one, making them fight at disadvantage. And all of this is supplemental. If someone wants to use a called shot, easy peasy, if not, "I roll to attack," just without the extra difficulty. It's in addition to the base content of the game, no individual pools of HP or anything like that.
The limb system is similar to something I devised, which is you can choose to target specific areas if you choose and I will determine any disadvantages to the roll depending on how difficult it would be. Any damage dealt to that area still takes from the overall creature health but with enough damage I would allow players to disable creature abilities. Dealing with a dragon? targeted shots to the wings with like a -2 could lead to disabling flight while still dealing direct HP damage. More along the lines to motivate strategic thinking and a chance to shift the battle more in their favor. Otherwise if they don't care for it then standard combat targeting is the default. Also I wouldn't utilize the system against players, debuffing PCs too much starts to tarnish any game enjoyment
My first DM played D&D since the first release, he invented dozends of homebrew rule. One of his Mantras for combat homebrew was: "It is okay for special situations. Like running away/after someone or a turnament. But never for general usage."
I’ve seen the limb one done well in warhammer where your typical shooting a person and normal enemies usually give up if you blow their leg or arm off. Melee also got to choose the part they wanted to hit rather than roll for it.
To be fair, stuff has hit points, like doors and stuff. I could see limbs having their own independent HP, but not sharing a pool. I used to play GURPS and I always enjoyed the ability to target limbs to cripple your target. I tried to implement a similar system in which I told players they could "call shots" when attacking, they roll at a disadvantage and if they hit then the enemy would suffer from debuffs, like being blinded or losing a limb.
Best way of doing homebrew campaign is to start with base ruleset and than introduce new rules and systems one by one. That allows players to learn the rules slowly, gives opportunity to revert or adjust changes that didn't work out as expected and allows DM to write changes down one by one, which is much easier to do. As an added bonus, everyone would have a better understanding what of the game was home-ruled, when they join another company.
From the way this DM changed the combat system to a hex map and targeted limbs, it kinda sounds like he was trying to wedge a more BattleTech style combat system in, which could be cool potentially, but I think his biggest misstep was in not presenting this homebrew as an experiment and tweaking it along the way with feedback from the players. My old DM in high school was great at running several different game systems, including D&D and BattleTech, so I would've loved the idea of him dabbling with a hybrid combat system. However, that's really the sort of thing that needs to be either super well prepared in advance or adjusted during gameplay.
I wanted to add monster races to my 5e game prior to them actually being a thing. While I wouldn't say I was a hardcore veteran at the time, I did have quite a bit of experience under my belt. There were like 12 races in total and my 3 players lapped em up like candy. I let them start at level 5 and it wasn't until session 3 that I began to see the problem. The first character, a Fighter Artificer Salamander had fire resist, smithing tools proficiency and a d4 fire damage bonus on hit with metal weapons he was holding. This grew instantly out of hand, dealing 3d4 additional fire damage every turn. There was also some UA Artificer jank that I can't fully remember, but it allowed his stats to be pretty damn high. Thri-kreen had a massive drawback for massive gain. You couldn't speak common, so you had to speak through your companions who you had taught sign language to. In return for this, Thri-kreen had an additional pair of arms that could do simple actions. These arms allowed for an additional bonus action and reaction each round, but required you to specifically use those hands. The player chose a Monk, and honestly it wasn't super out of control until they took Sentinel. It was a learning experience for sure, but I think the inability to speak common did not have the effect I wanted. Instead of trying to inspire a unique way of getting points across, it instead actively de-incentivized that character from interacting with NPCs. Lastly there was a Ghost Warlock first time player. The big drawback was that the ghost was tied to a memento and when reduced to zero hit points he would dissipate and reform from it after 24 hours. He himself could not carry the memento, and it was possible to revive him early using a short rest. The character also had the ability to fly, and he could also go through walls (as long as he didn't end his turn in them). While the whole memento thing never actually came into play, I made a crucial mistake via "the rule of cool." He asked if he could pull someone through a wall and I said "as long as he fails a saving throw against your DC." The new player priceeded to pull every enemy he could feasibly get his hands on through the floor. It wasn't until that session 3 that we realized he had yet to use any of his Class features. So, I do suggest that those looking to homebrew do it at their own peril. The game is already hard enough to keep track of and balance. Adding new combat/class/race features is like adding milk to hot water. If you don't do it carefully you'll just be left with a mess.
i also joined a campaign that the DM wanted to change the core combat rules to make thing cooler... he did not know what he was doing and most of the time we went with the normal rules.
"If de dislikes something, he will say to your face, which can hurt people's feeling" Thats such a weird phrasing. So hurting his feeling by doing something is OK, but when he dares to be vocal about it - its him who is ''hurting feelings''
Admittedly a blanket statement like that does sound a bit weird in a vaccuum, but in my experience hearing or reading similar statements, it's usually reffering to the kind of person whose "brutal honesty" has a weird tendency to emphasize the "brutal" part. Some examples: -A player who dislikes a poorly implemented houserule and their first instinct is to straight up call the DM an incompetent imbecile instead of discussing it with them. -A person who deems a hairstyle "too masculine" for a woman, so they blurt out how disgusting she looks with it first chance they get.
@@Elvalley your examples are straight up offences, with slander and everthing, and if someone uses them, he can not be a "not a bad person" OP stated that this guy was not bad, just honest Honesty != Rudeness
@@vrcxdc3623 my examples were deliberately extreme, because if I made them subtle I'd have to write quite a lot more. Being offensive, at least to a degrre, is kinda the issue though, what do you think "honest to the point of hurting feelings" could entail?
@@Elvalley feelings of some people are being hurt by literally anything, you know. For example, where i live, we have a prison sentence for, quote, "offending feelings of thoso who have faith" So, how it works - person tells thst his feeling were hurt by your opinion and you go to jail for 5 years. But they dont have to prove it, because it is impossible Basically its one of many laws we have have to be able to imprison mitetally anyone, if needed
@@vrcxdc3623 ah, I see. I do think you may have a bit of a biased view in the opposite direction from when most people say somebody talks in hurtful ways, but I get where you're coming from.
As a DM I do everything in my power to 1. make the game fun 2. Give it a FUN challenge 3. Keep my players alive 4. LISTEN to my players I want to ensure that ALL my players are having fun and getting creative input. Damn that last DM would’ve had me packing my stuff up and dipping. My first time play dnd was with my buddies and the friend that DM’d was awesome at it. It was funny, enjoyable, and entertaining we all didn’t get hurt too bad but he ain’t take it too easy on us either. Interaction with NPC and monsters were hilarious.
some guy decided to go into GRAPHIC detail with what he did with the dragon when i was DMing. i dont really wanna go into detail but man it completely killed the whole vibe
so he was either... A) Donkey from Shrek B) weird guy (oh please let it be this one and he just goes into insane detail about how he "ripped out the dragons tongue" or smth)
I actually ran my own Fallout System which allowed players to just take a shot at an enemy or use an extra action point to use a Vats attack and target a specific place which simply just had effects depending on hit , damage or crit , like aiming for the head gives you a crit on 18-20 on the die , shooting an arm if you did 1/4 or more of the total hp of the target , that limb was now crippled giving a negative to hit or use . Instead of changing how combat works in a 5e style system , i simply added an extra option for attacking .
Reminds me of the time I played in a homebrew campaign ran by a guy I met through pathfinder society. He declared arcane magic was not a thing in his world and we had to awaken arcane magic. So we all played divine casting classes. I was a paladin, we had a cleric and an Inquisitor (cleric/bard hybrid class). Then he started arbitrarily removing any spells from our spell lists that delt damage or boost damage, all while throwing ever more stuff that did ridiculous amounts of damage and had hundreds of hit points. With me the paladin, who traded smite for giving out my feats to my party members, dealing the highest damage of about 8-17 points of damage a turn. Let's just say during the 12th session, after I got one shotted while having full health, everyone at the table quit. The guy was newer to DMing and admitted that he hated how magic worked in DnD and removed it without thinking how to balance the game play to make it fun.
I had a dm say the fighters sword broke on a nat 1, it was the only weapon he had as it was a one-shot. Made the fighter feel bad since he couldn’t really do much of anything. He was able to get a new sword by the end of the fight though that let him cast a steel wind slash spell.
I actually really like the realistic setting he was trying to create, and the complexity that comes along with it. He should've treated this more like a playtest than a long-term campaign
I really like the idea of being able to target a specific body part as an addition to the standard combat rules, but definitely not as a substitute for them. I mainly only see this as useful to enable/disable an opportunity to flee for either side though. You're chasing a thief or something so the archer in the party tries to fire an arrow that will pin part of their clothing to wall or their foot to the ground. Maybe up the AC or add disadvantage for a targeted shot, but this was definitely overboard.
In my current campaign (of which I have a game diary series on my channel about), I have a ton of rules to make ths game a lot more lethal. But all of those rules are written down in special channel in the group's discord. And on top of that, I always make sure that that the rules that make combat more lethal also apply to the monsters they're fighting. If the players have less hit points, then it's only fair that the monsters have less hit points too. If the party has to make a check to cast their spells, so do the monsters.
The injuring limbs bit seems like they didn't realize hit points being reduced doesn't actually mean you're being injured. It's supposed to be a kind of "endurance/luck" extrapolation: when you lose hp, that means you're a little more worn down, more likely to not dodge/deflect the next blow, etc. When you finally do run out of hp, you finally suffer a direct damaging hit, and you go down. That's why you can fight at 100% power (assuming no drains/debuffs, etc) right up until the moment you go to 0 hp and you get knocked out.
I've been DMing for years in a sort of arbitrary way, although our system is a lot more roleplay-based than TTRPG like. Its barely a TTRPG, just has rolls for certain things and so far I've not gotten any complaints. I guess its because I always sort of do the story in favor of the players. My goal isn't to hinder their progress, but rather to write a proper narrative. The only time I've had complaints, I rectified stuff. When you do a mistake, own up to them.
I'm glad you tweaked on the sleight of hand rolls too, CritCrab. I was thinking, why would he need sleight of hand to pick leaves? He doesn't need to hide the act from an unconscious creature, and doing it quietly really wouldn't need any additional rolls for anything, it's not a complicated action.
Heres how I’d make a reality based system. The RP world is a combat sports promotion but one that covers EVERYTHING combat sports related from the largest market to niche events (as long as it’s legal). The gym your character represents is your faction but it also effects your training level and some aspects of your fighting style. MMA math is half the battle system and accounting for chaos is the other (as there’s always that fight that ends in an upset victory). Team based tournaments are basically a chess match to pick your character’s battles
I’m making a homebrew campaign. A few years ago I used to be a power hungry DM. Currently I’m making a campaign about solving a mystery in a custom plane I made and escape the plane
Funny thing about that, I once had to suffer through an old-school dm who's claimed to have been DMing for years, but also implied the impossible skillchecks trope, except, not just for boss fights, but even trivial things or even flavorful things (falling from a height that wouldnt hurt you, but roll to see if you could land proper, roll a nat 20 and the dm describes you falling flat on your face like an idiot) and he'd also do that irl timer thing, along side many other bad faith/straight up bad dm behavior. glad to be away from that.
Sounded like the DM realized at the end he fucked up and simply decided not to keep going. As you said, he doesn't sound malicious, so let's hope he returns to the basics and starts learning from there.
A lot of those ideas were tried out in early rival FRPG systems like Runequest and Palladium Games. Locational armour and hit points can work, as it does in Runequest, but critical hits tables rarely do, unless they are steeply nerfed in the conditions in which they can occur. Some elements of real life physics simply have to be left outside the game, like effects of height and weight differences, when going up against giants and similar. License simply has to be allowed for magic and mythical monsters to not be "scientific", so that they can't just crush players to death by moving their feet, or swatting them into oblivion with a swing of a club. Certainly in the real world certain kinds of events would break bones and tear muscles, but then you don't have a fantasy role playing game. You have perhaps a survival game. Not only does going into such detail slow combat down completely, which was the problem with D&D 3rd Edition, but it also needs to be balanced and made to make sense by systems like Greg Stafford's in Pendragon where because magical healing is very scarce, players can only take on one or two combats a year, because they then have to spend weeks and months healing with period medical help. If you go into detailed catastrophic injuries, then suddenly being fully magically healed after a few days and able to return to exploring creates a believability problem. It's dissonant. If the healing is easy, so should the combat system be. If the combat system is complex and "realistic" like that, then so must the healing system be.
Critical hit tables work quite nicely in the FFG Warhammer 40'000 RPGs, because those games are expected to be over the top violence from the moment weapons are drawn. One thing of note though is that in most of the systems it's much easier to crit an NPC than to crit a player.
The old HERO System has some great hit location rules but they are part of a complete combat system that is quite different from D&D. It's a really fun system with a GM and players who know what they are doing but it is not a noob friendly system by any stretch of the imagination.
There are only 2 hombrew rules i use 1. Crits double damage (both for hits and failed saves) 2. You can cast as many spells as you have resources (meaning you can absolutely misty step into a fireball as long as you have the slots, same with action surge).
I use a timer as well, a dragon hour glass filled with sand. Anyways... I only use it during combat because we had eight players at one point and some folks would never use their time to plan ahead and as a direct result we would have people flipping through books and spending upwards to half an hour deciding what they were going to do. So basically in order to expedite combat I made a house rule, every player gets five minuets, if you don't make a choice by then you lose your turn. Simple as that. It has really helped speed up combat and I now use it for any size group unless it's one on one.
One common thing I notice in these stories is that everyone at the table, particularly the OPs, let the problem people get away with absolute garbage, which is stressing them out, because they're too afraid of the stress of conflict to say anything. Like, they're effectively gaining +5 stress per session, but because saying something will cause them to gain +10 stress in a lump sum, they don't say anything, despite the entire concept of DnD to be a stress reliever. OP is five sessions in, so they're at 25 stress, and they're still scared of the +10 stress that would just go down as they remove themself from the stressful scenario. People are so scared of moderate amounts of stress that they will put up with tiny stressors for much longer, ultimately accounting for more overall stress, just to avoid one single stressful situation that they can predict. I mean, I'm anxious, I kinda get it, but, like, I also know it's gonna be better if I bite the bullet and open my mouth.
I run called shots in my campaign. Leg/arm AC is 3 over normal armor class, head is 6. Legs and arms have a certain amount of hit points proportionate to your total hit points (usually 25%, sometimes 20% or 15% depending on the enemy's challenge rating). If those points are depleted, that limb is out of commission. Monsters take a fixed amount of damage to their total hit point pool if they lose a limb. Head shots just deal extra damage. Critical hits on head kill some enemies outright. I have these rules written out. I dont change them. The players know about them and i almost never have the monsters attack my player's limbs (because i feel like that would be pretty lame). It ends up being mostly head and body attacks by both parties, but the option to disable limbs i think is pretty cool.
"The rules are too complex to explain" is the TTRPG version of "My fighting style is too strong for competitions"
If the rules are too complex to explain, there are no rules
If the rules are too complex to explain they are too complex to play.
@@Badartist888 exactly
"My goals are beyond your understanding"
"It's too complex to explain to the likes of you" Yeah I've heard that crap before. It *ALWAYS* means "I'm full of shit and trying to shame you into submission".
So, this DM just loves Fear and Hunger and instead of just saying it, he tried to push the systems into a normal campaign lol
"We have Fear and Hunger at home"
Fear and Hunger at home:
DnD community: Just play another system
Also DnD community: Why play another system if you can just homebrew
@@realdragonMore like homesteal
Its so obvious too
Crazy too because writing these rules and passing them out would take maybe 10 minutes all told lmao.
“If sneak attack is kept intact, you would take out a body part with every successful attack.” Okay, so let them do that! That sound like the perfect way to separate a rogue from another martial class in this system. Sneak attacking is already flavored as an opportunistic attack, so why shouldn’t it be better at disabling opponents? If you’re just home brewing for friends, then balance really isn’t a huge deal. It’s not like this VATS-esque thing is getting published or anything.
Yeah my immediate reaction there was "that sounds like a feature not a bug", it'd add a really fun dynamic to playing a rogue.
There's also the fact, that since the total HP of enemies is apparently divided across each body part (from my understanding of what was written/said in the story), if an additional d6 of damage, combined with a d4, d6, d8, or d12 worth of damage is enough to disable a single limb, even on targets with higher HP to be divided...then maybe the DM should bump up the HP?
Cause like, if I'm fighting the Tarrasque under this system, and I'm playing a Rogue/Fighter Multiclass, allowing for extra attack, and I target both legs of the Tarrasque with a Shortbow, doing 1d6 Piercing Damage + 1d6 Sneak Attack Damage to both legs, for a maximum of 24 damage between both legs, and the Tarrasque becomes paraplegic from 24 damage...then maybe the system is flawed
The D&D hitpoint system is in no way realistic and would need to be replaced wholesale to implement such a system. And as I've said elsewhere, if you're going to change it that much, why not start with a system that is closer to what you want to end with?
Its funnier when you find out its based on Fear and Hunger. Which has a lot of skills the player can use that are broken. So nerfing skills is laughable.
@@fred_derf True, I'm pretty sure a Barbarian for example would probably be dead after taking like...200 Arrow Wounds to the back, if things were realistic.
Like I'm sorry, I don't care how "built different" someone is as a human, 200 arrows in the back, is 200 arrows in the back. You'd die of blood loss.
But under D&D, the Barbarian lives cause Rage Resistance, and each arrow might only deal 1 damage, compared to the Barbarian's like 300+ HP
that ending with the cerberus feels like the DM realised how bad his homebrew system really was and had a "I made a terrible mistake" moment
Listening to the whole limb/bone system, I get the impression the DM had played way too much Fear and Hunger and really wanted to build a campaign around it
Hey should just use warhammer fantasy por any other system to make a gritty campaing, this was maddnes XD.
My head went straight to Cyberpunk 2020. God, that was a tedious system to play.
Which could be really cool and be pretty fun, if done properly and with everyone knowing the plan ahead of time.
Fair tbh, just gotta set expectations so people know what they are getting into
If I ever do a limb system, I'm keeping it as simple as Fallout to avoid too much tediousness.
Every single time I have heard "more realistic" in regards to a TTRPG it ends up being the "kiss of death" for the game.
It's a kiss of death and they ignore things that are actually kind of easy to do in real life.
not always if the game was built around it and not half baked homebrew with games like Warhammer Fantasy RPG and Cyberpunk 2020/Red as good example of well made "realistic" combat
I feel like this is a survivorship bias thing. We hear about the bad "more realistic" stories because they're bad and someone wants to rant, while good RPG stories with more realism might not even bring that up
@@TheSpiritus0 Yes, I noticed that too.
Kind of backwards don't you think?
Sad thing is, this wasn't realism AT ALL. Dude made up random rules on a whim to suit his own desires
This is why DM keeps all Homebrew rules in our discord channel in a small tab that's easy to find and, if anything is changed to make it more balance, everyone is told ahead of time before the rule goes into effect.
I still dislike the idea of modding things too heavily. If you turn the game on it's head, then nothing in the system will remain usable as everything is tested with RAW in mind not your homebrew. Big changes lead to a downward spiral forcing you to rethink everything from the ground up when you could've just played a different system. Like pathfinder. I also do homebrew, but I make monsters, items, and a few feats. Sometimes I'll funk around with creation rules and have my players start with a feat for flavor (like chef, charger, or something else that's rarely picked) to encourage them to go 'off-meta' since my table is a bunch of war-game peeps. I stay as close to RAW as possible.
@@yourbiggestfan395Bold of you to assert that 5e is in any way balanced 😂
For real though, I don't think I've ever played any system fully RAW, there's always a few tweaks at a minimum, and a full overhaul can be easier on some groups than getting them to try a whole new system.
@@Ontomancer There are classes, races, and subclasses, that are better than others. However, the game is, in fact, very balanced. The CR system when ran correctly allows for fun and challenging encounters without too much strain. Death is rare in 5e unless your DM fucking hates you or your fucking stupid. A lot of people don't respect the RAW encounter rules. I can math out my party's DPR and I know how long any encounter will take them no matter what. I know their chances at winning, and everything runs through spread sheets and tables before my players ever see it. All of the tools needed to math out items, encounters, and traps, are all in the DMG and it all is fair and smooth. There's a reason it's the most popular TTRPG, but it sounds like you have a different pet favorite. Monsters don't use the same tools as players and when they do, they tend to still have features that monsters have and are still weighed by CR by their defensive and offensive CR.
@@yourbiggestfan395 Most of the rules changed are just to make things more fun or to save on resources.
Like, because healing potions can be so expensive and we have few healers, DM ruled we can use either an action or bonus action to use them. By using an action, we get the full benefit from the healing potions. But we have to roll for the amount of health if we use a bonus action instead. Or, when making a character, if you use your starting gold to buy a tool, you're automatically proficient in that tool.
It's not too many big changes. I think the biggest change he made is that you can use both an action and bonus action level spells on the same turn because it's dumb you can cast a cantrip as an action and then a leveled spell as a bonus action when it takes up the same amount of time. Or how like you can't use a bonus action cantrip if you've used your action to cast a leveled spell. It makes combat more fun and restricts spell casters less.
@@potatofairy8535 I have the same thing in my games! Allowing more than one leveled spell to be cast on a turn is fun. Everything you listed though is inside the DMG as optional content and some aren't even rule changes. The prices of items aren't hard-set, they are just examples the DMG provides.
Hit Location combat systems work well when the system is deisgned around them, but not when forcibly shoved into a system they do not belong.
I just started a Runequest game and 100% this
Does the Fallout TTRPG have something like that? Wondered how they’d adapt VATS or something similar in a setting like that
@@CyborgCharlotte
Maybe they adapted closer to how it was in Fallout 1 to Tactics.
You can target an enemy in general, but using VATS allows you to target a limb with a accuracy penalty, automatic weapons couldn't be used with VATS
@@CyborgCharlotte look up how RIFTS or battletech does it. It requires it to be baked at least 1/2 way into the hit roll often with different dice (think they do a 1d20 and a d100 so people can't do the "I hit with this set of dice so thats what is the hit roll") that can be rolled along with the attack roll.
@@CyborgCharlotte The one from Modiphius absolutely does have a hit location system. The game itself is a little messy, but interesting and is definitely faithful to the source material.
"Heres a ball... Play."
"Play what? What kind of ball even is this?"
"Dont worry about it. Ill let you know the rules as you play."
"But..."
"PLAY."
Tbf, Calvinball is very fun.
OH MY GOSH YOU HAD A CHILDHOOD TOO YAY
@@levinseve3471 EYYYY
"Don't surprise players with random rules you're inconsistent with." I bet called shots/injury levels would be fine if not effectively brought out of nowhere.
DM I played with wanted to use called shots. She was newish so I assisted and quickly found a chart for such a thing. It worked well enough.
DM: "I'm committing all the rules to memory."
Me: "So you're just making it up as you go then?" Walks out.
I turn 360 degrees and walk away
@@ultureyou turn 180 degrees. if you turn 360 degrees that's a full circle and you're walking towards the DM again.
@@baydiac Walk through the table and into them to assert your dominance and express your distaste for their DMing methods.
@@baydiac Dumbass comment made me turn 720 degrees and walk away.
@@baydiaccould also be moonwalking away xD
“There’s so many homebrew rules that I can’t tell you them all, but it’s meant for realism”
“Yeah, nope”
The antidote here is to write down all the home rules as he comes up with them, and then bring them up like fucking case law whenever a contradiction happens a few sessions of playing under his own garbage Homebrew and being held to it, they'll cut the crap
Yeah; if there’s walls then record the location of the walls for future reference, don’t just say “we don’t know where the walls are they’re invisible we’ll address them as we go”
"Learn the basics, so you understand why they exist." - Wise Words of the CritCrab 🙏
Yeah, I always felt like combat could have been done better in 5e, but then I read other systems, heard stories, and attempted some changes for one shots, and I began to see why it is the way it is.
The main takeaway from this for new DMs (really any DMs) is: *write your rule changes down!* When you make a ruling during a game make a note of it so you can add it to your home-brew rules. If you don't write your home rules down you WILL end up frustrating your players.
I started playing in AD&D 2e and one of the things we had there was called shots. You could choose take a penalty to your roll in order to aim for specific body parts and different things would happen based on where you hit and how much damage. Whatever damage done still was subtracted from the whole, they were not divided like this guy.
It was official rules and I’m thinking of adjusting it to my new 5e game. I’m new to 5e so I’m waiting to see
For our game our DM uses a called shot system AC increases to call a shot (like +2 for a limb +4 for an eye). On a hit there is an affect but some times less damage...like hitting a leg might reduce movement or a shot to the chest might be leave the target stunned. A critical increases the severity/duration. It's been interesting I find when I play my barbarian I play a bit more strategically using reckless attack to take called shots at advantage in hopes of getting one of these effects.
@@kereymckenna4611 that sounds very similar to the old called shot system. It’s good to know that it may work once I get used to things. Thanks.
You: “AD&D”
Reasonable person: “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons”
Myself: “Attention Deficit and Disorder”
I imagine they were going for a “Fear and Hunger” kind of thing with the striking body parts, but with that you ran the risk of missing depending on the body part since it’s a little harder to hit arms and legs compared to the torso, and way harder to hit the head in an attempt to one shot things. But it’s not that hard to implement without nerfing abilities lmao
@@ShowerCurtain1 I mean to be honest I actually have less of a problem with a character dying in a funger campaign then a regular one, it may be because of how mainstream representation has effected my perception but a character dying on an epic quest feels a little unsatisfying in some ways while a character dying in the cruel world of funger sorta comes with the setting with someone dying without ever getting to the end fitting with the type of world funger is
@@ShowerCurtain1tbh, F&H was inspired by Miro Haverinen's D&D session with his friends.
@@LoarvicLoarvic if they played a Silent Hill/Hellraiser/AmnesiaTDD/Nethack/Berserk/Souls-like/Mortal Kombat inspired campaign maybe
@@noisehero4409 so average D&D campain
Just play Fear and Hunger at that point
The first story reminds me of when my friends and I in high school would joke about a ridiculously complex system, and we'd get affects like "Hypothalmus efficiency decreased 11%"
Oh I see that the DM might be a massive Fear and Hunger fan cause in the game you have to target enemy limbs to cripple and the Torso for the main HP that's my theory of the DMs hombrew.
limb targeting systems have existed before fallout or fear and hunger
Monster hunter did it first.
Yes man. Basic mechanics were created by a single game, thats how it works. People should put copyright laws into this stuff too.
"Every limb had a different armor class"
So if you shoot 10 arrows point blank, only the arms will take damage while the shots deflect off everything else?
"These rules are meant to be realistic!"
I assumed that the idea was that armor would cover different parts of the body. So a chest plate would grant AC to your torso, but not to your limbs. Don't know how it worked in practice. But that's what I assumed.
@@RickJaeger Exactly. That's what makes most sense. Going for the most protected region is not very logical unless you're a heavy damage dealing type. An arm is not very protected and is the most important for attacks so go for that.
It's a pretty good system actually.
a more accurate description would be "only the arms take damage and the rest of the arrows deflect or miss (whichever is appropriate)
remember that AC is a combination of sturdiness, mobility, AND size
well, think of like chest armor that doesn't extend to the arms, or a helmet. A helmet is only going to protect your head!
Bro is just trying to play FATAL
"Le rulébook, c'est moi!"
* Lous XIV, DM edition
The rulebook is me, but a winner is you!
There's realism in my games; gravity pulls you down, you need food and definitely water multiple times a week, fire will burn you if you touch it, and there are some things you can't do with your hands full. There should be enough realism that players' actions and options feel like they make sense consistently. Beyond that you're just imposing limits
Imposing Limits is not a bad thing
@@xolotltolox7626 not always but it can be
realism my game: you may get disease or leprosy for being dirty, some weapons like the kusarigama or chain weapons needs dexterity checks or fail and you hit yourself
This sounds like someone playtesting a new game system they're designing without telling their friends, but "keeping the rules in their memory" is insane. I mean, everything about the system is crazy, but trying to keep all of that in one's head while also running a game is just nuts.
It would've been completely different had he told them beforehand. "Guys I'm testing some big changes to the system, please be beta testers and bear with me as I might adjust them as we go to keep things balanced"
Obviously, he'd still need to keep everything written down and ask the players for feedback. It's not impossible or crazy, but it needs to be agreed upon before starting.
@@00r0ryyeah. But also at that point just make your own game designed around that since a lot of clases get nerfed and buffed. All of a sudden, fireball is even better. Or smite. At that point, you would have to rebalance so many numbers and stuff its not even worth it. Shits getting close to f.a.t.a.l with them "realistic mechanics🤓👍"
“The grid was turned into hexes” that’s not even homebrew some people just do that.
I do like the what you calls VATS in D&D system. It implies piecemeal armor as well, which is pretty cool. If it can be abstracted it sounds fun and not too disruptive.
How I would do it is not how he’s doing it, like health should be one pool, limbs being destroyed should only be on massive damage or maybe crits, and just keeping the piecemeal limb based system seems fine.
Ideally I’d either make or find a system for that because it would be more integrated into the system that way instead of slapped on top.
D&D started out using hexes, I've never been a fan of the switch to squares. Hexes just work better calculating distances etc. You don't need special rules for moving, firing, casting on the diagonal (for example) as there aren't any diagonals.
@@fred_derf OD&D used hexes for overland travel but aways used squares for interiors. Mainly because the thing they got overland travel rules from used hexes.
But I do agree it’s better
I’m also one to forgo the grid entirely and just measure distance, wargaming style
@@kaylaa2204, writes _"OD&D used hexes for overland travel but aways used squares for interiors."_
I've been playing since the Red Box and we always used a hex battle grid. I had a roll up one you could draw on using white board pens.
@@fred_derf I ain’t saying that’s a bad thing, I just always used squares for interior even if I’m using hexes, since it makes more sense for rooms, or just forgo a grid entirely
Hexes don’t really fit well trying to place it over a square room but it works great for like caverns or outdoor areas
Personal preference though
@@kaylaa2204, writes _"Hexes don’t really fit well trying to place it over a square room but it works great for like caverns or outdoor areas"_
Squares don't really fit well unless the room is some sort of rectangle and each wall is a multiple of 5 feet. So it's pretty much six of one, half-a-dozen of another.
Jaw-dropping story, but also the DM needs friends who are willing to have an honest conversation about what is and isn't working, rather than ranting about it on the internet.
True. I was dissapointed in the gnome player since i was waiting for him to go full nerd mode and tell him his system sucks because of its inconsistent rule set. Sometimes u need direct criticism to improve, its gonna anger or sadden u at the beginning, but its for the better. Dnd its a story that needs to be written by both dm and players, and as such, it needs both parties to be on the same page. The dm wanted fear n hunger but the players wanted core dnd.
Truuuuue. A lot of RPG horror story OPs need to hear this imo. I get that it's hard, I have social anxiety myself, but you really need to try that, at least before complaining online
HE IS BACK :3
Honestly, your videos man have helped me get into DMing and what to avoid doing, and I am happy, and I have a group of players that are helping me on my learning journey.
Good for you dude
If you need help trying to make a d and d map there’s a fantasy map generator it’s called. Azgarr
Any DM that modifies the game this much and doesn't provide players with a comprehensive overview at Session 0--IN WRITING--is NOT to be trusted.
Go go gadget all of your bones are broken. Go go gadget you're inside out now.
Go go gadget all of your thoughts and memories are fake. Go go gadget I am your mother.
Go go gadget compassion for fellow man.
You're a go go gadget
*scratches one big dandruff off my head* erm yeah sure whatever dude
@@corpsemachine6949 *Brandishes my iconic scimitar.* Yeah okay buddy. Keep making fun of me.
why would you say this@@corpsemachine6949
Go go gadget FATAL critical damage chart!
(Wait no don't look it up you will regret it)
im personally planning on having a very merciful limb cutting system for my campaign
first: the weapon has to be heavy
second: there's a second roll which halves modifiers and it does nothing if it rolls below 17, but if it rolls higher or the same, say goodbye to your arm or whatever was targeted
third: if you defend you cannot get limbs cut off
fourth: you can get limbs back by making a sacrifice (doesnt have to be anyone in the party, could be 10 mice if you want)
ik it's unrealistic but if everyone became potatoes from one enemy with big sword then that would be a bit unfun
yeah fr, the whole point of games like this is to be living in a fantastical setting whether it's high fantasy or not.. it's not meant to be realistic.. you can add realistic elements, sure, like if you take too much damage that knocks you unconscious, you are left with scarring depending on what knocked you unconscious, but to say a rock fell on your leg and now you can't move until you get a new leg?? that's a little unfun and takes the entertainment out of the game that is supposed to be enjoyable for everyone..
@@pumpkibee Actions are worthless if they don't have consequences. It seems that the reason the gnome mage got hurt is because he didn't dodge correctly while everyone else did, as in the player didn't take enough time to dodge carefully. Setting up that kind of system is good and immersive. I fundamentally disagree that the players are supposed to win. That's a game made for babies. The players are supposed to be able to win if they play correctly and die if they play incorrectly.
They should have left the gnome mage behind and ran. That was the best course of action.
@@icebox1954 "I fundamentally disagree that the players are supposed to win. That's a game made for babies." Bro what the fuck is this argument. If you think that a RPG campaign is a DM vs players thing, you are a bad DM. Imagine a long campaign, that takes 10+ sessions, for everyone to die to the BBEG at the very end because the DM "doesn't agree with the players winning".
Another thing "That was the best course of action", and also the least fun for everyone. As the guy in the video said, the role playing aspect was really good, and abandoning someone just because it's the best thing to do, doesn't mean it's the thing the characters would do; If you go that route, every lawful good paladin/cleric that risks his life to save a wounded person is being dumb and playing incorrectly.
Also "he didn't dodge correctly while everyone else did" This makes no sense when it was not the gnome fault since the DM was the one to make the convoluted rules to what was happening
@@leonardocoutomaciel4997 1. It was totally the gnome's fault. It was a skill issue.
2. If you're so childish that you think you should win automatically then you are unworthy of my time. Whatever campaign you're doing is devoid of value and beneath me.
3. Being a paladin doesn't mean being stupid. You don't automatically die for nothing. If a boss can't be beaten then living to fight another day is the correct way for a paladin to play.
@@icebox1954 wow, thankfully my DM is not you lol. Have fun with your players with your, idk, superiority? lol beneath me. This anwser feels like a bait but thanks for the laugh either way
I feel for that DM, I understand what it's like to want to homebrew some stuff and then it goes wrong. It's cool to see a story where a DM made an honest mistake and didn't mean for things to go badly.
Mad respect to him for recognizing he messed up and giving everyone a way out. Hope they can laugh about it now and have some good DnD games, love seeing the friendship preserved.
DM: "I'm introducing a limb targeting system!"
*Thinks back to Fear and Hunger.*
..... Ohno-
This is going to be a 🚽show.
Thankfully, there weren't any prison guards or harvestmen...
I swear, every time these upload, I'm at work, but that makes coming home all the more satisfying :3
That’s a prime example of the “death spiral” problem with games if I’ve ever heard it.
Love when the players are better DM’s then the actual DM lol
any time a dm says the rules are totally redesigned and there are too many changes to explain, you should assume he's making shit up as he goes along until proven otherwise, lol.
This is why you agree on rules beforehand. I feel that as a DM the most important thing is that the players have fun. It's a game, after all.
That cerberus could've built so much suspence too and the slight of could've even been made interesting.
First thing is that I'd say the door in is like 6-7ft high max so the run could feel like a good idea, but I don't know how to fit it in with tbis idea
As you enter the room you see a three headed hound asleep, from your estimates at least twice your heights and thrice your widths. Behind the beast is a large tree with pods seemingly filled with glowing liquid which could only be your remedy. "After OP gets there" the pods are quite large and seem as if they'd be tough to pluck from the tree, how would you like take them off (If they use a dagger they make it 2 points easier on slight of hand to silently move them and require a very low dex throw to cut them).
They actually have reason to roll 5 times as these are cumbersome and hold liquid which makes noise.
"Upon the first fail" You know you created too much noise and as you silently stare at the beast you can see its ears perc up waiting for another sound, after what feels like minutes the creatures ear goes back down.
"Upon the second fail" You witness the creature raise to its feet its size larger than you imagined. It still seems half asleep and you imagine that youd have at least several seconds before it notices you. What would you like to do?
Excellent example! As I said somewhere else, nothing against multiple rolls in situations like this, but only if you're deft enought to both explain the need for them and take advantage of them to raise tension. Save-or-suck is already troublesome enough as it is, and repetitive tasks can easily become teedious in inexperienced hands, even with the implied tension of "there's a monster over there".
Dracule did it correctly. If you set up your people to fail outside of amazing luck then it becomes forced. Give them one fail chance and let the second one be the determining one. Also, have the room's exit be smaller than the beast and explain before this that the beast was put here to guard the treasure quite a while ago and the master either died of old age or something and the faithful hound eagerly protects it over anything else. This gives the heroes a chance to attack the tree to make the hound back off so they can escape or something and the smaller exit makes the hound unable to follow. This is how I'd have done it.
Honestly, the fact that Gnome was injured could have made for a great moment. The Cerberus could have been awake, but taking slow steps towards the party, so the party can actually run away and try desperate shots against the Cerberus. Something dramatic happened, and the game is not ended because the DM wanted a dramatic showdown but everybody is bleeding but the DM/cerberus is reluctant to kill people.
4:07 wait wtf that’s-yes, yes! Do that! That’s great! I’d LOVE that kind of gameplay!
13:07 “I do an advantaged sneak attack on the sleeping Cerberus’s back, crippling its legs and spine, and I use the opportunity to grab a handful of leaves from the tree”
Like the thing about Fear and Hunger is _you_ can set traps _for the enemies to run into_
My favorite limb targeting/damage system so far is from the warhammer roleplay and rogue trader ttrpgs. To hit rolls line up with one of the limbs or torso with roughly a 15% chance to hit an arm or leg and a 40% to hit the body. Once you hit zero you apply an effect from a critical chart on a -1 to -10 scale with -10s being essentially a narratively gruesome death based on the weapon type being used on said section of the body. And -1s to 9s doing cosmetic damage and adding escalating debuffs that were curated by the developers very well imo. Very intuitive and benign and adds some nice aesthetic flavor and understandable mechanical nuance to the games without causing too much clutter. I found it relatively easy to convert the d100 system that those games use to homebrew it into my D&D campaigns and it has become one of my players favorite parts of combat with everyone getting excited to see what kind of critical hits they pull off and even enjoying getting critted because the battle scars add flavor to their character progression.
I've never played DnD before, and have a very non-DnD-ish homebrew, but the second I heard "There are too many rules, we'll just adress them as they come up", multiple loud klaxon blares went off in my head.
My world has 'too many rules' as well, but I have an in-depth guide to all of them that I always keep available to my players, and, I give mercy to players who bump into a rule that screws them over, if it wouldn't have had they known about it..
Though typically I stay within the policy of just not having any rules that screw over a player, if they don't know about it.. I prefer my player's failures to be caused by backlashes they were fully aware of prior to causing. Especially since my world/scenario plays a huge amount around a "Guilty pleasure" aspect. Doing things you know are wrong or that may damn you, but doing them anyway because you were tempted into doing them, or simply couldn't resist the urge to.
So many Red Flags here right from the start - the claim of "More Realistic" would have been enough by itself to have me run screaming from the room. The DM might have been a friend, but he was also a #$%^& idiot - if you MUST go Homebrew, then consistency and clarity are absolutely essential, and this "system" had neither. Given the DM;s resistance to providing notes, etc., I can only surmise that most of this was being pulled out of his @$$.
Gnome might have had some negative traits, but he wasn't the problem here. The DM and his alleged system was.
+7thesealord888, writes _"the claim of "More Realistic" would have been enough by itself to have me run screaming from the room."_
I couldn't agree more.
Absolutely garbage take.
Nah the gnome sounds an asshole overall , same for op
And as many pointed out a big part of the system seems to be taken from the video game "Fear and Hunger" and the dm probably felt weird or embarrassed to admit it
And keep in mind that overall all the sessions op said that everything else was great which means that he wasn't being a control freak and forcing them into situations or something.
Dm here, I use a heavily homebrewed world. If you want custom stuff I'll build it with you. Race? I'll work it in.
Class? Ehh I'm working to that. Backstory? Yes! If it fits more please!
But I don't go control freak
Cool :D
As a new DM starting a game for inexperienced players, I told them they could use anything they found in the rulebooks and I'd help them set up their sheets, with homebrew open for consideration. Fortunately nobody went crazy with it
Yeah, I run an extremely homebrew world too and it can be great to give people some more freedom etc.
@@lynxfirenze4994 like a grafted race where they can have a thri kreens extra arms, or a dragonborn breath weapon,
@@joelrobinson5457 honestly could be great.
One of the things I do with races is just separate mechanics from thematic outright. So there are "humans" with the stat block of an Orc because they're just that tough etcetera.
I find it opens things up well without requiring the oversight that Homebrew races do so saves some time/effort. Ofc sometimes things need to be Homebrewed regardless but races aren't too hard
4:23 I think the Jenga analogy is slightly flawed. You can remove one bottom block and have the tower standing perfectly fine. Two, however, and depending on the blocks pulled from the bottom, it’s either falling over or else very unsteady.
What the GM of this story essentially did is yank out the third bottom block and then tried to replace them as the tower was collapsing.
It's more like instead of taking out a jenga block, the DM shoved a TP roll in there with his body parts houserules and was hoping the tower would somehow remain standing.
@@MisterNightfish That’s a lot closer, actually, and it even gets to why it’s a bad idea. If you’re allowed to introduce random objects, are you even playing Jenga anymore?!
@@zacharysieg2305, writes _"If you’re allowed to introduce random objects, are you even playing Jenga anymore?!"_
Oooo, that sounds like it could actually be a fun game... you start with a pile of differently shaped blocks and you either have to take one from the pile and add it to the tower (building it) or remove one from the pile and add it elsewhere.
There’s one beautiful little thing that can help make limb damage mechanics go so much more smoothly: hit location dice. Players didn’t call their shot? No problem! As long as they hit, they will do damage. The die just determines where that damage is going.
I’ve run Fallout RPG before, and that die made for some very funny encounters. I swear, it had its days where it just decided that NOBODY gets to have arms/legs/heads!
I like how Earthdawn does it. Along with having Unconsciousness Ratings and Death Ratings for how much damage you can take, you also have Wound Thresholds, all based off of the same Toughness (Constitution) score. That determines how much damage you can take in a single hit before you take a serious injury, which can add up to wound penalties to both actions and recovery. Even still, single Wounds aren't too big a deal (unless they keep adding up), but double or triple wounds from a single attack can be. You can also make Called Shots with an accuracy penalty to land exactly where you want to hit if you still connect, potentially bypassing damage-reduction armor, and Wounds to specific parts can have reasonable effects. It therefore becomes totally reasonable for a Thief (Rogue) to sneak up, make a Called Shot to the throat with enough bonuses to cancel out penalties, and with a high enough success the person is probably lethally injured despite having half their HP left unless they have some sort of healing option. If players are scared of that, then some sort of neck armor like a gorget can help peace of mind a lot. The system can be dangerous, but since I'm not trying to actively murder my party's characters and they may or may not wish to kill their enemies, it works out well. It also means that on the few times when an antagonist shows up actively weaponizing this system, it immediately ramps them up several notches on the threat scale for players.
This actually reminds me of the German system my playgroup uses. It also has targeted hits with individual body parts applying different attack modifiers when targeted. The difference is though: That system isn't mandatory, you may just as much simply "attack" - which in my experience is indeed the default for most players. Only in very specific circumstances, against specific enemies (or similar), announcing targeted attacks is really worth it.
The problem with targeted attacks, is it's very much a TV / Movie trope and has no basis in real life. In real combat you hit the body part that's available to hit at the moment. In a melee what you hit is going to be determined far more by what your opponent gets in your way (such as their shield or weapon) then by "what you target". Your "targeting" is going to be determined by what opening they leave you. Their shield is a bit high? Great, strike at his legs. His shield is low? Go for the head. They've over extended their swing? Go for their sword arm. etc.
With ranged weapons, you aim for "the body", no one is accurate enough to target specific body parts when in combat with moving targets. The only thing that could be used to target specific body parts is _Magic Missile_ as it "unerringly hits its target" but even that would have to be homebrewed.
This is the kind of RPG horror story I like. I don't think the DM here was malicious. They just were way over-confident in their abilities with house rules. I feel like it's easy for people to think "I can remember all this in my head. It will be fine." But it's way harder than it sounds.
+Zulk_RS, writes _"I don't think the DM here was malicious"_
I think Arrogant would be a better term than Malicious. But they did exhibit some Rail Roady tendencies so they're at least a little malicious.
@@fred_derf I am willing to give them a charitable interpretation here. I don't think they wanted to railroad. I think they might have had trouble dealing with their own unwieldy and half-remembered rules that he created. Definitely Arrogant though.
@@Zulk_RS, writes _"I don't think they wanted to railroad."_
Making the character roll checks until they woke up the Cerberus with the only option being run away (or die) _is_ railroading. There was clearly no scenario there to allow them to get past the Cerberus.
But as i said, it was Rail Roady, not a full out Rail Road.
@@fred_derf I agree with you. It WAS a rail road. My point was that I don't think they did it on purpose. Like on paper, someone who has not have had much experience behind the DM screen might think that "Oh making them roll multiple times make sense." not realizing just how drastically it raises failure chance.
Then they might have thought "Okay. No problem. They can easily run away from the Cerberus" but because they have so many BS homebrew rules, they themselves forgot that "running away" is easier said then done.
Lastly there is a core problem with the rules that I think the DM themselves didn't realize: The Death Spiral. When the PCs decided to stay and fight, the DM waived a few of the rules thinking it would stack the odds in the PCs favor but they forgot completely that the more damage the PCs take, they worse their chance actively get, which leads to more damage which leads to bigger penalties which lead to more damage. The DM didn't realize the absolute shit show the rules would create. And when he finally did realize it, he basically soft ended the campaign.
@@Zulk_RS I agree with pretty much everything you've written. However I do think there was an element of "I'm going to show them how D&D should be played" to the DM's mindset so, as I sad, they're at least _a little_ malicious.
I run a heavily homebrewed campaign with my own tabletop group that has been on a hiatus for a while. In order to prepare, I had taken notes of everything:
The NPCs
The player character's stats and HP (I don't believe they'd cheat, but as the DM I do want to keep myself in check as well. My players have even told me damage I forgot about and had to apply, so I'm happy to have such trusting and trustworthy players)
The basic rules of combat
The basic details of any random items we make up off the top of my head
The events that happen during certain actions in the story
I even recap what happened last session ready for the next.
My players have LOVED my campaign, because of this attention to detail and willingness to build a story and put the players in the limelight. Any mention of intense themes (School attacks, mass unaliving, self-deletion) is treated as tastefully and tactfully as possible. Players' creative diplomacy and problem solving is either rewarded with graceful description or (when it's something that will have negative consequences) punished appropriately (Smashing a chest with your sword and rolled a 20 *specifically* to apply all force to it? You broke the chest, but cleaved the equipment inside, severing the magic enchantment it had. It's still very fashionable though and can sell for a healthy price.)
I feel that's where the DM is going wrong. Improv CAN work, but you need to have the basics detailed to maintain consistency. My players used to have a very power-gaming foreverDM that made their games unenjoyable at most times and made them untrusting to DMs. But when they learned how I did things, they were quick to even admit to their low rolls, and every 1 they roll has been thrilling because the high rolls that happen afterward are HYPE as all get out.
I love my group.
2:12 realism in a DnD game? sheeiit... off to a bad start.
This sounds more like how limb damage works in Monster Hunter, but the thing about Monster Hunter is that limb damage isn't just subtracted from total damage done, there's actual separate formulae for how it calculates limb breaking beyond just your raw damage output. The other thing, though, is I think D&D just has too low of health pools for this to be a viable system, since in most games with these types of limb damage the fights are longer, enough that they give more room for genuine strategizing with the system as limb damage debuffs are around long enough to be actually important and useful
Most important, most of games with limb damage are mecha games where even if a limb gets replaced or permanently destroyed you can replace it in short term instead of permanently losing a huge part of your contribution to the fight because your opponent rolled high enough damage on your main systems.
"We discussed among ourselves if we're supposed to run or fight" that right there would be a signal to a good DM that they'd messed up - the players aren't discussing whether to run or fight, they're discussing which one they're *SUPPOSED* to do.
So separate AC for limbs, HP for limbs, etc?
So he turned D&D 5e into RuneQuest? Then play RuneQuest!
(This old Grognard shakes his head and walks away mumbling)
I have a body part hit system, buts its reserved for critical hits to make them more, well, critical. One crit can end an encounter with a humanoid from full HP. Or you may only severely wound them. They say where they want to hit and they do so. They can also call a shot which gives disadvantage but allows to roll the table if hit. It's also optional, not enforced, but we've been pretty happy with it as a group.
I was going to say "if you want to play a lethal system play call of cthulhu" but even call of cthulhu is very straightforward in the way combat works, some systems are made to make combat heroic and survivable so you can multiply them without losing PCs, others are made to make combat chaotic and lethal to make any fight a dramatic scene, with a whole spectrum in-between, but for the love of god choose a system made for the spirit you want for your campaign.
As a DM I only ever use any kind of limb based shit if it makes a lot of sense, for example if you have a fucking boulder dropped on your legs they probably won’t work as well as before until you heal up
I use a quick ruleset for aimed attacks. Legs are AC+1, arms are AC+2, head is AC+3
I'd love to point out that hexes aren't that weird. A lot of game mats have hexes, and it's actually mathematically easier to do diagonal movement. That's why I use them.
yeah and I'm pretty certain they're not even homebrew, but a variant rule available in the official rules
I love playing with called shots like "I aim for his head, or sword arm." It's a home-brew rule I use in every game I run, but the way I do it is a +6 for headshots, often being insta-kills, +5 for hand, neck, foot, think small body parts here, and if it's just "I aim for their arm," nothing specific, a +4.
A shot to the dome, if it doesn't kill them, causes stun for 2D4 rounds, 10% chance of bleeding effect for 1D4/round till end of combat. Head wounds irl are no joke.
Legs and feet - disadvantage on movement checks, with a 10% chance to reduce movement speed by 10ft.
Arms - disadvantage on attacks.
Hands, a 50% chance to drop their weapon with a 10% chance that they can no longer fight with hand, having to use their non-dominant one, making them fight at disadvantage.
And all of this is supplemental. If someone wants to use a called shot, easy peasy, if not, "I roll to attack," just without the extra difficulty. It's in addition to the base content of the game, no individual pools of HP or anything like that.
The limb system is similar to something I devised, which is you can choose to target specific areas if you choose and I will determine any disadvantages to the roll depending on how difficult it would be. Any damage dealt to that area still takes from the overall creature health but with enough damage I would allow players to disable creature abilities. Dealing with a dragon? targeted shots to the wings with like a -2 could lead to disabling flight while still dealing direct HP damage. More along the lines to motivate strategic thinking and a chance to shift the battle more in their favor. Otherwise if they don't care for it then standard combat targeting is the default. Also I wouldn't utilize the system against players, debuffing PCs too much starts to tarnish any game enjoyment
My first DM played D&D since the first release, he invented dozends of homebrew rule. One of his Mantras for combat homebrew was: "It is okay for special situations. Like running away/after someone or a turnament. But never for general usage."
I’ve seen the limb one done well in warhammer where your typical shooting a person and normal enemies usually give up if you blow their leg or arm off. Melee also got to choose the part they wanted to hit rather than roll for it.
To be fair, stuff has hit points, like doors and stuff. I could see limbs having their own independent HP, but not sharing a pool. I used to play GURPS and I always enjoyed the ability to target limbs to cripple your target. I tried to implement a similar system in which I told players they could "call shots" when attacking, they roll at a disadvantage and if they hit then the enemy would suffer from debuffs, like being blinded or losing a limb.
Best way of doing homebrew campaign is to start with base ruleset and than introduce new rules and systems one by one.
That allows players to learn the rules slowly, gives opportunity to revert or adjust changes that didn't work out as expected and allows DM to write changes down one by one, which is much easier to do.
As an added bonus, everyone would have a better understanding what of the game was home-ruled, when they join another company.
From the way this DM changed the combat system to a hex map and targeted limbs, it kinda sounds like he was trying to wedge a more BattleTech style combat system in, which could be cool potentially, but I think his biggest misstep was in not presenting this homebrew as an experiment and tweaking it along the way with feedback from the players. My old DM in high school was great at running several different game systems, including D&D and BattleTech, so I would've loved the idea of him dabbling with a hybrid combat system. However, that's really the sort of thing that needs to be either super well prepared in advance or adjusted during gameplay.
I wanted to add monster races to my 5e game prior to them actually being a thing. While I wouldn't say I was a hardcore veteran at the time, I did have quite a bit of experience under my belt. There were like 12 races in total and my 3 players lapped em up like candy.
I let them start at level 5 and it wasn't until session 3 that I began to see the problem.
The first character, a Fighter Artificer Salamander had fire resist, smithing tools proficiency and a d4 fire damage bonus on hit with metal weapons he was holding. This grew instantly out of hand, dealing 3d4 additional fire damage every turn. There was also some UA Artificer jank that I can't fully remember, but it allowed his stats to be pretty damn high.
Thri-kreen had a massive drawback for massive gain. You couldn't speak common, so you had to speak through your companions who you had taught sign language to. In return for this, Thri-kreen had an additional pair of arms that could do simple actions. These arms allowed for an additional bonus action and reaction each round, but required you to specifically use those hands. The player chose a Monk, and honestly it wasn't super out of control until they took Sentinel. It was a learning experience for sure, but I think the inability to speak common did not have the effect I wanted. Instead of trying to inspire a unique way of getting points across, it instead actively de-incentivized that character from interacting with NPCs.
Lastly there was a Ghost Warlock first time player. The big drawback was that the ghost was tied to a memento and when reduced to zero hit points he would dissipate and reform from it after 24 hours. He himself could not carry the memento, and it was possible to revive him early using a short rest. The character also had the ability to fly, and he could also go through walls (as long as he didn't end his turn in them). While the whole memento thing never actually came into play, I made a crucial mistake via "the rule of cool." He asked if he could pull someone through a wall and I said "as long as he fails a saving throw against your DC." The new player priceeded to pull every enemy he could feasibly get his hands on through the floor. It wasn't until that session 3 that we realized he had yet to use any of his Class features.
So, I do suggest that those looking to homebrew do it at their own peril. The game is already hard enough to keep track of and balance. Adding new combat/class/race features is like adding milk to hot water. If you don't do it carefully you'll just be left with a mess.
i also joined a campaign that the DM wanted to change the core combat rules to make thing cooler... he did not know what he was doing and most of the time we went with the normal rules.
"If de dislikes something, he will say to your face, which can hurt people's feeling"
Thats such a weird phrasing. So hurting his feeling by doing something is OK, but when he dares to be vocal about it - its him who is ''hurting feelings''
Admittedly a blanket statement like that does sound a bit weird in a vaccuum, but in my experience hearing or reading similar statements, it's usually reffering to the kind of person whose "brutal honesty" has a weird tendency to emphasize the "brutal" part.
Some examples:
-A player who dislikes a poorly implemented houserule and their first instinct is to straight up call the DM an incompetent imbecile instead of discussing it with them.
-A person who deems a hairstyle "too masculine" for a woman, so they blurt out how disgusting she looks with it first chance they get.
@@Elvalley your examples are straight up offences, with slander and everthing, and if someone uses them, he can not be a "not a bad person"
OP stated that this guy was not bad, just honest
Honesty != Rudeness
@@vrcxdc3623 my examples were deliberately extreme, because if I made them subtle I'd have to write quite a lot more. Being offensive, at least to a degrre, is kinda the issue though, what do you think "honest to the point of hurting feelings" could entail?
@@Elvalley feelings of some people are being hurt by literally anything, you know.
For example, where i live, we have a prison sentence for, quote, "offending feelings of thoso who have faith"
So, how it works - person tells thst his feeling were hurt by your opinion and you go to jail for 5 years.
But they dont have to prove it, because it is impossible
Basically its one of many laws we have have to be able to imprison mitetally anyone, if needed
@@vrcxdc3623 ah, I see. I do think you may have a bit of a biased view in the opposite direction from when most people say somebody talks in hurtful ways, but I get where you're coming from.
And when the world needed him the most he returned
As a DM I do everything in my power to 1. make the game fun 2. Give it a FUN challenge 3. Keep my players alive 4. LISTEN to my players I want to ensure that ALL my players are having fun and getting creative input. Damn that last DM would’ve had me packing my stuff up and dipping. My first time play dnd was with my buddies and the friend that DM’d was awesome at it. It was funny, enjoyable, and entertaining we all didn’t get hurt too bad but he ain’t take it too easy on us either. Interaction with NPC and monsters were hilarious.
some guy decided to go into GRAPHIC detail with what he did with the dragon when i was DMing. i dont really wanna go into detail but man it completely killed the whole vibe
I’m guessing he *did* the dragon?
so he was either...
A) Donkey from Shrek
B) weird guy (oh please let it be this one and he just goes into insane detail about how he "ripped out the dragons tongue" or smth)
@@taylorthesillyguy nah he’s donkey from shrek
I actually ran my own Fallout System which allowed players to just take a shot at an enemy or use an extra action point to use a Vats attack and target a specific place which simply just had effects depending on hit , damage or crit , like aiming for the head gives you a crit on 18-20 on the die , shooting an arm if you did 1/4 or more of the total hp of the target , that limb was now crippled giving a negative to hit or use . Instead of changing how combat works in a 5e style system , i simply added an extra option for attacking .
Reminds me of the time I played in a homebrew campaign ran by a guy I met through pathfinder society. He declared arcane magic was not a thing in his world and we had to awaken arcane magic. So we all played divine casting classes. I was a paladin, we had a cleric and an Inquisitor (cleric/bard hybrid class). Then he started arbitrarily removing any spells from our spell lists that delt damage or boost damage, all while throwing ever more stuff that did ridiculous amounts of damage and had hundreds of hit points. With me the paladin, who traded smite for giving out my feats to my party members, dealing the highest damage of about 8-17 points of damage a turn. Let's just say during the 12th session, after I got one shotted while having full health, everyone at the table quit.
The guy was newer to DMing and admitted that he hated how magic worked in DnD and removed it without thinking how to balance the game play to make it fun.
gotta love DMs that believe to be the antagonist of "i have no mouth and i must scream"
I had a dm say the fighters sword broke on a nat 1, it was the only weapon he had as it was a one-shot. Made the fighter feel bad since he couldn’t really do much of anything. He was able to get a new sword by the end of the fight though that let him cast a steel wind slash spell.
I actually really like the realistic setting he was trying to create, and the complexity that comes along with it. He should've treated this more like a playtest than a long-term campaign
I really like the idea of being able to target a specific body part as an addition to the standard combat rules, but definitely not as a substitute for them. I mainly only see this as useful to enable/disable an opportunity to flee for either side though. You're chasing a thief or something so the archer in the party tries to fire an arrow that will pin part of their clothing to wall or their foot to the ground. Maybe up the AC or add disadvantage for a targeted shot, but this was definitely overboard.
In my current campaign (of which I have a game diary series on my channel about), I have a ton of rules to make ths game a lot more lethal. But all of those rules are written down in special channel in the group's discord. And on top of that, I always make sure that that the rules that make combat more lethal also apply to the monsters they're fighting. If the players have less hit points, then it's only fair that the monsters have less hit points too. If the party has to make a check to cast their spells, so do the monsters.
The injuring limbs bit seems like they didn't realize hit points being reduced doesn't actually mean you're being injured. It's supposed to be a kind of "endurance/luck" extrapolation: when you lose hp, that means you're a little more worn down, more likely to not dodge/deflect the next blow, etc. When you finally do run out of hp, you finally suffer a direct damaging hit, and you go down. That's why you can fight at 100% power (assuming no drains/debuffs, etc) right up until the moment you go to 0 hp and you get knocked out.
I've been DMing for years in a sort of arbitrary way, although our system is a lot more roleplay-based than TTRPG like. Its barely a TTRPG, just has rolls for certain things and so far I've not gotten any complaints. I guess its because I always sort of do the story in favor of the players. My goal isn't to hinder their progress, but rather to write a proper narrative.
The only time I've had complaints, I rectified stuff.
When you do a mistake, own up to them.
That taxing of a combat system is classic armchair design - I definitely created versions in Junior/High School
I'm glad you tweaked on the sleight of hand rolls too, CritCrab. I was thinking, why would he need sleight of hand to pick leaves? He doesn't need to hide the act from an unconscious creature, and doing it quietly really wouldn't need any additional rolls for anything, it's not a complicated action.
Heres how I’d make a reality based system. The RP world is a combat sports promotion but one that covers EVERYTHING combat sports related from the largest market to niche events (as long as it’s legal). The gym your character represents is your faction but it also effects your training level and some aspects of your fighting style. MMA math is half the battle system and accounting for chaos is the other (as there’s always that fight that ends in an upset victory). Team based tournaments are basically a chess match to pick your character’s battles
I’m making a homebrew campaign. A few years ago I used to be a power hungry DM. Currently I’m making a campaign about solving a mystery in a custom plane I made and escape the plane
1:30 am. But i can't go to sleep without watching this. Health can wait. Crab comes first!
Funny thing about that, I once had to suffer through an old-school dm who's claimed to have been DMing for years, but also implied the impossible skillchecks trope, except, not just for boss fights, but even trivial things or even flavorful things (falling from a height that wouldnt hurt you, but roll to see if you could land proper, roll a nat 20 and the dm describes you falling flat on your face like an idiot) and he'd also do that irl timer thing, along side many other bad faith/straight up bad dm behavior. glad to be away from that.
Sounded like the DM realized at the end he fucked up and simply decided not to keep going. As you said, he doesn't sound malicious, so let's hope he returns to the basics and starts learning from there.
I literally was putting a Battle System of DnD like that like a FUCKING EXAMPLE OF WHAT TO *NOT DO* to a friend, truly majestic.
I think that DM stumbled over some really old "Dark Eye" rules and even then botched the job by adopting them very badly.
A lot of those ideas were tried out in early rival FRPG systems like Runequest and Palladium Games. Locational armour and hit points can work, as it does in Runequest, but critical hits tables rarely do, unless they are steeply nerfed in the conditions in which they can occur.
Some elements of real life physics simply have to be left outside the game, like effects of height and weight differences, when going up against giants and similar. License simply has to be allowed for magic and mythical monsters to not be "scientific", so that they can't just crush players to death by moving their feet, or swatting them into oblivion with a swing of a club. Certainly in the real world certain kinds of events would break bones and tear muscles, but then you don't have a fantasy role playing game. You have perhaps a survival game.
Not only does going into such detail slow combat down completely, which was the problem with D&D 3rd Edition, but it also needs to be balanced and made to make sense by systems like Greg Stafford's in Pendragon where because magical healing is very scarce, players can only take on one or two combats a year, because they then have to spend weeks and months healing with period medical help. If you go into detailed catastrophic injuries, then suddenly being fully magically healed after a few days and able to return to exploring creates a believability problem. It's dissonant. If the healing is easy, so should the combat system be. If the combat system is complex and "realistic" like that, then so must the healing system be.
Critical hit tables work quite nicely in the FFG Warhammer 40'000 RPGs, because those games are expected to be over the top violence from the moment weapons are drawn. One thing of note though is that in most of the systems it's much easier to crit an NPC than to crit a player.
@@AGrumpyPanda That sounds good. Thanks for the info.
When the Cerberus is like “I want a dramatic fight but I want an actual fight; it’s no fun if I trounce characters”:
The old HERO System has some great hit location rules but they are part of a complete combat system that is quite different from D&D. It's a really fun system with a GM and players who know what they are doing but it is not a noob friendly system by any stretch of the imagination.
Last DM sounds like he was playtesting a WIP homebrew ruleset (with loads of potential) while going about it the wrong way entirely
Seems like the DM finally realized how bad his homebrew rules were during the Cerberus fight and decided to just call it.
literally fear and hunger, small chance to hit heads at the start and limb loss
There are only 2 hombrew rules i use
1. Crits double damage (both for hits and failed saves)
2. You can cast as many spells as you have resources (meaning you can absolutely misty step into a fireball as long as you have the slots, same with action surge).
I wanted drugs in my homebrew but it didn't catch on
So if a player character crit fails a saving throw on a fireball they can kiss their party goodbye?
@@Lulink013 no only the creature that crit fails takes 2x damage.
why homebrew to make casters better than they already are? not judging just curious.
@sirpipple1 More funner IMO.
I use a timer as well, a dragon hour glass filled with sand. Anyways... I only use it during combat because we had eight players at one point and some folks would never use their time to plan ahead and as a direct result we would have people flipping through books and spending upwards to half an hour deciding what they were going to do.
So basically in order to expedite combat I made a house rule, every player gets five minuets, if you don't make a choice by then you lose your turn. Simple as that. It has really helped speed up combat and I now use it for any size group unless it's one on one.
12:23 ah yes the good ol' roll to failure, when the dm has decided you must fail but pretends it's the dice fault
To date, the only VAT system Ive ever seen work in a TTRPG was from WEG Star Wars.
One common thing I notice in these stories is that everyone at the table, particularly the OPs, let the problem people get away with absolute garbage, which is stressing them out, because they're too afraid of the stress of conflict to say anything. Like, they're effectively gaining +5 stress per session, but because saying something will cause them to gain +10 stress in a lump sum, they don't say anything, despite the entire concept of DnD to be a stress reliever. OP is five sessions in, so they're at 25 stress, and they're still scared of the +10 stress that would just go down as they remove themself from the stressful scenario.
People are so scared of moderate amounts of stress that they will put up with tiny stressors for much longer, ultimately accounting for more overall stress, just to avoid one single stressful situation that they can predict. I mean, I'm anxious, I kinda get it, but, like, I also know it's gonna be better if I bite the bullet and open my mouth.
I run called shots in my campaign. Leg/arm AC is 3 over normal armor class, head is 6. Legs and arms have a certain amount of hit points proportionate to your total hit points (usually 25%, sometimes 20% or 15% depending on the enemy's challenge rating). If those points are depleted, that limb is out of commission. Monsters take a fixed amount of damage to their total hit point pool if they lose a limb. Head shots just deal extra damage. Critical hits on head kill some enemies outright. I have these rules written out. I dont change them. The players know about them and i almost never have the monsters attack my player's limbs (because i feel like that would be pretty lame). It ends up being mostly head and body attacks by both parties, but the option to disable limbs i think is pretty cool.