I feel all these house rules can immediately be countered with "So how does that make help everyone at the table have fun?" Especially the Talk IRL you talk in the game.
I can see the merit of this one. I was a player and we were "out of character" discussing a battle plan, and the DM told us how the enemy was advancing somehow. There's also light banter out of character that happens and no roleplay in character that makes the game feel kind of flat. But I don't wholly agree to that rule.
Honestly I've been with a lot of (usually convention or FLGS) DMs who enforced that one specifically. It's kind of a mainstay in the community for some reason. I think it's a control thing - the DM feels frustrated when their players get too sidetracked or unfocused and they don't have any subtler tools for keeping the game moving forward, so they overcorrect and brute force it like that. It's more of a punishment than a table tool, and that sucks for everybody involved.
@@haku8135 mb roll a d20 after every combat. That way everyone has the same odds of getting it and there's no way to gain more by powergaming. Then it becomes part of the levelling system. I really wonder how bad it was, because if you get a mechanical bonus for each time you kill with a bladed weapon, then the rogue and other melee chars would get OP before they even levelled
@@dizzydial8081 I mean from the perspective of both DM and player I don't think that is necessarily bad. Being able to hit the pause button should not always be an easy option, especially when in game your characters would be very hard pressed for time.
Our gaming group was "In a mood" one evening, just could not really focus on the game (I honestly do not remember why). We had the DM totally frustrated. He meant to drop a wandering monster on us but accidentally referred to it as "wandering damage". We teased him mercilessly for a few minutes until he just said "fuck it, you get hit by a lightning bolt from a pissed off Thunder God for 30 damage" (I do not remember the actual amount of damage). It became a running joke in the group, but our characters were, forever more, terrified of Thunder Gods with bad tempers.
@@bernardomacedo9848 I honestly don't mind that being banned tbh. But either way anyone who looks at d&d and sees a mmo-style role setup just ain't looking right. And for the record I'm ok with multi-classing just think it's too often used purely for power rather than interesting and justified ideas.
I actually had a DM like this. I asked him why that's his rule on classes and he said it's to "force diversity". It's an annoying as shit rule though. In one instance I spoke with him about my character before a new game, told him the bard I wanted to be, how I'd play him, etc. Then another player chose bard, would NOT change classes or they'd leave the game, and my DM asked me to change classes so we could keep the toxic ass player. That player would later steal from players, try to force PvP, and would break laws around cities because they're a "lol random" Chaotic Neutral Fallen Aasimar. I chose Artificer and forced the DM to allow me to make guns in his campaign just to spite him for that crap.
DMs not understanding rogues and sneak attack is a surprisingly common problem. There is the extra damage from sneak attack, but there are also DMs who think, because it’s “sneak” attack, it should only be made from hiding or something.
Sneak attack is truly a huge misnomer. For it to be called "Sneak Attack" suggests that it is an attack made while... You know... Sneaking. No, it's just an attack that exploits gaps in your opponents defense, as well as quick acting when their attention is briefly diverted. Something like "Swift attack" would have prevented SO many arguments.
@@headcrab4 Don't name it anything. Just say rogues get a bonus roll when an opponent is "distracted" and a distracted opponent is one which has another pc within 5ft of them or is unaware of your presence.
I think this is because of 2e, where you literally could only sneak attack of your opponent was unaware of you. It also didn’t work on the majority of creatures
@@thecharmer5981 I think most new DMs haven't even heard about 2e. Interesting tidbit, nonetheless. I always like hearing about edition-differences. I remember Pathfinder not allowing sneak attack on everything either, which sucked as a rogue being introduced into the game during an undead-heavy section.
The worst house rule that I had was that when we were trying to knock someone out instead of kill them we were doing half damage. He never told us he was going to use this rule and it resulted in 1 player dying. He only told us he was using it after we started complaining that everyone had INSANE health for our respective level at the time
@@judyhill2060 He also stopped everything to force a player's character off of a mountain as a is it a punishment for meta gaming. Instant 0 hp and took him out of the encounter. He didn't kill his character but still he should had stepped out side and had a word with him instead.
I mean - Devil’s Advocate here - the rule makes sense. My DM uses a similar rule. It’s 100% true that he definitely should have told you, but it’s also true you shouldn’t be declaring ‘nonlethal’ on every single attack and trying to game the system. Our Table’s Non-Lethal house rule is thus: When you roll to attack a creature and you hit, you may declare the damage to be nonlethal before seeing how much damage your attack did. If the nonlethal attack’s damage is not enough to bring the target to zero hit points, the target takes half damage from that attack.
Yeah...the "Killing a helpless opponent is a dark side act" thing is one of those "It COULD be fair, buut..." Because THAT WAS NOT KILLING A HELPLESS OPPONENT! That was finishing a foe that WOULD. NOT. DIE.
To be fair, that IS accurate to the lore, killing an opponent that physically is not a threat to you anymore (I assume this neigh immortal character could have been tied up or something after being knocked out) IS a dark side act. Anakin killing Dooku after CUTTING HIS ARMS OFF, making him basically helpless, was not the Jedi move. Apprehending him was, which he could have done. HOWEVER!............ The person killing this bitch, WASN'T EVEN A JEDI! So how the fuck is this a problem? The Dark Side is not a virus........ yet, who knows what Disney will do next?
@@haku8135 People forgetting Mace Windu was about to finish off Palpatine. If the threat is considered to be that dangerous then an exception can be made.
I know nothing about that system, but I think a better way to use that rule is "no PERMAdeath" basically, you can get downed, if you fail your saves you're down until a long rest or similar level of healing. The entire party CAN still be tpk'd like this and you run the risk of your main character being out of commission for a while. Helps to have ally npcs that can be used as backup characters. This keeps the risk of death while being less punishing for players who get attached to their characters like I do.
Honestly with how tanky it's possible to get via armor, dodge, and toughness, the healing shennanigans it's possible to pull as a chirurgeon, plus burning fate-points to survive even if you would die normally, it's actually kinda hard to kill people in Dark Heresy without some warp bullshit happening or a blatantly unfair encounter. Now both are 100% in line with the setting and game, but you gotta build up to that or it'll feel cheap.
Had a GM who had a rule that characters could only handle their level in gold in magic items...so a level 2 character could only have on them 2000gp worth of magic items. If they even touched anything more they would get teleported to a purgatory realm to wait to be rescued. As the contents of a bag of holding are not really on the character we started putting all the extra magic items in it...then when we faced a big bad major villain the person with the boh dumped the contents on the villain...which happened to be more than he could handle with what he already possessed....so off he went to purgatory realm and problem taken care of. That GM had a mess of house rules and a custom background generator. Our group of players were all exceptionally intelligent. After about a year of playing the GM started having to revise his rules on a monthly basis as we would find new ways to use his rules to our favor.
I mean, if you're trying to manage magic item levels, I can kinda understand the first part. The second part is stupid. Just make it so that item is like Thor's Hammer, you can't pick it up until you're high enough level to do so. TBC, I would never have that as a thing in my games. I'm just saying I can see the logic.
@@LoudAngryJerk could be even simpler: magic items with a value over your level won't have any effect. But I wouldn't use total value and the teleport thing is ofcourse stupid (and your group realised that pretty quickly it seems). Still, it seems like the DM has trouble determining what items to give the group and tries to balance it out (in a way that breaks it even more)
This is funny because the idea isn't bad by itself, but it went completely over his head that vanilla D&D is already supposed to work like this; except that the rule of thumb is to use XP as the equivalent for gold in magic items; not level in gold because the value of magical items scale exponentially (ie a +2 item should worth ten times as much as a +1 item). And if the DM made sure that the rewards are all balanced on the player level and player level scales according to how much shit they find - it's not a problem that should exist in the first place. A level 2 character should never have much more than 900gp in items; because they got about 300gp in their first "quest" to get to level 2 and by the time they make another 600gp they should have earned enough xp to get to level 3. So either way, players were levelling up too slowly, or the DM was giving them too much loot.
Something that wasn't a rule per se but I found annoying was that npc's auto succeed checks pc's have to role for, regardless of circumstances. For example: A child goblin npc(who had a single level in rogue) was able to easily disarm a trap by simply cutting the trip wire, but when one of the pc's tried to do it(who was a 14th level rogue) on an identical trap, they had to make a check, which they failed due to a stupidly high dc. Yes, the lvl 1 rogue child was able to pass a dc an adult lvl 14 rogue wasn't able to.
I thought you were saying auto succeed on on things players would have to roll for like crafting a weapon or armor. But no just Auto success on disarming traps
@@XMaster340 yeah, to be fair it's totally possible for a level 1 rogue to notice something a level 14 rogue didn't because a lot of D&D is still up to random dice rolls. if i were DMing in this situation and i wanted my players to be able to pass a trap and they failed to disarm it but had a little kid rogue with them, i'd just whip up something about how they'd actually made a trap like this before and knew how to disarm it, or maybe that the 14 rogue did everything wrong so the kid could discern the one thing to do right, or something along those lines. maybe since they are closer to the ground their perspective of the trap is different and they can see what needs to be disarmed easier. any of those would actually add some character to the kid rogue if that was my intention. if it's helping the players it is WAY less egregious than harming the players.
Well this could just be a case of the DM wanting to move things forward. I don't know if you've ever DM'd but you have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it (in the moment). So you often skip rolls and take average outcome, nobody wants to sit there watch 10 NPC guards roll during a combat encounter...
I played a one-shot once where the extremely new DM didn't understand how starting equipment worked and made their players simply roll 1d20 and that's how much gold you had x10. Meaning you could have anything between 10-200 gold. You were also allowed to have any weapon or armor that "made sense" for your character, including plate and greatswords. ... ...It was me. I was that DM.
Here's one I almost did: Being hit with an attack- any attack, gives you 1d4 fear. If your fear ever exceeds your total hit points, the next time you're hit with an attack, you take a point of exhaustion. I did add ways to reduce fear- it reset after combat ended, and if any enemies died near you, your fear was cut in half. The idea was that I'm also giving you a lot of ways to improve your character. Such as having two leveling systems allowing you to effectively go to 40th level (and get 40 hit die worth of hit points) and I wanted the first couple levels to be very panic-inducing. But given that my campaign was modeled to play like left 4 dead or Vermintide in D&D (lots of horde fights, lots of attacks) after one playtest session I determined that was bullshit. Instead I'm using it as a mechanic for very specific boss-related fights and encounters. And I'm giving players ways to mitigate it, such as by looking into the monster and knowing what they are, they no longer fear the creature.
I like how this isthe perspective of a dm trying in honesty, but 1 salty player could just as easily take one explanation you might have given at the table and present this as a horror dm story. Why i just always take to these stories with a grain of salt.
Perhaps have the players take a will save to halve the fear gain (rounded down). The fear threshold could be determined by Player Level + amount of nearby allies + wis mod + cha mod. Fear decreases by 1 every turn. If their fear equals double their threshold than they flee until their fear goes under their threshold. Allies nearby can spend a move action to reassure them but its cha + player level vs Current Fear
“I will not allow the rule of cool. You can only cast a spell as it says in the rules, and it can only do what it says in the rules. Trying to get creative with the game is preposterous and something I will not allow at my table!” - That Guy DM on session 1, moments before a TPK happened because we had no spell that would do anything to help us get away from a magical flood of acid that did 10d12 damage. Did not play in one of his games again.
"having a thorough explanation of mechanics on paper in front of you which the DM will abide by instead of ambushing you with his wackadoo house rules is bad" there comes a point where "I can do anything" has to be followed by "within limits"
Rule of cool doesn't exist. Consistency does. If a DM allows some stupid bs that breaks limitations of a spell, that's always how this spell should work from now on. Which is a house rule. Either that DM just wanted to slaughter everyone, or you all paid zero attention.
@@helgenlane the rule of cool is literally just creativity and thinking outside the box while using the rules. this dm literally said no creativity will be allowed. they probably had a brunch of solutions but if he literally said he wont allow a creative one then whats the point of even trying if they were just going to punish and blame them cuz he sucks at planning around creative plans. he just sounds like a bad and lazy dm who thinks hes playing against his players. shit would have had consistency if he knew how to play the game properly without sucking the fun out of it.
@@Kris-wo4pj if "he won't allow a creative solution" then he won't allow any solution at all, except for the only one that he envisioned. It's not about "rule of cool", it's just a bad DM who has zero understanding of this game as a system. There's no such thing as "rule of cool" if you are not breaking the rules from the books. Everything else is just normal gameplay and house rules.
@@Kris-wo4pj A creative solution can follow the rules: That's why the solution is creative. If you just rewrite your shit whenever you need to, you are not creating a solution, but ignoring the problem. Ignoring rules or limitations, when "it's just cool" is very dangerous thing to do in a less silly campaign and should be heavily moderated, if not unallowed. This is pretty much the difference between the first two and the last two seasons of GoT.
“Roll Sanity” ; our DM would self insert into the campaign, and any time we did something mildly out of the way of what he wanted we would have to roll sanity (d20) against him, or he would take over our characters until he saw fit. He, of course, always rolled nat 20.
If you want to go exactly by the book, play a videogame. DnD is meant to be open and diverse, options only being limited by the players imaginations. If your DM doesn't like that part of DnD, your DM doesn't like DnD
@@dylancarter9290 You'd be surprised how many "Great DnD players" on reddit play the game RAW and advocate for it. It's so alienating to me because the game itself was literally INTENDED to be played with rules as a guidance.
I'd have to go with "Paladins can only Smite with blunt weaponry." Not just as a bonus action, but period. Reason why this was the worst? Game about 2 1/2 years ago, it was Session 2, we'd just gotten lv2, I was wielding a sword-and-board combo, and during the first combat I tried to smite the zombie I was fighting. Cue house rule declaration. Made worse is the fact he still ruled I used the slot (something like I tried to cast, but because I wasn't using a blunt weapon, it auto-failed). Didn't return after that session. Heard from one of the other guys who stayed a little longer that he just seemed to arbitrarily make house rules when something was going too quickly for his tastes. Guess me potentially killing a single zombie was 'too fast'.
@@TheSpencermacdougall Honestly, didn't even think about it at the time, I was just so flabbergasted. Based on what I heard, he probably wouldn't have allowed it though.
@S.Lanham I’ve got a worst case. This was my first time playing dnd and I decided to play a vengeance paladin of the god of death Kelemvor (this is important). We had a rough fight where I used all my spell slots and got knocked unconscious (not killed). After which we take a long rest where the DM informs me I recover no spell slots and all my paladin abilities except extra attack are gone. Two sessions later I find a npc who is a cleric of kelemvor . I ask for help on getting my powers back. Here’s the kicker; apparently kelemvor thinks I’m dead so took away my powers. The god of death doesn’t know when one of his paladin’s is dead and takes away their powers!! Eventually I slowly get some of them back. At level 9 I had two first level spell slots. By this time everyone else in the party had got magic items, so far I have nothing. This creates a problem as we start fighting things resistant to non magic weapon damage. After one boss fight who was described as having a magic sword I say that sword was magic, so I would like to take it. I got a dark +1 magic long sword. Didn’t think much of it at the time. Next combat we where fighting something i hit it and smite at which point the DM describes the sword as breaking from the radiant energy. Turns out this weapon breaks after I use one of my two spell slots to smite with it- oh don’t worry it repairs itself at the end of a long rest. That campaign died after a while and I almost gave up dnd because of it. Thankfully a friend of mine offered to run waterdeep and I grew to love dnd.
I mean, i do that. But for myself. Not forcing/expecting others to do it as well. That's I think were the problem lies. We also don't roll a lot of crits usually, so theres that
One time when I was still new to D&D I played a gunslinger in a level 5 one shot DM decided that every time I shot, I would take 1d6 ear ringing damage…nothing else was changed to counteract this. So I COULD do a neat 1d8 damage IF I hit my target, but I would ALWAYS take damage no matter what I’m actually more mad at myself for not realizing at the time how MIND-BOGGLINGLY RIDICULOUS that was
"I wanna cast as many spells in one turn as I want!" Me: *Laughs* Me: *Laughs Harder* Me: *Laughs so hard I fall to the ground* Me: *Sits up suddenly and stops laughing* Me: "Absolutely the fuck not."
How do you even start to rationalize that? "I walk into the boss fight and throw 10 fireballs in six seconds, dealing 80d6 of damage before anybody does anything." Must have been some serious complaining for the DM to give in to that
@@dylancarter9290 Yeah, no, I would never allow this in my game, I don't care how many times they ask. At some point I would have to say "From now on, everytime you ask me if you can do this, you WILL suffer 3d12 psychic damage. So stop asking me."
Oh is THAT what that meant!? I Just thought he was complaining about quickened spell not letting you do two leveled spell and was trying to figure out what the big deal was.
Have a current GM who tweaks his house rules based on our strategies. When the campaign first started, I was playing a Vengeance Paladin, and when we discovered that it was mostly going to be a campaign with fiends/undead, he used an aspect of my character's background as justification to change the damage type on my smites to necrotic, which pretty much every enemy was either resistant or immune to. When our party strategy changed to utilizing our devil's sights and the Darkness spell, he began adding Devil's Sight to all enemies. So, we changed up our strategy, and were high enough level to start making use of spells and class features that force saving throws that would give us rounds of huge advantages, he started allowing his creatures to go multiple times per round, which meant multiple times per round to save and rid themselves of negative effects. Edit: I should have been clearer about the Devil's Sight/True Sight thing. I don't object to its presence on Demons and the couple Celestials we've fought, but more so to it being tossed on random beasts and undead, like some Gnolls, a Froghemoth and a The Lost that we fought.
What an ass. Did you call him out on his BS? He’s supposed to be creating a story for everyone to have fun in, not having an arms race between himself and the players.
See, he has the right idea: When players start using strong strategies it's time to toss some enemies that can compete with those strategies. But he implements it in the worst possible ways lol. Making your smite necrotic is horrible. Just let the PALADIN do shitloads of damage to undead. That's their thing.
Honestly, either call them out on their bullshit. Leave the campaign, or don't even complain, cause if you're all ok with putting up with his shit, that's now your group's problem.
The necrotic thing is dumb af that's your best weapon. The devil's sight thing kinda makes sense or blindsight cuz of devil's and undead depending on campaign setting. The multiple turns thing just feels like he is panicking lol.
DM 1: "As a Wizard, you're expected to keep track of every single spell component in your pouch. Yes I know what the PHB says about component pouches, I'm overriding that. And they all have prices now. Oh you're taking the Eschew Materials feat? All the prices just went above the 1GP threshold." Jerk had just finished playing Secret of Evermore and decided that's how arcane magic works now. Only arcane magic. I was, of course, the only arcane caster in the party. DM 2: "Now that you're in the middle of PvP and have already been shot multiple times, I am just now deciding that, despite your first successful attack roll, I'm now allowing the other guy to Reflex Save to avoid your attack." Also DM 2: "No your elf isn't immune to this particular magical sleep even though I've already explicitly called it magical sleep, which elves are immune to. It's now, uh, *induced unconsciousness* and those aren't dreams they're *hallucinations*." ALSO DM 2: "I know the party currently has clear vision for over 800ft in every direction, but this NPC just descended from a rope directly overhead, snatched the McGuffin from your hands (no roll), and ran out of vision (another 800ft) at the speed of fucking light. You have one round to stop them." ---Party stops them anyway, with long-ranged attacks. DM: "The McGuffin falls out of the thief's hands, slowly rolls into a hole in the ground (that didn't exist until just now), and instantly falls more than two miles straight down. You've lost it and it's ALL YOUR FAULT."
I had that last one happen to me 2 sessions ago lol. His argument was that it was something "different" then magic and I would indeed fall asleep like the rest of my party. All because it was to further his plot progression which I understand, but that elven feat has never come in use for me before, so extra bumped that it did not work...
Wow this makes me grateful for my DM’s. The only really negative experience I’ve had was a DM (and admittedly this was his first time) who would pretty much play your character for you. He would infer what your character would do and say and it would boil down to 50 minutes of him talking to himself and he had a bad habit of making every character talk and act the same way. Got boring real quick. But we talked him out of that.
@@spencer1531 Yes! I’m trying to get a session 0 with my dad, me, and my sister, with my dad’s friend as the DM. The DM’s friend Alex might join too, and if she does, she’ll be the only PC with experience. I hope she doesn’t kill me with OP monsters the party isn’t ready for, and that maybe she’ll give us a useless magic item for fun. The first hope is more important
All of what i'm about to list came from the same DM All female characters had a -4 strength mod regardless of system. Everything you say or do out of character is done in character and he enforced it. In order to do anything effectively in any situation you have to have a vast out of game understanding of it. This doesnt sound that bad but let me give an example: i was playing as an engineer in a starship troopers campaign and our cherenkov drive broke down. I went to roll technical mechanical and got a natural 20 with a +19 bonus. In order for me to be able to fix the damn thing, i needed to actually understand QUANTUM PHYSICS THEORY out of game because success required me providing formula, and the use of the correct tools and procedures. So this meant i needed i also needed understanding of nuclear reactor maintenance procedures....in depth. Because i couldnt provide such information, even my modofoed 39 roll wasnt able to succeed. I get wanting to have your players be knowledgeable about things but this is going too far. Every situation actually had only one actual solution but we were supposed to explore other options just to find out that we were wasting our time, and anything we qorked for basically was fucked over by the GM. Basically this house rule is "you have to outsmart the GM in order to have fun. Fuck gm vs player mentality
Fuck gm vs player mentality. Also lulwut. You needed in depth knowledge on how to repair starships in a space opera with literal supertech starships that cannot be produced with knowledge we have today? Cool. Especially on a nat 20..... In my groups we usualy discuss how the pro char with high skill probably does things, since the guys are unusually educated and loves going on tangents on all things. But it's usually to mentally depict how awesome the char is doing. Plus the gm often join in on this. So it's a coop atmosphere, but the tangents can last very long.....
oh, this reminds me of a story: a player found a magical bow called "Thunk" that would give him a guaranteed Crit on his next shot, BUT make him PERMANENTLY lose 1 Constitution on EVERY use, AND the smartass GM WOULD trigger it if he said "thunk" OUT of character... later he ALSO found a magical arrow that would turn an enemy into Gold IF he made a crit with it... yes, when they met the BBEG, he said: "i draw the magical arrow and prepare to fire" he then looked the GM in the eye and said, "THUNK."
Mine decided to add a relationship value to the game, where when the number gets high enough characters will get feelings for someone else in the party, it was awkward for us, especially my girlfriend at the time who was the character that everyone would get feelings for.
9:00 That makes no sense. If anything, clerics should have a very high likelihood of succeeding on a spell because they are drawing from the power of a god. The power of a god doesn't fail. Wizards rely on their focus and knowledge and willpower to cast spells. Bards rely on their earthly proficiencies. Much more prone to failure.
I disagree. One could easily argue that the spell effect is exactly what the god intended. But that doesn't mean it's what the cleric wanted. A cleric is always reliant on their gods favour. Don't get me wrong. It's still a shitty houserule. All I'm saying is that it does make sense for clerics to also be plagued by its effects.
@@XMaster340 But that would break the whole concept of being a cleric. Clerics are chosen by their god and they follow the will of their god. A cleric that turns against the will of their god is worse than an oathbreaker paladin. A cleric who loses a god's favor loses all power.
@@CristiNeagu True, but DnD gods are only human after all So they might have a bad day, or they might just enjoy messing with their clerics from time to time or they could be thinking that the cleric didn't show enough devotion during this specific spell cast. Just because a single spell fails or doesn't work as intended doesn't mean that the cleric has fallen out of favour.
@@XMaster340 I think we'll need some sort of lore buff to clear this up, but I see this as like an employer-employee relation. Your boss won't fire you for doing one wrong thing, but if you keep doing wrong things, you will be fired. In the same way, I don't think a god will micromanage which spells a cleric gets to cast based on the intent of each. I think it's more likely that the permission is based on trends, so if a cleric shows a good track record of obeying their god's will, I see no reason why their god would withdraw power on a spell by spell basis.
The reason I turned into a GM only is because of bad Gms in my area. We had this guy that said no one could use a Perception check to look for traps in an area unless you were a rogue. So if there was a plain rope across the path, no one was allowed to notice it was a trap, we were forced to just walk into it. Plus he didn't like keeping track of points and didn't trust anyone to write them down....it was horrible. Plus I wanted to make my first Bard, after I spent hours making the perfect character and backstory we get into combat, he then tells me I have to sing in real life to cast any spells and if I didn't my character couldn't cast. Yah @#$% that GM.
I'm going to be starting a Pathfinder 1st Ed campaign as GM. There's a player who's going to playing a bard. I'm not insisting he sings IRL if he uses Perform in combat. However, I did say if he does sing/perform a verse or two and it fits with what he's doing with it, he would get some bonus xp. It's got to be original each time too. TBH I'm not sure he will take the carrot, but you never know.
My first ever time playing D&D I made a tiefling bard. I was super excited and had a okay if slightly edgey backstory (first character sue me XD). During a fight I see a chance to use charm person and that was when the DM... Told me I had to sing... Not discussed prior not warned when picking bard... Also our game was being live streamed to an audience... I can't sing. Well... I can but badly. It wasn't pleasant for anyone and they kept insisting on it too. I got the to the point where I stopped casting my spells unless we Really needed them...and I mean life or death. That DM didn't last long and the person who took over let me just cast without singing.
3:30 Doom points are actually a thing used in other systems (Conan) and I think they’re actually pretty popular. The idea behind is is a DM gets a certain amount of points to spend and make things more difficult for the players. It’s their to both encourage the DM to make things challenging but limit things to keep thing fair. That being said I don’t think the DM was using it right as Doom points and anime should not be correlated.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, the DM's doom points were a counter to the parties Momentum points and interwove with that system (since, if I'm remembering correctly, players could choose to give the DM doom points in order to get better rolls if they were out of momentum, but could gain momentum gradually (and as a party) with their own rolls).
That sounds a lot like destiny points in FFG star wars and Genesys. There it is a pool which is decided at the start of the game. About half are black, rest are white. When players use them, to activate certain abilities or add undefined items to a scene, it turns black. When gm uses them, for powerful monster abilities, they turn white. A bad way i've seen "doom" points done, is mutant chronicles. In one of them, gm gets x per turn from some powerful monsters. Also ones when players do re-rolls. With these points, the gm can. With a group of enemies, shoot their machine gun. Jam a player weapon. An evil sorcerer using a spell. Re-roll and force worst result on a roll....... It's so much more player vs gm in Mutant chronicles. It's so bad. The machine gun is the worst, such an obvious board game mechanic, it's so stupid. In the FFG games they are fine. But i'm not super into the gm needing them. But they are fine.
I think the worst houserule I've heard is that in the classic "how do you want to do this?" part of the combat, which is the very end, you cannot describe how you're killing an enemy if it doesn't suit your in-game mechanics. So basically you can't stab an opponent multiple times if you're a rogue. How the hell houserules a fluff portion of the game?..
Had a DM make everyone roll for initiative outside of combat when we didn’t have a set goal. He’d go from person to person instead of letting us all play as a group like normal. He didn’t do this all the time but it’s completely contradictory to D&D since it’s a group game.
reminds me of a rule i read about in a different video, i think it's an official optional rule, that was supposed to "make combat more realistic"... everyone has to reroll initiative at the beginning of every round of combat. EVERYONE. EVERY round. this made EVERY fight take FOREVER to resolve.
I wouldn’t say it’s entirely a bad idea, especially if the group has issues talking over each other as it’s essentially a “talking stick” but if your group doesn’t have that sort of issues than it’s just slowing things down
@@ericb3157 that's how my game plays, and you're right, it does take forever. But it's what the DM wanted, and the rest of us didn't feel strongly enough about it to argue. I think it's a holdover from AD&D? That's the system they learned on, anyway, and we use a few other rules from there as well, like Crit tables. I don't completely hate it, but I probably wouldn't choose it myself if I were given the option.
I- kindof do this- when I'm in exploratory maps, and I want people to manage how much time they spend on a given task, I'll roll for non combat initiative.
"If you forget something out of character, it happens in character." My warlock was trying to communicate with their companion mouse, and I forgot that he had comprehend languages, and the DM made me connect with my patron (I was worshiping a celestial) for them to let me remember. I was also told if I were to forget again they wouldn't allow me to relearn it. That side campaign has been out on hold and never started again, but im assuming that if your warlock patron decided that you were unworthy, they can remove the powers they gave you (if I recall, 3 out of the 5 characters were warlocks) Also I haven't played much dnd so that could be normal
I mean, the way I usually rule it is that it’s your character. As the DM I have more than enough things to keep track of. If you forget you have comprehend languages in the moment, it’s not my responsibility to remind you of the things you can do. Having players be more responsible for remembering what actions they can take also leads to smoother sessions in my experience, players pay more attention, and combat goes much faster.
My table plays with the “forget” rule. My DM has enough to keep track of. Oftentimes people will roll History, but otherwise the only person you can really blame is yourself.
"Nat 20s always succeed and Nat 1s always fail", this is applied to everything. Even applies to initiative, Nat 20 is always first and Nat 1 is always last. Might not be too bad if it only applied to our PCs, which would still kinda suck but less so. It applies to the NPCs too. We have a rogue that can't stealth, because with a 31 stealth check when she's going through a camp of 30 bandits at least one of them is bound to roll a 20 and spot her. Which they did, every single time. We have an Observant feat Cleric with a 27 in passive Perception that can't spot anything because the NPCs always roll Nat 20 for stealth. Seriously, once got surrounded by 15 goblin archers and our Cleric only spotted 7 of them because of the dumb Nat 20 rule. Literally the only 7 enemies he's spotted the whole game, we get snuck up on a lot for no real reason. I wasn't even a fan of the rule before it was put into practice, but if what's already happened is not bad enough the rule is also not consistent. Our Rogue has a cursed magic item she got from a devil. She never had it Identified so she didn't know it was cursed. Apparently anytime she uses its magic abilities she has to roll a Wis save or fall unconscious, with the DC rising each time she succeeds but we didn't know that tidbit until afterwards. 2 uses, 2 saves, she succeeds then both. DC is a 30 something now, supposed to be impossible. 3rd use, 3rd save, rolls a Nat 20, falls unconscious anyways. 3rd round of a boss fight and our Rogue is out of the fight. Not missing hp so healing doesn't wake her up, caused by an unknown magic item so medicine and arcana checks don't do anything. She Nat 20d, should've succeeded, failed anyways, and was removed from the boss fight with no way to revive her. So yeah, it was inconsistent too and turned an already-difficult fight into a grueling slog because we lost our main damage dealer.
this video really makes me feel lucky that my DMs didn't really have the house rule issue. our group was too big and they could never get the balance right so every fight was over in 1 round or half the PCs die.
"If it meets it beats" except not really. I can't recall what happened exactly but a spell was cast that required our fighter to make a save, he meets the save and... Fails. I and the fighter call this out and he responds with if it meets it beats. We say the same and point out the obvious similarity between AC and DC. Nope still a fail. This was like the 16th time this kinda crap occurred so me and the fighter leave never to play with him again and continue to be friends despite not knowing each other before hand.
I have a "ties go to defender" rule. Essentially, all it does is make everything 5% harder to hit, but after so many players being confused about whether or not a tie succeeds or fails, I had to make a blanket house rule just to simplify it.
"If it meets it beats" is actually RAW (in 5e at least), if the roll ties the DC/AC, the roller wins. If the roll was a contest (both sides rolling), then maintain status quo (so for example, if the contest was an attempt to grapple, creature is not grappled on a tie, but if the roll is to escape a grapple, then a tie has the creature remain grappled, if the contest is neutral, like to do something before the other, then neither succeeds on a tie).
"Critical hits do max damage, then double damage (for example, a crit with a 1d8 weapon automatically does 16 damage, no rolls needed)." Sounds good until you realize that (A) enemies get this, too, and (B) the DM also liked to use single, big enemies that hit like a truck anyway. When one attack takes your Lv2 PC from full health to 2 points away from being killed outright (not knocked unconscious: killed outright) through resistance to the damage type taken, you begin to question the life choices that brought you to that table...
ok i miss read that at first. i do crits do auto max then role dice like normal so 1d8 does 1d8+8 on a crit i was worried i was doing a bad house rule there.
@@edwardmccartney5405 No, that house rule is cool (I use it myself at my table I DM at). Even the rule I stated would be "fine" with better enemy selection (like tankier, but less hard-hitting enemies, or enemies that rely more on numbers than individual hitting power, like creatures with Pack Tactics causing more frequent but takeable crits could make for a unique, tricky challenge). This house rule combined with an enemy that is a challenge because of how hard it hits means that instead of a series of bad rolls being potentially catastrophic for a party (which is more than fair), any single dice roll can easily snowball into a TPK by outright killing a strategy-critical PC, and it should be a very unique and special circumstance (maybe once or twice a campaign) that a single dice roll have that much campaign breaking/altering power, not every dice roll of every mini-boss and up.
@@MastrElite The way I run it at my games is max damage for one die then roll a damage die and add it to the total. For example, 2d6 + 2 crit would be 2d6 + 14. That way, the crit really matters, but they still get a bit of randomness with a potential for huge damage.
I'm going to be DM-ing for the first time soon and this video fills me with BOUNDLESS confidence because there is no way in a THOUSAND YEARS I could manage to fuck up the game as badly as these people did
There’s a lot of things in D&D that are pointlessly obtuse. Things like your money having weight, using spell components for simple spells like mage hand and dancing lights, and remembering to eat and feed your familiars every day. If your DM makes you do one of these, that’s normal. If your DM makes you do all of these, run.
The Star Wars story reminds me of 'that' scene from The Rise Of Skywalker and how Kylo Ren emerges unscathed from his TIE Fighter when it crashes and explodes after Rey cleaves one of the wings off...
That's bullshit. I understand not allowing multiclassing because multiclassing is an optional rule. But Just mentioning it is getting you kicked? Geez, Besides, wanting to optimize a character is not inherently bad
That sounds so stupid to be honest... I get not allowing certain expansions since there's a massive difference between someone playing with standard edition, and someone building a character out of twenty expansion books, but multiclassing? Sounds like DM was trash at balancing encounters for players..
"Sneak Attack means you only deal extra damage when you surprise the enemy" types of DMs are the fucking worst because they view their interpretation of the nomenclature of the game as the guide to building systems with no regard for balance or what it means to pick a class for the express purpose of being specialized in an ability that makes only exceptional people capable of performing them. If you replace "sneak" with "trick" -- or just read the fucking feature's description -- it would clear up the fact that the class feature is not literal WoW stealth openers, but rather, attacking in such a way that your attacks are more effective by use of cunning and timing in combat to leverage additional power against your opponent. That's why you can use it without advantage when you have allies with you -- you are doing the equivalent of attacking the same time to get around their guard and analyze their movements. This is why you can only do it once per turn. This is your feature to balance the fact that you don't hit like a train a la Barbarians, or attack a bunch of times like Fighters who are quick with their blades and skilled in weaving through a trading of martial weapon blows to land many hits.
the "no double up" rule, works if everyone agree before hand. my group did it once and the game was running well because I helped the DM create special things each class got as a bonus as well. It was themed around dark souls, so while there were a few fighter like types, we flavoured them differently
I once had a DM that didn’t tell anyone before we started playing that they would roll 1d4 when people went unconscious and that’s how many minutes they’d remain unconscious. No amount of healing would wake them up…
I could see that being a good answer to the wack-a-mole of healing, but you need to tall your party about that stuff. It would also depend a lot on the style of combat.
"Everytime character fall unconscious, you get a flaw". This went from open wounds too losing limbs. Which ended up with frontliner being fucked up while casters and archer totally fine. Meaning they were punished for doing their job.
Honestly as long as it’s communicated up front this can be really fun. I have a similar system to were they have to roll a 1d6 after getting knocked out and one of their main attributes goes permanently down by 1. So if it’s intelligence then they now have suffered a concussion or “brain damage”. Great way to make hitting 0 hp punishing without always needing permadeath.
@@sauronrodriguez4583 right, quick question. Who is the one actually fall unconscious most of the time? Cause for us it was the fighter, by doing his thing. Fighting upfront, meaning a player was punished going melee. The dm was also crazy enough sending iron golem as common enemy at lvl 5 (meet like 5 of them in a dungeon). So fighter going down in a fight was pretty likely.
@@hawkonroyale431 It is actually pretty even since across the group given we have a pretty good class distribution. If anything it's usually the magic-users that get knocked out most and with our cleric healing has been pretty plentiful. Probably important I say that we are not playing 5e but Basic Fantasy Roleplay which is a retroclone of Basic DnD from the 80's. So it's a d20 system just generally more minimalist but also tougher. For example, we just had a PC get sucked up into a tornado and lose half of his limbs but since it was one of those "save or die" type situations I told him after the session his character can live if he is okay with permanently reducing half his attributes to 3 (so a -3 modifier in our system) and he said yeah let's do it. Now he has has been reintroduced to the party as a sort of frankensteins monster/body horror claptrap that has been secretly revived by the main villian and so far everybody loves it. That being said I get what you're saying though and it depends on how truly damaging the wounds/maims are. If I lose an arm just for taking a club to the head at level 1 that is pretty ridiculous if not unrealistic. However, I do think it's part of the tanks job and kind of a known risk they are going to be the first one to get physically wounded (sometimes permanently) from melee combat just like how a wizard knows they will be a glass cannon and that their magic can backfire. So at the end of the campaign those that made it to the higher levels literally have the scars to prove it, much like in real life to an extent. It's ultimately the DM's job to be up front about this and let their players know they are running a campaign where combat is high risk and gritty which it seems like your DM didn't do. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience :(
Honestly, that isn't even necessarily a houserule. Goodberry is technically not a healing spell but a spell that creates a healing item, as if the berries were a healing potion.
@@JonathanMandrake It actually is a house rule. It was directly addressed in the sage advice, and in a tweet from Jeremy Crawford, it does in fact work that way.
8:30 That doesn't even make sense! Arcana isn't "doing a magic effect," it's literally just a shortened version of KNOWLEDGE: Arcana, from previous versions. So, Crit Arcana wouldn't bring someone back to life. It might mean you know where to go to find someone who knows a resurrection spell, but it wouldn't DO anything in and of itself
In fact, strictly speaking, an "Arcana Check" doesn't even exist in THIS edition. It's "Intelligence (Arcana) Check " with Intelligence being defined as the character's ability at memory and deduction. Any check involved with actually doing something with magic is always "Your spellcasting ability" with no skill proficiency being applicable.
'Arcana does random magic shit' is a rule from 4e -- it's how you did *any* out of combat magic because there were effectively no out of combat spells.
Had a GM Who had the house rule that a natural 1 on an attack roll caused the character to accidentally amputate a random limb /body part decided by the critical hit die. Apparently it's possible for a trained warrior to decapitate himself with a bad swing of a dagger.
The "nerfing martial abilities" thing is something I encountered a lot with my DM. He would always try to find a reason that pack tactics wouldn't apply for a kobold, etc. EDIT: I like the idea of "doom points," in theory. That sounded like it could be worked into a cool mechanic. But obviously executed poorly.
7th Sea does something similar, but it's a mechanic to make things ever more dramatic and rise stakes, never with the intention of screwing then up. Also in 7th Sea players are crazy powerful and death is very rare, allowing players to do the kind of stuff you see in Pirates of the Caribean (Setting is really really close those movies)
“Everything stacks” This was one of my own doing. I DMd a 3.5 campaign where all bonuses of the same type stack. So your boots and gloves of dex could both give +6 each. By the end of the game, everybody basically had scores of 40-50 in all their important stats and were killing gods just for fun.
@@tobinator1767 No, not as bad as some of these, but it definitely favored the min/maxers. And yeah, it made my job very difficult. Especially with equipping enemies
@@eel1378 see, here’s the difference. It only affected the difficulty of the campaign, and maybe wasn’t fun for the players. But no harm seemed to have occurred. You grew from that, and the next campaign was probably better.
@@eel1378 dokng a campain, where the Party has the power of gods and dominates everyone sounds like an interesting concept to me. Because then, they would basically also need to take the responsibility over everything they end up ruling over. What they do with this responsibility is still their choice.
7:50 I find a lot of DMs actually roll this the opposite way, where *nothing is ever* investigation. Even something that you'd obviously think would be, like searching a room for a specific item or clues, or trying to find a specific detail in a picture or book.
Although technically in the rule books, my DM was practically demanding to go through our character sheets to check: . Carrying capacity .gold amount .Spell slots .ammo . temporary hp .spell duration .death saving throws And so, so much more. It got to the point we called him teacher DM. The issue was that NPC were just fine and didn't need checking because, "I know what I'm doing" (he didn't). Pretty much every character or NPC he made was at least over carrying capacity or something like that. Thankfully, it was a one shot lasting 6, 2 hours campaign. He hasn't DM since. We only let him carry on because we were all timid people at the time.
Maybe not the worst but very difficult to work around: Mentioning the name of any Deity made them aware of you saying their name, and it allowed them to see you briefly. This extended to this campaigns version of Asmodeus as he counted as a Deity. It just makes conversation awkward as we always have to mind what we say.
I could see that being a cool mechanic if it were brought up in session 0 and had some more balance . I.e. saying a name gets their attention for 1 minute.
lol that makes me think of a mechanic. you know about that saying that 'if your ears itch it means someone is talking about you?' just imagine that also applying to a deity. so there is your cleric/paladin, spreading the gospel of their deity when at some point they randomly get smitten because 'shut up already!!!!' (aka the deity getting fed up with itchy ears.) you'd have to be so careful about not pissing off the chosen deity. But it would also be very annoying and no one would want to play a cleric or a paladin XD
In 3.5 that was actually a thing for dieties that had enough power. It was even more powerful because they could also have permenant perception around statues and prominent figures of their religion. I don't know if it was officially carried forward in 5e but a demigod definitely wouldn't have that ability.
In one of the 3.5 books, it gave deities a power score based on how high in their own pantheon they were. Any time you mentioned their name and/or title, they would be able to perceive the area for a number of years both forward and backward in time equal to that score. I think it had a radius in miles equal to that score as well, but it's been a while since I read that book. Grain of salt and all. 'always mind what you say' is right.
My dnd group is running a Star Wars campaign, where the BBEG gets a lightsaber that INSTANTLY cuts off your connection to the force. Worst concept ever.
Had a house rule on a game a few years ago, speak out of turn, even to crack a joke and "You are smote by God for 1 damage" basically turned combat into pure number crunching with no banter
DM once banned AoE spells because one player kept getting upset that the AoE spells would hit him. Made the Druid change his entire class to cleric because of this
"Whenever a character (PC, NPC, or monster) crits, the target has a 25% chance to be maimed." This sounds cool as a PC, since you can disable the monster a little before it dies in a few rounds. This is significantly less fun when you realize that this also can affect the monsters' attacks, and you only find out after making a tank and getting crit on and are the first case of failing the 25% chance. (Yes, the DM didn't share what homebrew was being used at the start of the campaign.) The DM refused to ret-con it, since it's a point of honor for him to never ret-con (that would be admitting that he made a mistake), but did conveniently provide some magic water that would restore any maimed body parts. Before anyone starts throwing any hate, the DM was pretty reasonable to work with, and when I said that I wasn't cool with maiming, I was told that it would be fixed, and to just wait for it; however, passing the 25% chance on crits would do something else, instead (knock you down, knock your weapon out of your hand, etc.).
I’m guilty of this myself, I made a rule that banned, in quite embarrassed to admit, opportunity attacks. My players kept breaking story encounters with it, and I got frustrated with it. I have since removed the rule since it’s fu**i g stupid.
First of all for the Star Wars one. The DM was right killing a down and unconscious foe is a dark side move. Now the GM loses all claims to being right by just saying that to save his DMPC waifu.
Yeah I totally agree. The DM destroyed his own credibility by the ridiculous things he made this character survive.. like bro even Anakin couldn’t even survive all that lol
@Grhifen Or hell, he could've Greavused them. Turned them into a cyborg after death. Or have them be some kind of super clone that is a prototype to test new clone DNA, which could give the party the incentive to find said Clone facility and destroy it.
Sounds like a bad mechanic for a game to say "You know that giant group of crazy people trying to blow up planets and commit genocide? You're not allowed to kill one of their soldiers who just spent hours chasing you to kill you because they were defeated in battle and are unconscious." Sounds incredibly dumb.
@@william4996 You're allowed to fight back and such, and iirc it gives you conflict not instantly reduces your morale. You have to roll for that, and even then you only swap to Darkside after morale goes below 30
I dm ffg so let me just say, most enemies even serious boss tier enemies like Vader don't reach above 30 wounds, and that inquisitor likely took roughly 40ish wounds to bring down due to the TIES, and killing a darkside user, such as an inquisitor is not a darkside action, nore can one action immediately flip you to darkside unless thst character had like a ton of conflicts, to really fuck with the dm do what I do 151crit vibroaxe with a mininum crit of one
@@comet.x Martel, the paladin of justice dies learns about the blood war between the devils and demons, decides the devils are needed to save the world, is resurrected as an archfeind warlock Tada 🎺 lawful good oathbreaker paladin/warlock
We had a homebrew rule where if you crit on initiative you could act twice that turn once at the beginning and once at the end. This turned out horribly when the BBEG got three turns and killed everyone
Those doom points are a thing in edge of the empire, basically when someone requests to do something awesome from aloted light side points the DM would gain a Dark side point and vis versa Pretty good for RP dms using it to bullshit a reason my Evil NPCs followed the PCs if they did something awesome rumers speard about the characters for example
Two things actually from the same DM. Summons have summoning sickness and only act on the next round making it so that lower Initiative rolls are first with summons. He decided that mid game, 4 month in and did not tell this to our summoner beforehand. Disengage doesn't work when there are two or more enemied next to you. (spontaneous rule when our Rogue escaped when he thought he had him for dead)
My DM didn’t like how initiative worked, so instead of rolling initiative for combat he’d have you roll for it at the beginning of the game. Not a bad idea in itself except that the roll lasted the whole game and it effected the order in which you did anything. Say I was a rogue and attempted to steal something from a shop, if our parties paladin had the higher initiative then he’d always catch me before I was able to do it and effectively shut me down. Or if I was a bard and wanted to speak with a noble; if the barbarian had a higher initiative he could always stop me from talking and hash things out himself.
For that first one, not even Action Surge would let you cast more than one leveled spell per turn. The PHB specifically says once you cast a spell, you can't cast any more spells that turn besides cantrips.
New world of darkness, mixed source book campaign (one player was a werewolf, one a vampire, one a mage etc). Two house rules came together to basically remove my ability to do a core werewolf thing. One, on an extended roll, you got exactly 5 rolls. No more, no less (even if you hit the success target early, you had to carry on). Two - crafting a basic werewolf magic item required 50 successes, and it only got worse from there..... Getting 10 success on a roll was considered an epic success, and you basically just got narrative control of the outcome of that action. It was also damn near impossible because you needed a 38 on a D10 (10s exploded). I had to do that 5 times. Also, rolling a 1, cancelled all prior successes. And this was all to make an item that could sort of replicate a level one power....which in the lore of werewolf, was used as currency. Suffice to say, I never managed to make one of those items, so just became OP as balls instead. Theoretically, by the end of the game, I could wield a mountain.....
Yeah, I know that shit. Made a Vamp that was on par with you Woofies in terms of Comat (4 Attacks per Round, average Damage 7 Severe per hit, just took 21 XP to get there, Char is 100% inside the Rules even though the Fluff is a bit creative). So many GMs got pissy and nerfed away basic Core Features like Basic Powers (Better Strengh, better Dex, better Con) of my Clan and changed the Rules of Generations and how many Blood you have, can spend and what Effect it does, because "Gen 8 is too powerful". After all of this, one wonders whay the GM did not say "Sorry, but this Char does not fit, do you have something else in Mind?" from the beginning.
I played a AD&D game where the DM didn't like magic users. She divided all spells up and based them on different stats. If I recall, fireball was based upon STR. Magic used spell points. You got your spell points from your stats. Spells cost I spell point per level of spell. So fireball cost 3 spell points to cast. If you had a 10 STR, then you could cast 3 fireballs and one other 1st level spell. Here's the kicker, when you cast fireball with a 10 STR as your spell points go down so does your STR. Cast one fireball, your STR is now 7, cat another fireball, your STR is now 4. See the problem. If you had an 18 INT and cast a 9th level spell that was based upon INT, your INT went down to 9. This really was bad for CON based spells. Basically spell casters were almost useless. The DM just wanted every fight to be hack and slash. Oh, and your spell points never changed as you went up levels.
I usually have my players pick different classes because they are new to the game and creating and seeing different stuff can help them be prepared to create even better/more in the future.
I do agree with the no duplicate classes rule, because one of them will always be better in combat than the other, which makes the worse character just feel useless. It also makes it hard as a Dm to make a combat where that character shines for their arc, when someone in the party can just do what they can but better. Maybe it’s because we’re a combat based group, and it may work in roleplay focused groups.
My second DM ruled that "sneak" attacks must be made from stealth. Which meant I got 1 sneak attack per round if that. Most encounters we were ambushed. All of my inquisitive rogue abilities were deemed too powerful. And all deception is impossible because there are no gnomes in barovia, forgeries were also impossible because you need the exact document/stamp/ring to copy it. Most miserable experience I've ever had, mostly because he was awful in other ways too.
many players and DMs don't fully understand the sneak attack rules in 5e anyway the combat circumstances to gain advantage on an attack roll are incomplete at best in the PHB (of course, hiding some mechanics from the players is D&D tradition) and you have to really get into the DMG (page 251) to find the rules on flanking (well look at that, surrounding a guy gives advantage against him, which empowers a rogue's sneak attack, who'd have thought? Certainly not anyone who'd played 3.x)
@@ChibiKami Flanking is an optional rule in 5E, though Sneak Attack explicitely procs if you 2v1 someone without disadvantage. However, I agree that a list of common advantage sources would be good for a beginner Rogue.
My friends and I have been playing Fate CORE for about a year and a half without any of us really understanding the meat of the system. A lot of experimentation and slapdash encounter design was basically forcing the game to try and be 5E with grid-based combat and bosses that had Stress capacities well into the double digits. One of the most dysfunctional house rules we tried at one point was having to roll Athletics to determine your movement for the turn. It was great for making our Athletics-focused characters do some real superhero shit, but it was nigh unplayable for our social-manipulation-focused support character with no points in Athletics, as it meant there were certain turns where she could only move one tile, or ZERO tiles at all. Our GM isn't bad and we like this game a lot, but things have gotten REALLY wacky with how we've been breaking this system apart.
I would say that depends on how they are rolled. If the chances are equal (which can be made with some math and Excel sheet), my only concern would be that it can slow things down.
"You can't play warlock because I think they're dumb and over powered and not good for roleplay" This was because my warlock was able to cast toll the dead
Alright, imagine this. Armor class doesn’t exist. Every attack will hit as long as you roll above an 11, armor is just temporary hit points, wizards can wear armor, no such thing as spell slots (infinite fireballs). Basically they lied to me when they said they were playing DnD
Yeah... Those guys doesn't want to play dnd but never try other ttrpg They should explore really what they were doing was nearing a dungeon world they should try that first
"Nat 20's and Nat 1's have MUCH greater effect" In reality, it means, if your character is good at something, others still often are WAY better at it, and if you roll nat 1, in your characters specialty, there is no reason to ever trust that character will succeed on something related. For example, our War Cleric rolled nat 20 on stealh ever since he looks the most capable in stalth out of all of us, including 2 other characters with expertise in stealth. Cleric wears Heavy armor. character with 21 strength (belt of giant strength) tries to do something strength related - rolls 18 total, does not succeed. Another character with 8 strength. rolls Nat 20, does it with ease. Our Druid was trying to scout while flying over a city filled with demons. rolls nat 20. Druid now knows exactly how many of each demon type are there in the city. Exact numbers, because apparently with nat 20 in perception, not only she could count 836 foes in about 2 minutes, but also see them through walls, since they were IN A CITY! There are many more in this session, like, our Artificer who makes items more powerful than Legenary ones while on lvl 8, simply because he has +11 to rolls (5 int, 6 expertise) and bonus from Flash of Genius when making them. While I have no idea how does artificer work, I am 100% sure, not like this. Combat starts after 1st attack, which means my Alert feat I started with is pretty much useless, since others get to hit, even tho it is clearly visible, then we roll initiative... and surprise is never a thing... (I started the campaign with Alert feat) so I got way nerfed (after rolling by far the worst stats among PC's, while our Rogue, who had abysmal stats, got buffed. Ehhh, I used to love this DM, when he did not know rules to D&D well (and neither did players), we had fun being creative with what we had, but now, even if we want to say something to one another mid combat, we have to use our action to do so. If not for a fact that people I am playing with are my real life friends, I would have left a while ago, but I dont think I will last much longer there, definitely not a good impression playing my 1st ever D&D campaign xD Welp, I am playing an Echo Knight, I declared that Echo is half-physical, can interact with world, but just barely, for example, if touched, it has a thick consistency, but acts more like a liquid that tries to return to proper shape than a material object, on top of that, it can make noises. DM, after a couple of sessions of me playing it as such, says, no, it is only visual, so makes no sounds and has no material influence on world around whatsoever. Fine, I argued a bit, but I accepted it. Later on, I was going to sneak on a creature with Blindsight, which means, it can perceive presence with sensors other than sight, but since Echo, according to my DM, works only on sight, it should not be possible to detect it without sight, UNLESS it had some kind of magic perception. DM says, no, creature has good hearing so it has great perception of everything around it, even stuff that can not produce sound. GREAT. Another thing? Echo acts as an object, which means, it does not provoke opportunity attacks and can not be targeted by certain spells. DM says no, it acts like a creature. Sure, I dont mind, but that means positive effects can be cast on it... or so I thought, even tho it is a creature, it can not become invisible with Invisibility spell. There are many more secret home rules, that w find out as we go, which are straight up busted, not to mention he is fudging like 80% of his dice rolls. I am so bloody done, but I feel bad arguing with him, since I was the one who asked to play with him, since I remembered it was great... and it was... when once again, he did not know the rules, and gave us space to be creative.
Nat 20 are for in game fights. Not on skills, let's say you are trying to seduce someone you have -2 on charisma. The challenge is 22 you roll 20 -2 you have 18 you still fail. The cute paladin with 14 charisma roll 20 +2 = success.
I love to break this to you... your DM clearly still doesn't know the rules. Talking, if only a little, is a free action. There are no crits on skill checks. And hell, most you said he does is wrong, if he is trying to follow the rukes
Well, he does know the rules, but rather he is changing them to his own vision, which makes no sense. But yeah, good news is that I left the group last friday, So there is a good ending to the story xD
I want to say that this video should come with a PTSD warning but the title pretty much gives you that. I knew what I was getting in to when I clicked on it and I have only myself to blame for these shivers.
My favourite bad houserule(as in I use it) is rl-bonus on physical checks. I thought, ey people often get + on social rolls for nice rp. So, well, that dangerous climb check for your wizard? 5 pushups get you +2
We had one guy at the game store who had really sexist rules geared toward female characters and/or players. (If they were a guy playing a female in game they had penalties and if they were a woman playing a male or female they had penalties.) He did eventually get laid the fuck out, choked out, kicked out of the store, and then he never came back. The guys responsible got a light "one week" ban for removing a problem player and the game store owner gave them a discount on some of the stuff they bought for a week after.
So one toolbag had another toolbag physically assault him for being a toolbag? He may be a sexist asshat but certainly doesnt give anyone the right to attack him. Im sure its a cool story to tell some kids tho.
@@joedan5366 beholder. Gotta keep it classic. But I've only ever tpk'ed a party once with a banshee. She crit three times, they rolled five 1's. That combat was....brutal.
About the Perception vs Investigation rule: I do the same thing......and in my opinion all of the example OP listed there can be justified by both. Investigation is meant for actively looking/searching for something/someone. - example: You spend some time looking for your target in the crowd using the traits you know them to have as reference. It takes a minute but eventually you find your target pickpocketing a nobleman talking to a merchant. Perception is your ability to notice things around at a quick glance or two. - exmaple: As your walking through the market square taking in the scene. You spot a nobleman getting pickpocketed by a figure that appears to be the target you were looking for. That being said the DM should've told the player and just gave them maybe some key words/phrases to signal that they want to use Perception such as, glance/spot/notice/be on the lookout/keep an eye on etc. Also they should have said that during character creation or a session 0.
A better way to view it isn't active vs passive, as that is not the role of these skills and undermines the passive ability score system, but as whether you are actively using your knowledge in a slow and meticulous way to find or discern something (investigation) or are relying on using your senses to detect the existence or presence of something (perception). In simplest terms possible, the distinction is "looking for clues" vs "spotting a trap". If you investigate a crime scene, you aren't rolling to visually notice the existence of a blood stain, but rather, rolling to see if you look in the right places, to know what a very old stain looks like, to even think to check if furniture might have been moved around to hide the stain, and other aspects that rely on knowledge and logic. When you're looking for a hidden assassin, you aren't investigating the corner of your eye, you are actively bringing attention to your senses to detect motion, a smell, a sound -- or in some rare cases, a bit of intuition like "I am wary of attacks from above/below and other odd angles of attack". This doesn't require intelligence to do, a dumb animal can have very sharp senses and intuition about things like hunting and stalking. Tbh, I don't understand how people struggle with that one, because the names of the skills honestly couldn't be any more clear and concise.
@@AnaseSkyrider well said. The only reason I could guess why people get confused is because some people think that having a high PP means you walk into a room a know every intricate detail about it. Even though there is a Passive Investigation score which would be more reasonable to argue about that.
In 5e Passive Perception is typically for if you're generally aware of something without explicitly trying to be aware of something. Actively using your perception skill is more for trying to see something, either in a broad sense, or trying to discern something at a distance. (Or just generally trying to roll higher than your passive) Actively using your investigation skill is generally more up close and personal, like specifically examining an object or place for information. In other words, you use perception to notice a suspicious bush. You use investigation to search and examine the suspicious bush, and your passive perception tells you whether or not you noticed the other suspicious bush sneaking up behind you while you were busy with the 1st suspicious bush.
Had a DM straight up ban magic 'unless it could be explained with technology'. Not only did it straight up make it a nightmare to even consider playing my favorite class, but you could literally explain every spell in the game in this manner. It was a sci-fi campaign, but still. Stuff like that, as well as straight up banning classes for arbitrary reasons, is a huge pet peeve of mine.
Critical hit and fumble tables should only be used if they are quick, and are used for dramatic effect. DMs need to remember that, over the course of a campaign, players will have more crits against them and more fumbles by them than the enemy will. That's just the math.
The critical fail house rule is just stupid. A LVL 20 character who is basically a god, still has the same likelihood as a LVL 1, of accidentally throwing their bow off the tower instead of shooting it? 🤦
I'm in a game where the DM is a old school D&D player and has made a bunch of rules to make the game harder. 1) Long rest does not restore HP on it's own. You must spend Hit Dice to regain HP back. You can only use 1 Hit Dice for every hour your rest up to half your Hit Dice. 2) If you hit zero HP and make all three death saves you again a point of exhaustion. 3) You have a limited number of Cantrips you can use. You can use 10 times your level in cantrips and only get them back after a long rest.
Short one: Critical Fumbles in DnD 4e. Critical Fumbles being a detrimental thing to your character, sometimes even doing damage to you. Now in 4e Wizards and similar mages were primarily meant to spam AoEs because there were things called minions that let you put huge numbers of enemies on the field but only had a single point of health. So often you'd be hitting 6-10 things with your AoEs. In 4e AoEs were done by making an attack roll against every target. Meaning mages often rolled ten times the number of attacks as martials. I think you can see the problem with crit fumbles here. Yes, we did have a wizard knock himself out by toasting a goblin horde. Thank you for wondering. That situation was retconned and was the death of the rule.
Besides, what sense does it make that a big ball of fire has a greater chance of fucking you up back, if there is three goblins within it, instead of one?
I play mostly Druids, after going through session 0 and having no issues, 2 sessions later, he informs the group that polymorph, , shapechange, and any abilities that change your form would not be allowed. Then refused to let me make a new character.
I am guilty of setting rules when it comes to party characters because of the setting, like a specific starting weapon per character or set story goals to work towards, but as a dm it bugs me when I repeatedly said, aside from minor restrictions at the start, you can roam around the map doing stuff like you want and the players turn into sheep that need to be herded even though I created an open world game of sorts. Also, if people are starting at level 2, don't be I'm a ship captain who is also a werewolf who has control, or I want my character to be the op Mc from a book series.
Well, setting rules for character creation and telling the players before they make character sheets is fine. The issue with most of the people in the video is they basically tell the party after they start. As long as you arent forcing people to be a certain race, class with all the same stats, you're good. Seriously, I had a DM like that who literally started us off with the same stats, race and no class.
Best houserule: when somone rolls a 69 on percentile dice, the first person to say "nice" gets inspiration
Gonna show this to dm, brb
In my DH game, 69 and 01 are swapped. It’s actually pretty funny and adds a bit more tension on 00 rolls.
Stealing this.
Adding this to my personal list
A shame you almost never roll percentiles in 5e.
I feel all these house rules can immediately be countered with "So how does that make help everyone at the table have fun?" Especially the Talk IRL you talk in the game.
I can see the merit of this one. I was a player and we were "out of character" discussing a battle plan, and the DM told us how the enemy was advancing somehow.
There's also light banter out of character that happens and no roleplay in character that makes the game feel kind of flat. But I don't wholly agree to that rule.
Honestly I've been with a lot of (usually convention or FLGS) DMs who enforced that one specifically. It's kind of a mainstay in the community for some reason.
I think it's a control thing - the DM feels frustrated when their players get too sidetracked or unfocused and they don't have any subtler tools for keeping the game moving forward, so they overcorrect and brute force it like that.
It's more of a punishment than a table tool, and that sucks for everybody involved.
That "Blooded" idea sounds pretty cool.
If you fucking BALANCE it correctly that is.
@@haku8135 mb roll a d20 after every combat. That way everyone has the same odds of getting it and there's no way to gain more by powergaming. Then it becomes part of the levelling system. I really wonder how bad it was, because if you get a mechanical bonus for each time you kill with a bladed weapon, then the rogue and other melee chars would get OP before they even levelled
@@dizzydial8081 I mean from the perspective of both DM and player I don't think that is necessarily bad. Being able to hit the pause button should not always be an easy option, especially when in game your characters would be very hard pressed for time.
Our gaming group was "In a mood" one evening, just could not really focus on the game (I honestly do not remember why). We had the DM totally frustrated. He meant to drop a wandering monster on us but accidentally referred to it as "wandering damage". We teased him mercilessly for a few minutes until he just said "fuck it, you get hit by a lightning bolt from a pissed off Thunder God for 30 damage" (I do not remember the actual amount of damage). It became a running joke in the group, but our characters were, forever more, terrified of Thunder Gods with bad tempers.
Basicaly: "fuck you get thundered"
I mean, to be fair, since you randomly encountered the thing that dealt a lightning strike, it very much could be classified as wandering damage
"rocks fall, you all die"
@@Mike-mm8gg comically large anvil
Sounds like your DM is vindictive. Ridiculously childish of them.
"Every PC must be a seperate class" to me just shows that you don't realise how diverse the classes actually are.
imagine if this dm finds out about multiclassing
@@bernardomacedo9848 I honestly don't mind that being banned tbh.
But either way anyone who looks at d&d and sees a mmo-style role setup just ain't looking right.
And for the record I'm ok with multi-classing just think it's too often used purely for power rather than interesting and justified ideas.
Look no further than a party of all Clerics!
I actually had a DM like this. I asked him why that's his rule on classes and he said it's to "force diversity". It's an annoying as shit rule though. In one instance I spoke with him about my character before a new game, told him the bard I wanted to be, how I'd play him, etc. Then another player chose bard, would NOT change classes or they'd leave the game, and my DM asked me to change classes so we could keep the toxic ass player. That player would later steal from players, try to force PvP, and would break laws around cities because they're a "lol random" Chaotic Neutral Fallen Aasimar. I chose Artificer and forced the DM to allow me to make guns in his campaign just to spite him for that crap.
@@mrbubblestea you killed him?
"Spell casters must make grapple checks on touches spells."
That hurt my soul
Finally a time for buff wizards to shine!
@@VoidplayLP Does the old man anime thing where they rip their shirt off and are secretly super buff under it.
@@morphstarchangeling8024 master Roshi!!
"Everything you say out of character is in character."
Cue the NPC having a panic attack realizing that everything about his world is fake.
DMs not understanding rogues and sneak attack is a surprisingly common problem. There is the extra damage from sneak attack, but there are also DMs who think, because it’s “sneak” attack, it should only be made from hiding or something.
Sneak attack is truly a huge misnomer. For it to be called "Sneak Attack" suggests that it is an attack made while... You know... Sneaking. No, it's just an attack that exploits gaps in your opponents defense, as well as quick acting when their attention is briefly diverted. Something like "Swift attack" would have prevented SO many arguments.
@@headcrab4 Don't name it anything. Just say rogues get a bonus roll when an opponent is "distracted" and a distracted opponent is one which has another pc within 5ft of them or is unaware of your presence.
I think this is because of 2e, where you literally could only sneak attack of your opponent was unaware of you. It also didn’t work on the majority of creatures
@@thecharmer5981 either that or due to skyrim
@@thecharmer5981 I think most new DMs haven't even heard about 2e.
Interesting tidbit, nonetheless. I always like hearing about edition-differences. I remember Pathfinder not allowing sneak attack on everything either, which sucked as a rogue being introduced into the game during an undead-heavy section.
The worst house rule that I had was that when we were trying to knock someone out instead of kill them we were doing half damage. He never told us he was going to use this rule and it resulted in 1 player dying. He only told us he was using it after we started complaining that everyone had INSANE health for our respective level at the time
That's fucked lmao
@@judyhill2060 He also stopped everything to force a player's character off of a mountain as a is it a punishment for meta gaming. Instant 0 hp and took him out of the encounter. He didn't kill his character but still he should had stepped out side and had a word with him instead.
That's straight ridiculous
I mean - Devil’s Advocate here - the rule makes sense. My DM uses a similar rule. It’s 100% true that he definitely should have told you, but it’s also true you shouldn’t be declaring ‘nonlethal’ on every single attack and trying to game the system.
Our Table’s Non-Lethal house rule is thus:
When you roll to attack a creature and you hit, you may declare the damage to be nonlethal before seeing how much damage your attack did.
If the nonlethal attack’s damage is not enough to bring the target to zero hit points, the target takes half damage from that attack.
@@thewovenmantis6813 What if they just declared that all damage they did was nonlethal at the beginning?
Yeah...the "Killing a helpless opponent is a dark side act" thing is one of those "It COULD be fair, buut..."
Because THAT WAS NOT KILLING A HELPLESS OPPONENT! That was finishing a foe that WOULD. NOT. DIE.
Tbh it was the DM being a right Arsehole and not wanting his prized OP DMPC being offed
@@fuynnywhaka101 Yuup.
Also, the force user wasn't even the one doing a dark side act, the dark side doesn't generate off of evil people, jeez.
To be fair, that IS accurate to the lore, killing an opponent that physically is not a threat to you anymore (I assume this neigh immortal character could have been tied up or something after being knocked out) IS a dark side act. Anakin killing Dooku after CUTTING HIS ARMS OFF, making him basically helpless, was not the Jedi move. Apprehending him was, which he could have done.
HOWEVER!............ The person killing this bitch, WASN'T EVEN A JEDI! So how the fuck is this a problem? The Dark Side is not a virus........ yet, who knows what Disney will do next?
@@haku8135 People forgetting Mace Windu was about to finish off Palpatine. If the threat is considered to be that dangerous then an exception can be made.
"GM hates killing PCs"
"GM is running Dark Heresy"
I'm sorry, but I think that dude is running the wrong system.
I know nothing about that system, but I think a better way to use that rule is "no PERMAdeath" basically, you can get downed, if you fail your saves you're down until a long rest or similar level of healing. The entire party CAN still be tpk'd like this and you run the risk of your main character being out of commission for a while.
Helps to have ally npcs that can be used as backup characters.
This keeps the risk of death while being less punishing for players who get attached to their characters like I do.
Honestly with how tanky it's possible to get via armor, dodge, and toughness, the healing shennanigans it's possible to pull as a chirurgeon, plus burning fate-points to survive even if you would die normally, it's actually kinda hard to kill people in Dark Heresy without some warp bullshit happening or a blatantly unfair encounter. Now both are 100% in line with the setting and game, but you gotta build up to that or it'll feel cheap.
@@Invisifly2 That's very true for just about anything as far as the build up goes.
That last line is so important. There are a ton of systems out there, find the one you want for the game you want.
@@Ariemius ive seen alot of people who dont wanna play dnd but they never tried other systems so they are stuck playing dnd
Had a GM who had a rule that characters could only handle their level in gold in magic items...so a level 2 character could only have on them 2000gp worth of magic items. If they even touched anything more they would get teleported to a purgatory realm to wait to be rescued. As the contents of a bag of holding are not really on the character we started putting all the extra magic items in it...then when we faced a big bad major villain the person with the boh dumped the contents on the villain...which happened to be more than he could handle with what he already possessed....so off he went to purgatory realm and problem taken care of. That GM had a mess of house rules and a custom background generator. Our group of players were all exceptionally intelligent. After about a year of playing the GM started having to revise his rules on a monthly basis as we would find new ways to use his rules to our favor.
Honestly this is the way to beat really stupid house rules, win at their game you know?
I mean, if you're trying to manage magic item levels, I can kinda understand the first part. The second part is stupid. Just make it so that item is like Thor's Hammer, you can't pick it up until you're high enough level to do so.
TBC, I would never have that as a thing in my games. I'm just saying I can see the logic.
@@LoudAngryJerk could be even simpler: magic items with a value over your level won't have any effect.
But I wouldn't use total value and the teleport thing is ofcourse stupid (and your group realised that pretty quickly it seems).
Still, it seems like the DM has trouble determining what items to give the group and tries to balance it out (in a way that breaks it even more)
you know, him letting it happen is really cool, and that hes revising it now.
This is funny because the idea isn't bad by itself, but it went completely over his head that vanilla D&D is already supposed to work like this; except that the rule of thumb is to use XP as the equivalent for gold in magic items; not level in gold because the value of magical items scale exponentially (ie a +2 item should worth ten times as much as a +1 item).
And if the DM made sure that the rewards are all balanced on the player level and player level scales according to how much shit they find - it's not a problem that should exist in the first place. A level 2 character should never have much more than 900gp in items; because they got about 300gp in their first "quest" to get to level 2 and by the time they make another 600gp they should have earned enough xp to get to level 3. So either way, players were levelling up too slowly, or the DM was giving them too much loot.
Something that wasn't a rule per se but I found annoying was that npc's auto succeed checks pc's have to role for, regardless of circumstances. For example: A child goblin npc(who had a single level in rogue) was able to easily disarm a trap by simply cutting the trip wire, but when one of the pc's tried to do it(who was a 14th level rogue) on an identical trap, they had to make a check, which they failed due to a stupidly high dc. Yes, the lvl 1 rogue child was able to pass a dc an adult lvl 14 rogue wasn't able to.
I thought you were saying auto succeed on on things players would have to roll for like crafting a weapon or armor. But no just Auto success on disarming traps
@JustDev Nah, it's nust bad judgement. As a DM you don't roll for most actions that NPCs take. That would be ridiculous!
@@XMaster340 yeah, to be fair it's totally possible for a level 1 rogue to notice something a level 14 rogue didn't because a lot of D&D is still up to random dice rolls. if i were DMing in this situation and i wanted my players to be able to pass a trap and they failed to disarm it but had a little kid rogue with them, i'd just whip up something about how they'd actually made a trap like this before and knew how to disarm it, or maybe that the 14 rogue did everything wrong so the kid could discern the one thing to do right, or something along those lines. maybe since they are closer to the ground their perspective of the trap is different and they can see what needs to be disarmed easier. any of those would actually add some character to the kid rogue if that was my intention.
if it's helping the players it is WAY less egregious than harming the players.
In FPS games, NPCs auto-disarm traps by triggering them. On themselves. Because their AI is stupid.
Well this could just be a case of the DM wanting to move things forward. I don't know if you've ever DM'd but you have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it (in the moment). So you often skip rolls and take average outcome, nobody wants to sit there watch 10 NPC guards roll during a combat encounter...
I played a one-shot once where the extremely new DM didn't understand how starting equipment worked and made their players simply roll 1d20 and that's how much gold you had x10. Meaning you could have anything between 10-200 gold. You were also allowed to have any weapon or armor that "made sense" for your character, including plate and greatswords.
...
...It was me. I was that DM.
Here's one I almost did: Being hit with an attack- any attack, gives you 1d4 fear. If your fear ever exceeds your total hit points, the next time you're hit with an attack, you take a point of exhaustion. I did add ways to reduce fear- it reset after combat ended, and if any enemies died near you, your fear was cut in half.
The idea was that I'm also giving you a lot of ways to improve your character. Such as having two leveling systems allowing you to effectively go to 40th level (and get 40 hit die worth of hit points) and I wanted the first couple levels to be very panic-inducing.
But given that my campaign was modeled to play like left 4 dead or Vermintide in D&D (lots of horde fights, lots of attacks) after one playtest session I determined that was bullshit. Instead I'm using it as a mechanic for very specific boss-related fights and encounters. And I'm giving players ways to mitigate it, such as by looking into the monster and knowing what they are, they no longer fear the creature.
I like how this isthe perspective of a dm trying in honesty, but 1 salty player could just as easily take one explanation you might have given at the table and present this as a horror dm story. Why i just always take to these stories with a grain of salt.
Perhaps have the players take a will save to halve the fear gain (rounded down).
The fear threshold could be determined by Player Level + amount of nearby allies + wis mod + cha mod.
Fear decreases by 1 every turn.
If their fear equals double their threshold than they flee until their fear goes under their threshold.
Allies nearby can spend a move action to reassure them but its cha + player level vs Current Fear
The DM in me understands the intention behind this, but the player in me understands how unfun this is.
@@awfulsails idk about tbe effects, but a consequence is a lot more time spent on rolling dice. That's not great for an irl game
Funny you mention Vermintide, since Warhammer Fantasy RPG has a built in Fear system. I'd recommend running that sometime.
“I will not allow the rule of cool. You can only cast a spell as it says in the rules, and it can only do what it says in the rules. Trying to get creative with the game is preposterous and something I will not allow at my table!” - That Guy DM on session 1, moments before a TPK happened because we had no spell that would do anything to help us get away from a magical flood of acid that did 10d12 damage. Did not play in one of his games again.
"having a thorough explanation of mechanics on paper in front of you which the DM will abide by instead of ambushing you with his wackadoo house rules is bad"
there comes a point where "I can do anything" has to be followed by "within limits"
Rule of cool doesn't exist. Consistency does. If a DM allows some stupid bs that breaks limitations of a spell, that's always how this spell should work from now on. Which is a house rule.
Either that DM just wanted to slaughter everyone, or you all paid zero attention.
@@helgenlane the rule of cool is literally just creativity and thinking outside the box while using the rules. this dm literally said no creativity will be allowed. they probably had a brunch of solutions but if he literally said he wont allow a creative one then whats the point of even trying if they were just going to punish and blame them cuz he sucks at planning around creative plans. he just sounds like a bad and lazy dm who thinks hes playing against his players. shit would have had consistency if he knew how to play the game properly without sucking the fun out of it.
@@Kris-wo4pj if "he won't allow a creative solution" then he won't allow any solution at all, except for the only one that he envisioned. It's not about "rule of cool", it's just a bad DM who has zero understanding of this game as a system. There's no such thing as "rule of cool" if you are not breaking the rules from the books. Everything else is just normal gameplay and house rules.
@@Kris-wo4pj A creative solution can follow the rules: That's why the solution is creative. If you just rewrite your shit whenever you need to, you are not creating a solution, but ignoring the problem. Ignoring rules or limitations, when "it's just cool" is very dangerous thing to do in a less silly campaign and should be heavily moderated, if not unallowed.
This is pretty much the difference between the first two and the last two seasons of GoT.
“Roll Sanity” ; our DM would self insert into the campaign, and any time we did something mildly out of the way of what he wanted we would have to roll sanity (d20) against him, or he would take over our characters until he saw fit. He, of course, always rolled nat 20.
His dice are loaded if he is always rolling a Nat 20
@@aiodensghost8645 he’s just lying my dude
If you want to go exactly by the book, play a videogame. DnD is meant to be open and diverse, options only being limited by the players imaginations. If your DM doesn't like that part of DnD, your DM doesn't like DnD
sounds like he was trying to put call of cthulhu rules into it
@@dylancarter9290 You'd be surprised how many "Great DnD players" on reddit play the game RAW and advocate for it. It's so alienating to me because the game itself was literally INTENDED to be played with rules as a guidance.
I'd have to go with "Paladins can only Smite with blunt weaponry." Not just as a bonus action, but period.
Reason why this was the worst? Game about 2 1/2 years ago, it was Session 2, we'd just gotten lv2, I was wielding a sword-and-board combo, and during the first combat I tried to smite the zombie I was fighting. Cue house rule declaration. Made worse is the fact he still ruled I used the slot (something like I tried to cast, but because I wasn't using a blunt weapon, it auto-failed). Didn't return after that session. Heard from one of the other guys who stayed a little longer that he just seemed to arbitrarily make house rules when something was going too quickly for his tastes.
Guess me potentially killing a single zombie was 'too fast'.
Did you try saying that you used the blunt side of the sword?
@@TheSpencermacdougall Honestly, didn't even think about it at the time, I was just so flabbergasted. Based on what I heard, he probably wouldn't have allowed it though.
…what?
@S.Lanham I’ve got a worst case. This was my first time playing dnd and I decided to play a vengeance paladin of the god of death Kelemvor (this is important).
We had a rough fight where I used all my spell slots and got knocked unconscious (not killed). After which we take a long rest where the DM informs me I recover no spell slots and all my paladin abilities except extra attack are gone.
Two sessions later I find a npc who is a cleric of kelemvor . I ask for help on getting my powers back.
Here’s the kicker; apparently kelemvor thinks I’m dead so took away my powers. The god of death doesn’t know when one of his paladin’s is dead and takes away their powers!!
Eventually I slowly get some of them back. At level 9 I had two first level spell slots. By this time everyone else in the party had got magic items, so far I have nothing. This creates a problem as we start fighting things resistant to non magic weapon damage.
After one boss fight who was described as having a magic sword I say that sword was magic, so I would like to take it. I got a dark +1 magic long sword. Didn’t think much of it at the time.
Next combat we where fighting something i hit it and smite at which point the DM describes the sword as breaking from the radiant energy. Turns out this weapon breaks after I use one of my two spell slots to smite with it- oh don’t worry it repairs itself at the end of a long rest.
That campaign died after a while and I almost gave up dnd because of it. Thankfully a friend of mine offered to run waterdeep and I grew to love dnd.
I hate this one as I love the "2H-Sword-Pally".
I reckon instead of going for, "if you roll a nat 1s or 20s take a shot" it should be "chug a cup of coke without stopping"
much more punishing.
I mean, i do that. But for myself. Not forcing/expecting others to do it as well. That's I think were the problem lies. We also don't roll a lot of crits usually, so theres that
I'd do that myself ez. I wouldn't make someone else do it tho
Coke... Oh, right, you mean Coca Cola!
One time when I was still new to D&D I played a gunslinger in a level 5 one shot
DM decided that every time I shot, I would take 1d6 ear ringing damage…nothing else was changed to counteract this.
So I COULD do a neat 1d8 damage IF I hit my target, but I would ALWAYS take damage no matter what
I’m actually more mad at myself for not realizing at the time how MIND-BOGGLINGLY RIDICULOUS that was
i bet earplugs for 2 copper would solve that problem but whatever
@@I-VisiBomb-I implying the dm would let him
I get the feeling the DM just didn't like that class in general, or just didn't like having guns, or an unfair "balancing" of the class.
Imagine dying from tinnitus
Get earplugs, walk up to an enemy and fire the gun close to their ears. Enjoy free damage.
"I wanna cast as many spells in one turn as I want!"
Me: *Laughs*
Me: *Laughs Harder*
Me: *Laughs so hard I fall to the ground*
Me: *Sits up suddenly and stops laughing*
Me: "Absolutely the fuck not."
How do you even start to rationalize that? "I walk into the boss fight and throw 10 fireballs in six seconds, dealing 80d6 of damage before anybody does anything." Must have been some serious complaining for the DM to give in to that
@@dylancarter9290 Yeah, no, I would never allow this in my game, I don't care how many times they ask. At some point I would have to say "From now on, everytime you ask me if you can do this, you WILL suffer 3d12 psychic damage. So stop asking me."
"Certainly. If you hit 20th level, you can do that. Once. And then your character dies. No resurrection."
Oh is THAT what that meant!? I Just thought he was complaining about quickened spell not letting you do two leveled spell and was trying to figure out what the big deal was.
@@christopherballard1348 nahhhhhh he wanted to empty his spell slots like an LMG empties it's clip
Have a current GM who tweaks his house rules based on our strategies. When the campaign first started, I was playing a Vengeance Paladin, and when we discovered that it was mostly going to be a campaign with fiends/undead, he used an aspect of my character's background as justification to change the damage type on my smites to necrotic, which pretty much every enemy was either resistant or immune to. When our party strategy changed to utilizing our devil's sights and the Darkness spell, he began adding Devil's Sight to all enemies. So, we changed up our strategy, and were high enough level to start making use of spells and class features that force saving throws that would give us rounds of huge advantages, he started allowing his creatures to go multiple times per round, which meant multiple times per round to save and rid themselves of negative effects.
Edit: I should have been clearer about the Devil's Sight/True Sight thing. I don't object to its presence on Demons and the couple Celestials we've fought, but more so to it being tossed on random beasts and undead, like some Gnolls, a Froghemoth and a The Lost that we fought.
That’s absolutely god awful…
What an ass. Did you call him out on his BS? He’s supposed to be creating a story for everyone to have fun in, not having an arms race between himself and the players.
See, he has the right idea: When players start using strong strategies it's time to toss some enemies that can compete with those strategies. But he implements it in the worst possible ways lol. Making your smite necrotic is horrible. Just let the PALADIN do shitloads of damage to undead. That's their thing.
Honestly, either call them out on their bullshit. Leave the campaign, or don't even complain, cause if you're all ok with putting up with his shit, that's now your group's problem.
The necrotic thing is dumb af that's your best weapon. The devil's sight thing kinda makes sense or blindsight cuz of devil's and undead depending on campaign setting. The multiple turns thing just feels like he is panicking lol.
DM 1: "As a Wizard, you're expected to keep track of every single spell component in your pouch. Yes I know what the PHB says about component pouches, I'm overriding that. And they all have prices now. Oh you're taking the Eschew Materials feat? All the prices just went above the 1GP threshold." Jerk had just finished playing Secret of Evermore and decided that's how arcane magic works now. Only arcane magic. I was, of course, the only arcane caster in the party.
DM 2: "Now that you're in the middle of PvP and have already been shot multiple times, I am just now deciding that, despite your first successful attack roll, I'm now allowing the other guy to Reflex Save to avoid your attack."
Also DM 2: "No your elf isn't immune to this particular magical sleep even though I've already explicitly called it magical sleep, which elves are immune to. It's now, uh, *induced unconsciousness* and those aren't dreams they're *hallucinations*."
ALSO DM 2: "I know the party currently has clear vision for over 800ft in every direction, but this NPC just descended from a rope directly overhead, snatched the McGuffin from your hands (no roll), and ran out of vision (another 800ft) at the speed of fucking light. You have one round to stop them."
---Party stops them anyway, with long-ranged attacks.
DM: "The McGuffin falls out of the thief's hands, slowly rolls into a hole in the ground (that didn't exist until just now), and instantly falls more than two miles straight down. You've lost it and it's ALL YOUR FAULT."
I had that last one happen to me 2 sessions ago lol. His argument was that it was something "different" then magic and I would indeed fall asleep like the rest of my party. All because it was to further his plot progression which I understand, but that elven feat has never come in use for me before, so extra bumped that it did not work...
That component price could be abused by buying wood, burning it down and selling the ash. Infinite money glitch
Wow this makes me grateful for my DM’s. The only really negative experience I’ve had was a DM (and admittedly this was his first time) who would pretty much play your character for you. He would infer what your character would do and say and it would boil down to 50 minutes of him talking to himself and he had a bad habit of making every character talk and act the same way. Got boring real quick. But we talked him out of that.
I think DMs should always try to be conscious of how much they're talking compared to the players
@@spencer1531 Yes! I’m trying to get a session 0 with my dad, me, and my sister, with my dad’s friend as the DM. The DM’s friend Alex might join too, and if she does, she’ll be the only PC with experience. I hope she doesn’t kill me with OP monsters the party isn’t ready for, and that maybe she’ll give us a useless magic item for fun. The first hope is more important
All of what i'm about to list came from the same DM
All female characters had a -4 strength mod regardless of system.
Everything you say or do out of character is done in character and he enforced it.
In order to do anything effectively in any situation you have to have a vast out of game understanding of it. This doesnt sound that bad but let me give an example: i was playing as an engineer in a starship troopers campaign and our cherenkov drive broke down. I went to roll technical mechanical and got a natural 20 with a +19 bonus. In order for me to be able to fix the damn thing, i needed to actually understand QUANTUM PHYSICS THEORY out of game because success required me providing formula, and the use of the correct tools and procedures. So this meant i needed i also needed understanding of nuclear reactor maintenance procedures....in depth. Because i couldnt provide such information, even my modofoed 39 roll wasnt able to succeed. I get wanting to have your players be knowledgeable about things but this is going too far.
Every situation actually had only one actual solution but we were supposed to explore other options just to find out that we were wasting our time, and anything we qorked for basically was fucked over by the GM. Basically this house rule is "you have to outsmart the GM in order to have fun. Fuck gm vs player mentality
Fuck gm vs player mentality.
Also lulwut.
You needed in depth knowledge on how to repair starships in a space opera with literal supertech starships that cannot be produced with knowledge we have today?
Cool.
Especially on a nat 20.....
In my groups we usualy discuss how the pro char with high skill probably does things, since the guys are unusually educated and loves going on tangents on all things.
But it's usually to mentally depict how awesome the char is doing. Plus the gm often join in on this.
So it's a coop atmosphere, but the tangents can last very long.....
oh, this reminds me of a story:
a player found a magical bow called "Thunk" that would give him a guaranteed Crit on his next shot, BUT make him PERMANENTLY lose 1 Constitution on EVERY use, AND the smartass GM WOULD trigger it if he said "thunk" OUT of character...
later he ALSO found a magical arrow that would turn an enemy into Gold IF he made a crit with it...
yes, when they met the BBEG, he said:
"i draw the magical arrow and prepare to fire"
he then looked the GM in the eye and said,
"THUNK."
@@ericb3157 pretty sure this made it into a video at some point...
Mine decided to add a relationship value to the game, where when the number gets high enough characters will get feelings for someone else in the party, it was awkward for us, especially my girlfriend at the time who was the character that everyone would get feelings for.
That would make me laugh if I watched that, I’m sorry
@@turellbirdey4501 to be honest I wouldn't blame you.
that sounds like a GM whos thinks people think like characters from an Bioware game.
If I wanted that I'd just play Miitopia
That would be a cool idea... if the relationship value was only applied to NPCs and not forced on players.
9:00 That makes no sense. If anything, clerics should have a very high likelihood of succeeding on a spell because they are drawing from the power of a god. The power of a god doesn't fail. Wizards rely on their focus and knowledge and willpower to cast spells. Bards rely on their earthly proficiencies. Much more prone to failure.
I disagree. One could easily argue that the spell effect is exactly what the god intended. But that doesn't mean it's what the cleric wanted. A cleric is always reliant on their gods favour.
Don't get me wrong. It's still a shitty houserule. All I'm saying is that it does make sense for clerics to also be plagued by its effects.
@@XMaster340 But that would break the whole concept of being a cleric. Clerics are chosen by their god and they follow the will of their god. A cleric that turns against the will of their god is worse than an oathbreaker paladin. A cleric who loses a god's favor loses all power.
@@CristiNeagu True, but DnD gods are only human after all So they might have a bad day, or they might just enjoy messing with their clerics from time to time or they could be thinking that the cleric didn't show enough devotion during this specific spell cast. Just because a single spell fails or doesn't work as intended doesn't mean that the cleric has fallen out of favour.
@@XMaster340 I think we'll need some sort of lore buff to clear this up, but I see this as like an employer-employee relation. Your boss won't fire you for doing one wrong thing, but if you keep doing wrong things, you will be fired. In the same way, I don't think a god will micromanage which spells a cleric gets to cast based on the intent of each. I think it's more likely that the permission is based on trends, so if a cleric shows a good track record of obeying their god's will, I see no reason why their god would withdraw power on a spell by spell basis.
@@XMaster340 Like I said, we need a lore buff to answer this one. But I still maintain that clerics should be less impacted by this.
The reason I turned into a GM only is because of bad Gms in my area. We had this guy that said no one could use a Perception check to look for traps in an area unless you were a rogue. So if there was a plain rope across the path, no one was allowed to notice it was a trap, we were forced to just walk into it. Plus he didn't like keeping track of points and didn't trust anyone to write them down....it was horrible. Plus I wanted to make my first Bard, after I spent hours making the perfect character and backstory we get into combat, he then tells me I have to sing in real life to cast any spells and if I didn't my character couldn't cast. Yah @#$% that GM.
Did the wizard have to spontaneously produce fire? The barbarian bench 200 kg?
Did the Warlock have to call A demon? Did the Ranger have to shoot somebody? Did the Druid have to turn into an Animal?
I'm going to be starting a Pathfinder 1st Ed campaign as GM.
There's a player who's going to playing a bard. I'm not insisting he sings IRL if he uses Perform in combat.
However, I did say if he does sing/perform a verse or two and it fits with what he's doing with it, he would get some bonus xp.
It's got to be original each time too.
TBH I'm not sure he will take the carrot, but you never know.
My first ever time playing D&D I made a tiefling bard. I was super excited and had a okay if slightly edgey backstory (first character sue me XD). During a fight I see a chance to use charm person and that was when the DM... Told me I had to sing... Not discussed prior not warned when picking bard... Also our game was being live streamed to an audience... I can't sing. Well... I can but badly. It wasn't pleasant for anyone and they kept insisting on it too. I got the to the point where I stopped casting my spells unless we Really needed them...and I mean life or death. That DM didn't last long and the person who took over let me just cast without singing.
So unless the dm is on all fours beasts cannot attack got it
3:30 Doom points are actually a thing used in other systems (Conan) and I think they’re actually pretty popular. The idea behind is is a DM gets a certain amount of points to spend and make things more difficult for the players. It’s their to both encourage the DM to make things challenging but limit things to keep thing fair. That being said I don’t think the DM was using it right as Doom points and anime should not be correlated.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, the DM's doom points were a counter to the parties Momentum points and interwove with that system (since, if I'm remembering correctly, players could choose to give the DM doom points in order to get better rolls if they were out of momentum, but could gain momentum gradually (and as a party) with their own rolls).
That sounds a lot like destiny points in FFG star wars and Genesys.
There it is a pool which is decided at the start of the game.
About half are black, rest are white.
When players use them, to activate certain abilities or add undefined items to a scene, it turns black.
When gm uses them, for powerful monster abilities, they turn white.
A bad way i've seen "doom" points done, is mutant chronicles.
In one of them, gm gets x per turn from some powerful monsters. Also ones when players do re-rolls.
With these points, the gm can.
With a group of enemies, shoot their machine gun.
Jam a player weapon.
An evil sorcerer using a spell.
Re-roll and force worst result on a roll.......
It's so much more player vs gm in Mutant chronicles. It's so bad.
The machine gun is the worst, such an obvious board game mechanic, it's so stupid.
In the FFG games they are fine. But i'm not super into the gm needing them. But they are fine.
I think the worst houserule I've heard is that in the classic "how do you want to do this?" part of the combat, which is the very end, you cannot describe how you're killing an enemy if it doesn't suit your in-game mechanics. So basically you can't stab an opponent multiple times if you're a rogue.
How the hell houserules a fluff portion of the game?..
Had a DM make everyone roll for initiative outside of combat when we didn’t have a set goal. He’d go from person to person instead of letting us all play as a group like normal. He didn’t do this all the time but it’s completely contradictory to D&D since it’s a group game.
reminds me of a rule i read about in a different video, i think it's an official optional rule, that was supposed to "make combat more realistic"...
everyone has to reroll initiative at the beginning of every round of combat.
EVERYONE.
EVERY round.
this made EVERY fight take FOREVER to resolve.
I wouldn’t say it’s entirely a bad idea, especially if the group has issues talking over each other as it’s essentially a “talking stick” but if your group doesn’t have that sort of issues than it’s just slowing things down
@@ericb3157 that's how my game plays, and you're right, it does take forever. But it's what the DM wanted, and the rest of us didn't feel strongly enough about it to argue. I think it's a holdover from AD&D? That's the system they learned on, anyway, and we use a few other rules from there as well, like Crit tables. I don't completely hate it, but I probably wouldn't choose it myself if I were given the option.
I- kindof do this- when I'm in exploratory maps, and I want people to manage how much time they spend on a given task, I'll roll for non combat initiative.
@@ericb3157 oh i playd in a game like that 3 veteran players and one new player, still took ages to finish one single combat
"If you forget something out of character, it happens in character."
My warlock was trying to communicate with their companion mouse, and I forgot that he had comprehend languages, and the DM made me connect with my patron (I was worshiping a celestial) for them to let me remember. I was also told if I were to forget again they wouldn't allow me to relearn it.
That side campaign has been out on hold and never started again, but im assuming that if your warlock patron decided that you were unworthy, they can remove the powers they gave you (if I recall, 3 out of the 5 characters were warlocks)
Also I haven't played much dnd so that could be normal
Kind of. Depends a lot on the backstory and how the padt was made.
I mean, the way I usually rule it is that it’s your character. As the DM I have more than enough things to keep track of. If you forget you have comprehend languages in the moment, it’s not my responsibility to remind you of the things you can do. Having players be more responsible for remembering what actions they can take also leads to smoother sessions in my experience, players pay more attention, and combat goes much faster.
@@dinohunter321 i should have clarified, I had realized out of character. I specifically said "im an idiot. I have comprehend languages"
I can understand rolling intelligence in rare instances to recall information but outright forcing players to 'forget' information is just stupid.
My table plays with the “forget” rule. My DM has enough to keep track of. Oftentimes people will roll History, but otherwise the only person you can really blame is yourself.
"Nat 20s always succeed and Nat 1s always fail", this is applied to everything. Even applies to initiative, Nat 20 is always first and Nat 1 is always last. Might not be too bad if it only applied to our PCs, which would still kinda suck but less so. It applies to the NPCs too. We have a rogue that can't stealth, because with a 31 stealth check when she's going through a camp of 30 bandits at least one of them is bound to roll a 20 and spot her. Which they did, every single time. We have an Observant feat Cleric with a 27 in passive Perception that can't spot anything because the NPCs always roll Nat 20 for stealth. Seriously, once got surrounded by 15 goblin archers and our Cleric only spotted 7 of them because of the dumb Nat 20 rule. Literally the only 7 enemies he's spotted the whole game, we get snuck up on a lot for no real reason.
I wasn't even a fan of the rule before it was put into practice, but if what's already happened is not bad enough the rule is also not consistent. Our Rogue has a cursed magic item she got from a devil. She never had it Identified so she didn't know it was cursed. Apparently anytime she uses its magic abilities she has to roll a Wis save or fall unconscious, with the DC rising each time she succeeds but we didn't know that tidbit until afterwards. 2 uses, 2 saves, she succeeds then both. DC is a 30 something now, supposed to be impossible. 3rd use, 3rd save, rolls a Nat 20, falls unconscious anyways. 3rd round of a boss fight and our Rogue is out of the fight. Not missing hp so healing doesn't wake her up, caused by an unknown magic item so medicine and arcana checks don't do anything. She Nat 20d, should've succeeded, failed anyways, and was removed from the boss fight with no way to revive her. So yeah, it was inconsistent too and turned an already-difficult fight into a grueling slog because we lost our main damage dealer.
this video really makes me feel lucky that my DMs didn't really have the house rule issue. our group was too big and they could never get the balance right so every fight was over in 1 round or half the PCs die.
"If it meets it beats" except not really. I can't recall what happened exactly but a spell was cast that required our fighter to make a save, he meets the save and... Fails. I and the fighter call this out and he responds with if it meets it beats. We say the same and point out the obvious similarity between AC and DC. Nope still a fail. This was like the 16th time this kinda crap occurred so me and the fighter leave never to play with him again and continue to be friends despite not knowing each other before hand.
I have a "ties go to defender" rule. Essentially, all it does is make everything 5% harder to hit, but after so many players being confused about whether or not a tie succeeds or fails, I had to make a blanket house rule just to simplify it.
"If it meets it beats" is actually RAW (in 5e at least), if the roll ties the DC/AC, the roller wins. If the roll was a contest (both sides rolling), then maintain status quo (so for example, if the contest was an attempt to grapple, creature is not grappled on a tie, but if the roll is to escape a grapple, then a tie has the creature remain grappled, if the contest is neutral, like to do something before the other, then neither succeeds on a tie).
"Critical hits do max damage, then double damage (for example, a crit with a 1d8 weapon automatically does 16 damage, no rolls needed)." Sounds good until you realize that (A) enemies get this, too, and (B) the DM also liked to use single, big enemies that hit like a truck anyway. When one attack takes your Lv2 PC from full health to 2 points away from being killed outright (not knocked unconscious: killed outright) through resistance to the damage type taken, you begin to question the life choices that brought you to that table...
ok i miss read that at first. i do crits do auto max then role dice like normal so 1d8 does 1d8+8 on a crit i was worried i was doing a bad house rule there.
@@edwardmccartney5405 No, that house rule is cool (I use it myself at my table I DM at). Even the rule I stated would be "fine" with better enemy selection (like tankier, but less hard-hitting enemies, or enemies that rely more on numbers than individual hitting power, like creatures with Pack Tactics causing more frequent but takeable crits could make for a unique, tricky challenge). This house rule combined with an enemy that is a challenge because of how hard it hits means that instead of a series of bad rolls being potentially catastrophic for a party (which is more than fair), any single dice roll can easily snowball into a TPK by outright killing a strategy-critical PC, and it should be a very unique and special circumstance (maybe once or twice a campaign) that a single dice roll have that much campaign breaking/altering power, not every dice roll of every mini-boss and up.
@@edwardmccartney5405 I do the same rule. Helps a crit feel like a crit and not accidentally roll 2 1s...
@@MastrElite exactly my thought. nothing worse then doing more damage on a normal hit then a crit
@@MastrElite The way I run it at my games is max damage for one die then roll a damage die and add it to the total.
For example, 2d6 + 2 crit would be 2d6 + 14. That way, the crit really matters, but they still get a bit of randomness with a potential for huge damage.
I'm going to be DM-ing for the first time soon and this video fills me with BOUNDLESS confidence because there is no way in a THOUSAND YEARS I could manage to fuck up the game as badly as these people did
There’s a lot of things in D&D that are pointlessly obtuse. Things like your money having weight, using spell components for simple spells like mage hand and dancing lights, and remembering to eat and feed your familiars every day. If your DM makes you do one of these, that’s normal. If your DM makes you do all of these, run.
Money having weight seems pointless until you realize that each party member is currently carrying a literal ton of money lmao
The Star Wars story reminds me of 'that' scene from The Rise Of Skywalker and how Kylo Ren emerges unscathed from his TIE Fighter when it crashes and explodes after Rey cleaves one of the wings off...
(Heard this from a friend in a homebrew Final fantasy campaign,) "Thief's characters can only steal once they reach lvl 15". They started at lvl 1
Worst Home rule I encountered was a DM who'd kick you from the game for being a powergamer if you even mentioned the world multiclass.
That's bullshit.
I understand not allowing multiclassing because multiclassing is an optional rule. But Just mentioning it is getting you kicked?
Geez, Besides, wanting to optimize a character is not inherently bad
That sounds so stupid to be honest... I get not allowing certain expansions since there's a massive difference between someone playing with standard edition, and someone building a character out of twenty expansion books, but multiclassing? Sounds like DM was trash at balancing encounters for players..
"Sneak Attack means you only deal extra damage when you surprise the enemy" types of DMs are the fucking worst because they view their interpretation of the nomenclature of the game as the guide to building systems with no regard for balance or what it means to pick a class for the express purpose of being specialized in an ability that makes only exceptional people capable of performing them.
If you replace "sneak" with "trick" -- or just read the fucking feature's description -- it would clear up the fact that the class feature is not literal WoW stealth openers, but rather, attacking in such a way that your attacks are more effective by use of cunning and timing in combat to leverage additional power against your opponent. That's why you can use it without advantage when you have allies with you -- you are doing the equivalent of attacking the same time to get around their guard and analyze their movements. This is why you can only do it once per turn. This is your feature to balance the fact that you don't hit like a train a la Barbarians, or attack a bunch of times like Fighters who are quick with their blades and skilled in weaving through a trading of martial weapon blows to land many hits.
the "no double up" rule, works if everyone agree before hand. my group did it once and the game was running well because I helped the DM create special things each class got as a bonus as well. It was themed around dark souls, so while there were a few fighter like types, we flavoured them differently
I once had a DM that didn’t tell anyone before we started playing that they would roll 1d4 when people went unconscious and that’s how many minutes they’d remain unconscious. No amount of healing would wake them up…
I could see that being a good answer to the wack-a-mole of healing, but you need to tall your party about that stuff. It would also depend a lot on the style of combat.
In my first ever campaign, the DM had a rule that whenever you made a pun, you would take psychic damage.
"Everytime character fall unconscious, you get a flaw". This went from open wounds too losing limbs. Which ended up with frontliner being fucked up while casters and archer totally fine. Meaning they were punished for doing their job.
Honestly as long as it’s communicated up front this can be really fun. I have a similar system to were they have to roll a 1d6 after getting knocked out and one of their main attributes goes permanently down by 1. So if it’s intelligence then they now have suffered a concussion or “brain damage”. Great way to make hitting 0 hp punishing without always needing permadeath.
@@sauronrodriguez4583 right, quick question. Who is the one actually fall unconscious most of the time?
Cause for us it was the fighter, by doing his thing. Fighting upfront, meaning a player was punished going melee. The dm was also crazy enough sending iron golem as common enemy at lvl 5 (meet like 5 of them in a dungeon). So fighter going down in a fight was pretty likely.
@@hawkonroyale431 It is actually pretty even since across the group given we have a pretty good class distribution. If anything it's usually the magic-users that get knocked out most and with our cleric healing has been pretty plentiful. Probably important I say that we are not playing 5e but Basic Fantasy Roleplay which is a retroclone of Basic DnD from the 80's. So it's a d20 system just generally more minimalist but also tougher. For example, we just had a PC get sucked up into a tornado and lose half of his limbs but since it was one of those "save or die" type situations I told him after the session his character can live if he is okay with permanently reducing half his attributes to 3 (so a -3 modifier in our system) and he said yeah let's do it. Now he has has been reintroduced to the party as a sort of frankensteins monster/body horror claptrap that has been secretly revived by the main villian and so far everybody loves it. That being said I get what you're saying though and it depends on how truly damaging the wounds/maims are. If I lose an arm just for taking a club to the head at level 1 that is pretty ridiculous if not unrealistic. However, I do think it's part of the tanks job and kind of a known risk they are going to be the first one to get physically wounded (sometimes permanently) from melee combat just like how a wizard knows they will be a glass cannon and that their magic can backfire. So at the end of the campaign those that made it to the higher levels literally have the scars to prove it, much like in real life to an extent. It's ultimately the DM's job to be up front about this and let their players know they are running a campaign where combat is high risk and gritty which it seems like your DM didn't do. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience :(
Denying the Life Cleric's healing bonus to Goodberry.
Must be a good DM if that's the worst rule lol, let's be honest it IS pretty OP and imo Life Cleric Heal Bonuses shouldn't apply to Goodberry
that's very badberry
g'huck
Honestly, that isn't even necessarily a houserule. Goodberry is technically not a healing spell but a spell that creates a healing item, as if the berries were a healing potion.
@@JonathanMandrake It actually is a house rule. It was directly addressed in the sage advice, and in a tweet from Jeremy Crawford, it does in fact work that way.
@@eat00002 that was *berry bad.*
8:30
That doesn't even make sense! Arcana isn't "doing a magic effect," it's literally just a shortened version of KNOWLEDGE: Arcana, from previous versions.
So, Crit Arcana wouldn't bring someone back to life. It might mean you know where to go to find someone who knows a resurrection spell, but it wouldn't DO anything in and of itself
In fact, strictly speaking, an "Arcana Check" doesn't even exist in THIS edition. It's "Intelligence (Arcana) Check " with Intelligence being defined as the character's ability at memory and deduction. Any check involved with actually doing something with magic is always "Your spellcasting ability" with no skill proficiency being applicable.
Also getting prof shouldnt matter if its crit arcana because having +40 or -2 doesnt influence your odds of Nat20
'Arcana does random magic shit' is a rule from 4e -- it's how you did *any* out of combat magic because there were effectively no out of combat spells.
Had a GM Who had the house rule that a natural 1 on an attack roll caused the character to accidentally amputate a random limb /body part decided by the critical hit die. Apparently it's possible for a trained warrior to decapitate himself with a bad swing of a dagger.
The "nerfing martial abilities" thing is something I encountered a lot with my DM. He would always try to find a reason that pack tactics wouldn't apply for a kobold, etc.
EDIT: I like the idea of "doom points," in theory. That sounded like it could be worked into a cool mechanic. But obviously executed poorly.
7th Sea does something similar, but it's a mechanic to make things ever more dramatic and rise stakes, never with the intention of screwing then up. Also in 7th Sea players are crazy powerful and death is very rare, allowing players to do the kind of stuff you see in Pirates of the Caribean (Setting is really really close those movies)
“Everything stacks”
This was one of my own doing. I DMd a 3.5 campaign where all bonuses of the same type stack. So your boots and gloves of dex could both give +6 each. By the end of the game, everybody basically had scores of 40-50 in all their important stats and were killing gods just for fun.
that doesnt seem like the worst rule you could do, at least that sounds fun.(Well, probably not for you tho)
@@tobinator1767 No, not as bad as some of these, but it definitely favored the min/maxers. And yeah, it made my job very difficult. Especially with equipping enemies
@@eel1378 see, here’s the difference. It only affected the difficulty of the campaign, and maybe wasn’t fun for the players. But no harm seemed to have occurred. You grew from that, and the next campaign was probably better.
@@eel1378 dokng a campain, where the Party has the power of gods and dominates everyone sounds like an interesting concept to me. Because then, they would basically also need to take the responsibility over everything they end up ruling over. What they do with this responsibility is still their choice.
Seems to be easily summarized as.
Oooops.
7:50 I find a lot of DMs actually roll this the opposite way, where *nothing is ever* investigation. Even something that you'd obviously think would be, like searching a room for a specific item or clues, or trying to find a specific detail in a picture or book.
Although technically in the rule books, my DM was practically demanding to go through our character sheets to check:
. Carrying capacity
.gold amount
.Spell slots
.ammo
. temporary hp
.spell duration
.death saving throws
And so, so much more. It got to the point we called him teacher DM.
The issue was that NPC were just fine and didn't need checking because, "I know what I'm doing" (he didn't). Pretty much every character or NPC he made was at least over carrying capacity or something like that. Thankfully, it was a one shot lasting 6, 2 hours campaign. He hasn't DM since.
We only let him carry on because we were all timid people at the time.
I go through sheets every level or so to make sure no one is forgetting anything, more often than not some bonuses are forgotten lol
Tbh the first part is completely reasonable
Maybe not the worst but very difficult to work around: Mentioning the name of any Deity made them aware of you saying their name, and it allowed them to see you briefly. This extended to this campaigns version of Asmodeus as he counted as a Deity. It just makes conversation awkward as we always have to mind what we say.
I could see that being a cool mechanic if it were brought up in session 0 and had some more balance . I.e. saying a name gets their attention for 1 minute.
lol that makes me think of a mechanic. you know about that saying that 'if your ears itch it means someone is talking about you?' just imagine that also applying to a deity. so there is your cleric/paladin, spreading the gospel of their deity when at some point they randomly get smitten because 'shut up already!!!!' (aka the deity getting fed up with itchy ears.) you'd have to be so careful about not pissing off the chosen deity. But it would also be very annoying and no one would want to play a cleric or a paladin XD
In 3.5 that was actually a thing for dieties that had enough power. It was even more powerful because they could also have permenant perception around statues and prominent figures of their religion. I don't know if it was officially carried forward in 5e but a demigod definitely wouldn't have that ability.
In one of the 3.5 books, it gave deities a power score based on how high in their own pantheon they were. Any time you mentioned their name and/or title, they would be able to perceive the area for a number of years both forward and backward in time equal to that score. I think it had a radius in miles equal to that score as well, but it's been a while since I read that book. Grain of salt and all. 'always mind what you say' is right.
My dnd group is running a Star Wars campaign, where the BBEG gets a lightsaber that INSTANTLY cuts off your connection to the force. Worst concept ever.
Had a house rule on a game a few years ago, speak out of turn, even to crack a joke and "You are smote by God for 1 damage" basically turned combat into pure number crunching with no banter
DM once banned AoE spells because one player kept getting upset that the AoE spells would hit him. Made the Druid change his entire class to cleric because of this
"Whenever a character (PC, NPC, or monster) crits, the target has a 25% chance to be maimed." This sounds cool as a PC, since you can disable the monster a little before it dies in a few rounds. This is significantly less fun when you realize that this also can affect the monsters' attacks, and you only find out after making a tank and getting crit on and are the first case of failing the 25% chance. (Yes, the DM didn't share what homebrew was being used at the start of the campaign.) The DM refused to ret-con it, since it's a point of honor for him to never ret-con (that would be admitting that he made a mistake), but did conveniently provide some magic water that would restore any maimed body parts. Before anyone starts throwing any hate, the DM was pretty reasonable to work with, and when I said that I wasn't cool with maiming, I was told that it would be fixed, and to just wait for it; however, passing the 25% chance on crits would do something else, instead (knock you down, knock your weapon out of your hand, etc.).
I’m guilty of this myself, I made a rule that banned, in quite embarrassed to admit, opportunity attacks.
My players kept breaking story encounters with it, and I got frustrated with it. I have since removed the rule since it’s fu**i g stupid.
First of all for the Star Wars one. The DM was right killing a down and unconscious foe is a dark side move. Now the GM loses all claims to being right by just saying that to save his DMPC waifu.
Yeah I totally agree.
The DM destroyed his own credibility by the ridiculous things he made this character survive.. like bro even Anakin couldn’t even survive all that lol
@Grhifen Or hell, he could've Greavused them. Turned them into a cyborg after death. Or have them be some kind of super clone that is a prototype to test new clone DNA, which could give the party the incentive to find said Clone facility and destroy it.
Sounds like a bad mechanic for a game to say "You know that giant group of crazy people trying to blow up planets and commit genocide? You're not allowed to kill one of their soldiers who just spent hours chasing you to kill you because they were defeated in battle and are unconscious." Sounds incredibly dumb.
@@william4996 You're allowed to fight back and such, and iirc it gives you conflict not instantly reduces your morale. You have to roll for that, and even then you only swap to Darkside after morale goes below 30
I dm ffg so let me just say, most enemies even serious boss tier enemies like Vader don't reach above 30 wounds, and that inquisitor likely took roughly 40ish wounds to bring down due to the TIES, and killing a darkside user, such as an inquisitor is not a darkside action, nore can one action immediately flip you to darkside unless thst character had like a ton of conflicts, to really fuck with the dm do what I do 151crit vibroaxe with a mininum crit of one
If you break wind at the table a gelatinous cube or ooze will materialize in your character's space regardless of where they are or what they're doing
DM: all classes have alignment requirements
Me: imma head out
Oathbreaker? What's that?
@@comet.x Martel, the paladin of justice dies learns about the blood war between the devils and demons, decides the devils are needed to save the world, is resurrected as an archfeind warlock
Tada 🎺 lawful good oathbreaker paladin/warlock
We had a homebrew rule where if you crit on initiative you could act twice that turn once at the beginning and once at the end. This turned out horribly when the BBEG got three turns and killed everyone
Those doom points are a thing in edge of the empire, basically when someone requests to do something awesome from aloted light side points the DM would gain a Dark side point and vis versa
Pretty good for RP dms using it to bullshit a reason my Evil NPCs followed the PCs if they did something awesome rumers speard about the characters for example
Two things actually from the same DM. Summons have summoning sickness and only act on the next round making it so that lower Initiative rolls are first with summons. He decided that mid game, 4 month in and did not tell this to our summoner beforehand.
Disengage doesn't work when there are two or more enemied next to you. (spontaneous rule when our Rogue escaped when he thought he had him for dead)
My DM didn’t like how initiative worked, so instead of rolling initiative for combat he’d have you roll for it at the beginning of the game. Not a bad idea in itself except that the roll lasted the whole game and it effected the order in which you did anything. Say I was a rogue and attempted to steal something from a shop, if our parties paladin had the higher initiative then he’d always catch me before I was able to do it and effectively shut me down. Or if I was a bard and wanted to speak with a noble; if the barbarian had a higher initiative he could always stop me from talking and hash things out himself.
"I punch him"
"TWENTY!"
For that first one, not even Action Surge would let you cast more than one leveled spell per turn. The PHB specifically says once you cast a spell, you can't cast any more spells that turn besides cantrips.
New world of darkness, mixed source book campaign (one player was a werewolf, one a vampire, one a mage etc).
Two house rules came together to basically remove my ability to do a core werewolf thing.
One, on an extended roll, you got exactly 5 rolls. No more, no less (even if you hit the success target early, you had to carry on).
Two - crafting a basic werewolf magic item required 50 successes, and it only got worse from there.....
Getting 10 success on a roll was considered an epic success, and you basically just got narrative control of the outcome of that action. It was also damn near impossible because you needed a 38 on a D10 (10s exploded).
I had to do that 5 times. Also, rolling a 1, cancelled all prior successes.
And this was all to make an item that could sort of replicate a level one power....which in the lore of werewolf, was used as currency.
Suffice to say, I never managed to make one of those items, so just became OP as balls instead.
Theoretically, by the end of the game, I could wield a mountain.....
Yeah, I know that shit. Made a Vamp that was on par with you Woofies in terms of Comat (4 Attacks per Round, average Damage 7 Severe per hit, just took 21 XP to get there, Char is 100% inside the Rules even though the Fluff is a bit creative).
So many GMs got pissy and nerfed away basic Core Features like Basic Powers (Better Strengh, better Dex, better Con) of my Clan and changed the Rules of Generations and how many Blood you have, can spend and what Effect it does, because "Gen 8 is too powerful".
After all of this, one wonders whay the GM did not say "Sorry, but this Char does not fit, do you have something else in Mind?" from the beginning.
There hve always been too many DMs that want to “take everything they say seriously”
I played a AD&D game where the DM didn't like magic users. She divided all spells up and based them on different stats. If I recall, fireball was based upon STR. Magic used spell points. You got your spell points from your stats. Spells cost I spell point per level of spell. So fireball cost 3 spell points to cast. If you had a 10 STR, then you could cast 3 fireballs and one other 1st level spell. Here's the kicker, when you cast fireball with a 10 STR as your spell points go down so does your STR. Cast one fireball, your STR is now 7, cat another fireball, your STR is now 4. See the problem. If you had an 18 INT and cast a 9th level spell that was based upon INT, your INT went down to 9. This really was bad for CON based spells. Basically spell casters were almost useless. The DM just wanted every fight to be hack and slash. Oh, and your spell points never changed as you went up levels.
I usually have my players pick different classes because they are new to the game and creating and seeing different stuff can help them be prepared to create even better/more in the future.
Seems like alot of these are the results of peeved DMs trying to gimp players into losing, save for the first one which was the opposite
I do agree with the no duplicate classes rule, because one of them will always be better in combat than the other, which makes the worse character just feel useless. It also makes it hard as a Dm to make a combat where that character shines for their arc, when someone in the party can just do what they can but better. Maybe it’s because we’re a combat based group, and it may work in roleplay focused groups.
My second DM ruled that "sneak" attacks must be made from stealth. Which meant I got 1 sneak attack per round if that. Most encounters we were ambushed.
All of my inquisitive rogue abilities were deemed too powerful. And all deception is impossible because there are no gnomes in barovia, forgeries were also impossible because you need the exact document/stamp/ring to copy it.
Most miserable experience I've ever had, mostly because he was awful in other ways too.
many players and DMs don't fully understand the sneak attack rules in 5e anyway
the combat circumstances to gain advantage on an attack roll are incomplete at best in the PHB (of course, hiding some mechanics from the players is D&D tradition) and you have to really get into the DMG (page 251) to find the rules on flanking (well look at that, surrounding a guy gives advantage against him, which empowers a rogue's sneak attack, who'd have thought? Certainly not anyone who'd played 3.x)
@@ChibiKami Flanking is an optional rule in 5E, though Sneak Attack explicitely procs if you 2v1 someone without disadvantage.
However, I agree that a list of common advantage sources would be good for a beginner Rogue.
You probably meant "1 sneak attack per combat"? Because you can only get it once per turn anyway and you only have 1 turn in 1 round without reaction.
@@helgenlane yes
“Grapple Check” was funnier than it should’ve been
My friends and I have been playing Fate CORE for about a year and a half without any of us really understanding the meat of the system. A lot of experimentation and slapdash encounter design was basically forcing the game to try and be 5E with grid-based combat and bosses that had Stress capacities well into the double digits. One of the most dysfunctional house rules we tried at one point was having to roll Athletics to determine your movement for the turn. It was great for making our Athletics-focused characters do some real superhero shit, but it was nigh unplayable for our social-manipulation-focused support character with no points in Athletics, as it meant there were certain turns where she could only move one tile, or ZERO tiles at all. Our GM isn't bad and we like this game a lot, but things have gotten REALLY wacky with how we've been breaking this system apart.
DM: Only the person who gets the killing blow gets XP
Me (Wizard): Well Hell
My worst experience with homebrew rules was rolled DCs…
Literally makes everythibg super unbalanced and hard
what do you mean with rolled Dcs? Pre determined? or opposed checks?
I would say that depends on how they are rolled. If the chances are equal (which can be made with some math and Excel sheet), my only concern would be that it can slow things down.
"You can't play warlock because I think they're dumb and over powered and not good for roleplay"
This was because my warlock was able to cast toll the dead
Alright, imagine this. Armor class doesn’t exist. Every attack will hit as long as you roll above an 11, armor is just temporary hit points, wizards can wear armor, no such thing as spell slots (infinite fireballs). Basically they lied to me when they said they were playing DnD
Yeah... Those guys doesn't want to play dnd but never try other ttrpg
They should explore really what they were doing was nearing a dungeon world they should try that first
Sounds like Rifts to me.
"Nat 20's and Nat 1's have MUCH greater effect"
In reality, it means, if your character is good at something, others still often are WAY better at it, and if you roll nat 1, in your characters specialty, there is no reason to ever trust that character will succeed on something related.
For example, our War Cleric rolled nat 20 on stealh ever since he looks the most capable in stalth out of all of us, including 2 other characters with expertise in stealth. Cleric wears Heavy armor.
character with 21 strength (belt of giant strength) tries to do something strength related - rolls 18 total, does not succeed. Another character with 8 strength. rolls Nat 20, does it with ease.
Our Druid was trying to scout while flying over a city filled with demons. rolls nat 20. Druid now knows exactly how many of each demon type are there in the city. Exact numbers, because apparently with nat 20 in perception, not only she could count 836 foes in about 2 minutes, but also see them through walls, since they were IN A CITY!
There are many more in this session, like, our Artificer who makes items more powerful than Legenary ones while on lvl 8, simply because he has +11 to rolls (5 int, 6 expertise) and bonus from Flash of Genius when making them. While I have no idea how does artificer work, I am 100% sure, not like this.
Combat starts after 1st attack, which means my Alert feat I started with is pretty much useless, since others get to hit, even tho it is clearly visible, then we roll initiative... and surprise is never a thing... (I started the campaign with Alert feat) so I got way nerfed (after rolling by far the worst stats among PC's, while our Rogue, who had abysmal stats, got buffed.
Ehhh, I used to love this DM, when he did not know rules to D&D well (and neither did players), we had fun being creative with what we had, but now, even if we want to say something to one another mid combat, we have to use our action to do so.
If not for a fact that people I am playing with are my real life friends, I would have left a while ago, but I dont think I will last much longer there, definitely not a good impression playing my 1st ever D&D campaign xD
Welp, I am playing an Echo Knight, I declared that Echo is half-physical, can interact with world, but just barely, for example, if touched, it has a thick consistency, but acts more like a liquid that tries to return to proper shape than a material object, on top of that, it can make noises.
DM, after a couple of sessions of me playing it as such, says, no, it is only visual, so makes no sounds and has no material influence on world around whatsoever.
Fine, I argued a bit, but I accepted it.
Later on, I was going to sneak on a creature with Blindsight, which means, it can perceive presence with sensors other than sight, but since Echo, according to my DM, works only on sight, it should not be possible to detect it without sight, UNLESS it had some kind of magic perception.
DM says, no, creature has good hearing so it has great perception of everything around it, even stuff that can not produce sound. GREAT.
Another thing? Echo acts as an object, which means, it does not provoke opportunity attacks and can not be targeted by certain spells. DM says no, it acts like a creature. Sure, I dont mind, but that means positive effects can be cast on it... or so I thought, even tho it is a creature, it can not become invisible with Invisibility spell.
There are many more secret home rules, that w find out as we go, which are straight up busted, not to mention he is fudging like 80% of his dice rolls.
I am so bloody done, but I feel bad arguing with him, since I was the one who asked to play with him, since I remembered it was great... and it was... when once again, he did not know the rules, and gave us space to be creative.
Nat 20 are for in game fights. Not on skills, let's say you are trying to seduce someone you have -2 on charisma. The challenge is 22 you roll 20 -2 you have 18 you still fail. The cute paladin with 14 charisma roll 20 +2 = success.
I love to break this to you... your DM clearly still doesn't know the rules. Talking, if only a little, is a free action. There are no crits on skill checks. And hell, most you said he does is wrong, if he is trying to follow the rukes
Well, he does know the rules, but rather he is changing them to his own vision, which makes no sense. But yeah, good news is that I left the group last friday, So there is a good ending to the story xD
My group does the 20/1 Initiative thing and everyone I’ve played with loves it.
I guess it’s up to the person
I want to say that this video should come with a PTSD warning but the title pretty much gives you that.
I knew what I was getting in to when I clicked on it and I have only myself to blame for these shivers.
My favourite bad houserule(as in I use it) is rl-bonus on physical checks.
I thought, ey people often get + on social rolls for nice rp.
So, well, that dangerous climb check for your wizard? 5 pushups get you +2
I'm down. You want advantage on this con save against poison? Eat this really hot pepper. You won't.
"Elven trance allows you to long rest while the non-elves in the party short rest..." Couldn't convince the DM otherwise.
Best houserule: if you get a crit you roll a percent die to see if it's only double or up to triple or quadruple damage
Thanks, I hate it
If you don't kiss the gm goodnight, your character will instantly die
We had one guy at the game store who had really sexist rules geared toward female characters and/or players. (If they were a guy playing a female in game they had penalties and if they were a woman playing a male or female they had penalties.) He did eventually get laid the fuck out, choked out, kicked out of the store, and then he never came back.
The guys responsible got a light "one week" ban for removing a problem player and the game store owner gave them a discount on some of the stuff they bought for a week after.
So one toolbag had another toolbag physically assault him for being a toolbag?
He may be a sexist asshat but certainly doesnt give anyone the right to attack him.
Im sure its a cool story to tell some kids tho.
To that person who felt queasy around alcohol, you are not alone
PANR has tuned in.
Would you rather have your party tpk to a batkeep or a beholder
Yay!
@@MrRipper always here for you big cat!
@@joedan5366 beholder. Gotta keep it classic. But I've only ever tpk'ed a party once with a banshee. She crit three times, they rolled five 1's. That combat was....brutal.
You know. Table top rpg's aren't really my thing.
But I love listening to everyone's stories here. Keep them coming.
About the Perception vs Investigation rule: I do the same thing......and in my opinion all of the example OP listed there can be justified by both.
Investigation is meant for actively looking/searching for something/someone.
- example: You spend some time looking for your target in the crowd using the traits you know them to have as reference. It takes a minute but eventually you find your target pickpocketing a nobleman talking to a merchant.
Perception is your ability to notice things around at a quick glance or two.
- exmaple: As your walking through the market square taking in the scene. You spot a nobleman getting pickpocketed by a figure that appears to be the target you were looking for.
That being said the DM should've told the player and just gave them maybe some key words/phrases to signal that they want to use Perception such as, glance/spot/notice/be on the lookout/keep an eye on etc. Also they should have said that during character creation or a session 0.
A better way to view it isn't active vs passive, as that is not the role of these skills and undermines the passive ability score system, but as whether you are actively using your knowledge in a slow and meticulous way to find or discern something (investigation) or are relying on using your senses to detect the existence or presence of something (perception). In simplest terms possible, the distinction is "looking for clues" vs "spotting a trap".
If you investigate a crime scene, you aren't rolling to visually notice the existence of a blood stain, but rather, rolling to see if you look in the right places, to know what a very old stain looks like, to even think to check if furniture might have been moved around to hide the stain, and other aspects that rely on knowledge and logic.
When you're looking for a hidden assassin, you aren't investigating the corner of your eye, you are actively bringing attention to your senses to detect motion, a smell, a sound -- or in some rare cases, a bit of intuition like "I am wary of attacks from above/below and other odd angles of attack". This doesn't require intelligence to do, a dumb animal can have very sharp senses and intuition about things like hunting and stalking.
Tbh, I don't understand how people struggle with that one, because the names of the skills honestly couldn't be any more clear and concise.
@@AnaseSkyrider well said. The only reason I could guess why people get confused is because some people think that having a high PP means you walk into a room a know every intricate detail about it. Even though there is a Passive Investigation score which would be more reasonable to argue about that.
In 5e Passive Perception is typically for if you're generally aware of something without explicitly trying to be aware of something.
Actively using your perception skill is more for trying to see something, either in a broad sense, or trying to discern something at a distance. (Or just generally trying to roll higher than your passive)
Actively using your investigation skill is generally more up close and personal, like specifically examining an object or place for information.
In other words, you use perception to notice a suspicious bush. You use investigation to search and examine the suspicious bush, and your passive perception tells you whether or not you noticed the other suspicious bush sneaking up behind you while you were busy with the 1st suspicious bush.
Failing an insight roll doesn’t mean you have to believe the person. Just means you don’t detect any deception.
Had a DM straight up ban magic 'unless it could be explained with technology'. Not only did it straight up make it a nightmare to even consider playing my favorite class, but you could literally explain every spell in the game in this manner. It was a sci-fi campaign, but still. Stuff like that, as well as straight up banning classes for arbitrary reasons, is a huge pet peeve of mine.
If they don't want magic to exist without logical explanation, why the FUUUU- are they using D&D as their game system?
Critical hit and fumble tables should only be used if they are quick, and are used for dramatic effect.
DMs need to remember that, over the course of a campaign, players will have more crits against them and more fumbles by them than the enemy will. That's just the math.
The critical fail house rule is just stupid. A LVL 20 character who is basically a god, still has the same likelihood as a LVL 1, of accidentally throwing their bow off the tower instead of shooting it? 🤦
I mean... the bow might just be stuck to the arrow
@@loganw7101 yes, but I've seen DMs break bows and swords, throw snow into a fire, and stab the team mate behind you. That's just dumb
Even worse, as they advance they have a much GREATER chance than a lvl 1 character of doing something like that, because they get more attacks.
I'm in a game where the DM is a old school D&D player and has made a bunch of rules to make the game harder.
1) Long rest does not restore HP on it's own. You must spend Hit Dice to regain HP back. You can only use 1 Hit Dice for every hour your rest up to half your Hit Dice.
2) If you hit zero HP and make all three death saves you again a point of exhaustion.
3) You have a limited number of Cantrips you can use. You can use 10 times your level in cantrips and only get them back after a long rest.
Oof... but I see how that can be fun if you know that's what you're getting into
Short one: Critical Fumbles in DnD 4e. Critical Fumbles being a detrimental thing to your character, sometimes even doing damage to you. Now in 4e Wizards and similar mages were primarily meant to spam AoEs because there were things called minions that let you put huge numbers of enemies on the field but only had a single point of health. So often you'd be hitting 6-10 things with your AoEs.
In 4e AoEs were done by making an attack roll against every target. Meaning mages often rolled ten times the number of attacks as martials. I think you can see the problem with crit fumbles here.
Yes, we did have a wizard knock himself out by toasting a goblin horde. Thank you for wondering. That situation was retconned and was the death of the rule.
Besides, what sense does it make that a big ball of fire has a greater chance of fucking you up back, if there is three goblins within it, instead of one?
I play mostly Druids, after going through session 0 and having no issues, 2 sessions later, he informs the group that polymorph, , shapechange, and any abilities that change your form would not be allowed. Then refused to let me make a new character.
He did not want you there.
I am guilty of setting rules when it comes to party characters because of the setting, like a specific starting weapon per character or set story goals to work towards, but as a dm it bugs me when I repeatedly said, aside from minor restrictions at the start, you can roam around the map doing stuff like you want and the players turn into sheep that need to be herded even though I created an open world game of sorts. Also, if people are starting at level 2, don't be I'm a ship captain who is also a werewolf who has control, or I want my character to be the op Mc from a book series.
Well, setting rules for character creation and telling the players before they make character sheets is fine. The issue with most of the people in the video is they basically tell the party after they start. As long as you arent forcing people to be a certain race, class with all the same stats, you're good. Seriously, I had a DM like that who literally started us off with the same stats, race and no class.
Gotta love it. My favorite DM to watch has like 2/3rds of these rules in his 2e homebrew "2.neal"