One of my favorite things I have stolen was letting the players do the recap before the session begins. It allows me as the DM it get a sense of what the players thought was important. I basically know where the plot is and what’s coming next, but they happened to mention that Red Wizard for the third time after leaving her behind five games ago. It’s a nice indication that the players think she was an important ncp and should maybe make a return. It also let you mine the players imaginations on what comes next, which often leads to the players having more fun.
@@OldSchoolGM94 maybe next time warning them ahead of time might work, like at the a text reminder, hey btw I expect you guys to know what's happened, and to help remind the other players, and show what you think might be important for them to know... This gets them think ahead of time instead of just springing it on them
One idea I came out with, and that my players absolutely loved was to introduce a fae merchant whom the party could contact every once in a while. This fae offered a range of services, from equipment to information to serendipitous items (a one-time occurrency where you just have the item you needed, X gp worth or less) to lucky rerolls. The twist was that this merchant didn't accept gold or equipment, they accepted stories, speeches and personal details. To get the location of a foe they were hunting, each had to share their greatest tragedy. To obtain the weapon of her dreams, the barbarian needed to share three insecurities gnawing at her. And in order to have a very specific and rare spell taught to her, the wizard had to argue convincingly in favor and against a point of political philosophy. The players felt it was a great, organic way of sharing part of their backstory or thoughts and talking about it later. Sorry if it feels like I'm blowing my own horn, but I was proud of how engaged they were.
The Han Solo-Lando Rule, or I Know a Guy Rule. When the party is getting to a new town a member of the party can say "Hey, I know a guy in that town" even if he did not specified it in his background. Then he rolls a Charisma check (or better the GM rolls it in secret) to determinate what's the relationship between the player character and the NPC. If the roll is high the NPC is a good friend of the PC or is in debt with him, if the roll is low the party is going to be stab in the back. This makes the city more realistic, because no background can ever describe every sigle person the character has met in his life, particularly if the character is an 100 years old elf or gnome. It could be difficult for some GMs to improvise a brand new npc in a few minutes so this rule could be "dangerous".
Matteo Runchi also know as the 'Circles' rule, originally from Burning Wheel. In that game Circles is the name of an entirely separate stat, called circles. For the circles ability to be functional you need to know the broad stokes of your characters backstory, because it's easier to find people you know in places that you've lived in previously. The circles score typically starts quite low, like 1 or 2, but you can add to it with reputations and affiliations with different groups which give you bonuses. Then when you want to use Circles to find an new NPC you give the GM some conditions for what kind of person you're looking for and the GM gives you a difficulty number to beat based on factors like shared social class or occupation, any specific knowledge or disposition they have, and how urgently convenient it would be if they showed up right now. To test the ability, you build a dice pool of d6s using your Circles as the base plus bonuses from appropriate reputations and affiliations and a bonus if you give the NPC a name before you roll. Each d6 has a 50% chance of producing a "success". If you get enough total successes to equal or exceed the difficulty number then you succeed the test and find the NPC. If you fail then you either don't find them, or you find someone else of the GMs choosing who isn't quite right, or you find them but they hate you and all future social interactions with them will be more difficult or they will try to back stab you or sell you out at a later date: Which is how the rule got associated with Han-solo, because the common example is when Han says he knows Lando Calrissian it's as though he just failed a circles test because it gets the whole party in trouble! (Circles tests are meant to be hard, and are most commonly failed, so I think the standard implementation in D&D where you just use Charisma is too charitable and gives even more power to the socially focuses PCs. Personally, I'd recommend using half-charisma as the base, and then adding modifiers from appropriate reputations, affiliations, and if you give them a name first, and any other advantages you want to jockey for). Hope this helps, or at least gives you some more background info about the rule and its origin :)
@@seraaron Burning Wheel HYPE! I love TBW, but 5e is so much more accessible. I am trying to hack in Circles as well as Beliefs and Instincts using something similar to the Artha rewards system. Because there aren't any mechanics for knowing someone in 5e it can be hard to just let players do it. You give them an inch and they will take a mile. "Yeah I totally no the King/Duke here." I wonder if adding the relationships BW allows you to buy in Character Creation would be too noodley to also cram in to 5e...
I've generally found youtube comments to have great tips and advice for all kinds of games, whether of the tabletop or video variety. I learned how to play Paradox games mostly from youtube comments saying what let's players needed to do better.
My house rules: -Rumours (stolen from Will Wheaton iirc). I get the players to come up with rumours about their characters before their first session. They need enough to Equal the number of players in the party including them plus one. So I have a party of 5, they call come up with 6 rumours. 1/3 to 1/4 depending on party size (in this instance I say 2 out of 6) are false. The rest are true. I them distribute these among the players to encourage intrigue, backstory and keep them guessing. It develops interesting dynamics -Called shots: if a player says they'll try to take a shot at a particular part of the enemy (say the eye) I will make a secondary AC number in my head that's higher than their regular AC. If the player beats the regular AC but not the second, they hit the target but not specifically where they want. If they hit both, they have a specific impact say stabbing an eye will blind, a hamstring will cripple them.
That called shots rule seems a little broken, just because there's no reason not to make a called shot. If you're just as likely to hit as normal while also getting chance to debuff the enemy, why wouldn't you do that for every attack? You could give a small penalty to called shots, like a -2 to-hit or maybe missing completely provokes an attack of opportunity, just something that makes sure called shots aren't strictly superior to a regular attack
I hate called shot. It’s just more dice rolls and more complex and there’s usually a meta to it like eyes or neck and either it isn’t balanced out by both how easy it is to hit and how effective it is. And it’s also very frustrating and unfair when used against the player Certain enemies deserve called shots because they’re huge unique in anatomy and difficult to cripple in a single attack. Hydra, beholder, and kraken. But not constructs and people and bears. It’s hard to do called shots on something with 2 arms 2 legs 2 eyes and one neck. Especially when they’re wearing armor. Oh you’re going to aim for the head and they have a helmet? Or the leg but they are in plate? No, just make normal attacks, if you hit you hit.
@@alliebonesVODs the main mechanical problem with the rule is that it's not a D&D rule! It's a hack of an apocalypse engine rule that works much better with consequence rolls than with skill rolls. I would personally adapt it that called shot provokes an attack of opportunity if you fail the roll, and does half damage if you succeed against primary AC.
Quick thoughts. If you score a critical, you can forego your double damage, and add another effect to the enemy, like blinded, or numb, or lop off a limb. Which could lower AC or Dex. I think AC and any check should be lowered the further you get into battle. Not a lot or all the time. But if you come out with less health, and nothing other ailing you so what. Just take a healing potion.
Whenever my players want something implemented, like called shots, I remind them that anything I let them do, my NPCs will do back to them A LOT. I ask them to think about what a big group of bandits all shooting at their heads with bows and crossbows could do, what their named boss whos higher level than the party with the GWM feat and swinging a greataxe can do with called shots. I have never had a party choose to use called shots after I explained that.
I like the concept of travel montages from 13th Age. So often in D&D, play slows down during travel, and most DMs either gloss over it, or don’t know how to make travel interesting even if they go through the motions of checking for monsters or whether the party gets lost. In the travel montage, the DM turns to the player on their left or right, and says “tell me one challenge or problem you had on the journey.” Then the player next to the first describes how their character did something to solve that problem or meet that challenge. That same player describes the next problem or challenge. You go around the group until everyone has described a problem and also a way their character did something clever or cool to get everyone out of the jam they go into. It goes quickly, it gives players a chance to fill out the world and/or their backstory, and as a side effect it helps build relationships between the characters as they tackle problems during their journey.
I tried to do this to summarize downtime (they went on lil downtime adventures) and players were rather "deer in headlights" / unresponsive. Any thoughts on how to coax more out of them?
I had the same issue as Sam on this one, I started suggesting stuff but I end up doing most of the talking bar 2 of my players who are seasoned. What I do now is good old hex crawl. Each hex is 10 miles the party can move 3 hexes a day. Each hex they roll a d100 on my encounter table each encounter is non-combat, but many encounter have 3-6 extra options so if they get the same thing twice I have a different encounter for them. In the extra options there is combat encounters. I have also made a camping system that uses a skill challenge when they are camping in the wilderness or a dungeon. It has made travel a very strong aspect of the game.
@@granttrain3553 d100 with 3-6 variant encounters each is a pretty crazy table! Any chance it is something you could share? Also, details on that camping system?
One of my favorite RP / character building mechanics my DM used is similar to the campfire stories idea. Every other time we took a long rest we share "the first time I..." stories relevant to what was happening around us. Session one was "the first time I slept outside". After fighting goblins it was "my first fight" stories. It was a great way to learn more about the other characters and really helped flesh out who we were traveling with.
So a fun little "minigame" I decided to use in my games is one for lockpicking. As far as I am aware it's not posted anywhere so this is how it goes: It's actually the "mechanic" used in a drinking game called Bus Driver. You put 5 cards in a row face up and then the person picking the lock has to guess if the card you pull from the top of the deck is going to be higher or lower than the card on the table. If they guess correctly you move to the next card and so on untill you guess all 5 cards. If the number is the same just make them guess again for that card. But if they guess wrong then they fail to pick the lock or whatever you chose to happen. Each card kinda represents one of those little pins you have to position correctly in a padlock for example. But if you want to make the lock easier or harder to pick just tweak the number of cards they need to guess. Idk if this is already a common rule so I decided to share here.
I like the idea - and I like how the cards parallel the tumblers / pins on the lock - but does this mean that someone with expertise and 20 dex will be no different from someone with no proficiency and 8 dex? Because with a d20 they would have different modifiers by at least 10 and that's a big difference.
@@trevorvanderwoerd8915 You could say that they have a number of wrong guesses equal to their dex modifier before they fail the entire lock. So if two people one with dex 10 and one with dex 20 tried to pick the same lock the first would have to get every card right on the first try, while the second could guess the card wrong 5 times before failing. idk how you would deal with leveling the playing field for people who have score below 10, but maybe you could just say they cant even attempt to pick it.
So what I do when I run, for AC, I'm not big on the all or nothing aspect of it, so I tell players that if they're attacked and their AC is say, 15, and the creature attacking them rolls a 15, then that attack glances. When it glances, it only kind of nicks or grazes you, and so only does half damage, and it helps new players who don't know what happens if their AC is met. Also in the last game I ran, I had the party sit under the stars and roll a CHA saving throw and the person who rolled the lowest was most in Awe of the night sky and started to talk about themselves and their past more and that really drew out some good baclstory for the characters.
Wow. I use this exact same houserule, with the exact same terminology. I thought it was original when I thought of it. Did you get this from somewhere? Or is this just an obvious thing that everyone thinks of?
My biggest hangup with starting a character was "my character is from the city, but I don't know any cities in the campaign I'll be playing. I feel too weird to make up a city and compel the DM to put it in their world." So in the handout I gave to the players, I gave them a choice of starting towns. Each town had a different kind of people in it. If they chose to be from the frigid villiage of Easford, they would automatically gain +1 to their Constitution score, since the people that live there are hardy and weathered. If they chose to be from Adwick, a shady city full of gamblers and dishonest merchants, they would get +1 to their Charisma score, since they would need to be more aware of how to get by in that kind of system.
I leave blanks for city or region names when making a new character and let the DM fill that in. Make a background vague, enough info to provide potential hooks... but nothing that makes the DM change the world. "Druid is from ______________ (farming village) where his druid clan has been helping farmers be more efficient (and thus not need to clear more forest)"
I don't like my players to start knowing every single language ever. Also, the game assumes you either know a language or you don't. That's almost never the case irl. Languages exist on a percentile die. A player’s base language automatically starts at 100%. Other languages after that will exist somewhere else on the scale which may be rolled for upon character creation. In order to become better at a certain language, you need to spend 1 day + one GP to gain 1 percentile (using either a teacher or a book of some kind). So if a player is 30% proficient in Elvish, they will need to spend 50 days and 50 Gold Pieces in order to become 80% proficient with the language. During an encounter, a player can make an Int check to try to pick up some of the language, if they succeed, they gain 1 percent proficiency in it without having to spend the gold. Whenever attempting to speak the language, a player will role a percentile dice. In order to succeed at getting their idea across, they simply need to role within their percentile score.
I really like this idea. It's not quite realistic but its a hell of a lot closer to realism. I think for an in-combat situation I would make the attempt cost some sort of action, or invoke some sort of penalty for the distraction. Assuming 1% knowledge is more than "those words sound angry". I'd also incorporate an intelligence score into the rate at which someone can learn new languages. Either by increasing the base rate of learning or making the non-combat learning process chance based as well. Something like the Keen Mind feat would also dramatically increase rate of learning.
@@gnomechewer1351 RuneQuest has a pretty solid system for languages if you're looking for inspiration. It's percentile based and gives descriptions for each 20% increment of mastery, ranging from "may only communicate things like 'please don't kill me!'" to "this is leaders, diplomats, emissary level speech. 'most beneficent greetings you most noble and pious highness". Your native tongue begins at INT x 5%, and your knowledge in any language can be raised in 5% increments by visiting sages and paying a fee based on your current knowledge level. And there's even optional rules for learning through hiring a follower that knows the language or immersing yourself in a population of native speakers.
I actually do this. I have characters friends with Rogues in the party and is actively learning thieves Cant, so he gets percintile chance of understanding the rogues in the party when they talk(I have 3 in the party)
Some of my house rules I somewhat stolen from places, and some I kinda just came up with on my own. House Rules I use off the top of my head: - Critical hit lets you roll max weapon damage + the die you normally roll for said weapon rather than double the damage dice. Shortsword for example is 1d6, rather than 2d6 you roll 1d6+6. It eliminates those poopy double 1 rolls for weapon damage when you hit, and makes them actually exciting. - Dragonborn can use their breath weapon a number of times equaling their CON mod (minimum of 1). - A rather silly meta rule that has no bearing on the game itself, but any time a pun is made, the player who made the pun takes 1d4 psychic damage. Before people tell me this is a terrible rule, please note that the PLAYER takes the damage, not the character. Like I said, stupid silly rule. - An actual rule this time, I tend to borrow this rule from Taliesin Jaffe when making NPCs, and that I use the seven dwarves method when it comes to coming up with quirks. I roll a d8, 1-7 is a corresponding dwarf, an 8 allows me to roll twice and combine the rolls. So if for one NPC I roll say a 5 (which for my rule is Grumpy), I can have an NPC who's kind of a dick to people. And if I roll an 8, I roll twice more, this time getting a 1 and a 7 (Doc & Dopey in my case), then I get an NPC who's very smart but kinda scatterbrained in social situations. And the final house rule is not exactly a house rule, but I pretty much use Dael's SPERM method of coming up with settlements.
One house rule that I do is that during character creation I have my players choose what month they are born in and that gives them a +1 to a specific ability score and proficiency in a skill. Another rule is that I award inspiration points where my players can use them to "buy" feats which its price will go up exponentially for every feat they buy. Like, 1st feat = 5 points, 2nd feat = 25 points and so on. This is addition to the normal 5e feat rules, not a replacement. Both of these rules together can make for some really themed characters.
I bought a pound of dice that came with 2 d30s. My DM decided to incorporate them into our campaign. Once per session, we can choose to replace any d20 roll with the d30. All the players must unanimously agree to use it. Skill/Ability Checks and Saves add their bonuses as normal. If used on an Attack Roll, anything 20 or above counts as a crit. Nothing will beat the time we were on trial, trying to convince a council of elders why our sorcerer should keep this valuable artifact he had. He made a long speech and it all came down to 1 Charisma roll. We decided to use the d30 and he rolled a NATURAL 30! We got to keep the artifact.
I use Matt Colville's trick of assigning a player damage tracker. I'm not sure if you'd call that a house rule or more of a lifehack, but it makes my life easier and I think it makes it easier for the tactician players in my group to strategize. I also have something that I'm not sure if I stole it from somewhere and forgot or if I was just inspired by FATE, but every campaign I choose some broad topic that I expect the party to be learning about or dealing with a lot over the course of the story, and then I ask every player to send me at least one (though more are welcome) rumor that their characters have heard about that topic. I then spin any that strike my fancy into quests, setting elements, etc. And the best part is, because the players don't know the reliability of the rumors, they can't metagame. Even if they get clear confirmation that their rumor is grounded in reality, they have no way to tell what parts are exaggerated or flat out wrong. And I think it's also fun for a player to know that something they did helped me tell them a cool story.
My only problem with your last statement is that your players are the only reason you're telling a story. As a TH-camr I watch always says "Not my baby, our Frankenstein". The way your players decide to go or decide to play is what tells the story. You, the DM, are the narrator. You are the bard seeking the story. You're Jaskier from The Witcher - constantly trying to write a new song but you always need inspiration. What I'm trying to say is - if you're the DM who thinks that you're the only reason your players are playing D&D, think again.
I have a house rule. The DM may from time to time pass you a note. You are free to read the contents of the note to anyone BUT you MAY NOT EVER show them the note. The note may or may not have anything written on it. Sometimes they are just nonsense like "you saw a crow land on a branch", sometimes it just says "Please respond to this note". Since the players can never show the note they can claim that it says whatever they want and it builds a certain level of paranoia while keeping information that would legitimately be private to a player actually private. If I need to tell a player something long I just take them to another room but I don't like doing that as it leaves most of the players just sitting. You should also prepare notes prior to the game when possible to speed things up.
Homebrew Epic Death So in DND a game of Heroes, nobody wants to die ... unless it's awesome. During a tough story boss fight a player fails drops to 0 hp. On his second failed death save, I give them the choice: You can risk dying and hope your fellow team mates pull together enough coin to maybe wish you back ... OR you get to go out in a blaze of glory, no resurrection, few dice, all narrative. I generally have a song i associate with each on of my player characters. That song is that players 4 minutes and I generally throw something in that lets to go a little super sayin. Describe how you beat the boss, slump to the ground and give a heart felt goodbye to your companions. Then your song ends ... and your character is gone but no one will forget them !
sorry, i know this is a really old comment, but this is so fascinating... so do they just auto-kill the boss or how does that work if they decide to sacrifice themself??
@@teeny_ducken Hey ! So the last time this happened in game my players had amazingly screwed up with their decision making. Tabaxi druid went down, boss was getting ready to land the final blow and the rest of the party look determined to try save her but the odds were staked too highly against them. I explained to the Druid player that she could either risk rolling another death save but what was likely was a different character would die trying to save her OR I could end the fight now, and everybody survives but no magic would ever bring her back. In a heart beat she picked sacrifice. I described how the site of her death immediately turned into a garden and the boss was consumed be vines and roots. Now a giant tree marks the site. I'll admit there were tears but next game she rolled a cleric and the other characters in the party still talk about her and blame themselves for what happened. 10/10 my favorite game
Personally, I like my own "stress" system. I created it to be a less punishing version of the exhaustion mechanic. It's very simple: for every 3 levels of stress you accumulate, you gain one level of exhaustion. If you ever get to 6 levels of stress, you get a permanent quirk (anxiety, greedy, etc...). If you get to 10 levels of stress, you have a mental breakdown. I give out stress for stuff like seeing an eldritch horror, fleeing a battle, reading disturbing texts, and so on. You loose stress by resting (lose 2 for long, one for short), drinking in a tavern, or doing anything that would calm and relax your character. You can think of this as the opposite of inspiration; giving out penalties for screwing up, or making your character do something that would mess with their head. So far, it has done a good job at encouraged roll-playing, as a real character. But that might be partially due to they type of game I'm running (Lots of spooky and gross stuff).
i think i'll steal this one, i really like it a lot and i think it can make being knocked out feel more impactful at a certain level of play ( having many people with heals on my party ) without feeling too harsh
@@donaldcedar7574 I've never played darkest dungeon. From what I've seen of it, it's stress system acts as more of a second health bar that you can't heal as easily. From what I can tell, in darkest dungeon when you max out your stress bar, your character gets some kind of permanent debuff to encourage you to drop that character. My system is just designed to encourage roll-playing, any quirk you get doesn't actually effect your combat ability. The system I made is a shallow immitation of how real people can suffer from stressful situations. So it's not that I copied off darkest dungeon, we both are just immitating real life.
@Donald Cedar Also everything you can ever think of has been done in some form before so we could all stand around all day for the next fifty thousands years stating that everything anyone makes as an inventor, engineer and creator, is all stolen from somewhere else. Everything comes from somewhere. The latest video games wouldn't exist without building off of those that came before them. It's not stealing from a single game you saw. That single game is hardly the first game ever to implement any form of stress meter. Horror TTRPG's have been doing things like that for twenty years long before Darkest Dungeon. Did Darkest Dungeon steal it from them? Who knows. Darkest Dungeon is a straight up brutal D&D-esque dungeon crawl with no holds barred and gritty rules. Without D&D, Darkest Dungeon most probably would not exist. So did Darkest Dungeon just steal everything from D&D? How about Skyrim? Divinity Original Sin? Pathfinder both the ttrpg and the game? Nothing is truly original. The only problem is if you're literally just lifting an exact system from something else and claiming it's your own. That's shitty. But being inspired by some game mechanic you saw elsewhere and then putting your own version of it in your game? That's called progress. I had only ever played D&D and only started in the past few years and I began making my own tabletop rpg's using D6 dice pool system and came up with an entire means of realistically simulating medieval esque combat. Thought I'd invented it all, a whole new type of system. Then I found some modern games coming out through Geek and Sundry that were doing more or less the exact same thing albeit sometimes with d10's or whatever instead, but same idea and then realised that a game that came out literally like 20 years ago did exactly the type of system down to a tee nearly as what I was creating. I had never known that such an idea even existed as I had only ever played D20, D&D. I knew there were d6 type systems, but knew not how they worked or that there were any like the type I was making. Point is, just like pyramids popped up all over the world and swords, spears and shields popped up all over the world, often no matter how great or unique your idea, someone else has already thought of it.
I have a travel system that's designed to encourage character interaction. I use a simple d6 table to determine the nature of the interaction (a hidden roll, or even volunteers help determine the main two participants in the scene). Based on the outcome of the die, the scene may ask for one character to tell a story from their past, maybe bring up a story/joke/or song from their culture, or even play out a silly interaction based on a subject for them to talk about. My players love this because not only does it get them into role playing in character and legitimately bonding on that level (not to mention providing a great opportunity for characters with a shared backstory to round-robin a few stories from their common past...), but it also made travelling interesting for them in a Canterbury Tales/road trip-like kind of way!
"...Or do I put me figuring out that I wasn't using a mic, then setting up the mic, and asking Rhys what I should do actually IN THE VIDEO?" Honestly, you went with the best option.
Yeah, I've implemeted Matt Mercer's ressurection rules in one of its variants. Basically, whenever someine tries to ressurcet a creature - he has to roll spellcasting ability check for it. DC os different for different ages. DC of ressurecting a puppy (or for Christ sake a baby) is only 5. But for an old man it would be 15. DC is increased with every ressurection plus such powerful magic gets attention from the gods, and they may give some permanent penalty to the ressurected, or just put them on a list. And whenever they have something that needs to be done - the list comes into play.
I've never had to use it but my idea was to either resurrect the player by sunrise or sunset and if not, go to the church and then the party is Indebted To The Church, probably leading to an interesting quest later on
One of the rules I DM with (and can't quite remember where I got it from) is the Ultimate Success/Ultimate Failure rule. On any check/saving throw with advantage or disadvantage, the player rolls twice regardless of their first role. If they role two 20's, its an ultimate success, if it's two 1's, its an ultimate failure, and the result of that throw is scaled accordingly. Say, for example, someone is attempting to pick a padlock with disadvantage. If they rolled two 20's, they'd not only unpick the lock, but be able to keep the locking mechanism, and would later find the matching key for it, giving them a useful item they would not have gained with a single nat 20.
I haven't had much need for house rules, but the one thing I do have is that magic is flavored towards the caster's disposition; for example, beastform. The whole party that I'm DMing is on their way to undeadness (which is the giant blinking story hook that started the campaign :D), so she can only take undead forms of the animal, with rotting bits and pieces missing and/or hanging out, giving her advantages on intimidation checks. :D
That's a great idea. Always encourage players to flavour their characters. A good question to ask a player with a 'caster PC: "What colour is your magic?"
The house rule that got shared the quickest among various gaming groups in our area is rolling with the GM for HP. It's sorta like the reroll on 1, but GM and player both roll, player chooses which roll to keep.
The "old school" method was to give the player a maximum HP number for Level ZERO (where they learned their trade) and then have them roll for 1st Level. This gave old AD&D Character's 10 Hit Dice before they transitioned to only getting a couple of points per level at 10th (and beyond).
Straight up a must have for a DM is Stronghold Merchants and Revised Shopping Catalog. RSC- organizes the worlds most common items, stuff you can find in the players hand book such as armor, weapons, tools and so on, into a list separated out by shop. No more wondering what’s inside a general store or what a blacksmith might be selling. Best part it lists the items selling and buying price along with a check mark of wether the shopkeeper has it based on location (village/town/city). There’s a great tavern section in the back along with world building description listed in the beginning if needed. SM- is another like RSC where it lists and separates items based on seller but this one if meant for traveling merchants to give your world flavor. Using dice you roll to see Who they are, What they sell and at what quality. I’ve even made my own ledger with rules about rolling for a traveling market that the city has, swapping out merchants as they leave the market for a new town.
Starfinder's encumbrance system is very similar to what you described. Most items have 1 "bulk", heavy items have 2 or more bulk, and lightweight items count as 1/10th bulk. You can carry up to half your Strength score in bulk without being encumbered, and your total limit is your Strength score.
I use different sets of houserules depending on the adventure and group, because I always feel too sheepish about using more than a couple at a time. One I use almost every game, though, is the Silver Standard. The coinage in the game is converted from factors of ten to a hundred. If something had a gold price in the book, that's now its price in silver. Super simple to convert on the fly, new players don't even notice. Plus, gold is well out of reach for commoners, which means the players actually straighten up and pay attention to mention of it. Most people's coinpouches jingle with copper and silver. I like that. Other houserules include: Drugs make your magic go awry in dangerous but sometimes useful ways. While drunk, levitation spells lift you and let you control horizontal movement, not vertical. Turn Undead brings low CR creatures back from the dead. Magic weapon permanently makes your sword rustproof. Teleport works beyond its normal limits, but unpredictably. Hallucinogens are truly dangerous to high level spellcasters, and those around them. I've also adopted a bunch of stuff from older editions. The AD&D DMG has been almost as useful as the 5th Ed one to me. Chance of divine intervention for the pious; I've translated a bunch of spells(and some spells like goodberry I've rolled back to their historical effect if it makes more sense to me or serves a purpose like survival gameplay), unnatural aging when you cast stuff like restoration spells or wish, potion miscibility, AD&D turns and rounds for dungeon exploration(codifying that searching and mapping a room takes ten minutes really frees up the ritual caster to do something cool).
...is the drug/magic connection a reference to Rogue and/or Nethack? Because they had a similar mechanic if you read certain scrolls while confused or hallucinating.
@@BigusGeekus Yup! I've snuck other nethack homages in, too. The rogue in my game bought and ate a tin of floating eye meat once. They've had a couple of one-use figurines. The wizard has the Eye of Aethiopica. And they just met an NPC paladin from a far land, with the strange name of Pae-an Val-Hum-Fem-Law.
My most-used house rule I have is not doing monster turns all at once; they're individually added to the initiative order like anyone else. Originally it was by mistake, but when it was pointed out I decided the actual rules were stupid and dumb and they wouldn't get invited to parties, so I kept doing my own thing The other one involves killing a sleeping character. A knife to the throat is going to be lethal whichever way you look at it, so instead I had the player make a stealth check to not alert anyone else. That was made up on the spot, though, I might tweak it slightly.
Regarding the AngryGM. When I took over GMing for a group I've played with off and on for a couple decades now, our previous GM pointed me towards his site. I can honestly say that it's the single most useful resource for getting a handle on ... _"WTF am I even supposed to be doing here?"_ that I have so far encountered. He's the absolute best at breaking RPGs down into the fundamentals. Yes, he's a bit of a troll on Twitter, but his defence is that a) he doesn't engange with people who don't engage with him and b) the thing was a dumpster fire before he got there. Which is pretty fair, TBH. The "Click Rule" is a classic example of him noticing that something in the game doesn't appear to be experienced as fun by players, putting his finger on why it's not fun (namely, players experience them as an XP "tax" that needs to be paid to reach the _real_ encounters) and providing a fix. The rule turns traps from a thing that just happens to your character into an immediate need for you to _make a decision._
Pretty much the only house rules I've made up myself are: 1. Swords and polearms can do both slashing and piercing damage. I assume slashing unless a player tells me they are using piercing, whether in a specific instance or as their character's usual style. This effectively means that there is no mechanical difference between shortswords and scimitars. I made this change due to swords and polearms being specifically designed as weapons that can be used either way. It just seems odd to me that RAW says you can't cut with a shortsword or stab with a halberd.* 2. "Rapier" has been broadened to a category of sword I have designated as "sideswords". Of course, a player can still decide that their character's sidesword is a rapier, but this way they can also say it's an arming sword, a sabre, a cutlass, a jian or a saif. Elves have proficeincy with this weapon instead of longswords. Same rules as rapier, taking into account the previous rule. I made this change due to not wanting players to feel like they were locked in to a weapon as culturally specific as the rapier if they wanted to play a DEX-based sword-wielder. *I mean, halberds literally have a spear point attached above the axe head bit. It's not there for decoration.
My only complaint about the angry gm is that his articles are so so friggin long. I find his points get lost in the length of the discussion. That being said the click rule is pure genius.
@@nickwilliams8302 not ALL swords and pole arms are designed with two methods of damage though. I would do this for advanced players who choose to pick a historically accurate weapon for sure. But maybe I would drop the damage of the "alternate" damage type by one die size. So like, a halberd with a pointy top does 1d8 piercing. I REALLY like your idea for changing rapiers though (but really it is more of a flavor thing). I would personally prefer less weapons overall and generic weapon "catagories" instead just like you describe.
Angry GM blocked me on Twitter, which is no real loss to me. I still read, appreciate, use, and share his stuff. But there's not much defending his personality issues or his verbosity. His Five Rules for Dating My Teenaged Skill System series is still the best DMing advice I've ever read, and his encounter-building stuff is up there with The Alexandrian.
I can't remember where I got the idea from (if anyone knows please post it as a reply), but I tweaked someones idea of spicing up knowledge rolls. Let's say the party hears about a monster or wants to track one down and kill it, I make them roll an appropriate knowledge check. Depending on their result I allow them to pick cards from 1 of 3 decks. Each deck has cards relevant to the monster, some are false (e.g. Vampires can only be killed with cuddles), and some are true (e.g. Vampires can walk in the light but in a significantly weaker state). Each deck has a certain percentage of true and false cards. A person rolling poorly will draw from the deck with the most false information and the reverse is true for a player rolling well. The key here is that there is still a possibility that a player pulled a true fact despite rolling poorly, and vice versa. This uncertainty can lead to interesting in game social interactions. I also tend to tweak which deck they draw from depending on other factors such as being a local to the region, having fought a similar beast in their backstory, etc. When doing so I usually jump the players choice of deck up or down 1 accordingly after they've rolled. Obviously I rarely do this for a single creature, unless that's the point of the one shot. But I like to do this when people travel to a new area or when starting a new campaign. That way every player has a few cards with random lore of the region (e.g. social norms, laws, culture, common monsters, myths and legends, etc) which they can refer to. It takes a bit of prep, but once you've set it up, it really helps to level the playing field between new players and veterans as to the lore of the setting you are using. And if I'm feeling lazy I just use a single deck of cards with half the cards being false, and the half true and make the players draw from it. Edit: Corrected some typos and a few other mistakes
Ada, Chafe Yeah, it''s quite a versatile system that can be used for any sort of knowledge, from which local plants are cure headaches to the local lord is called Jeff to ghosts can only be put to rest if their corpses are sprinkled with rosewater. I also like to sneakily introduce plot hooks through the cards. I mean, just because they appear to be shuffled, doesn't mean they are ;)
DM: a pressure plate grinds slowly to the floor beneath your footfalls, what do you do? Player: oh no! I drop to the floor. DM: you're already going there, it is a pit trap after all. This is the ultimate lower move for a mean DM, thank you.. I'm stealing it.
I think a better way to envision the point system would be to convert the normal encumberance rules into points. So a Character with 8 Strength can carry 40 points before being encumbered. This allows you to get slightly more reasonable numbers for heavy things.
I've stolen a couple of homebrew rules! Most recently was yours, about assigning party members roles during overland travel. That really made things more engaging for them, and my wonderful group was happy to roleplay little snapshots of them performing their duties, some better than others. :D Other than that, I think the biggest one is Matt Colville's rules about skill checks. I encouraged my group to, before I ask them to make a skill check, to justify using a skill to perform a task. So instead of using athletics to climb the tree, they use persuasion to get a farmer to lend them a ladder. Basically, I want them to think outside the box, and so far, they seem to really enjoy it! I do say no on occasion, but I think it's worked out in the end. Additionally, for certain things, I don't let players attempt it unless they're proficient, or if I do, I'll set unequal DCs for proficient and non-proficient players. I think it helps them feel more useful as part of the team!
RPG's are a derivative medium. We all "steal", but really we are paying homage to tropes we want to see come up in our games, to things we love. Good game mechanics are information, and as Gibson taught us, information wants to be free. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all, and using someone else's house rules are a great sign of respect. Good video, subbed. Keep up the good work!
One of my favorite stolen house rules its the one about critical hits, i mean, its so underwhelming when you hit a nat 20 and the damage you roll its like, 1 so you end up doing 2 damage with a crit, and that defeats the whole purpose of a critical hit. the rule i use in my campaign its that, instead of rolling the damage dice and do a x2, you take the max damage from the attack and you add the roll you got from your dice, that way even if you roll a 1 in the damage it will feel like a crit, like an important damage was made
I have a character creation “worksheet” that I hand out to all of my players at the start of each new campaign. It contains information about the region, such as the style of local government, the name of the ruler (or council body), the name of the capital city, skills common to the region that can be added to the character’s class skills (we play 3.5, there are 5 regional skills and the player chooses 3 of them), a bonus feat they can choose (indicative of the type of people common to the region, there are 3 choices and the player picks 1), the predominant religion, as well as available playable races and classes, and the predominant alignment of the region.
A guy I knows likes to write a fake "newspaper" for his setting. During offgame downtime, he writes this fictional bulletin with a few articles in it regarding what's happening in the world the players inhabit. It has quite a few pros: -It can be an entertaining way to infodump -It gives life to a world by having many things happen, both relevant and not to the main plot -Can be fun to make an old NPC pop up for whatever reason, or old PC if players have retired them -Makes the time waiting between sessions much more bearable, and hypes the next one -It's entirely optional and reading it is not a requirement but he likes to sprinkle a lot of lore and foreshadowing between the news so everyone always reads it willingly It's obviously very time consuming for the DM, but it's a good tool to use with groups very invested in the world and that can manage to get together to play only rarely. I'm sure someone could adapt this idea to fit even different kinds of groups, the key concept is making the infodump fun.
As far as I know, this is an original house rule. Spell components: I'm not going to force the players to learn the verbal components to the spells since that slows the game down. The first time the spell is cast, the player writes down their own magic words and the tone of voice when casting. From that point on, the player must say the magic words in exactly the same way as the first casting scenario, no matter the current context or company. Obviously, if you're stealthing about and have to mutter "Abra Kadabra," you risk losing your stealthiness. Leave it to the players to be creative with their components and watch them curse their own names as Past Him/Her screwed them over in this moment.
I would add that, depending of the spell LvL, you would need an amount of "Magic Word" to complete your magic component. So a first LvL Spell Burning Hands May be "Pyross!!" But when you blast that fireball, you may have to shout "Omna Incinarae Pyross!!!" Get that sweet Mary Poppins "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" going
I made a house rule the other night. If someone uses Spare the Dying, (which means the injured character is stable and no longer needs to make death saving throws), they can still make the death saving throws optionally for a chance to get up off the ground. Otherwise, theres usually just one character whos stable, but bored on the ground. Its a bit of a risk vs reward, so they could still die for real, but id theyve only rolled saves, they wont have to feel like theyve gone to waste! Also I usually allow nonlethal attacks from all attacks. (With the exception of things like Power World Kill, or the One hit kill Monk Attack). Ive played with people who really didnt want their characters to kill, and thought 'fuck it' Why make the game inaccessible to them?
I mean, I dont understand why you cant? Every hand held weapon known to mankind has a "non-lethal use". be it a pommel strike on an arming sword or a buttstroke from an M-16. except those pesky double bladeed daggers. hahaha
@@bassmanjla Sure, but i do sort of get it with something like a fireball spell, which attacks everything indiscriminately. Raw states All melee weapons can be used non lethally, but i also allow spells and ranged weapons.
@@dr.whippersnatch7200 Sure almost every weapon has a non-lethal way to use it but those uses will (and I think should) do significantly less damage. If a person (player or character) wants to abstain from killing but still subdue a target they should specialize in unarmed, improvised weapons, creative use of potions/spells, or a nice solid blackjack. A large sword wielding paladin will not be as effective with a pommel as they would the pointy end.
I say that you can declare "non-lethal" damage any time as long as you can describe it. You declare before rolling. On a critical hit, they take regular damage though; so you risk hitting them hard enough to kill them with the flat of your sword.
I loved the "click" idea, it simulates instictive split second reaction of a person facing danger naturally which makes the game much more realistic. Inventory rule is not bad, but I think it becomes unnecessery once the party acquires a bag of holding.
@@mathewbyfield1004 That is how I (plan) to run it next game. Mundane Backpacks give you +1 or +2 carry weight. Magic bags give you a bunch depending on rarity. Wagons and pack animals get like 50 points (but can't come with you into dungeons!)
I stole a version of my travel rules from the Rollplay Westmarches game and something Matt Colville mentioned in one of his videos about random encounters. It has developed as our campaign as gone one from a way to go day by day and find out what happens slowly to a method of fast traveling. The current variation is for every day of travel you pick who is leading the party and they roll a skill, Athletics, Stealth, or Survival. The skill you use determines how you are traveling and grants certain bonuses. Athletics has you traveling faster, Stealth is avoiding detection, Survival is being more careful. Based on how well you roll gets you extra effects, like safer camping, finding useful stuff on your trip, ignoring the Con Save everyone has to roll for traveling quickly, etc. Also for each day, I roll a d12, on a roll or 11 or 12(except when you are using survival) to determine if there is a random encounter. This isn't always a fight and I've taken a page from Old School DnD where they could come across a traveling merchant on the road, a person in need of help, someone that runs across their camp at night, or something that wants to kill them. I theme it however appropriate based on where they are, but I don't have a list of things that could be encountered, I don't plan that much. From levels 1 thru 4, we wanted a much more incremental game where the minutia of traveling and feeding ourselves was a bigger deal. At this point we were still tracking exp and hadn't switched to milestones yet. The higher our levels got the less interesting that got and we just wanted a way to get from place to place. We still use it to inject random things and will pause occasionally when someone wants to RP a camp scene, but we have started adding up how many days it will take to get from place to place and roll that many dice instead of RPing the start and end of every day and rolling when we break camp. One of the other things I use, is the Dungeon World method of having handy tools. In our current game it is really only used by our herbalist, but the potential is there for other people to take advantage of it. She uses her Herbalist Kit to find plants and make simple items from them, the easy way to do this is the say and Herbalist Kit has a certain amount of charges and buying supplies or finding stuff while traveling can replenish those charges. Whenever she needs to make a basic healing item(typically a slap patch that heals 1d4+1), she just marks off a charge. The Warlock needs some herbs to summon her imp again? 2 charges. Need to make a poison someone can apply to their weapon? 1 charge per d6 of damage you want it to deal. Some of the uses require a skill roll and the results can diminish on bad rolls or get bonuses on good rolls. I also use clocks from Powered by the Apocalypse and Blades in the Dark games to track progress on character stuff. Whenever they are working on a long term project like training a skill, learning a language, studying about a culture, etc I tell them to start a clock with an arbitrary amount of segments based on how difficult I think the task is or how long I think it should take. They fill in segments as they RP doing the thing or make rolls in their free time to work on it. Also luck rolls, whenever I don't want to make a decision on something, I'll have the character most invested in the outcome roll a d20. I set the number they have to beat to get their way. Typically it's just 10 or better, but if I think it's unlikely to go their way I may set it at 15 or more. If it's something I would give them better odds on than a coin flip I just give it to them, it's not worth leaving up to chance.
I love that travel idea. Depending on the characters and situation I would allow the non-leader to pick a skill as well that might do something. For example; Leader picks athletics. Player 2 picks history because the party is looking for signs of an ancient civilization. If player 2 does well it gives them clues that they are on the right track.
I use a set of Fate dice the way you use luck rolls. If they ask if the room contains a particular item, I roll the Fate dice, +'s are good things, -'s are bad things and blanks are when I decide.
got fate points from somewhere: you have playernumber +1 tokens on the table. at any point a player may spend one (give it to the gm) to a) encounter b) change fate c) reroll encounters are what they sound like. on a high roll there might be a helpful npc, on a low roll there might be an enemy around the corner with a dagger with the crest of a certain noble house, as long as it progresses the story change fate: things are certainly going, but they are not going well or where the players want them to go. roll and depending on the roll, things happen. high roll means things might start going well or the characters get ambushed with overwhelming force by the villain they seek, but then taken into his secret lair and given a monologue and a slowly filling sand chamber but being left alone a low roll ... well maybe the same but the villain remembers to take their weapons and magicitems the roll itself is secondary, the main part is that something changes (which can keep games moving if people get stuck) rerolls are the lamest but can be important sometimes
If my players get a nat 20 on a skill challenge i make them reroll and if they get 19/20 on that they get a perma plus one to that skill but only when doing that same thing. Do a dwarven architecture check and get the double 20 perma plus one to knowledge about the same thing because you found it slightly interesting. Double 20 when breaking down a door? you get a perma plus one because your body figured out how to break them a bit easier. Double 20 on pickpocketing a tiefling you notice how they walk in relations to their tail to learn to pick pocket just that race better. etc etc.
For playing high fantasy high magic campaigns I personally found combat to be more dynamic when doing away with the one-spell-one-cantrip rule in the PHB and simply only used the action economy as the only limitation for what spells could be cast during a turn. It made combat more dynamic because the *bad guys* could also use it.
The one thing to be careful about is if you have a sorcerer with the quickened spell metamagic feature. Things can get quickly out of hand if their are only 2-3 encounters before a long rest.
@@Birbucifer Oh basically in the PHB, the rules around spellcasting state that if you cast a levelled spell as a bonus action, the only other spells you can cast on your turn are cantrips. You can't action spell, bonus action spell. I ignored that restriction and let my players cast as many spells as their action economy would allow them, providing they didn't violate the casting times of them. So for instance they could cast Fireball with their action, Misty Step with their bonus, when under the RAW they could only cast one *or* the other, but not both.
@@TheWalkerboh65 The sorcerer in the party retrained into Wizard upon realising the rules around multiclassed spell-casting and the discrepancies between spellslot levels and spells of a level they could actually cast, so that problem never arose :P
TheKazragore Ah I see, I didn’t realize that restriction existed, I have a Phoenix Sorcerer in a game that I DM for and I just kinda let her do her thing and no problems have arosen so far.
Charlie's House Rules: Starting a character: OL People have HP = Con (no bonus). So, fighter with 12 Con starts at 1st level with 12+10+1 = 23 HP. Crit Hit Table: Includes tripping, free attacks, damaging armor, disarming opponents, headshots, etc via a 2d6 table Crit Miss Table: Includes hit other, sling weapons, drop weapons, opponent get opportunity attacks, slips, prone, etc... via a 2d6 table Training Costs: If you hire a trainer for your new level (between 1-10 only) you get ADVANTAGE on your HP roll. Cost 50g for 1st level, 10 for 2nd, ... 500 for 10th Special Armor Rules: Same basic rules, but you can wear chain shirt and leather pants. Helms matter esp Crit Headshots. All ACs end up within 1 or so of the normal chart. Shields have HP. Miss by shield value, shield takes dmg. Round/Kite shield = 50 HP. Buckler = 25 HP Mounted Combat Rules: Charges and setting for charges = 2x dmg, lances break ... DC = 2x wpn dmg vs Dmg Done... Hvy War = 1d12 ... anything > 23 pts breaks the lance. Cheers!
Know a bit late. But with Tales by the Campfire; I had the NPC's there who also drew cards. It helped flesh out the world and gave those characters some depth when they asked the PC's to help them with something. And also when Goblins attacked soon after.
I’ve been blasted for this one before, but my rule with Attunement is that you can attune to a number of items equal to your proficiency bonus. So levels 1-4 you can attune to 2 items, 5-8 three items, 9-12 four items, etc. It’s not really as overpowered as it seems since most games only ever get into the 5-8 range, with some getting into the 9-12 range. The characters are theoretically only going to find so many items requiring attunement at levels 1-4, and if they are still adventuring past 9-12 they’ve probably accumulated many cool magic items. Let them use their magic items! It’s more fun for the players and it means that you can throw bigger/scarier stuff at them!
This is also a big measure for more high magic games in 5e IMO. Faerun in 5e is a much lower magic than other editions have used. Its a largely normal world, with a bit of magical flavour in some areas. Compare to the likes of Eberron. Magic items are everywhere. Most people probably know some amount of magic. The world runs on magic and you have nations built around necromancy ect. You have magically created artificial people. It starts shutting down a bit when there are a ton of magic items around, yet your party can only use one or two at a time, can get fairly annoying. When magic items are rarer, its not as much of an issue, but when they're ubiquitous, allowing more attunement can really add to the high magic feeling. Personally, I'd look at houseruling minor and major attunement at some point, but I'd need to think through balancing it. There are a lot of cool, but mostly useless, magic items in Xanathars, yet many still force attunement as they offer some level of benefit minor benefit. Having minor attunement be for these little baubles and such that are fun to play with and can be abused from time to time, and major attunements for some of the more useful magic items like a ring of protection, Ioun stone, or staff of the magi, would have them see more use and could lead to more roleplaying, rather than them being constantly looked over as they don't compare to the more consistently useful tools the game throws at you.
I do something slightly different. At any level where a player can choose ASI or Feat, I allow the option to take an attunement slot up to a maximum of 6 (just like artificer). Honestly, I don't really find it to be overpowered at all because there are soooooooo many items in the game already which require attunement but don't provide any static bonus that it's just usually not a big deal in terms of encounter balancing. And it's a nice way to give MORE options. Magic items are huge part of the game, and heroes want to be able to do cool stuff...we should let them. I also like to homebrew lots of quirky items that give small bonuses to a skill or do something unique which doesn't necessarily influence combat but might be socially useful, so I find that it facilitates that.
I know you made this video a while back, but since you asked, one I use: • Weapon features Martial classes get left so poorly behind in the later levels, so I added a bunch of speciality moves ("martial spells"?) that can be performed with scimitars or tridents or whatnot so that suddenly that fighter or rogue can take part in the epic scale action.
Lockpicking in combat mini game. Roll four d4 simultaneously every round (including rounds for allies n enemies) Everytime one of them comes up four remove it from the pool of dice (a four means you’ve successfully locked in a pin of the lock). Once all four dice have come up four once, the lock is open. I’ll use this if it’s some kind of difficult unusual lock. Doesn’t make sense to use it everytime. Makes for some good tension, especially when the lockpicker needs someone to cover their back while the lockpicking happens.
Ooh, I also like that it kind of genuinely feels like what lock picking is like. Like, maybe you know what you're doing and are good at it, but you still sometimes come up against a stubborn pin that will. not. shelve.
MonarchsFactory you can also do it with advantage, just add more dice to the pool. But you’d still only need four 4s to open it. Like maybe it’s a rare type of lock you’ve encountered before.
Haha fun video, mishaps and shenanigans, like a D&D session. I'll probably be borrowing that campfire one as my party has some travel they'll be doing. Maybe this was only a problem because I had 4 people who could heal in my group, but things were kinda ridiculous, it felt like whack a mole, so I implemented the rule that every time after the first you're knocked out you get a level of exhaustion. Simple, but it brings a lot of tactical depth to a fight as well as making close calls more meaningful (without using those permanent injury tables which my players would hate cause my game is so edge of the wire kinda thing) and tense. So rogues don't just win every chase scene, I implemented stamina rules with the DC going up for every dash action taken in the chase scene. Gives a sense of creeping fatigue and higher tensions for everyone and encourages people who can bonus action dash to think creatively and maybe try something else some rounds. Makes the high stamina low speed characters feel like they got a chance too, so long as they can keep within eyeshot. The exhaustion gained on the failed saves are temporary and exclusive to the chase and fade pretty soon afterwards.
I usually go for a Strength or Constitution Athletics check for extended running, since you have to be conditioned to do it. Also usually stops the Rogues and Monks getting away with high speed escapes too easily.
I’ve used the Click Rule myself for quite some time. Good to finally learn who may be the originator of it. LOL I used to read the Angry GM a lot a couple years ago. His writing style is pretty cool, IMO.
Yeah, I personally like his work fine, I like to duck in and see what he's up to from time to time - but I also understand why a lot of people would be put off by the brand. And the verbose intros, my WORD, that man can write a thousand words before getting to the point!
MonarchsFactory Yes, the dude knows how to hit a word count goal! For me, that was part of the fun, reading the rambling introductions. But the dude has some REALLY good information in his posts. I was binging on his material for several months at one point (because, you know, it takes several months to read his backlog of content LOL)
A cool way to adapt tales by the campfire would be to use a Tarot/Tarokka/Harrow Deck and each player pulls a card and then tell a story based on that card. Allows for some cool variety.
Something I picked up from my DM that I use now, is bonus XP. Essentially every player is given a small amount of XP that they have to give away to another player. It can be for anything from good role playing, a funny joke, or a clever plot to just because. It helps encourge people to pay attention to each other and to role play more.
The main houserule we use in my games are for Crit 20s in combat, since it’s a bummer to crit and roll all 1s for damage. So we do this: After rolling crit 20 in combat, roll a d10 to see how effective your hit was 1- you still roll all applicable die twice 2-9 you roll once, and the 2nd roll will automatically be max damage 10- normal roll and crit rolls auto max damage This adds a little more suspense to see if those big hits really land, or if it just looks cooler than it is effective
Just a heads up, the stories around the campfire thing is lifted straight from another TTRPG game called Savage Worlds, where it's called Interludes. It's a great little mechanic and should definitely be in D&D as well. Just wanted to point it out as a commentary on the upside to trying other systems!
Tales around the campfire is an adaptation of the Interludes mechanic from Savage Worlds, right? But traps. If you haven’t already read it, try to find Traps & Treachery from Fantasy Flight’s Legends & Lairs series back during d20. (It uses the Reflex save. ;).) It’s an excellent book that goes into depth about how to describe traps in your game, how to set them off, and how players should go about disarming them. It’s a solid read, even if you’re not playing Pathfinder or 3.x. And, of course, Grimtooth’s Traps. Any of them. They’re wunderbar.
The game I am part of has a few house rules (it is a 3.5 and Pathfinder mixed type game). One is lethal and non-lethal damage. The armour you wear absorbs its AC in damage, which is sent to the character as non lethal damage, which starts at 0 and maxes at current HP. The rest hits as lethal. If you hit your max HP in Non-Lethal, things happen, if you go below your lethal in non-lethal, things happen. Another is rolling a D20 for defending against attacks. You get modifiers for things like dex etc, with 1 being a crit fail, and 20 being a crit success. You may borrow them, as they are good rules.
The old Torg role playing game (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torg) had a nice mechanic that would translate nicely into D&D , especially if combat in your game tends to descend into a dice rolling exercise. It had a pack of cards that you would draw from each turn and would give certain actions bonuses or penalties so "bonus XPs for ranged attacks", " advantage to all athletics checks" , "opponent gets disadvantage on saving throws" , "-1 to hit all round", and maybe the occasional "disadvantage on every roll". The idea is that by giving small benefits and penalties to certain actions you can nudge players to do something interesting to take advantage or avoid the effect rather then just standing there rolling to hit. "Advantage on acrobatics? then I'll roll through the trolls legs and climb up its back and set its hair on fire..."
My houserule is that creativity is always rewarded: combining spells or spell effects pretty much always work, unless the spells themselves state it doesn't or if it is too gamebreaking. When someone uses the spell Grease the spell rules say the ground becomes slippery. My players have also attempted to light the grease on fire, which I would allow. A grease fire deals 2d6 fire damage for every turn starting or ending inside a square that's on fire, which makes 4d6 the highest, if someone stays inside the fire a full turn.
Just wanted to let you know that I have been binging your videos over the past couple weeks in preparation for a D&D game that I am DMing for my friends and they have been a great help on seeing how you can take creative spins on the rules of the game. I love your D&D videos and look forward to seeing more.
I borrowed Matt Mercer's whole "taking a potion is a bonus action, instead of a full action". Just makes more sense. As for homebrews that I made - when rolling for health, I tell the players that the average is actually the minimum they can roll. Players wind up with a lot more health, this way; which I'm actually ok with.
I would go with a Diablo Approach. Hear me out You can have an item that let you have 3 potion "at reach" / as a bonus action. All these other bottles are into your backpack / as an Action That way, the player will manage which effect they want, buff or healing on hand. And it limit the number of potion they can access
i think the thing with the trap and giving the players agency is more of a added hastle, since as a player rely on my abillities given me by my class, it would be a bit harsh if by my uninformed decissions i could negate them. The inventory management i find it more a hastle than it´s worth, but that is relative to the campaign i run, if it is resource management heavy the inventory becomes relevant accordingly, but in general i keep it like the point and click adventures i dont care if the players have a waschingmaschine in their inventory or whatever so they can carry as much and many of whatever they find within certain amounts of reason, they litterally can´t carry whole dragonhords in their left pocket like guybrush threepwood. i don´t want to track the players inventory as a GM and don´t want to waste too much time on letting them manage it either. i like the idea with the cards thing, i will probably steal this one ;)
My party goes through “story cycles” every time they finish a mini adventure they get one of three things Shopping episode, Beach episode, Or cool items
*My own House Rules* 1. Human Physical Height: roll 17d6+5 inches. Anyone of abnormal height is subject to bigotry. 2. Falling damage: If falling damage is 1d6/10' fallen, irrespective of character weight, so damage by falling objects is calculated by (object weight÷character weight)×1d6 per 10' object falls. 3. Characters who put low dice rolls to charisma: you get a traumatising event for your origin with the only chance for avoidance being a successful charisma check.
I have been trying, due to my inexperience as a DM, to minimize my use of house rules, but one that I have been toying with and quite love is the 'Extra Advantage/Disadvantage' rule. I have NO idea where I got it, but the summary is thus: Extra advantages or disadvantages add +1 to the roll, up to a maximum of 5. I have been considering for some rolls, where you would normally give a character the choice between the higher of two scores (Acrobatics or Athletics is the most obvious example), instead of the initial disadvantage, asking them to roll the lower score. I don't know if that'd be too harsh or not. I might give my players the choice of taking disadvantage or the lower score.
My favorite house rule I learned at the table at my first in-person game. At the end of the session everyone participates in a go-around where we say something we liked that 1 person did. We do this until everyone has said something nice about everyone. Common variants, the person who is being complimented isn't able to say anything when it is their turn, so no explanations of their behavior. Another variant is that you can only compliment the player's or DM's roleplaying.
So a few things I do are more for flavor than mechanics, buuuut. Any class can learn Thieves Cant, so long as they have a background in criminal activity. (My cleric in my current campaign has this.) Short rests don't actually take an hour, they are more so for any reasonable amount of time without combat/tension. This is a time when they party can "take a rest" or ease their nerves. Long rests do still require camp and sleep. After/during long rests, if my players state they're doing "something" first thing in the morning, I'll give them little bonuses for such things. IE: The Fighter and Rogue decide to spar. The Fighter manages to dodge the Rogue's attack, granting a +1 to AC, while landing the hit on the Rogue, granting the rogue a +1 to HP. These bonuses only last for the day. Other examples are like Clerics being specific in their prayers may allow for a +1 to spell DCs, or Druid communing with the nearby trees/animals provides a +1 to nature/survival and such. The possibilities for this are truly endless. Players with an above average Intelligence can roll to receive some kind of "hunch" that they may have about a puzzle or really anything that could pertain to academic/pattern based observations. (This serves as the DM giving a hint about what to do.) I don't recall where I got this from, but I group encounter enemies by "type" (Spellcaster, ranged, tanks, sneaks) give the same initiative to that "type," moving them all into position at once, and rolling their attacks/actions all together. I like to color code my dice to keep it all in order, but it also provides me some "freedom" to determine what creates drama, IE, that die that was MEANT for the Barbarian and misses, just barely hits the Wizard. Players don't know which die is for who.
One house Rule that i quite liked is that your first two kits (like Alchemy kits thief's tools things like that) that your Characters get from the world (I.E. Bought from a shop, found or "Borrowed") are put in two slots that make it so that it doesn't count to weight like it was properly packed to the adventure's bag your character carries and starts with but if you lose the bag you lose the slots as well unless you get an adventure's bag which it costs more
I nerfed the crap out of lycanthropes. They can no longer inflict their curse with a simple bite or scratch( natural born/or a ritual). Instead they add poison damage to attacks that would have caused lycanthropy. I also nerfed most creatures that reproduce in a similar way. I feel like such creatures would have easily overrun any area they live in.
My house rule Is for wizards. At Lev 1 they should normally spend at least 50 gp to learn a Spell from a scroll, which Is quite expensive at Lev 1. So instead they spend 10 gp at Lev 1, 20 gp at Lev 2 and so on up to Lev 5, then we follow the normal rules since from Lev 5 characters own a bit of Gold.
You're missing the whole idea of why it's expensive. Scrolls are expensive. The ink you need to write in your spell book is expensive. And, for most people who would even think about adventuring, unless you're a rich noble who's bored and thinks you know better, you won't have much money to be learning new spells. It's like saying that we should lower the price of certain items because someone only makes $10/hr vs the person who makes $50/hr. Makes no sense. You're also not giving your PCs any reason to want to save something for later. Imagine how much more excited they are when they get a scroll of a spell they want but they hold on to if for several levels and then finally learn it because they can afford it. Feels good when you can finally afford things. With your idea, might as well make +x armor and +x weapons cheaper too. You're babying wizards, it'd only be fair. To each their own, I guess.
My twist on the tales by the fire system would be to give three cards to each player so they can choose which story to tell. Additionally, I'd say telling a story is optional, but if they do tell a story, they gain a one-time-use bonus to a d20 roll equal to the number on the card they told. For faces, you instead turn a d20 roll into that result (A=1, J=11, Q=12, K=13), allowing you to negate crit fails. And for the ace, if it was a story of pain or loss, you can turn any d20 roll into a natural 1, and if was a story of love or gain, you can turn any d20 roll into a natural 20. Also, that's totally cracked if you do it more than once every adventure or so. For my tables, I'd say it's something that happens during overland travel before reaching the site of the adventure. The players won't have another chance to gain mechanical benefits from this until the adventure is over.
Same, there is a reason you can take the average OR roll. But getting a 1 just straight sucks. Though a Barbarian I often extend this to a 2 as well. You must keep the reroll though, in my world at least. Gambling is risky after all.
Totally enjoying your authentic vlogs. It's part of your charm. As for stolen house rules, I'm planning on stealing one I saw somewhere where players can use something akin to inspiration points to say "I know someone who can help with that" or "I've got something in my pocket that could help", and then they have to describe that someone or something. Can't be game-breaking, like a +5 vorpal dagger of stabby-stabby bleeding, but something simple like a mirror, or a certain merchant in a new town that the character happens to know.
*Can attempt intimidation using any strength instead of charisma *I lifted Matt Colville's Skill challenges for transit to places (each player must make a check of their choice while describing how they use that check to help get the party there without incident. DM sets DC based on how likely that thing is to help, and the number of failures reflects how many random encounters/other setbacks they run into along the way, such as delay or loss of stealth) *XP is earned at 2 points per session (variable with level, doing cool stuff). Level up by spending XP points equal to the level you're gaining (or sum equivalent, if multiclassing) * Weapon crits deal (max damage from dice) + (normal damage from dice) + modifiers * spell crits deal normal damage from dice twice + modifiers
I always liked the Perry rule from the Holmes DnD. But I like adding if you perry with a sword and it doesn’t break, then the player gets an additional attack with the other hand doing full damage. Like a dagger. If a shield is in the other hand then it can be used to knock the combatant over or push them off the edge of a cliff, etc. This gives the player more options then just hacking all the time. Sorry my stuff is old. I haven’t played in the last 30 years or so.
I have a rule regarding magic items where there is no way to directly identify magic items. Rather they roll arcana checks which describe rough translation of runes or use detect magic to gain clues about how magic items may work. Therefore they have to learn the item's use through trial and error. Also for death and ressurection, I basically allow ressurection to allow the character to have a new set of death saving throws. But each time they are ressurected the DC goes up and they may develop a penalty to a skill roll with some death flavor text.
A very simple house rule I have fixes the Arcane Archer and makes it perhaps the most fun Fighter subclass in 5e. You can use the Arcane Shot feature as many times equal to your Int. modifier, minimum of 2 per short rest.
Houserule in my 5e games: Ability-score bonuses at character creation are not related to your race. Everyone gets a +2 and a +1, and can assign them to two different ability scores, and then they get whatever fun fluff and capabilities their race of choice gets by the rules, but no ability scores from the race. I largely went that direction because I saw my experienced players again and again having "builds" for characters in their heads, and constantly picking whatever race mechanically supported that build, rather than whatever they felt would be fun.
Meant to be read with a bit of joking sarcasm. Tone is very difficult to put in words to be read as opposed to being said. Yet equal in terms of being construed.. funny.
For currency weight and inventory, as well as the difficulty of assigning it as treasure and keeping track; just make all the coinage worth as much as the next category up, and you can either upgrade platinum to be worth 100 gold instead of 10(not my preferred option), or just make gems more commonly found and traded(raw uncut gems could even make sense as loot on creatures of all kinds, way more than coins, or loot bats. As for platinum, the reason I don't prefer making it more useful, is that, historically and even today, platinum was/is less common/valuable than gold, and silver was the more common 'wealth' coinage for most people for most of civilized history, and the wealthy used gems as easily transportable forms of condensed wealth, even so much so as to be very discreet.
You're comparing a fantasy world to real-world economics and resource availability? The reason platinum is so valuable is because not many cities/regions have access to it and it's become a precious resource.
I'm currently running four groups of three through a westmarch survival hexcrawl thing where you have to spend money to level up (no xp tracking at all). So, there is all of that. But we are using several combat house rules within this: - Shields count as a light weapon (1d4 bludgeoning) - enables offhand attacks with you shield, just like a real one. - If your attack roll is greater than double the targets AC then you score a critical hit - this makes it feel like your weapon skill matters and helps you clear out minions. - If your damage roll is greater than the targets HP maximum then you cleave them in two and the excess damage is carried over to any other enemy within range - ie: if there are two goblins within range (max hp of 7) and you hit the wounded one who has only 3 hp left with a damage roll of 9, then that goblin is killed and dismembered and his buddie takes the 6 remaining points of damage - this lets those overpowered killing blows go to use and just feels badass. - Channelling spells - if you use the ready action to hold a spell and at the start of your next turn you still have the spell held, you can use your action to make a spellcasting check to ''channel'' the spell, adding one spell level to the held spell and setting a new trigger for the readied spell, the DC is 10 plus the spells current level, if you fail you lose the original spell slot as if you had cast the spell but the spell does not trigger - good for making a level 9 Fireball, especially when the players see the Kobold sorcerer in the back row doing it to them. - If you hit 0 hit points you gain one level of exhaustion - because getting knocked out should really really suck We also roll the Protection and Defense fighting styles into a single one called Bastion (which I stole from Reforged from the DawnForgedCast) and have a few extra weapons and spells taken from various internet sources.
I had a good over thinking session about when disadvantage or advantage is over doing it once. Like, say the player has to meet something with their score, or it's barely an issue but in that frustrating line between disadvantage is too harsh, but a straight role isn't challenging enough, so similar to the blight spell they can subtract from their roll according to another die (say a D8 but it can change). So say the player is making some sort of intelligence role even though their character probably wouldn't know due to their backstory or what have you. Instead of disadvantage, cause that seems a tiny bit harsh, they can subtract the roll from say a D6 that way it's the feeling of it being more difficult with how it also feeling harsh because it's more of a technical reason for disadvantage. Of course this doesn't have to be the case and I'm also completely rubbish at explaining things so I'm sorry if this was hella confusing
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One of my favorite things I have stolen was letting the players do the recap before the session begins. It allows me as the DM it get a sense of what the players thought was important. I basically know where the plot is and what’s coming next, but they happened to mention that Red Wizard for the third time after leaving her behind five games ago. It’s a nice indication that the players think she was an important ncp and should maybe make a return. It also let you mine the players imaginations on what comes next, which often leads to the players having more fun.
Matt Colville thanks you. It probably has multiple sources, but I remember it somewhere in his mess of stuff.
I tried this. It was about as awkward as asking the new kid at church to lead a worship group in prayer
@@OldSchoolGM94 maybe next time warning them ahead of time might work, like at the a text reminder, hey btw I expect you guys to know what's happened, and to help remind the other players, and show what you think might be important for them to know... This gets them think ahead of time instead of just springing it on them
@@myabella7104 yeah they knew it was coming. We did it for 5 sessions before I gave up on it
Omg yes!
One idea I came out with, and that my players absolutely loved was to introduce a fae merchant whom the party could contact every once in a while. This fae offered a range of services, from equipment to information to serendipitous items (a one-time occurrency where you just have the item you needed, X gp worth or less) to lucky rerolls.
The twist was that this merchant didn't accept gold or equipment, they accepted stories, speeches and personal details. To get the location of a foe they were hunting, each had to share their greatest tragedy. To obtain the weapon of her dreams, the barbarian needed to share three insecurities gnawing at her. And in order to have a very specific and rare spell taught to her, the wizard had to argue convincingly in favor and against a point of political philosophy.
The players felt it was a great, organic way of sharing part of their backstory or thoughts and talking about it later.
Sorry if it feels like I'm blowing my own horn, but I was proud of how engaged they were.
That's fucking brilliant dude !
I am stealin it right away !
This is a very cool idea, thanks for sharing !
I was trying to think of a good idea to promote more role play and this is great. One hundred percent taking it and adding next game
The Han Solo-Lando Rule, or I Know a Guy Rule.
When the party is getting to a new town a member of the party can say "Hey, I know a guy in that town" even if he did not specified it in his background. Then he rolls a Charisma check (or better the GM rolls it in secret) to determinate what's the relationship between the player character and the NPC.
If the roll is high the NPC is a good friend of the PC or is in debt with him, if the roll is low the party is going to be stab in the back.
This makes the city more realistic, because no background can ever describe every sigle person the character has met in his life, particularly if the character is an 100 years old elf or gnome.
It could be difficult for some GMs to improvise a brand new npc in a few minutes so this rule could be "dangerous".
Matteo Runchi also know as the 'Circles' rule, originally from Burning Wheel. In that game Circles is the name of an entirely separate stat, called circles. For the circles ability to be functional you need to know the broad stokes of your characters backstory, because it's easier to find people you know in places that you've lived in previously. The circles score typically starts quite low, like 1 or 2, but you can add to it with reputations and affiliations with different groups which give you bonuses. Then when you want to use Circles to find an new NPC you give the GM some conditions for what kind of person you're looking for and the GM gives you a difficulty number to beat based on factors like shared social class or occupation, any specific knowledge or disposition they have, and how urgently convenient it would be if they showed up right now. To test the ability, you build a dice pool of d6s using your Circles as the base plus bonuses from appropriate reputations and affiliations and a bonus if you give the NPC a name before you roll. Each d6 has a 50% chance of producing a "success". If you get enough total successes to equal or exceed the difficulty number then you succeed the test and find the NPC. If you fail then you either don't find them, or you find someone else of the GMs choosing who isn't quite right, or you find them but they hate you and all future social interactions with them will be more difficult or they will try to back stab you or sell you out at a later date: Which is how the rule got associated with Han-solo, because the common example is when Han says he knows Lando Calrissian it's as though he just failed a circles test because it gets the whole party in trouble! (Circles tests are meant to be hard, and are most commonly failed, so I think the standard implementation in D&D where you just use Charisma is too charitable and gives even more power to the socially focuses PCs. Personally, I'd recommend using half-charisma as the base, and then adding modifiers from appropriate reputations, affiliations, and if you give them a name first, and any other advantages you want to jockey for). Hope this helps, or at least gives you some more background info about the rule and its origin :)
@@seraaron Burning Wheel HYPE! I love TBW, but 5e is so much more accessible. I am trying to hack in Circles as well as Beliefs and Instincts using something similar to the Artha rewards system. Because there aren't any mechanics for knowing someone in 5e it can be hard to just let players do it. You give them an inch and they will take a mile. "Yeah I totally no the King/Duke here." I wonder if adding the relationships BW allows you to buy in Character Creation would be too noodley to also cram in to 5e...
"Dangerous," eh? I too like to live "dangerously."
Ah, I see you also watch 'Dungeon Dudes' ;)
I love this
"a story of love, a story of pain, a story of loss, a story of gain"
THAT'S AMAZING!
I heard it as "a story of lust", and got all excited. Bu then again my Slaaneshi daemons always make people uncomfortable.
Never thought I'd be taking notes out of the TH-cam comments section, but here I am. 😂
Super glad I decided to scroll down.
Ditto!
I've generally found youtube comments to have great tips and advice for all kinds of games, whether of the tabletop or video variety. I learned how to play Paradox games mostly from youtube comments saying what let's players needed to do better.
My house rules:
-Rumours (stolen from Will Wheaton iirc). I get the players to come up with rumours about their characters before their first session. They need enough to Equal the number of players in the party including them plus one. So I have a party of 5, they call come up with 6 rumours. 1/3 to 1/4 depending on party size (in this instance I say 2 out of 6) are false. The rest are true. I them distribute these among the players to encourage intrigue, backstory and keep them guessing. It develops interesting dynamics
-Called shots: if a player says they'll try to take a shot at a particular part of the enemy (say the eye) I will make a secondary AC number in my head that's higher than their regular AC. If the player beats the regular AC but not the second, they hit the target but not specifically where they want. If they hit both, they have a specific impact say stabbing an eye will blind, a hamstring will cripple them.
That called shots rule seems a little broken, just because there's no reason not to make a called shot. If you're just as likely to hit as normal while also getting chance to debuff the enemy, why wouldn't you do that for every attack? You could give a small penalty to called shots, like a -2 to-hit or maybe missing completely provokes an attack of opportunity, just something that makes sure called shots aren't strictly superior to a regular attack
I hate called shot. It’s just more dice rolls and more complex and there’s usually a meta to it like eyes or neck and either it isn’t balanced out by both how easy it is to hit and how effective it is.
And it’s also very frustrating and unfair when used against the player
Certain enemies deserve called shots because they’re huge unique in anatomy and difficult to cripple in a single attack. Hydra, beholder, and kraken. But not constructs and people and bears. It’s hard to do called shots on something with 2 arms 2 legs 2 eyes and one neck. Especially when they’re wearing armor. Oh you’re going to aim for the head and they have a helmet? Or the leg but they are in plate? No, just make normal attacks, if you hit you hit.
@@alliebonesVODs the main mechanical problem with the rule is that it's not a D&D rule! It's a hack of an apocalypse engine rule that works much better with consequence rolls than with skill rolls. I would personally adapt it that called shot provokes an attack of opportunity if you fail the roll, and does half damage if you succeed against primary AC.
Quick thoughts. If you score a critical, you can forego your double damage, and add another effect to the enemy, like blinded, or numb, or lop off a limb. Which could lower AC or Dex. I think AC and any check should be lowered the further you get into battle. Not a lot or all the time. But if you come out with less health, and nothing other ailing you so what. Just take a healing potion.
Whenever my players want something implemented, like called shots, I remind them that anything I let them do, my NPCs will do back to them A LOT. I ask them to think about what a big group of bandits all shooting at their heads with bows and crossbows could do, what their named boss whos higher level than the party with the GWM feat and swinging a greataxe can do with called shots. I have never had a party choose to use called shots after I explained that.
I like the concept of travel montages from 13th Age. So often in D&D, play slows down during travel, and most DMs either gloss over it, or don’t know how to make travel interesting even if they go through the motions of checking for monsters or whether the party gets lost. In the travel montage, the DM turns to the player on their left or right, and says “tell me one challenge or problem you had on the journey.” Then the player next to the first describes how their character did something to solve that problem or meet that challenge. That same player describes the next problem or challenge. You go around the group until everyone has described a problem and also a way their character did something clever or cool to get everyone out of the jam they go into. It goes quickly, it gives players a chance to fill out the world and/or their backstory, and as a side effect it helps build relationships between the characters as they tackle problems during their journey.
I tried to do this to summarize downtime (they went on lil downtime adventures) and players were rather "deer in headlights" / unresponsive. Any thoughts on how to coax more out of them?
@@hauk119 Offer up ideas to them as examples
This one is going in my next game.
But I would add in that the DM interrupts anytime they like if a random encounter was rolled.
I had the same issue as Sam on this one, I started suggesting stuff but I end up doing most of the talking bar 2 of my players who are seasoned. What I do now is good old hex crawl. Each hex is 10 miles the party can move 3 hexes a day. Each hex they roll a d100 on my encounter table each encounter is non-combat, but many encounter have 3-6 extra options so if they get the same thing twice I have a different encounter for them. In the extra options there is combat encounters. I have also made a camping system that uses a skill challenge when they are camping in the wilderness or a dungeon. It has made travel a very strong aspect of the game.
@@granttrain3553 d100 with 3-6 variant encounters each is a pretty crazy table! Any chance it is something you could share?
Also, details on that camping system?
One of my favorite RP / character building mechanics my DM used is similar to the campfire stories idea. Every other time we took a long rest we share "the first time I..." stories relevant to what was happening around us. Session one was "the first time I slept outside". After fighting goblins it was "my first fight" stories. It was a great way to learn more about the other characters and really helped flesh out who we were traveling with.
So a fun little "minigame" I decided to use in my games is one for lockpicking.
As far as I am aware it's not posted anywhere so this is how it goes: It's actually the "mechanic" used in a drinking game called Bus Driver. You put 5 cards in a row face up and then the person picking the lock has to guess if the card you pull from the top of the deck is going to be higher or lower than the card on the table. If they guess correctly you move to the next card and so on untill you guess all 5 cards. If the number is the same just make them guess again for that card. But if they guess wrong then they fail to pick the lock or whatever you chose to happen.
Each card kinda represents one of those little pins you have to position correctly in a padlock for example. But if you want to make the lock easier or harder to pick just tweak the number of cards they need to guess.
Idk if this is already a common rule so I decided to share here.
I like that quite a bit. Maybe failure breaks a lockpick?
I like the idea - and I like how the cards parallel the tumblers / pins on the lock - but does this mean that someone with expertise and 20 dex will be no different from someone with no proficiency and 8 dex? Because with a d20 they would have different modifiers by at least 10 and that's a big difference.
@@trevorvanderwoerd8915 Well you need proficiency in thieve's tools and one in your inventory to even attempt it.
@@trevorvanderwoerd8915 maybe people with proficiency automatically knock off one card. Expertise 2 cards. Or can draw more cards per turn.
@@trevorvanderwoerd8915 You could say that they have a number of wrong guesses equal to their dex modifier before they fail the entire lock.
So if two people one with dex 10 and one with dex 20 tried to pick the same lock the first would have to get every card right on the first try, while the second could guess the card wrong 5 times before failing.
idk how you would deal with leveling the playing field for people who have score below 10, but maybe you could just say they cant even attempt to pick it.
So what I do when I run, for AC, I'm not big on the all or nothing aspect of it, so I tell players that if they're attacked and their AC is say, 15, and the creature attacking them rolls a 15, then that attack glances.
When it glances, it only kind of nicks or grazes you, and so only does half damage, and it helps new players who don't know what happens if their AC is met.
Also in the last game I ran, I had the party sit under the stars and roll a CHA saving throw and the person who rolled the lowest was most in Awe of the night sky and started to talk about themselves and their past more and that really drew out some good baclstory for the characters.
"Roll for wonder of the universe" I love that
@@MonarchsFactory a CHA save against space is probably the last thing players expect but it's really realistic if one goes camping
I have a longstanding group, full of veteran players, and I think I may just steal this for them anyway.
Wow. I use this exact same houserule, with the exact same terminology. I thought it was original when I thought of it. Did you get this from somewhere? Or is this just an obvious thing that everyone thinks of?
I just thought it up on my own about two years ago, I think it's just common terminology for combat
My biggest hangup with starting a character was "my character is from the city, but I don't know any cities in the campaign I'll be playing. I feel too weird to make up a city and compel the DM to put it in their world." So in the handout I gave to the players, I gave them a choice of starting towns. Each town had a different kind of people in it. If they chose to be from the frigid villiage of Easford, they would automatically gain +1 to their Constitution score, since the people that live there are hardy and weathered. If they chose to be from Adwick, a shady city full of gamblers and dishonest merchants, they would get +1 to their Charisma score, since they would need to be more aware of how to get by in that kind of system.
Oh man, that is a problem I ALWAYS have with the character creation phase! Neat fix
I leave blanks for city or region names when making a new character and let the DM fill that in.
Make a background vague, enough info to provide potential hooks... but nothing that makes the DM change the world.
"Druid is from ______________ (farming village) where his druid clan has been helping farmers be more efficient (and thus not need to clear more forest)"
Being professional? That's not how things work around here. Being a scrub? That's how we roll.
Nobody has time to be professional! Gotta get that TH-cam dolla dolla bills
Hygiene is important. -nods-
But what do we roll? D6? D20?
@@ComradeVenus D12!
I don't like my players to start knowing every single language ever. Also, the game assumes you either know a language or you don't. That's almost never the case irl.
Languages exist on a percentile die. A player’s base language automatically starts at 100%. Other languages after that will exist somewhere else on the scale which may be rolled for upon character creation. In order to become better at a certain language, you need to spend 1 day + one GP to gain 1 percentile (using either a teacher or a book of some kind).
So if a player is 30% proficient in Elvish, they will need to spend 50 days and 50 Gold Pieces in order to become 80% proficient with the language.
During an encounter, a player can make an Int check to try to pick up some of the language, if they succeed, they gain 1 percent proficiency in it without having to spend the gold.
Whenever attempting to speak the language, a player will role a percentile dice. In order to succeed at getting their idea across, they simply need to role within their percentile score.
I really like this idea. It's not quite realistic but its a hell of a lot closer to realism.
I think for an in-combat situation I would make the attempt cost some sort of action, or invoke some sort of penalty for the distraction. Assuming 1% knowledge is more than "those words sound angry".
I'd also incorporate an intelligence score into the rate at which someone can learn new languages. Either by increasing the base rate of learning or making the non-combat learning process chance based as well. Something like the Keen Mind feat would also dramatically increase rate of learning.
@@gnomechewer1351 RuneQuest has a pretty solid system for languages if you're looking for inspiration. It's percentile based and gives descriptions for each 20% increment of mastery, ranging from "may only communicate things like 'please don't kill me!'" to "this is leaders, diplomats, emissary level speech. 'most beneficent greetings you most noble and pious highness". Your native tongue begins at INT x 5%, and your knowledge in any language can be raised in 5% increments by visiting sages and paying a fee based on your current knowledge level. And there's even optional rules for learning through hiring a follower that knows the language or immersing yourself in a population of native speakers.
Yo this rules!
Yes. Noted. This is very good.
I actually do this. I have characters friends with Rogues in the party and is actively learning thieves Cant, so he gets percintile chance of understanding the rogues in the party when they talk(I have 3 in the party)
Some of my house rules I somewhat stolen from places, and some I kinda just came up with on my own. House Rules I use off the top of my head:
- Critical hit lets you roll max weapon damage + the die you normally roll for said weapon rather than double the damage dice. Shortsword for example is 1d6, rather than 2d6 you roll 1d6+6. It eliminates those poopy double 1 rolls for weapon damage when you hit, and makes them actually exciting.
- Dragonborn can use their breath weapon a number of times equaling their CON mod (minimum of 1).
- A rather silly meta rule that has no bearing on the game itself, but any time a pun is made, the player who made the pun takes 1d4 psychic damage. Before people tell me this is a terrible rule, please note that the PLAYER takes the damage, not the character. Like I said, stupid silly rule.
- An actual rule this time, I tend to borrow this rule from Taliesin Jaffe when making NPCs, and that I use the seven dwarves method when it comes to coming up with quirks. I roll a d8, 1-7 is a corresponding dwarf, an 8 allows me to roll twice and combine the rolls. So if for one NPC I roll say a 5 (which for my rule is Grumpy), I can have an NPC who's kind of a dick to people. And if I roll an 8, I roll twice more, this time getting a 1 and a 7 (Doc & Dopey in my case), then I get an NPC who's very smart but kinda scatterbrained in social situations.
And the final house rule is not exactly a house rule, but I pretty much use Dael's SPERM method of coming up with settlements.
Wait, I thought the pun rule was just part of the game.
@@steveejohnson7932 It is, it's just a harmless meta thing we do is all.
You can make them step, barefooted on a 1d4 :D it counts
@@LunaWolfSaphira There is wisdom in your words.
I love the 7 dwarves rule. i always have trouble with random npcs. thank you
One house rule that I do is that during character creation I have my players choose what month they are born in and that gives them a +1 to a specific ability score and proficiency in a skill.
Another rule is that I award inspiration points where my players can use them to "buy" feats which its price will go up exponentially for every feat they buy. Like, 1st feat = 5 points, 2nd feat = 25 points and so on. This is addition to the normal 5e feat rules, not a replacement. Both of these rules together can make for some really themed characters.
That's cool, like a star sign/fate's will kind of influence on character, love it!
"I have to go to a music recital of questionable quality" is something I imagine a parent would say about their child behind their back.
That was my favorite sentence from the whole video. 😂
every DM multy classes into theif
I bought a pound of dice that came with 2 d30s. My DM decided to incorporate them into our campaign. Once per session, we can choose to replace any d20 roll with the d30. All the players must unanimously agree to use it. Skill/Ability Checks and Saves add their bonuses as normal. If used on an Attack Roll, anything 20 or above counts as a crit. Nothing will beat the time we were on trial, trying to convince a council of elders why our sorcerer should keep this valuable artifact he had. He made a long speech and it all came down to 1 Charisma roll. We decided to use the d30 and he rolled a NATURAL 30! We got to keep the artifact.
I use Matt Colville's trick of assigning a player damage tracker. I'm not sure if you'd call that a house rule or more of a lifehack, but it makes my life easier and I think it makes it easier for the tactician players in my group to strategize.
I also have something that I'm not sure if I stole it from somewhere and forgot or if I was just inspired by FATE, but every campaign I choose some broad topic that I expect the party to be learning about or dealing with a lot over the course of the story, and then I ask every player to send me at least one (though more are welcome) rumor that their characters have heard about that topic. I then spin any that strike my fancy into quests, setting elements, etc. And the best part is, because the players don't know the reliability of the rumors, they can't metagame. Even if they get clear confirmation that their rumor is grounded in reality, they have no way to tell what parts are exaggerated or flat out wrong. And I think it's also fun for a player to know that something they did helped me tell them a cool story.
My only problem with your last statement is that your players are the only reason you're telling a story. As a TH-camr I watch always says "Not my baby, our Frankenstein". The way your players decide to go or decide to play is what tells the story. You, the DM, are the narrator. You are the bard seeking the story. You're Jaskier from The Witcher - constantly trying to write a new song but you always need inspiration.
What I'm trying to say is - if you're the DM who thinks that you're the only reason your players are playing D&D, think again.
I have a house rule. The DM may from time to time pass you a note. You are free to read the contents of the note to anyone BUT you MAY NOT EVER show them the note. The note may or may not have anything written on it. Sometimes they are just nonsense like "you saw a crow land on a branch", sometimes it just says "Please respond to this note". Since the players can never show the note they can claim that it says whatever they want and it builds a certain level of paranoia while keeping information that would legitimately be private to a player actually private. If I need to tell a player something long I just take them to another room but I don't like doing that as it leaves most of the players just sitting. You should also prepare notes prior to the game when possible to speed things up.
Fantastic. I am running Curse of Strahd and this would be great.
@@adamjchafe Yes, that is a perfect place to use that rule. Enjoy!
I am stealing this idea! 😁
Stolen, awesome idea, thx XD
something almost related is I randomly make them roll perception/spot. Sometimes it's nothing or just a fun little easter egg.
Homebrew Epic Death
So in DND a game of Heroes, nobody wants to die ... unless it's awesome.
During a tough story boss fight a player fails drops to 0 hp. On his second failed death save, I give them the choice: You can risk dying and hope your fellow team mates pull together enough coin to maybe wish you back ...
OR you get to go out in a blaze of glory, no resurrection, few dice, all narrative.
I generally have a song i associate with each on of my player characters. That song is that players 4 minutes and I generally throw something in that lets to go a little super sayin. Describe how you beat the boss, slump to the ground and give a heart felt goodbye to your companions. Then your song ends ... and your character is gone but no one will forget them !
this is awesome
sorry, i know this is a really old comment, but this is so fascinating... so do they just auto-kill the boss or how does that work if they decide to sacrifice themself??
@@teeny_ducken
Hey !
So the last time this happened in game my players had amazingly screwed up with their decision making. Tabaxi druid went down, boss was getting ready to land the final blow and the rest of the party look determined to try save her but the odds were staked too highly against them. I explained to the Druid player that she could either risk rolling another death save but what was likely was a different character would die trying to save her OR I could end the fight now, and everybody survives but no magic would ever bring her back. In a heart beat she picked sacrifice. I described how the site of her death immediately turned into a garden and the boss was consumed be vines and roots. Now a giant tree marks the site. I'll admit there were tears but next game she rolled a cleric and the other characters in the party still talk about her and blame themselves for what happened. 10/10 my favorite game
@@jmacrac5778 awesome! that seems like it makes the players just that much more invested in their characters.. thanks!
If the Bard breaks out into Country Roads during the Click Rule, I will throw a book at them.
the *player* takes 1d6 blunt damage from the book, the others players take 1d4 psychic damage .
"Avoid, avoid, avoid the deadly trap!" - Thanks Elan
What book though?
@@CptnJaymz Geography. Because the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River have nothing to do with West Virginia lol
Personally, I like my own "stress" system. I created it to be a less punishing version of the exhaustion mechanic.
It's very simple: for every 3 levels of stress you accumulate, you gain one level of exhaustion. If you ever get to 6 levels of stress, you get a permanent quirk (anxiety, greedy, etc...). If you get to 10 levels of stress, you have a mental breakdown. I give out stress for stuff like seeing an eldritch horror, fleeing a battle, reading disturbing texts, and so on. You loose stress by resting (lose 2 for long, one for short), drinking in a tavern, or doing anything that would calm and relax your character.
You can think of this as the opposite of inspiration; giving out penalties for screwing up, or making your character do something that would mess with their head. So far, it has done a good job at encouraged roll-playing, as a real character. But that might be partially due to they type of game I'm running (Lots of spooky and gross stuff).
Very Darkest Dungeon, I like it
i think i'll steal this one, i really like it a lot and i think it can make being knocked out feel more impactful at a certain level of play ( having many people with heals on my party ) without feeling too harsh
So you're basically stealing from Darkest Dungeon. But go ahead and call it your own.
@@donaldcedar7574 I've never played darkest dungeon. From what I've seen of it, it's stress system acts as more of a second health bar that you can't heal as easily. From what I can tell, in darkest dungeon when you max out your stress bar, your character gets some kind of permanent debuff to encourage you to drop that character. My system is just designed to encourage roll-playing, any quirk you get doesn't actually effect your combat ability.
The system I made is a shallow immitation of how real people can suffer from stressful situations. So it's not that I copied off darkest dungeon, we both are just immitating real life.
@Donald Cedar Also everything you can ever think of has been done in some form before so we could all stand around all day for the next fifty thousands years stating that everything anyone makes as an inventor, engineer and creator, is all stolen from somewhere else. Everything comes from somewhere. The latest video games wouldn't exist without building off of those that came before them. It's not stealing from a single game you saw. That single game is hardly the first game ever to implement any form of stress meter. Horror TTRPG's have been doing things like that for twenty years long before Darkest Dungeon. Did Darkest Dungeon steal it from them? Who knows. Darkest Dungeon is a straight up brutal D&D-esque dungeon crawl with no holds barred and gritty rules. Without D&D, Darkest Dungeon most probably would not exist. So did Darkest Dungeon just steal everything from D&D? How about Skyrim? Divinity Original Sin? Pathfinder both the ttrpg and the game? Nothing is truly original. The only problem is if you're literally just lifting an exact system from something else and claiming it's your own. That's shitty. But being inspired by some game mechanic you saw elsewhere and then putting your own version of it in your game? That's called progress.
I had only ever played D&D and only started in the past few years and I began making my own tabletop rpg's using D6 dice pool system and came up with an entire means of realistically simulating medieval esque combat. Thought I'd invented it all, a whole new type of system. Then I found some modern games coming out through Geek and Sundry that were doing more or less the exact same thing albeit sometimes with d10's or whatever instead, but same idea and then realised that a game that came out literally like 20 years ago did exactly the type of system down to a tee nearly as what I was creating. I had never known that such an idea even existed as I had only ever played D20, D&D. I knew there were d6 type systems, but knew not how they worked or that there were any like the type I was making. Point is, just like pyramids popped up all over the world and swords, spears and shields popped up all over the world, often no matter how great or unique your idea, someone else has already thought of it.
I have a travel system that's designed to encourage character interaction.
I use a simple d6 table to determine the nature of the interaction (a hidden roll, or even volunteers help determine the main two participants in the scene).
Based on the outcome of the die, the scene may ask for one character to tell a story from their past, maybe bring up a story/joke/or song from their culture, or even play out a silly interaction based on a subject for them to talk about.
My players love this because not only does it get them into role playing in character and legitimately bonding on that level (not to mention providing a great opportunity for characters with a shared backstory to round-robin a few stories from their common past...), but it also made travelling interesting for them in a Canterbury Tales/road trip-like kind of way!
"...Or do I put me figuring out that I wasn't using a mic, then setting up the mic, and asking Rhys what I should do actually IN THE VIDEO?" Honestly, you went with the best option.
Yeah, I've implemeted Matt Mercer's ressurection rules in one of its variants. Basically, whenever someine tries to ressurcet a creature - he has to roll spellcasting ability check for it. DC os different for different ages. DC of ressurecting a puppy (or for Christ sake a baby) is only 5. But for an old man it would be 15. DC is increased with every ressurection plus such powerful magic gets attention from the gods, and they may give some permanent penalty to the ressurected, or just put them on a list. And whenever they have something that needs to be done - the list comes into play.
I've never had to use it but my idea was to either resurrect the player by sunrise or sunset and if not, go to the church and then the party is Indebted To The Church, probably leading to an interesting quest later on
One of the rules I DM with (and can't quite remember where I got it from) is the Ultimate Success/Ultimate Failure rule. On any check/saving throw with advantage or disadvantage, the player rolls twice regardless of their first role. If they role two 20's, its an ultimate success, if it's two 1's, its an ultimate failure, and the result of that throw is scaled accordingly. Say, for example, someone is attempting to pick a padlock with disadvantage. If they rolled two 20's, they'd not only unpick the lock, but be able to keep the locking mechanism, and would later find the matching key for it, giving them a useful item they would not have gained with a single nat 20.
I haven't had much need for house rules, but the one thing I do have is that magic is flavored towards the caster's disposition; for example, beastform. The whole party that I'm DMing is on their way to undeadness (which is the giant blinking story hook that started the campaign :D), so she can only take undead forms of the animal, with rotting bits and pieces missing and/or hanging out, giving her advantages on intimidation checks. :D
That's a great idea. Always encourage players to flavour their characters.
A good question to ask a player with a 'caster PC: "What colour is your magic?"
The house rule that got shared the quickest among various gaming groups in our area is rolling with the GM for HP. It's sorta like the reroll on 1, but GM and player both roll, player chooses which roll to keep.
I've always used the 'roll twice, drop the lowest' method at my table, but I like this a lot. It's a minor change, I think I'll swap to this :)
Thats how my first DM did me! We both Rolled and his was secret and you could keep your roll or take his.
Isn't that functionally the same as "roll, then you can choose to reroll if you want, but you have to use the second roll"?
@ Jlerpy Yeah, it's just a slightly more fun way of doing it and turns it into a thing we do together, instead of a thing you do by yourself.
The "old school" method was to give the player a maximum HP number for Level ZERO (where they learned their trade) and then have them roll for 1st Level. This gave old AD&D Character's 10 Hit Dice before they transitioned to only getting a couple of points per level at 10th (and beyond).
Straight up a must have for a DM is Stronghold Merchants and Revised Shopping Catalog.
RSC- organizes the worlds most common items, stuff you can find in the players hand book such as armor, weapons, tools and so on, into a list separated out by shop. No more wondering what’s inside a general store or what a blacksmith might be selling. Best part it lists the items selling and buying price along with a check mark of wether the shopkeeper has it based on location (village/town/city). There’s a great tavern section in the back along with world building description listed in the beginning if needed.
SM- is another like RSC where it lists and separates items based on seller but this one if meant for traveling merchants to give your world flavor. Using dice you roll to see Who they are, What they sell and at what quality.
I’ve even made my own ledger with rules about rolling for a traveling market that the city has, swapping out merchants as they leave the market for a new town.
I've never heard of the RSC* but now I NEED IT.
(*or at least THIS one, the RSC I'm familiar with is the Royal Shakespeare Company)
Where can I get my hands on this RSC???
I would also love know where I could get this!
@@MonarchsFactory I commented down below the links :)
This is amazing, thank you so much!!
Starfinder's encumbrance system is very similar to what you described. Most items have 1 "bulk", heavy items have 2 or more bulk, and lightweight items count as 1/10th bulk. You can carry up to half your Strength score in bulk without being encumbered, and your total limit is your Strength score.
I use different sets of houserules depending on the adventure and group, because I always feel too sheepish about using more than a couple at a time.
One I use almost every game, though, is the Silver Standard. The coinage in the game is converted from factors of ten to a hundred. If something had a gold price in the book, that's now its price in silver. Super simple to convert on the fly, new players don't even notice. Plus, gold is well out of reach for commoners, which means the players actually straighten up and pay attention to mention of it. Most people's coinpouches jingle with copper and silver. I like that.
Other houserules include: Drugs make your magic go awry in dangerous but sometimes useful ways. While drunk, levitation spells lift you and let you control horizontal movement, not vertical. Turn Undead brings low CR creatures back from the dead. Magic weapon permanently makes your sword rustproof. Teleport works beyond its normal limits, but unpredictably. Hallucinogens are truly dangerous to high level spellcasters, and those around them.
I've also adopted a bunch of stuff from older editions. The AD&D DMG has been almost as useful as the 5th Ed one to me. Chance of divine intervention for the pious; I've translated a bunch of spells(and some spells like goodberry I've rolled back to their historical effect if it makes more sense to me or serves a purpose like survival gameplay), unnatural aging when you cast stuff like restoration spells or wish, potion miscibility, AD&D turns and rounds for dungeon exploration(codifying that searching and mapping a room takes ten minutes really frees up the ritual caster to do something cool).
...is the drug/magic connection a reference to Rogue and/or Nethack? Because they had a similar mechanic if you read certain scrolls while confused or hallucinating.
@@BigusGeekus Yup! I've snuck other nethack homages in, too. The rogue in my game bought and ate a tin of floating eye meat once. They've had a couple of one-use figurines. The wizard has the Eye of Aethiopica. And they just met an NPC paladin from a far land, with the strange name of Pae-an Val-Hum-Fem-Law.
My most-used house rule I have is not doing monster turns all at once; they're individually added to the initiative order like anyone else.
Originally it was by mistake, but when it was pointed out I decided the actual rules were stupid and dumb and they wouldn't get invited to parties, so I kept doing my own thing
The other one involves killing a sleeping character. A knife to the throat is going to be lethal whichever way you look at it, so instead I had the player make a stealth check to not alert anyone else.
That was made up on the spot, though, I might tweak it slightly.
Regarding the AngryGM. When I took over GMing for a group I've played with off and on for a couple decades now, our previous GM pointed me towards his site. I can honestly say that it's the single most useful resource for getting a handle on ... _"WTF am I even supposed to be doing here?"_ that I have so far encountered. He's the absolute best at breaking RPGs down into the fundamentals.
Yes, he's a bit of a troll on Twitter, but his defence is that a) he doesn't engange with people who don't engage with him and b) the thing was a dumpster fire before he got there. Which is pretty fair, TBH.
The "Click Rule" is a classic example of him noticing that something in the game doesn't appear to be experienced as fun by players, putting his finger on why it's not fun (namely, players experience them as an XP "tax" that needs to be paid to reach the _real_ encounters) and providing a fix. The rule turns traps from a thing that just happens to your character into an immediate need for you to _make a decision._
Hear, hear! Well put!
Pretty much the only house rules I've made up myself are:
1. Swords and polearms can do both slashing and piercing damage. I assume slashing unless a player tells me they are using piercing, whether in a specific instance or as their character's usual style. This effectively means that there is no mechanical difference between shortswords and scimitars.
I made this change due to swords and polearms being specifically designed as weapons that can be used either way. It just seems odd to me that RAW says you can't cut with a shortsword or stab with a halberd.*
2. "Rapier" has been broadened to a category of sword I have designated as "sideswords". Of course, a player can still decide that their character's sidesword is a rapier, but this way they can also say it's an arming sword, a sabre, a cutlass, a jian or a saif. Elves have proficeincy with this weapon instead of longswords. Same rules as rapier, taking into account the previous rule.
I made this change due to not wanting players to feel like they were locked in to a weapon as culturally specific as the rapier if they wanted to play a DEX-based sword-wielder.
*I mean, halberds literally have a spear point attached above the axe head bit. It's not there for decoration.
My only complaint about the angry gm is that his articles are so so friggin long. I find his points get lost in the length of the discussion.
That being said the click rule is pure genius.
@@nickwilliams8302 not ALL swords and pole arms are designed with two methods of damage though.
I would do this for advanced players who choose to pick a historically accurate weapon for sure. But maybe I would drop the damage of the "alternate" damage type by one die size.
So like, a halberd with a pointy top does 1d8 piercing.
I REALLY like your idea for changing rapiers though (but really it is more of a flavor thing). I would personally prefer less weapons overall and generic weapon "catagories" instead just like you describe.
Angry GM blocked me on Twitter, which is no real loss to me. I still read, appreciate, use, and share his stuff. But there's not much defending his personality issues or his verbosity. His Five Rules for Dating My Teenaged Skill System series is still the best DMing advice I've ever read, and his encounter-building stuff is up there with The Alexandrian.
I can't remember where I got the idea from (if anyone knows please post it as a reply), but I tweaked someones idea of spicing up knowledge rolls. Let's say the party hears about a monster or wants to track one down and kill it, I make them roll an appropriate knowledge check. Depending on their result I allow them to pick cards from 1 of 3 decks. Each deck has cards relevant to the monster, some are false (e.g. Vampires can only be killed with cuddles), and some are true (e.g. Vampires can walk in the light but in a significantly weaker state).
Each deck has a certain percentage of true and false cards. A person rolling poorly will draw from the deck with the most false information and the reverse is true for a player rolling well. The key here is that there is still a possibility that a player pulled a true fact despite rolling poorly, and vice versa. This uncertainty can lead to interesting in game social interactions. I also tend to tweak which deck they draw from depending on other factors such as being a local to the region, having fought a similar beast in their backstory, etc. When doing so I usually jump the players choice of deck up or down 1 accordingly after they've rolled.
Obviously I rarely do this for a single creature, unless that's the point of the one shot. But I like to do this when people travel to a new area or when starting a new campaign. That way every player has a few cards with random lore of the region (e.g. social norms, laws, culture, common monsters, myths and legends, etc) which they can refer to. It takes a bit of prep, but once you've set it up, it really helps to level the playing field between new players and veterans as to the lore of the setting you are using.
And if I'm feeling lazy I just use a single deck of cards with half the cards being false, and the half true and make the players draw from it.
Edit: Corrected some typos and a few other mistakes
i dig this. i dig this alot
You could do the same thing for a specific NPC, a region of the world, etc.
I like it!
Ada, Chafe Yeah, it''s quite a versatile system that can be used for any sort of knowledge, from which local plants are cure headaches to the local lord is called Jeff to ghosts can only be put to rest if their corpses are sprinkled with rosewater. I also like to sneakily introduce plot hooks through the cards. I mean, just because they appear to be shuffled, doesn't mean they are ;)
DM: a pressure plate grinds slowly to the floor beneath your footfalls, what do you do?
Player: oh no! I drop to the floor.
DM: you're already going there, it is a pit trap after all.
This is the ultimate lower move for a mean DM, thank you.. I'm stealing it.
*Click*
(Barbarian enters rage)
(Barbarian hacks away with his adamantine great axe)
“It’s ok friends, I have deactivated the trap... and the walls)
I think a better way to envision the point system would be to convert the normal encumberance rules into points.
So a Character with 8 Strength can carry 40 points before being encumbered. This allows you to get slightly more reasonable numbers for heavy things.
I've stolen a couple of homebrew rules! Most recently was yours, about assigning party members roles during overland travel. That really made things more engaging for them, and my wonderful group was happy to roleplay little snapshots of them performing their duties, some better than others. :D
Other than that, I think the biggest one is Matt Colville's rules about skill checks. I encouraged my group to, before I ask them to make a skill check, to justify using a skill to perform a task. So instead of using athletics to climb the tree, they use persuasion to get a farmer to lend them a ladder. Basically, I want them to think outside the box, and so far, they seem to really enjoy it! I do say no on occasion, but I think it's worked out in the end. Additionally, for certain things, I don't let players attempt it unless they're proficient, or if I do, I'll set unequal DCs for proficient and non-proficient players. I think it helps them feel more useful as part of the team!
RPG's are a derivative medium. We all "steal", but really we are paying homage to tropes we want to see come up in our games, to things we love.
Good game mechanics are information, and as Gibson taught us, information wants to be free. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all, and using someone else's house rules are a great sign of respect.
Good video, subbed. Keep up the good work!
One of my favorite stolen house rules its the one about critical hits, i mean, its so underwhelming when you hit a nat 20 and the damage you roll its like, 1 so you end up doing 2 damage with a crit, and that defeats the whole purpose of a critical hit. the rule i use in my campaign its that, instead of rolling the damage dice and do a x2, you take the max damage from the attack and you add the roll you got from your dice, that way even if you roll a 1 in the damage it will feel like a crit, like an important damage was made
I have a character creation “worksheet” that I hand out to all of my players at the start of each new campaign. It contains information about the region, such as the style of local government, the name of the ruler (or council body), the name of the capital city, skills common to the region that can be added to the character’s class skills (we play 3.5, there are 5 regional skills and the player chooses 3 of them), a bonus feat they can choose (indicative of the type of people common to the region, there are 3 choices and the player picks 1), the predominant religion, as well as available playable races and classes, and the predominant alignment of the region.
This is really neat, I just may nick some of this for myself
A guy I knows likes to write a fake "newspaper" for his setting. During offgame downtime, he writes this fictional bulletin with a few articles in it regarding what's happening in the world the players inhabit. It has quite a few pros:
-It can be an entertaining way to infodump
-It gives life to a world by having many things happen, both relevant and not to the main plot
-Can be fun to make an old NPC pop up for whatever reason, or old PC if players have retired them
-Makes the time waiting between sessions much more bearable, and hypes the next one
-It's entirely optional and reading it is not a requirement but he likes to sprinkle a lot of lore and foreshadowing between the news so everyone always reads it willingly
It's obviously very time consuming for the DM, but it's a good tool to use with groups very invested in the world and that can manage to get together to play only rarely. I'm sure someone could adapt this idea to fit even different kinds of groups, the key concept is making the infodump fun.
As far as I know, this is an original house rule.
Spell components: I'm not going to force the players to learn the verbal components to the spells since that slows the game down. The first time the spell is cast, the player writes down their own magic words and the tone of voice when casting. From that point on, the player must say the magic words in exactly the same way as the first casting scenario, no matter the current context or company.
Obviously, if you're stealthing about and have to mutter "Abra Kadabra," you risk losing your stealthiness.
Leave it to the players to be creative with their components and watch them curse their own names as Past Him/Her screwed them over in this moment.
I would add that, depending of the spell LvL, you would need an amount of "Magic Word" to complete your magic component.
So a first LvL Spell Burning Hands May be "Pyross!!" But when you blast that fireball, you may have to shout "Omna Incinarae Pyross!!!"
Get that sweet Mary Poppins "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" going
I made a house rule the other night. If someone uses Spare the Dying, (which means the injured character is stable and no longer needs to make death saving throws), they can still make the death saving throws optionally for a chance to get up off the ground. Otherwise, theres usually just one character whos stable, but bored on the ground. Its a bit of a risk vs reward, so they could still die for real, but id theyve only rolled saves, they wont have to feel like theyve gone to waste!
Also I usually allow nonlethal attacks from all attacks. (With the exception of things like Power World Kill, or the One hit kill Monk Attack). Ive played with people who really didnt want their characters to kill, and thought 'fuck it' Why make the game inaccessible to them?
I mean, I dont understand why you cant? Every hand held weapon known to mankind has a "non-lethal use". be it a pommel strike on an arming sword or a buttstroke from an M-16.
except those pesky double bladeed daggers. hahaha
@@bassmanjla Sure, but i do sort of get it with something like a fireball spell, which attacks everything indiscriminately. Raw states All melee weapons can be used non lethally, but i also allow spells and ranged weapons.
@@dr.whippersnatch7200 Sure almost every weapon has a non-lethal way to use it but those uses will (and I think should) do significantly less damage. If a person (player or character) wants to abstain from killing but still subdue a target they should specialize in unarmed, improvised weapons, creative use of potions/spells, or a nice solid blackjack. A large sword wielding paladin will not be as effective with a pommel as they would the pointy end.
I say that you can declare "non-lethal" damage any time as long as you can describe it. You declare before rolling. On a critical hit, they take regular damage though; so you risk hitting them hard enough to kill them with the flat of your sword.
@@dr.whippersnatch7200 Don't spread miss-information. Please read the rules book from time to time.
I loved the "click" idea, it simulates instictive split second reaction of a person facing danger naturally which makes the game much more realistic. Inventory rule is not bad, but I think it becomes unnecessery once the party acquires a bag of holding.
Yeah but the bag of holding isn't unlimited either - just give the players 10-20 more points?
@@mathewbyfield1004 That is how I (plan) to run it next game.
Mundane Backpacks give you +1 or +2 carry weight.
Magic bags give you a bunch depending on rarity.
Wagons and pack animals get like 50 points (but can't come with you into dungeons!)
I stole a version of my travel rules from the Rollplay Westmarches game and something Matt Colville mentioned in one of his videos about random encounters. It has developed as our campaign as gone one from a way to go day by day and find out what happens slowly to a method of fast traveling. The current variation is for every day of travel you pick who is leading the party and they roll a skill, Athletics, Stealth, or Survival. The skill you use determines how you are traveling and grants certain bonuses. Athletics has you traveling faster, Stealth is avoiding detection, Survival is being more careful. Based on how well you roll gets you extra effects, like safer camping, finding useful stuff on your trip, ignoring the Con Save everyone has to roll for traveling quickly, etc. Also for each day, I roll a d12, on a roll or 11 or 12(except when you are using survival) to determine if there is a random encounter. This isn't always a fight and I've taken a page from Old School DnD where they could come across a traveling merchant on the road, a person in need of help, someone that runs across their camp at night, or something that wants to kill them. I theme it however appropriate based on where they are, but I don't have a list of things that could be encountered, I don't plan that much.
From levels 1 thru 4, we wanted a much more incremental game where the minutia of traveling and feeding ourselves was a bigger deal. At this point we were still tracking exp and hadn't switched to milestones yet. The higher our levels got the less interesting that got and we just wanted a way to get from place to place. We still use it to inject random things and will pause occasionally when someone wants to RP a camp scene, but we have started adding up how many days it will take to get from place to place and roll that many dice instead of RPing the start and end of every day and rolling when we break camp.
One of the other things I use, is the Dungeon World method of having handy tools. In our current game it is really only used by our herbalist, but the potential is there for other people to take advantage of it. She uses her Herbalist Kit to find plants and make simple items from them, the easy way to do this is the say and Herbalist Kit has a certain amount of charges and buying supplies or finding stuff while traveling can replenish those charges. Whenever she needs to make a basic healing item(typically a slap patch that heals 1d4+1), she just marks off a charge. The Warlock needs some herbs to summon her imp again? 2 charges. Need to make a poison someone can apply to their weapon? 1 charge per d6 of damage you want it to deal. Some of the uses require a skill roll and the results can diminish on bad rolls or get bonuses on good rolls.
I also use clocks from Powered by the Apocalypse and Blades in the Dark games to track progress on character stuff. Whenever they are working on a long term project like training a skill, learning a language, studying about a culture, etc I tell them to start a clock with an arbitrary amount of segments based on how difficult I think the task is or how long I think it should take. They fill in segments as they RP doing the thing or make rolls in their free time to work on it.
Also luck rolls, whenever I don't want to make a decision on something, I'll have the character most invested in the outcome roll a d20. I set the number they have to beat to get their way. Typically it's just 10 or better, but if I think it's unlikely to go their way I may set it at 15 or more. If it's something I would give them better odds on than a coin flip I just give it to them, it's not worth leaving up to chance.
I love that travel idea.
Depending on the characters and situation I would allow the non-leader to pick a skill as well that might do something. For example;
Leader picks athletics. Player 2 picks history because the party is looking for signs of an ancient civilization.
If player 2 does well it gives them clues that they are on the right track.
I use a set of Fate dice the way you use luck rolls. If they ask if the room contains a particular item, I roll the Fate dice, +'s are good things, -'s are bad things and blanks are when I decide.
TH-cam content is the best with genuine content. If I wanted perfectly edited, by the book video, I would go to the movie theater. Carry on scrublord!
got fate points from somewhere:
you have playernumber +1 tokens on the table. at any point a player may spend one (give it to the gm) to a) encounter b) change fate c) reroll
encounters are what they sound like. on a high roll there might be a helpful npc, on a low roll there might be an enemy around the corner with a dagger with the crest of a certain noble house, as long as it progresses the story
change fate: things are certainly going, but they are not going well or where the players want them to go. roll and depending on the roll, things happen. high roll means things might start going well or the characters get ambushed with overwhelming force by the villain they seek, but then taken into his secret lair and given a monologue and a slowly filling sand chamber but being left alone a low roll ... well maybe the same but the villain remembers to take their weapons and magicitems
the roll itself is secondary, the main part is that something changes (which can keep games moving if people get stuck)
rerolls are the lamest but can be important sometimes
If my players get a nat 20 on a skill challenge i make them reroll and if they get 19/20 on that they get a perma plus one to that skill but only when doing that same thing. Do a dwarven architecture check and get the double 20 perma plus one to knowledge about the same thing because you found it slightly interesting. Double 20 when breaking down a door? you get a perma plus one because your body figured out how to break them a bit easier. Double 20 on pickpocketing a tiefling you notice how they walk in relations to their tail to learn to pick pocket just that race better. etc etc.
For playing high fantasy high magic campaigns I personally found combat to be more dynamic when doing away with the one-spell-one-cantrip rule in the PHB and simply only used the action economy as the only limitation for what spells could be cast during a turn. It made combat more dynamic because the *bad guys* could also use it.
I’m confused on this. Whats the one-spell-one-cantrip rule, and how did you get around it exactly?
The one thing to be careful about is if you have a sorcerer with the quickened spell metamagic feature. Things can get quickly out of hand if their are only 2-3 encounters before a long rest.
@@Birbucifer Oh basically in the PHB, the rules around spellcasting state that if you cast a levelled spell as a bonus action, the only other spells you can cast on your turn are cantrips. You can't action spell, bonus action spell. I ignored that restriction and let my players cast as many spells as their action economy would allow them, providing they didn't violate the casting times of them. So for instance they could cast Fireball with their action, Misty Step with their bonus, when under the RAW they could only cast one *or* the other, but not both.
@@TheWalkerboh65 The sorcerer in the party retrained into Wizard upon realising the rules around multiclassed spell-casting and the discrepancies between spellslot levels and spells of a level they could actually cast, so that problem never arose :P
TheKazragore Ah I see, I didn’t realize that restriction existed, I have a Phoenix Sorcerer in a game that I DM for and I just kinda let her do her thing and no problems have arosen so far.
Charlie's House Rules:
Starting a character: OL People have HP = Con (no bonus). So, fighter with 12 Con starts at 1st level with 12+10+1 = 23 HP.
Crit Hit Table: Includes tripping, free attacks, damaging armor, disarming opponents, headshots, etc via a 2d6 table
Crit Miss Table: Includes hit other, sling weapons, drop weapons, opponent get opportunity attacks, slips, prone, etc... via a 2d6 table
Training Costs: If you hire a trainer for your new level (between 1-10 only) you get ADVANTAGE on your HP roll. Cost 50g for 1st level, 10 for 2nd, ... 500 for 10th
Special Armor Rules: Same basic rules, but you can wear chain shirt and leather pants. Helms matter esp Crit Headshots. All ACs end up within 1 or so of the normal chart.
Shields have HP. Miss by shield value, shield takes dmg. Round/Kite shield = 50 HP. Buckler = 25 HP
Mounted Combat Rules: Charges and setting for charges = 2x dmg, lances break ... DC = 2x wpn dmg vs Dmg Done... Hvy War = 1d12 ... anything > 23 pts breaks the lance.
Cheers!
Know a bit late.
But with Tales by the Campfire; I had the NPC's there who also drew cards. It helped flesh out the world and gave those characters some depth when they asked the PC's to help them with something. And also when Goblins attacked soon after.
I’ve been blasted for this one before, but my rule with Attunement is that you can attune to a number of items equal to your proficiency bonus. So levels 1-4 you can attune to 2 items, 5-8 three items, 9-12 four items, etc. It’s not really as overpowered as it seems since most games only ever get into the 5-8 range, with some getting into the 9-12 range. The characters are theoretically only going to find so many items requiring attunement at levels 1-4, and if they are still adventuring past 9-12 they’ve probably accumulated many cool magic items. Let them use their magic items! It’s more fun for the players and it means that you can throw bigger/scarier stuff at them!
This is also a big measure for more high magic games in 5e IMO.
Faerun in 5e is a much lower magic than other editions have used. Its a largely normal world, with a bit of magical flavour in some areas.
Compare to the likes of Eberron. Magic items are everywhere. Most people probably know some amount of magic. The world runs on magic and you have nations built around necromancy ect. You have magically created artificial people. It starts shutting down a bit when there are a ton of magic items around, yet your party can only use one or two at a time, can get fairly annoying. When magic items are rarer, its not as much of an issue, but when they're ubiquitous, allowing more attunement can really add to the high magic feeling.
Personally, I'd look at houseruling minor and major attunement at some point, but I'd need to think through balancing it. There are a lot of cool, but mostly useless, magic items in Xanathars, yet many still force attunement as they offer some level of benefit minor benefit. Having minor attunement be for these little baubles and such that are fun to play with and can be abused from time to time, and major attunements for some of the more useful magic items like a ring of protection, Ioun stone, or staff of the magi, would have them see more use and could lead to more roleplaying, rather than them being constantly looked over as they don't compare to the more consistently useful tools the game throws at you.
I do something slightly different. At any level where a player can choose ASI or Feat, I allow the option to take an attunement slot up to a maximum of 6 (just like artificer). Honestly, I don't really find it to be overpowered at all because there are soooooooo many items in the game already which require attunement but don't provide any static bonus that it's just usually not a big deal in terms of encounter balancing. And it's a nice way to give MORE options. Magic items are huge part of the game, and heroes want to be able to do cool stuff...we should let them. I also like to homebrew lots of quirky items that give small bonuses to a skill or do something unique which doesn't necessarily influence combat but might be socially useful, so I find that it facilitates that.
I know you made this video a while back, but since you asked, one I use:
• Weapon features
Martial classes get left so poorly behind in the later levels, so I added a bunch of speciality moves ("martial spells"?) that can be performed with scimitars or tridents or whatnot so that suddenly that fighter or rogue can take part in the epic scale action.
Lockpicking in combat mini game.
Roll four d4 simultaneously every round (including rounds for allies n enemies)
Everytime one of them comes up four remove it from the pool of dice (a four means you’ve successfully locked in a pin of the lock).
Once all four dice have come up four once, the lock is open.
I’ll use this if it’s some kind of difficult unusual lock. Doesn’t make sense to use it everytime. Makes for some good tension, especially when the lockpicker needs someone to cover their back while the lockpicking happens.
Ooh, I also like that it kind of genuinely feels like what lock picking is like. Like, maybe you know what you're doing and are good at it, but you still sometimes come up against a stubborn pin that will. not. shelve.
MonarchsFactory you can also do it with advantage, just add more dice to the pool. But you’d still only need four 4s to open it. Like maybe it’s a rare type of lock you’ve encountered before.
Haha fun video, mishaps and shenanigans, like a D&D session. I'll probably be borrowing that campfire one as my party has some travel they'll be doing.
Maybe this was only a problem because I had 4 people who could heal in my group, but things were kinda ridiculous, it felt like whack a mole, so I implemented the rule that every time after the first you're knocked out you get a level of exhaustion. Simple, but it brings a lot of tactical depth to a fight as well as making close calls more meaningful (without using those permanent injury tables which my players would hate cause my game is so edge of the wire kinda thing) and tense.
So rogues don't just win every chase scene, I implemented stamina rules with the DC going up for every dash action taken in the chase scene. Gives a sense of creeping fatigue and higher tensions for everyone and encourages people who can bonus action dash to think creatively and maybe try something else some rounds. Makes the high stamina low speed characters feel like they got a chance too, so long as they can keep within eyeshot. The exhaustion gained on the failed saves are temporary and exclusive to the chase and fade pretty soon afterwards.
I usually go for a Strength or Constitution Athletics check for extended running, since you have to be conditioned to do it. Also usually stops the Rogues and Monks getting away with high speed escapes too easily.
In the DMG it even says you can only dash a few times during a chase
This is probably my favorite list of house rules. I've been looking up house rules for the last two months off and on and had not seen the click rule.
1st point, "traps" starts at 1:37
2nd point, "Inventory" starts at 5:55
3rd poing, "tales by the campfire" starts at 7:37
I’ve used the Click Rule myself for quite some time. Good to finally learn who may be the originator of it. LOL
I used to read the Angry GM a lot a couple years ago. His writing style is pretty cool, IMO.
Yeah, I personally like his work fine, I like to duck in and see what he's up to from time to time - but I also understand why a lot of people would be put off by the brand. And the verbose intros, my WORD, that man can write a thousand words before getting to the point!
MonarchsFactory Yes, the dude knows how to hit a word count goal! For me, that was part of the fun, reading the rambling introductions. But the dude has some REALLY good information in his posts. I was binging on his material for several months at one point (because, you know, it takes several months to read his backlog of content LOL)
A cool way to adapt tales by the campfire would be to use a Tarot/Tarokka/Harrow Deck and each player pulls a card and then tell a story based on that card. Allows for some cool variety.
Something I picked up from my DM that I use now, is bonus XP. Essentially every player is given a small amount of XP that they have to give away to another player. It can be for anything from good role playing, a funny joke, or a clever plot to just because. It helps encourge people to pay attention to each other and to role play more.
That inventory system sounds like the actual mechanic used for Pathfinder 2e
The main houserule we use in my games are for Crit 20s in combat, since it’s a bummer to crit and roll all 1s for damage. So we do this:
After rolling crit 20 in combat, roll a d10 to see how effective your hit was
1- you still roll all applicable die twice
2-9 you roll once, and the 2nd roll will automatically be max damage
10- normal roll and crit rolls auto max damage
This adds a little more suspense to see if those big hits really land, or if it just looks cooler than it is effective
Just a heads up, the stories around the campfire thing is lifted straight from another TTRPG game called Savage Worlds, where it's called Interludes. It's a great little mechanic and should definitely be in D&D as well. Just wanted to point it out as a commentary on the upside to trying other systems!
Tales around the campfire is an adaptation of the Interludes mechanic from Savage Worlds, right?
But traps. If you haven’t already read it, try to find Traps & Treachery from Fantasy Flight’s Legends & Lairs series back during d20. (It uses the Reflex save. ;).) It’s an excellent book that goes into depth about how to describe traps in your game, how to set them off, and how players should go about disarming them. It’s a solid read, even if you’re not playing Pathfinder or 3.x.
And, of course, Grimtooth’s Traps. Any of them. They’re wunderbar.
The game I am part of has a few house rules (it is a 3.5 and Pathfinder mixed type game).
One is lethal and non-lethal damage. The armour you wear absorbs its AC in damage, which is sent to the character as non lethal damage, which starts at 0 and maxes at current HP. The rest hits as lethal. If you hit your max HP in Non-Lethal, things happen, if you go below your lethal in non-lethal, things happen.
Another is rolling a D20 for defending against attacks. You get modifiers for things like dex etc, with 1 being a crit fail, and 20 being a crit success.
You may borrow them, as they are good rules.
The old Torg role playing game (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torg) had a nice mechanic that would translate nicely into D&D , especially if combat in your game tends to descend into a dice rolling exercise.
It had a pack of cards that you would draw from each turn and would give certain actions bonuses or penalties so "bonus XPs for ranged attacks", " advantage to all athletics checks" , "opponent gets disadvantage on saving throws" , "-1 to hit all round", and maybe the occasional "disadvantage on every roll".
The idea is that by giving small benefits and penalties to certain actions you can nudge players to do something interesting to take advantage or avoid the effect rather then just standing there rolling to hit. "Advantage on acrobatics? then I'll roll through the trolls legs and climb up its back and set its hair on fire..."
My houserule is that creativity is always rewarded: combining spells or spell effects pretty much always work, unless the spells themselves state it doesn't or if it is too gamebreaking. When someone uses the spell Grease the spell rules say the ground becomes slippery. My players have also attempted to light the grease on fire, which I would allow. A grease fire deals 2d6 fire damage for every turn starting or ending inside a square that's on fire, which makes 4d6 the highest, if someone stays inside the fire a full turn.
Just wanted to let you know that I have been binging your videos over the past couple weeks in preparation for a D&D game that I am DMing for my friends and they have been a great help on seeing how you can take creative spins on the rules of the game. I love your D&D videos and look forward to seeing more.
I borrowed Matt Mercer's whole "taking a potion is a bonus action, instead of a full action". Just makes more sense.
As for homebrews that I made - when rolling for health, I tell the players that the average is actually the minimum they can roll. Players wind up with a lot more health, this way; which I'm actually ok with.
I would go with a Diablo Approach. Hear me out
You can have an item that let you have 3 potion "at reach" / as a bonus action.
All these other bottles are into your backpack / as an Action
That way, the player will manage which effect they want, buff or healing on hand.
And it limit the number of potion they can access
i think the thing with the trap and giving the players agency is more of a added hastle, since as a player rely on my abillities given me by my class, it would be a bit harsh if by my uninformed decissions i could negate them.
The inventory management i find it more a hastle than it´s worth, but that is relative to the campaign i run, if it is resource management heavy the inventory becomes relevant accordingly, but in general i keep it like the point and click adventures i dont care if the players have a waschingmaschine in their inventory or whatever so they can carry as much and many of whatever they find within certain amounts of reason, they litterally can´t carry whole dragonhords in their left pocket like guybrush threepwood. i don´t want to track the players inventory as a GM and don´t want to waste too much time on letting them manage it either.
i like the idea with the cards thing, i will probably steal this one ;)
My party goes through “story cycles” every time they finish a mini adventure they get one of three things
Shopping episode,
Beach episode,
Or cool items
*My own House Rules*
1. Human Physical Height: roll 17d6+5 inches. Anyone of abnormal height is subject to bigotry.
2. Falling damage: If falling damage is 1d6/10' fallen, irrespective of character weight, so damage by falling objects is calculated by (object weight÷character weight)×1d6 per 10' object falls.
3. Characters who put low dice rolls to charisma: you get a traumatising event for your origin with the only chance for avoidance being a successful charisma check.
Campfire’s an Interlude from Savage Worlds, it’s also rewarded with an Inspiration-type token!
I have been trying, due to my inexperience as a DM, to minimize my use of house rules, but one that I have been toying with and quite love is the 'Extra Advantage/Disadvantage' rule. I have NO idea where I got it, but the summary is thus: Extra advantages or disadvantages add +1 to the roll, up to a maximum of 5.
I have been considering for some rolls, where you would normally give a character the choice between the higher of two scores (Acrobatics or Athletics is the most obvious example), instead of the initial disadvantage, asking them to roll the lower score. I don't know if that'd be too harsh or not. I might give my players the choice of taking disadvantage or the lower score.
My favorite house rule I learned at the table at my first in-person game. At the end of the session everyone participates in a go-around where we say something we liked that 1 person did. We do this until everyone has said something nice about everyone.
Common variants, the person who is being complimented isn't able to say anything when it is their turn, so no explanations of their behavior. Another variant is that you can only compliment the player's or DM's roleplaying.
Your sound without the mic sounded better. It was louder and more easily understandable. JSYK
Oh my gosh that Trap Reaction mechanic is so simple yet an innovative homebrew mechanic. From here on out, that’s incorporated into my sessions now.
So a few things I do are more for flavor than mechanics, buuuut.
Any class can learn Thieves Cant, so long as they have a background in criminal activity. (My cleric in my current campaign has this.)
Short rests don't actually take an hour, they are more so for any reasonable amount of time without combat/tension. This is a time when they party can "take a rest" or ease their nerves. Long rests do still require camp and sleep.
After/during long rests, if my players state they're doing "something" first thing in the morning, I'll give them little bonuses for such things. IE: The Fighter and Rogue decide to spar. The Fighter manages to dodge the Rogue's attack, granting a +1 to AC, while landing the hit on the Rogue, granting the rogue a +1 to HP. These bonuses only last for the day. Other examples are like Clerics being specific in their prayers may allow for a +1 to spell DCs, or Druid communing with the nearby trees/animals provides a +1 to nature/survival and such. The possibilities for this are truly endless.
Players with an above average Intelligence can roll to receive some kind of "hunch" that they may have about a puzzle or really anything that could pertain to academic/pattern based observations. (This serves as the DM giving a hint about what to do.)
I don't recall where I got this from, but I group encounter enemies by "type" (Spellcaster, ranged, tanks, sneaks) give the same initiative to that "type," moving them all into position at once, and rolling their attacks/actions all together. I like to color code my dice to keep it all in order, but it also provides me some "freedom" to determine what creates drama, IE, that die that was MEANT for the Barbarian and misses, just barely hits the Wizard. Players don't know which die is for who.
One house Rule that i quite liked is that your first two kits (like Alchemy kits thief's tools things like that) that your Characters get from the world (I.E. Bought from a shop, found or "Borrowed") are put in two slots that make it so that it doesn't count to weight like it was properly packed to the adventure's bag your character carries and starts with but if you lose the bag you lose the slots as well unless you get an adventure's bag which it costs more
I nerfed the crap out of lycanthropes. They can no longer inflict their curse with a simple bite or scratch( natural born/or a ritual). Instead they add poison damage to attacks that would have caused lycanthropy. I also nerfed most creatures that reproduce in a similar way. I feel like such creatures would have easily overrun any area they live in.
My house rule Is for wizards. At Lev 1 they should normally spend at least 50 gp to learn a Spell from a scroll, which Is quite expensive at Lev 1. So instead they spend 10 gp at Lev 1, 20 gp at Lev 2 and so on up to Lev 5, then we follow the normal rules since from Lev 5 characters own a bit of Gold.
You're missing the whole idea of why it's expensive. Scrolls are expensive. The ink you need to write in your spell book is expensive. And, for most people who would even think about adventuring, unless you're a rich noble who's bored and thinks you know better, you won't have much money to be learning new spells.
It's like saying that we should lower the price of certain items because someone only makes $10/hr vs the person who makes $50/hr. Makes no sense.
You're also not giving your PCs any reason to want to save something for later. Imagine how much more excited they are when they get a scroll of a spell they want but they hold on to if for several levels and then finally learn it because they can afford it. Feels good when you can finally afford things.
With your idea, might as well make +x armor and +x weapons cheaper too. You're babying wizards, it'd only be fair.
To each their own, I guess.
My twist on the tales by the fire system would be to give three cards to each player so they can choose which story to tell.
Additionally, I'd say telling a story is optional, but if they do tell a story, they gain a one-time-use bonus to a d20 roll equal to the number on the card they told.
For faces, you instead turn a d20 roll into that result (A=1, J=11, Q=12, K=13), allowing you to negate crit fails.
And for the ace, if it was a story of pain or loss, you can turn any d20 roll into a natural 1, and if was a story of love or gain, you can turn any d20 roll into a natural 20.
Also, that's totally cracked if you do it more than once every adventure or so. For my tables, I'd say it's something that happens during overland travel before reaching the site of the adventure. The players won't have another chance to gain mechanical benefits from this until the adventure is over.
I "adopted" the roll 1 on hit dice when leveling up is a re roll rule.
2 is the new 1 yo!
Great vid as always scrub♡
Hehehe, re roll rule. Good luck with that
Same, there is a reason you can take the average OR roll. But getting a 1 just straight sucks. Though a Barbarian I often extend this to a 2 as well. You must keep the reroll though, in my world at least. Gambling is risky after all.
I used to do that but then rolling a 2 became the new '1'. I just do max HP and everyone is much happier.
Totally enjoying your authentic vlogs. It's part of your charm. As for stolen house rules, I'm planning on stealing one I saw somewhere where players can use something akin to inspiration points to say "I know someone who can help with that" or "I've got something in my pocket that could help", and then they have to describe that someone or something. Can't be game-breaking, like a +5 vorpal dagger of stabby-stabby bleeding, but something simple like a mirror, or a certain merchant in a new town that the character happens to know.
The look after the clap at the beginning captures all of my frustrations from this week.
*Can attempt intimidation using any strength instead of charisma
*I lifted Matt Colville's Skill challenges for transit to places (each player must make a check of their choice while describing how they use that check to help get the party there without incident. DM sets DC based on how likely that thing is to help, and the number of failures reflects how many random encounters/other setbacks they run into along the way, such as delay or loss of stealth)
*XP is earned at 2 points per session (variable with level, doing cool stuff). Level up by spending XP points equal to the level you're gaining (or sum equivalent, if multiclassing)
* Weapon crits deal (max damage from dice) + (normal damage from dice) + modifiers
* spell crits deal normal damage from dice twice + modifiers
The campfire idea is very clever. It could make short/long rests a little more involved.
This makes me hope my next player group has a bard :)
I always liked the Perry rule from the Holmes DnD. But I like adding if you perry with a sword and it doesn’t break, then the player gets an additional attack with the other hand doing full damage. Like a dagger. If a shield is in the other hand then it can be used to knock the combatant over or push them off the edge of a cliff, etc. This gives the player more options then just hacking all the time. Sorry my stuff is old. I haven’t played in the last 30 years or so.
I have a rule regarding magic items where there is no way to directly identify magic items. Rather they roll arcana checks which describe rough translation of runes or use detect magic to gain clues about how magic items may work. Therefore they have to learn the item's use through trial and error.
Also for death and ressurection, I basically allow ressurection to allow the character to have a new set of death saving throws. But each time they are ressurected the DC goes up and they may develop a penalty to a skill roll with some death flavor text.
@discoandherpes I don't use it
The best "click" sound is "pssssssss". Everyone freaks the hell out when expecting an explosion.
A very simple house rule I have fixes the Arcane Archer and makes it perhaps the most fun Fighter subclass in 5e. You can use the Arcane Shot feature as many times equal to your Int. modifier, minimum of 2 per short rest.
Arcane Archer is already better than being a Ranger. Not sure why you felt the need to add anything to it.
Houserule in my 5e games: Ability-score bonuses at character creation are not related to your race. Everyone gets a +2 and a +1, and can assign them to two different ability scores, and then they get whatever fun fluff and capabilities their race of choice gets by the rules, but no ability scores from the race.
I largely went that direction because I saw my experienced players again and again having "builds" for characters in their heads, and constantly picking whatever race mechanically supported that build, rather than whatever they felt would be fun.
By far the greatest video ever uploaded to TH-cam in terms of quality, content and professionalism (Thumbs up)
it's a good video,great video even,but that's a little much don't you think?
Meant to be read with a bit of joking sarcasm.
Tone is very difficult to put in words to be read as opposed to being said. Yet equal in terms of being construed.. funny.
For currency weight and inventory, as well as the difficulty of assigning it as treasure and keeping track; just make all the coinage worth as much as the next category up, and you can either upgrade platinum to be worth 100 gold instead of 10(not my preferred option), or just make gems more commonly found and traded(raw uncut gems could even make sense as loot on creatures of all kinds, way more than coins, or loot bats. As for platinum, the reason I don't prefer making it more useful, is that, historically and even today, platinum was/is less common/valuable than gold, and silver was the more common 'wealth' coinage for most people for most of civilized history, and the wealthy used gems as easily transportable forms of condensed wealth, even so much so as to be very discreet.
You're comparing a fantasy world to real-world economics and resource availability? The reason platinum is so valuable is because not many cities/regions have access to it and it's become a precious resource.
I'm currently running four groups of three through a westmarch survival hexcrawl thing where you have to spend money to level up (no xp tracking at all). So, there is all of that. But we are using several combat house rules within this:
- Shields count as a light weapon (1d4 bludgeoning) - enables offhand attacks with you shield, just like a real one.
- If your attack roll is greater than double the targets AC then you score a critical hit - this makes it feel like your weapon skill matters and helps you clear out minions.
- If your damage roll is greater than the targets HP maximum then you cleave them in two and the excess damage is carried over to any other enemy within range - ie: if there are two goblins within range (max hp of 7) and you hit the wounded one who has only 3 hp left with a damage roll of 9, then that goblin is killed and dismembered and his buddie takes the 6 remaining points of damage - this lets those overpowered killing blows go to use and just feels badass.
- Channelling spells - if you use the ready action to hold a spell and at the start of your next turn you still have the spell held, you can use your action to make a spellcasting check to ''channel'' the spell, adding one spell level to the held spell and setting a new trigger for the readied spell, the DC is 10 plus the spells current level, if you fail you lose the original spell slot as if you had cast the spell but the spell does not trigger - good for making a level 9 Fireball, especially when the players see the Kobold sorcerer in the back row doing it to them.
- If you hit 0 hit points you gain one level of exhaustion - because getting knocked out should really really suck
We also roll the Protection and Defense fighting styles into a single one called Bastion (which I stole from Reforged from the DawnForgedCast) and have a few extra weapons and spells taken from various internet sources.
Stories by the Campfire is an actual game mechanic in Savage Worlds.
I think it sounded better without the mic. Also, you seriously have some features in common with Keira Knightley. It's uncanny. Also, great video!
I had a good over thinking session about when disadvantage or advantage is over doing it once. Like, say the player has to meet something with their score, or it's barely an issue but in that frustrating line between disadvantage is too harsh, but a straight role isn't challenging enough, so similar to the blight spell they can subtract from their roll according to another die (say a D8 but it can change).
So say the player is making some sort of intelligence role even though their character probably wouldn't know due to their backstory or what have you. Instead of disadvantage, cause that seems a tiny bit harsh, they can subtract the roll from say a D6 that way it's the feeling of it being more difficult with how it also feeling harsh because it's more of a technical reason for disadvantage. Of course this doesn't have to be the case and I'm also completely rubbish at explaining things so I'm sorry if this was hella confusing
Love the idea of the campfire stories, but I feel it would take much time from the gaming night... How much do your dnd nights last?