The only time I was faced with somebody being told they had to take a piss. The player, "What the hell?" The DM responded, "It has been six months! You can not hold it in any longer. You have go!" We all laughed. We knew the DM. We knew this was not a got you moment to kill of a PC. It was just reason to get him behind a bush so he could find a clue. It was a great, funny campaign.
This is the sort of thing that can work if everyone in the group knows each other really well and knows what sorts of jokes work or don't work. It's almost satirical, playing off the idea that in most games, people don't describe going to the bathroom or other boring/unpleasant minutia of daily life.
Had one DM ban rangers entirely in every campaign he ran because "they're a bad class, and you won't enjoy playing them. I want everyone to have fun. So no rangers." Even the other non-ranger players in that game were a bit miffed at this one, because I've been playing rangers longer than this DM had been alive, I knew how to make them entertaining and the others were really looking forward to seeing it. This DM also banned warlocks and monks for the same reason. He couldn't figure out how to make the classes work, so he assumed nobody else could either, and banned the class so people wouldn't play a class HE couldn't enjoy playing.
Well, I did play a monk I could not figure out how to make work. But that was because I rolled one single 12 and it also was a game where everything was at least one skill check. Want to ask NPCs about a person you just met? That is History and Persuasion.
LOL! This sounds like Ron Swanson responding to a bad DM (and I mean that in the best way possible) DM: "Rangers are bad. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. You're better off playing something else." Ron: "Son, I've been playing rangers since before you were born. Don't tell me what I would enjoy."
Rule Four: Yeah, insta-death is trash; I just imagine that the third nat-one is trying to, like, flirt with a waitress and the player character suddenly exploding or something.
Rule One: I mean, if you're going into the desert to hunt orcs, why not find a Ranger who knows how to track orcs and how to survive in the desert? That seems like it makes sense, and that's on the DM for not preparing against that eventuality in a game literally called "Hunting Orcs in the Desert". Maybe make the orcs a lesser threat, or one of several; they could've teamed up with some goblins, or are working for a dragon, for example, or have a base with a portal to a jungle where their actual stronghold is, making the Ranger's desert knowledge useless. There are a ton of ways to get around that ranger, and the fact that the DM's response to not knowing how to do so led to them banning them altogether just screams "bad DM".
Honestly I get a DM not liking the favorite terrain feature very much, since it can make survival situations a bit boring. If I was worried of that I'd probably ask the ranger to take tashas deft explorer feature instead, but not ban the class...
Rule Two: Cool. So if I polymorph the BBEG into a wizard NPC we've befriended, he'll just help us out, right? No? Then why did I turn on my friends when I was a dragon? The wizard is lawful good, so that means that the BBEG's alignment changes to that, right? No? Interesting.
About the multiclassing rule, there is a similar concept (namely in Pathfinder, but it can work in 5e or possibly other systems too, with some tweaking) called "Gestalt". This is where, basically, player characters have two classes that they level up in simultaneously. (Universal features like hit points don't stack between the two, but you take whichever has the better version. A fighter+barbarian character would get the barbarian's d12 hit dice over the fighter's d10. A wizard+artificer would get the wizard's number of spells per day, etc.) The difference between what I've described and the terrible house rule you mentioned is that in this case, it's something EVERY character gets, and everyone is aware of (and hopefully on board with) from the beginning. As a replacement for multiclassing, it doesn't work. The DM also has to adjust combat difficulty accordingly, and it can be unpredictable, so while it can be fun, it's more of a gimmick or novelty than anything else, and it's going to be wonky. Attempt at your own risk. I certainly wouldn't recommend it except maybe if the group is really chill and not antagonistic or argumentative.
A Polymorphed creature doesn't retain their mental stats... its one of the things that separates it from Wildshape. You DO however keep your personality and alignment so no a PC Polymorphed into a red dragon does not turn evil. About the XP only on kills though... I can also think of a video game example for why that's a dumb idea... The original Disgaea was like that. Only the character who made the last hit would actually get XP, which sucked for any character that specialized in healing. Yes I could have given them an offensive weapon, but that would make them worse at healing... and if they had the ideal "weapons" for healing they may do one or two HP of damage on an enemy at their same level... it was not fun... Later games in the series made it so healers got XP from doing what they were supposed to. HEAL. Made those games so much more fun to play since I didn't have HOPE an enemy would get down to only one or two HP so that the healer could get the final kill..
Odd thing was, I remember when you did get XP for kills in 2nd edition D&D. But you also had other options. And these seemed to be bonus awards. Yes, Wanda the Warrior gets 10xp per level of goblin she slays. But if Mike the Mage casts an illusion that makes the goblins walk single file into Wanda's swords, that counts. And if Pat the Priest talks the party out of being arrested on sight when walking into town covered in gore and blood, that's a bigger award.
my wife at least has us tell her when our characters are bathing, if we do not state this she will use the "this person seems offended by your odor" kind of thing which, is actually pretty cool for roleplay, eating is obviously something to keep track of again for roleplay and such but... bathrooms and monthly cycles that... that's unnecessary, bathroom is like an automatic thing if you gotta pee well then you just freaking go. I like the realism of arrow tracking, armor damage/repair, eat/sleep/bath you know stuff that a clever DM can put to use... I've personally used the arrow tracking one, got my archer player to let me know they were resupplying where they could if they didn't find some along the way... even in combat they started asking if a downed enemy had spare arrows they could use... good stuff!
I’m the same way when I DM. You have to keep track of things like food, ammunition, water, and bathing. Going so far as keeping track of your bathroom use or menstrual cycles is a bit much though, as it doesn’t help with the role playing. On the older character sheets, there were actually charts for keeping track of your arrows, food, and water. Which makes sense, unless your character has an enchanted quiver that never runs out, or a Myrlund’s Spoon, Ring Of Sustenance, or magical Soup Kettle, and a Decanter of Endless Water. And generally speaking, you didn’t get those until your character is much higher in level. Lower level characters HAD to keep track of their consumables. Tracking Arrows: If you run out of arrows, you can’t use your bow. Tracking Food: If you run out of food, you’ll go hungry and begin to weaken the longer you go without. Tracking Water: If you run out of water, you can die of thirst. Especially if you heavily exert yourself or are going through especially harsh terrain, like a desert for instance. In real life, a person can die of thirst in three or four days. Bathing: Go too long without bathing, you start to stink. This tends to hamper one’s social interactions. In game, this could lead to ever increasing penalties on CHA based skill checks, especially Diplomacy and a bard’s seduction attempts. And if a DM wants to get REALLY nasty, going too long without bathing could lead to illness or infection.
@@Thundarr100tracking all this staff takes time from actual game and it makes sense only in situation when you are in deficit. So if you are in town best way is just assume that you got all of this and spend n coins to it every day, if you are traveling but spend money to prepare fore this and have some way to transport big weight you also dont need it. In crisis situation (like finding youself in dungeon with no way out) or in not so good equipped journey it can make some sense.
There’s actually a term for leveling up two classes at once: Gestalt. It is very overpowered, but it can be fun if every PC is equally overpowered and the DM is equipped to still challenge them.
Any Gotcha! houserule that is secret and gets revealed when triggered. Like a natural 1 on an attack roll means you hit an ally, or a natural 1 on a saving throw doubles the damage which only gets revealed when you roll a natural 1. Or a grapple attack ending barbarian rage, revealed after the grapple attack has been made.
I think the nat 1 hits an ally can be funny if it makes sense with how the characters and situation makes it seem like plausible. I would usually only do this for laughs and if the battle is very srrious I usually choose another penalty for the nat 1 and not something like this.
Rule Three: The only time I've ever seen bodily functions matter in D&D was recently. My party and I got locked up in jail, and my cellmate played the old "hand in warm water" prank on me while I slept, which made my character piss himself an obscene amount. This was cleaned by a janitor's prestidigitation spell, and upon awakening, I was the only member of our group that didn't suffer Exhaustion because I'd expelled so much.
bodily functions can be interesting if they're stuff players should actually have to keep track of depending on the campaign. like if you're playing a wilderness campaign, your players should be keeping track of something like food or sleep, but you would need to discuss that with your players before hand. let them know they have to hunt/gather for food, find a safe place to camp, making sure you share the watches so everyone gets enough rest, etc, even bathing I can see as an interesting mechanic for when you visit civilization and you haven't bathed in a while damaging your cha or if you don't bath regularly you might get a disease or your wounds might get infected. But you can't just start big with that, but you things can progressivly get worse if you don't take care of it. bathroom stuff though, isnt' one of them because of a lot of reasons but a big one is that your players don't control how time passes in the game. The DM has a lot more control of how time passes and making sure how to track random shit liek having to take a piss when youre traveling or about to invade the 9 hells isn't fun, it's a frustration feature like you said
I mean, just my gut reaction here after immediately hearing it but.... If the logic is that Red Dragons are covetous, wouldn't it still go after the god-like entity due to it having more power and, therefore, more to covet? Or am I missing something?
It would depend on whether or not the dragon believed it could win. Something to remember about dragons is that they're not stupid, especially the really old ones. Their vanity and greed doesn't often tend to win out over their self-preservation, although they will defend their treasure hordes to the death.
Also, red dragons (as well as most characters and most players [about half of the time]) aren't idiots and know that a god trying to kill you is a bigger threat than the people fighting said god with you. Can't covet shit if you're dead
In the West Marches game I'm in, there's a choking-on-potions rule... but it's for if you use feats/items/whatever to be able to drink too many potions in a round, so your chance of choking goes up the more you chug. It was put in place to bonk stick our powergamer who tried to drink 10 potions in a round one time........ it wasn't in any way meant to apply to healing unconscious characters.
I had a GM once who declared all potions were one quart. This made them heavy (4 pounds including container) and took longer to drink, and the player had to chug a 32 ounce soda while GM timed them with a stopwatch. Not the only time I disagreed with that GM.
Regarding leveling up by kills only, I have a story. Once upon a time I was playing Tomb of Annihilation and the druid acquired a hummingbird friend, who was happy to scout the jungle for us in exchange for access to the gallon on honey our Alchemy Jug produced every day. The party became quite fond of this hummingbird and at one point we met a highly leveled NPC caster and someone asked if they could cast Awaken on the hummingbird. The GM hesitated, clearly debating how broken this would be, then to our great joy agreed. We now had a sentient hummingbird friend, Protector-of-the-Red-Flowers-from-those-Evil-Yellow-Bellied-Sapsuckers, accompanying us. (We called him Protector for short.) The next time we leveled, we asked if the hummingbird could level as well. The GM said no, he was just a companion, he didn't share our xp. We said, "But what if he DID share our XP? What if he got some kills?" The GM laughed and said he was a hummingbird with 1 hp and a peck attack that did 1 point of damage, did we really want to take him into fights? We said, "We don't have to. We've got this." The next fight, we very carefully incapacitated two of the enemies, knocking them down to zero hp without dealing lethal damage and tying them up. We then said, "These creatures are helpless. Protector can safely coup-de-grace them with his single point of damage." The GM laughed again and said, "All right, I'll allow it." We then proceeded to knock down enemies and let the hummingbird finish them off each fight until the GM gave in and let Protector level as a druid with a focus in blasty spellcasting, with the condition that he would be a GMPC and not under our direct control. Given that Protector was already somewhat OP due to having true flight and a high AC from his tiny size, we were fine with that. (The GM also refused to allow him to Wild Shape or cast Polymorph, citing balance issues, which we felt was fair given that we already had a Moon Circle Druid in the party.) Long story short, that hummingbird continued with the party as a GMPC until we had another player join and our amazing GM let them take over Protector-of-the-Red-Flowers as a fully-fledged PC. To avoid spoilers, I will just say that the hummingbird druid was AMAZINGLY useful in the Tomb proper and actually ended up getting the killing blow on two of the three final bosses. Good times.
I can see bodily functions being an issue in a game with a lot of hunting and tracking. Real-life hunters do pay close attention to their quarry's excretions, so if your PCs are being hunted and trying to hide their trail, that sort of thing would get folded into it. But I would think you could just knock a few miles off their daily walking distance to cover the time that would take, rather than keeping specific accounts.
Regarding the house rule of having 2 classes advancing at the same time, there was an optional rule in either 3E or 3.5E that allowed just that, it was called gestalt classes. When you levelled, you would get all the features of both classes, but where you would roll the HP dice for both classes, you only got to use the highest roll. The one character was a Barbarian / Sorcerer, and consistently rolled higher on the sorcerer's d4 for hit points than on the barbarian's d12 🤣 We only every used it in two campaigns, and that was because the DM wanted a high powered campaign, and insisted that ALL the characters were had gestalt classes. With all character being OP, no one character took all the spot light and it was kind of fun.
So, about the bodily fluids rule: I would start paying very close attention to whether the DM placed toilets in their maps, because they better start tracking this for NPCs...
The "3 nat 1s = death" thing could work in something like paranoia (screwing up so much is treasonous) I sometimes forget that nat1 could mean something extra bad is a house rule because I've played so many other systems that include things like that. Had a funny nat1 story from a recent game when one member of the party rolled a 1 to spot two snipers, but they both also rolled 1s to attack him. I ended up ruling that he failed to see them but did notice something on the floor and they accidentally shot each-other when he knelt down to look.
Ad&d had that style of multiclassing but you split the xp you earned between classes Thus your multiclass character would always be 2-3 levels lower than everyone else
8:33 now I'm just thinking of one player who joined our (technically public) game expecting this. Apparently, he was lied to about this being a published rule at his previous table and built his rogue for the express purpose of sniping kills. First session we had him in, he was rubbing his alleged success in our faces (especially to the players with support characters) until he learned we shared xp. Judging by his expression hearing this, he must've gone through all stages of grief and invented new ones to cope with this news. He accepted it and moved on but started to do things to "get ahead" in the game. Like roping in one or two players into some dungeon crawling shenanigans while the others just wanted to enjoy some downtime activities, just so he'd have fewer people to share xp with. For context over why that was a very bad idea, we were playing Dungeon of the Mad Mage. A module that punishes players for splitting the party. This was not his worst trait, and he eventually left the group due to life stuff, but that's another story for another day.
@common viewer in all fairness, the other players were great to play DnD with, just a little squirrely from being young and new to the game. This guy was just a later addition to the group before we had to dissolve it for life reasons (a good chunk of them were leaving town to start college). He only got a couple players to go along with his shenanigans, but even they had their lines to draw. For example, he tried to talk one of the other players into killing a friendly NPC because she had a sword he wanted and was "probably worth a lot of xp." The other player was instantly against the idea, partially because he was the one who hired her to tag along, partially because everyone in the group enjoyed her himbo personality and would be upset if anything happened to her out of PC greed. Thankfully, our problem player dropped the issue, which seemed to be a running thing anytime he was met with opposition from the other players. Granted, we've had our share of weirdos being a public game, but this guy stood out for having a bunch of smaller problems stuffed into one problem player sack. Fam, it takes a lot to top the guy who had an obvious thing for goblins (but thankfully kept it away from the minor players) AND the guy who literally shrieked at another player for trying to be diplomatic in a situation that called for diplomacy.
Thank you Crispy. I also totally forgot to write down my houserules somewhere for my players to access. I mean I write session notes, have tables with actions, choices and consequences, long elaborate backstories etc. but nope all my house rules, just in my head. But no longer! Thank you for that.
In my current campaign (modified 1e pathfinder with some pf2e and dnd5e elements), I use vigor and wounds whenever characters take wound damage there is a chance of minor injuries. Small bleeds, an early knockout, temporary penalties to movement and such or permanent scars/marks. In my system a roll crits when the total beats the ac of the target by 10, these crits deal normal damage instead of double but deal a small amount of damage directly to wounds which can cause these debuffs. In addition I have added a called shots rule, where you can declare a crit. If don't beat the targets ac by 10 or more you miss, but if you do score the crit you can deal major injuries like the loss of a limb. This is of course rarely used and is mainly reserved for the use of the pcs to show off if they encounter some low level mooks or for exceedingly strong enemies to quickly tell the players they should not be fighting something.
I have heard of the "if you go down you get exhaustion" rule, and i honestly hate it. The problem is that it only addresses part of the issue, it only actually feels like it addresses the GMs side, while ignoring the player side of the problem. A big part of why yoyoing is often the go to is that most 5e healing sucks balls. The amount that any given spell heals is so often tiny compared to the damage the enemy dishes out. Your friend is low enough that they may go down the next time they're hit, so, you heal them? Pretty good chance that they'll still go down the next time they're hit. Second problem is how quickly they can die once down. You've only got a couple of rounds, or possibly only one round if the enemy is likely to go for a finish off. Third, related to second, it's often easier or the same amount of action to heal compared to stabilising, so you only stabilise when you're out of heals. So if you're going to punish yoyoing, please power up healing (you could reduce the number of casts while upping the power if you want, action economy is part of the issue), stretch out death saving throws, and make stabilisation easier/faster. I feel like the first one, (powering up heals) is probably the most important. A game where heals are fewer, but more significant and getting downed is more meaningful could work quite well. It will lead to situations where someone gets downed and it's worth saving your last heal to try and keep someone else up while rushing over to try and stabilise the downed player. Also, the irony of the "yoyoing, sucks but is better if exhaustion" bit being just after the "don't change multiclassing, the game designers knew what they were doing" amuses me :P I do think the custom multiclassing rule was bad, but yeah, the designers barely knew what they were doing for half of 5e. So many holes and issues.
@@sleepinggiant4062 I'd be surprised if they didn't run in to yoyoing. Especially as the whole "heal from 0" was a specifically highlighted new feature of the rules, so they really should have looked at it's effects. This issue is such a widespread problem because it is such a logical result of the system. This isn't a secret tactic spread by the community, just something that many people at tables end up doing because it's what the system encourages. All the other flaws and holes in the system indicate they were either not really the best at game design (whether that's the fault of the individuals, or something exacerbated by circumstances i can't say, i can only look at the results) or they weren't given adequate time, possibly both. Plus, as I've highlighted, there are multiple problems with healing and dealing with downed characters, which are their own issues, but contribute to this tactic. And on top of that, they've not, as far as I'm aware, made any attempt in all the years since release, to address the issue. Despite being plenty happy to introduce many alternate rule options in subsequent releases. Which is evidence that it is functioning as intended, that this is what they balance for and is part of their whole crappy 6-8 encounters per day strategy.
@@sleepinggiant4062 I'd be surprised if they didn't run in to yoyoing. Especially as the whole "heal from 0" was a specifically highlighted new feature of the rules, so they really should have looked at it's effects. This issue is such a widespread problem because it is such a logical result of the system. This isn't a secret tactic spread by the community, just something that many people at tables end up doing because it's what the system encourages. All the other flaws and holes in the system indicate they were either not really the best at game design (whether that's the fault of the individuals, or something exacerbated by circumstances i can't say, i can only look at the results) or they weren't given adequate time, possibly both. Plus, as I've highlighted, there are multiple problems with healing and dealing with downed characters, which are their own issues, but contribute to this tactic. And on top of that, they've not, as far as I'm aware, made any attempt in all the years since release, to address the issue. Despite being plenty happy to introduce many alternate rule options in subsequent releases. Which is evidence that it is functioning as intended, that this is what they balance for and is part of their whole crappy 6-8 encounters per day strategy.
Actually, only wildshape allows druids to retain their intellectual stats. Polymorph - and true polymorph, assuming one uses it to turn into a dragon - will replace your mental stats with the creature's. However, your alignment and personality both stay the same, so it doesn't affect your way of thinking. Only your capacity for it! This is part of why druids' ability to wildshape is so useful for scouting if nobody has a familiar, since turning a party member into a beast, which is all normal polymorph can do, will make it hard for them to focus on the task and retain relevant information. Which is all part of the fun~
I'm a part of a small group that develops our own unusual ttrpg system and we had quite a dispute with the main author of it. The thing is, in this system you can choose how to level up: you can either just pick a normal human skill without any risks or you can try to obtain a powerful magical skill or go beyond normal human ability scores but then you need to roll d100 to see if you... instantly die in the process or not. And every time you do it, the chance of death grows. I like the idea but despise the instant death penalty the main author is holding on so hard, so in my alternative version of the game, if you fail the roll, you just fall into a coma for one day and lose a bit of your max health and your max morale - feels much more fair this way.
The worst single tabletop game campaign I ever was involved in was one that used the "You only get xp based on kill count" rule. This rule was compounded by the fact that the system we were playing was Palladium Rifts, and if anyone here is familiar with Rifts (and Palladium games in general), you know that there is basically no such thing as class balance. So, long story short, due to the fact that we had one character who was a dragon hatchling (with some questionable rule-bending min-maxing going on) and a freaking Elven Ninja Juicer, you can guess who got pretty much ALL the kills in the party, and thus all the XP. I tried to play as a fair-go Mystic Ronin (who are badass, but nowhere near as badass as a freaking dragon hatchling with mystic martial arts or a ninja JUICER), but by the time I got to go (and I almost always went last, because I had the lowest PP/Agility), the Ninja & Dragon had already downed every enemy, so I just kept getting farther & farther behind the rest of the party. At the time, I thought I was just bad at making effective characters in TTRPGs (this was the same year I got into TTRPGs, so I was still a bit of a noob), and that my character was trash, and I ended up literally burning her character sheet out of spite. It wasn't until later that I realized that both the Dragon & Ninja Juicer's players were borderline Munchkin-level power gaming and that the DM was just bad & lacked the spine to either (a) tell the OP players to tone their shit down a bit or (b) find ways to power up the weaker players to level the playing field. In fact, said DM did the opposite: I had a badass suit of armor that would have let me be the party tank, no question about it (like only the dragon character had more MDC than my armor), but he would force me & the other players to remove our armor for every fight, claiming, "It's to level the playing field." (No, seriously), which meant that my character usually ended up getting knocked out of action first, while the Ninja Juicer, with his insane bonuses to parry & dodge just parried & dodged everything except for the very rare times he rolled a nat 1, and the dragon, having a massive MDC pool unarmored could just take any hit short of a direct anti-matter bomb without any problem.... Needless to say, said house rule combined with blatant, unchecked power gaming on the part of two of the players (who I'm still friends with... They admitted they were kinda being munchkins & jerks at the time), really soured me to tabletop gaming for almost a year afterwards. This happened over 20 years ago, and just thinking about it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
4:06 Had a DM once that gave the party a ring that did random shit. Level 1 characters, 3.5 D&D. We're dealing with spiders, I am healing people from unconscious to full, giving my all. He decided to make my leather armor into a metal breast plate. Everyone was cheering my upgrade and I had to shout them down so I could tell the DM, "That is your right, but if this is your choice, the party is dead". He asked me to explain myself. "I am a healer". He got confused "Clerics can wear heavy armor" I had to tell him to look at the sheet, because I am NOT a cleric, I am a healer and not only am I not proficient, using this forbidden armor will shut down all my healer magic and stuff. Had to show him Page 8 of the miniatures guide to prove what he was doing would kill the party. He chose to upgrade someone else.
I use the unconscious/ehaustion rule in my game and it makes a real difference, and makes the PC's more aware of not just dropping down and getting back up like yo=yo's.
I feel like a lot of these can be really fun in very specific gameplay. Like you said, the main issue is when people take a specific rule and apply it generally instead. This video kind of makes me want to mash all these house rules together for a crazy, wonky overpowered game. Sort of like monopoly when you're already winning lol "House rule"
I have to say, I hate "confirming a crit." Why do I need to confirm it? The DM saw my 20. The other players saw it. There's no need to roll it again to make sure it's a 20.
Got the 3 nat 1s to die thing is so ridicules. As someone who plays Call of Cthulhu, a D100 system, the idea that getting 3 1's in a row is instant death is absurd! Like what is the math on that... 0.5%, IE 1 in 200? I've gotten two 1's in a roll in Call of Cthulhu before and even in a game as hyper lethal as CoC that would STILL feel like total nonsense as a blanket rule! And in D&D, a game about long term character progression that can take months or even years to play... a 1 in 200 chance across hundards and hundreds of dive rolls REALLY isn't that crazy....
@@andreacallegari7137 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 = .0125% which is still over 1 in 10,000 which is high, but not impossibly so. If we assume in an average game a player makes 15 rolls between combat and skill checks (a somewhat conservative estimation) it would take them 666 games to randomly keel over and die from a random roll. Multiply that by the number of players, lets say 5 we have a nearly 1% chance that in any given session, someone is going to die from this stupid rule.
It always pays to inform your players ahead of time before implementing any house rules. Let them know what you've changed and why. Ask them how they feel about the rule. If they don't like, swallow your pride and sheve it for another group. No house rule is worth ruining the game for your players.
I run a house rule where if you roll a Nat 20 on an attack roll, you add max damage to your damage roll for guaranteed high damage. This applies for enemies as well.
The three nat ones killing you is actually a pretty common old rule. You used to see it at 3.5 tables full of grizzled meat grinder players. It was a counter part to the triple 20 being an instant kill at a lot of tables. And both only ever applied to combat. You rolled a 1. You roll again for a fail table, if you roll another 1, you hurt yourself. Roll again, if you roll another 1 you just basically triple 20d yourself and die. And yeah. It sucked as an idea, though I never saw it actually happen to anyone.
Banning Ranger: Yeah, that DM was basically being salty his player was taking advantage of the setting to make a useful build. Perhaps a tad overpowered given the concept, but that's what Ranger is supposed to do; be good at one thing. Banning Ranger just for that is being petty. More DMs should work with their players to make their PCs compatible and even effective in-game. Killing XP only: I think some old TTRPGs had that rule, or maybe just some old grognard DMs. Either way, it was unfun, and only encouraged playing heavy martial or strong mage classes, while supports got shafted. Not fun. Polymorph Gotcha: Yeah, that was just being a jerk. Multiclassing: ...Oh god. Monk/Rogue comboes, Barbarian/Paladin comboes, etc... work just break the game. EVERYONE would be multiclassing since not doing so would mean being left behind. Twice the ASIs, twice the HP die, etc... Bodily Functions tracking: No. Just no. Not only would it be incredibly unfun, but to be realistic you'd have to roll for them hourly (a person takes a piss every 4-6 hours on average) Realistic injuries: Might be fun, but only for some people. Also, some injuries are less fun (and more disgusting) than others.
Regarding the Multi-classing: thats how it worked in 1st and 2nd edition, both classes gaining XP and advancing together.. not one or the other, as in 3rd and 5th editions. Character would divide their XP by the number of classes they had and apply the result to each class. What was multi-classing in 3rd an 5th was/is a sort of in-between the 1st/2nd eds and those editions 'Dual Class' rules for humans.
I’d love to hear some of your Homebrew rules and how they work. Also I listen to a D&D podcast where the DM implemented at think where if the played rolled X amount of nat 20’s he’d get a move against the party and on the flip side if they rolled X amount of nat 1’s they’d get a move against him. It was a pretty interesting rule and added something to the game.
The Multiclass rule was about the DM losing sight of the issue. He overestimated the problem with the base rule, and in trying to "fix" it, removed the check against the *real* problem.
the two players who died in the our current campaign certainly earned it, lol one of them attacked the BBEG in what was supposed to be a roleplay encounter and the rest of us decided to support that fool, so half the party died XD
The realism speech I feel can apply to any sort of story. It is possible to always lean so far into realism that it becomes distracting as if you assume the audience can’t suspend their disbelief a little bit.
I once ran a oneshot, the plan was to eventually make one of the player betray the party. The group knew about this but not who the traitor would end up being. In the first session I made them keep track of who dealt the finishing blow on which enemy. This was not for xp, they did not even know what kind of impact this would have on anything. Before I had a chance to even get to the part where anyone could become a traitor, one of the party members betrayed the rest to try and hog kills. It was an hilarious one shot, but damn do people get quick to betray eachother.
2:27 The only time doing something like banning a class is acceptable is when it is part of the theme of the campaign. Back during 4E, I always wanted to do a "No Divine Classes" campaign (because 4E would let you do that because there were martial, arcane and Psionic healing classes that were just as good at healing as clerics), but couldn't get anyone to do it, and I'm not a good enough GM to do it myself. 7:37 The only time I've seen "three nat1s equals instant death" was when we were fighting the Terrasque and it rolled three nat1s in a row and ripped out it's own throat in a botched attack. Which was mostly a "holy shit, that actually just happened" moment rather than anything else. 11:42 From my experience with Dark Heresy, and games based on it, which does have built -in tables for more permanent affects on injuries, it can be pretty interesting and adds to the tension when things go poorly. But that sort of thing is also a core conceit of the game, and so is to be expected. Warhammer 40k is not a nice place. Especially for (mostly) baseline humans.
6:35 This actually happened to me recently. My Level 2 Circle of Stars Druid rolled a 1 when trying to cast Guiding Bolt. Our group house rule is that when rolling a 1 on an attack with allies in range, you wind up hitting one of them. We all have slight modifications to this depending on who's GMing - I give the player about to get hit with friendly fire the option to use his reaction to dodge his ally's errant attack for example - and the GM for this campaign had me roll another d20. My guess is he was seeing if my attack would actually get past the AC of whoever he decided I was going to accidentally hit. Nope, another nat 1 on that. So then he had me roll ANOTHER d20, and wouldn't you know it, it was a nat 1 hat trick. He had me roll damage, explained how the something went horribly wrong with how I attempted to cast the spell, and it exploded in my face, permanently scarring one of my hands and leaving me with 3 HP. We survived the fight, thankfully, but given how I could've hit our Paladin who was hanging by a thread with 1 HP against a horde of Kua-Toa, I took it and we all had a collective laugh and sighs of relief. And I was able to heal the Paladin on my next turn, so it all worked out in the end.
I recall accidentally banning Divination Wizards from my campaign. Me and some of the players were looking at homebrews just to have some fun, looking at what's available. I ended up finding one that used a similar mechanic to the School of Divination's Portent feature, which lets you start the day rolling 2-3 D20's at the start of the day and just kinda pocket them for the rest of the day. I made some comments about how I feel like it takes the stakes out of somethings to just be able to declare at any point that, actually I just succeed. We ended up talking about how I'd feel weird about it at my table for a while before a veteran player joined the call and listened in before saying "You know that's a real ability in the official game, right? It's actually like base-PHB." I've never had a Wizard or played a Wizard in any of my campaigns, so I really didn't know anything about it. So I relented into allowing it, but at this point, my players all knew my feelings on it, so they made a silent pact that no one would use it.
I know a DM who bans wild magic barbarians, because he banned wild magic sorcerers for being disruptive but does not want any player to say wild magic sorcerers should be allowed, because wild magic barbarians are allowed.
@@schwarzerritter5724 Funny you mention that. In one of my current campaigns, I play a Beast Barbarian that subclassed Wild Magic Sorcerer (for lore reasons). That DM would hate me.
I am not against banning certain classes. I mean if you want a low magic more grounded fantasy game. For an example of another system, I have some rules about playing Jedi in my campaigns that means it is restricted in some eras to a limited number of players in some and in others I would actually recommend a full party if Jedi. The main thing is if it makes sense lore wise at the time. I am not running a full Jedi party at the height of the Galactic Empire’s reign. Force Adept get more leeway, but I would still run it like Mage the Ascension with paradox replaced by Inquistors.
I had a DM house rule that nat 1s provoke attacks of opportunities. Problem is we were all level one playing DiA over Roll20. We didn’t last very long because the dice algorithm was not in a our favor.
The only time I implemented a different multiclassing system was in a "godslayer" campaign where the entire point of the narrative was that the world was destroyed by an evil lovecraftian god and the players were the last survivors trying to take it down by any means necessary. In this campaign we had a rule called omniclassing, where whenever you level up, you can take the class features of any class from that level, so you had like the Cleric's 1st level abilities, the Paladin's 2nd level abilities, the Rogue's 3rd level abilities, etc, to make their own "custom" ultimate class, and the ONLY REASON this worked is that the entire narrative point of this campaign was fighting an elder god for the fate of the universe, so I let them be as overpowered as they wanted and then gave them a boss fight worthy of that level. In a campaign, this would ruin everything xDDDDD
The multiclass rule thing actually, I can see it happen. Gestalt classes can work in a high powered game, with a small party (3-4 max) and a DM, who badly wanted to throw some tough creatures at the party, but had to hold back.
I don't have a lot of house rules for my game, but they are all written and pinned in the campaign discord server. Nothing outrageous, a short list of banned things. Which potion, ASI, and rest rules I'm using, and the lack of flanking rules. This doesn't stop one of my players from not reading them
I could see the "3 nat 1's to death" rule implemented in a Tomb of Annihilation game. It'd be tricky, but it might enhance the lethality that that campaign has
Fun fact on the multiclassing thing - that's probably based on an old 3.5/PF system called "Gestalt"; and there _are_ Gestalt rules for 5E. However..... gestalt is notoriously high power scaling. You can't just slap Gestalt on a game and expect CR to hold up like a normal game.Not that CR holds up under the weight of the vanilla game, but I digress. Anyway you have to plan for Gestalt.... it's not hte kind of house rule to just throw in willy nilly.
The two classes at the same time is called gestalting, started in 3.5 it was to have best of both worlds. Found good homebrew for the rulings and find it fun in 5e if for a solo or a group accepted thing like my group is going to use those rules once they get level 7 or so.
Actually, levelling up two or more classes at the same time dates all the way back to 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D. Back then, if you were playing a multiclassed character, you split your awarded XP between your various classes. As a result, you levelled up slower than your fellow players who were only playing a single character class. This kept the power level more or less equal.
@@WhyYouMadBoi yeah, I’m old. I have to remind myself to say BAB and not THAC0. The old system worked okay. But it does have its faults (which is likely why they changed it for 3rd Edition and made players level up each character class one at a time). For one thing, back then different classes levelled up at different rates. Rogues and clerics levelled up the quickest, as they had fewer hit points than fighters while still being likely to find themselves in the thick of the combat. Fighters levelled up slower, and at the steadiest pace of all the classes (required XP was always double what it was previously). Barbarians, rangers, and paladins required more XP than fighters at the lower levels to balance out their special class abilities, but less at the higher levels so that they could catch up with the other classes. Wizards required similar XP to clerics at the lower levels, but then needed more than the paladins at higher levels. This allowed PCs to stay at similar power levels in combat in regards to hit points and THAC0. But for multi classed characters, it made one of the characters classes level up more quickly than the others. Which could be frustrating when one class is levelling up while the other stays behind, let alone the fact that everyone else in the party only has one class and are levelling up much quicker. And of course there’s the hit points. The hit dice for multi classed characters were added together and then divided by the number of classes. So for a Fighter/Mage, when the mage levels up before the fighter, the player rolled 1d4 for the hit points, and then divided the result by 2. Then when the fighter half caught up, the player would roll 1d10 and again divide the result by 2. At best a fighter/mage would get 7 hit points + CON modifier every level. Once they managed to get caught up with the other characters though? While they would always be a little behind in XP, they could get to be insanely powerful. Just imagine a 10th level fighter/mage hurling fireballs and lightning bolts at a distance, and then closing in for melee with a badass sword.
@@sherylcascadden4988 you’re welcome. A lot of people seem to forget that D&D has been around a lot longer than 23 years, and that we haven’t always used the d20 OGL system.
3 nat 1s = death, means that people in the campaign world die once out of 8000 times anybody try to do any series of things. Rarely should anybody make it to their adulthood if that were the case considering how often people do stuff. Re: choking on the potion - The potion is magical. It doesn't care if it is in the lungs or the stomach. It activates once it is in the body. It's not like you need to wait for a digestion time when properly drinking the stuff.
Instant Death, or Longterm Crippling Problems as possible consequences for simply getting an unlucky roll while trying to do something else, is a profoundly Gygaxian kind of ruling. The old rules, and many modules, were just FULL of things that, if you happened to roll badly, could end you in one of a variety of violent and annoying ways. To wit, I direct you to 1st and 2nd edition Psionics. In 1st edition AD&D, anyone could try to unlock their psionic potential. This required rolling a percentile die on a chart - this could result in you having some random selection of major or minor powers on a 'good' roll; on a bad roll, these could permanently lower your mental stats from backlash, or indeed, KILL the character outright on the worst possible roll. Yes, a character could die *during character generation* from brain damage while trying to unlock their latent psionic potential. In 2nd edition, a not only did a variation of the 'brain damage' table exist for 'dabbling' characters trying to unlock latent psionic abilities, but there was also an entire Psionicist class, who you would THINK would at least be able to learn and use psionic abilities (which their entire class is built around) safely. NOPE! Every single psionic power had an 'activation roll', a d20 against a flat difficulty (with only the possibility of a tiny adjustment from a good stat); failing the roll would cause you to lose the spent power points as well as the spent action as your power fails you activate entirely. Even the simplest low-end powers had a one in four or so chance of just not working when you went to use them, while the more potent effects might fail more than half the time. And no, you didn't get better at these checks as you got higher in level - they were as difficult at level 15 as they were at level 3. Worst, of course, was that you could roll a natural 1 on these checks, which caused a 'backlash' effect, which varied depending on the power you were using, which usually involved the power rebounding against you in some way, often for damage or debilitating effect - at least a few of them were functionally 'instant death' backlash effects. Just for using a power *your class is meant to be good at*. Any GM that channels the spirit of the Gygax to insert punishing crippling 'consequences' like this needs to brush up on what the last 50 years of evolution of tabletop games have become - players care about their characters, and this is a good thing; players don't want to have to throw half a dozen characters into a meat grinder just to clear one dungeon; that is not the game that we are playing anymore. This sort of thing also applies to 'gotchas', which are, by and large, a staple of the Adversarial DM Style in which the GM is the 'enemy' of the players, rather than the choreographer of the threats that face them. Giving your players no way to know what was going to happen, in or out of game, and thus no way to understand or prepare for it until its too late, whether it be a house rule or an in-game event, is dicks. Surprise! your players have no changed the rules of your game so that they are now playing with someone else as the GM!
Here is a House Rule that I've made up that I do think people should go with: No Shop, in any town, on any continent, no matter how wealthy, will ever sell you anything with a greater value than a 'rare' magical item, or +3 enchantment value in 3.5, unless I choose to make a special, limited exception. If you want the highest level loot, the best items for your character, inform the DM, explain what type of items you're looking for, try to set up a side quest or add something to the next appropriate loot table. Why this rule? Mainly because it invites players to make their desires clear to the DM, rather than sighing over random loot tables that gave them things they're just going to pawn; I recall getting a Manual of Stone Golem Creation in a party with a Rogue, a Cleric, and a Knight, so nobody *could* make a golem anyway, alongside a Dual Scythe of Animal Slaying +4. Would've been cool if it was a particularly large knife, but okay. And I've also been in campaigns where the DM just 'went off the book' and create a Metropolis where the party just *bought* +5 everything, which is nice, but we were entirely OP from there forward, without much to find in the world. This rule means they have to search for the things they want, the DM can assist them in getting it, and the items can have relevance to the plot instead of coming off loot tables.
I liked this one a lot. I've gotten a lot of rude comments over the years due to the inclusion of critical attack fails in some of my campaigns. It's something I grew up playing in games with. I don't typically use the double 1 self own rule anymore, but the confirm your 1 and then roll a d8 for the direction you throw your weapon/your bow unstrings/you trip rule is still around.
The levelling in 2 classes simultaneously is just "Gestalt", it's not a house rule, it's something that's been around since like Advanced D&D, I had a gestalt spellthief/rogue in 3.5 (to be fair, the spellthief on it's own is so terrible if you weren't Gestalt with rogue to kind of 'balance it out' it wouldn't even be worth playing.). So Gestalt rules are fine if either A) it helps bring an underpowered class up to the level of a normal class, or B) Everyone is Gestalt (but then that's why Pathfinder has the 'hybrid classes' which are basically gestalt classes).
About the first one: if you name your campaign “Hunting the Desert Orcs” you should expect your players to roll characters good at hunting Desert Orcs. How many horror stories do we hear about players insisting on a character that doesn’t fit into the campaign? This isn’t the place for my swashbuckling pirate.
Already on the first one: I MET the DM that banned rogues for being good at B&E, and the DM who banned fighters... ostensibly because they were "boring" but found out it was because even a core option only Pathfinder 1 fighter can be built to be busted as fuck, very specifically when optimized for hitting things. Yeah, apoarently Generic Cleave Path Fighter #4 was too much for this guy to handle.
Gestalt characters are powerful, but if every character is gestalt then its not too broken, especially in 5e. Action economy is still a thing and you should already be working on using combats that push your players that aspect.
About the multiclass, that's how 2ed AD&D worked, and it's was fine. To be fair, a multi class did then only get half xp, or 33% if they was triple class. Human did not become multi class, but Duel Class, that's work as Multi Class do now.
When I DM I use real physics in the game . 'I shoot my Long bow at the goblin at max range down this long hallway .' The shot will hit the floor after medium range not enough arch in the shot to make it to max range other than skipping , and sliding down the hall . 'I shoot my long bow at the goblin at max range across the Grand Dwarf Hall . ' Now there is a chance for a dramatic last ditch shot to stop the fleeing goblin.
In my experience, realism rules make the game objectively worse, because they accomplish nothing but make marital classes worse to play: "I want to shoot him with my bow." "The ceiling is too low." " I want to shoot him with Eldritch Blast." "Sure, go ahead." "You forgot to bring your equipment to the blacksmith, so all weapons and armor have -2 now." "Do spells also get -2?" "Of course not." "There is not enough room to use a two-handed weapon here." "Is there enough room for magic?" "As long as no enemy is withing 5 feet of you."
"permanent injury table" is just.. Yeouch. I mean, we had permanent injuries when we were downed in a game that ended in a sort of fizzle due to some low grade 'horror' in the background I stayed mostly out of (Mainly one player not... Really playing and just clinging to another character and making rp ALL ABOUT clinging to this other player character... And also only playing cosplays of characters from FFXIV. It was pissing off two other people, but when they switched out a character for a cosplay of an Endgame SPoiler character and one of the players is a managing to get through the game without being spoiled, the other friend of mine who'd been dealing with this problem player since they got booted from ANOTHER game we were all involved in.. Or rather took themselves out when asked to actually involve themselves and instead spent the time the DM was DMing distracting the player they clung to in this OTHER game... Well they snapped and basically told the DM that the two of them would leave if the problem player didn't switch out the character from this spoiler character.. And the DM just ended the game completely rather than put their foot down. I was busy irl when this happened but I came back to this but yeah. Not fun) and my character got massive scars down his side and, being a tiefling with horns that looked like antlers, lost one almost completely and had another damaged, all cause he got 1 hit knocked out by an adult black dragon breath attack. However it didn't cause him to lose any charisma or anything. He just sort of went with acid scars down the entire leftside of his body and had to buy new clothes and his magic tattoo design of brass dragonscales, when expanded to the next level for improved AC, got some oak bark stylizing to take advantage of the new skin texture. One of the characters got breath weapon knocked out by a Green dragon and all their exposed skin got bleached a couple shades lighter -- it would have slowly darkened back up over time (before the Campaign would be able to end naturally - so it'd remain for the rest of it if it hadn't fizzled) but it was like a farmers tan in reverse. The damage made sense for what took them down to 0 but wasn't something that effected our abilities, and if we REALLY didn't like something it'd be 'lessened'. Like I personally went "mess me up just don't try and force me to make my character something they're not" to the DM and took the scars, the sudden more demonic twisted rusted metal antlers being added via him doing Druid Craft to make false ones, the fact that his voice altered when he spoke or translated infernal into something more echoey and demonic, being polymorphed into a blue baboon by an ancient magic trap turned my demonic antlers perma-blue, and other characters got upset about changes and they were made less permanent and more a temporary issue. Some people LIKE getting messed with, but not in ways like "poops in a bag cause their intestines got mangled in a *Crit*" I also had been holding onto ingredients for reincarnate from a random loot drop the DM had on fantasy grounds early on, and when one of our characters got MANGLED in the last fight shortly before the game ended, I gave them the option -- I was basically the only one who could bring them back without a deus ex machina deal with the devil other characters were offered, BUT it's REINCARNATE. The "Makes you a totally random body" Revival spell. I offered, and thankfully the player was PSYCHED to keep their player but get a randomized race... They kept it as "its X but as a Y" change, but *did* opt to randomize sex, even if gender remained the same. So our Lady Half-elf Bonk (Bard Monk) ended up a Male Dhampir twin of her past life with some 'demonic' elements to it (because every spell of my druid got twisted by the DM to have a demonic lean to it more and more as time went on. I had basically gifted him "my druid doesn't know his parents' and turns out his mom was a Night Hag. Fun!) But I NEVER would have forced it: If they didn't want to do the Reincarnate I could roleplay it as my guy forgetting he even had the components because it was EARLY GAME he found them and maybe didn't even realize it was a spell component and just was keeping it cause it smelt nice.
Polymorph only applies to beasts, so using polymorph, the PC couldnt turn into a red dragon. Theyd need true polymorph, a 9th level spell. Otherwise, my 5e PC wouldve finished her quest to return to her true dragon nature (she was a bronze dragon true polymorphed into a human to protect her as a wyrmling)
The only time I was faced with somebody being told they had to take a piss. The player, "What the hell?" The DM responded,
"It has been six months! You can not hold it in any longer. You have go!" We all laughed. We knew the DM. We knew this was not a got you moment to kill of a PC. It was just reason to get him behind a bush so he could find a clue.
It was a great, funny campaign.
I knew he had to be joking if you were holding it in for six months. That is physically impossible.
This is the sort of thing that can work if everyone in the group knows each other really well and knows what sorts of jokes work or don't work. It's almost satirical, playing off the idea that in most games, people don't describe going to the bathroom or other boring/unpleasant minutia of daily life.
Had one DM ban rangers entirely in every campaign he ran because "they're a bad class, and you won't enjoy playing them. I want everyone to have fun. So no rangers." Even the other non-ranger players in that game were a bit miffed at this one, because I've been playing rangers longer than this DM had been alive, I knew how to make them entertaining and the others were really looking forward to seeing it.
This DM also banned warlocks and monks for the same reason. He couldn't figure out how to make the classes work, so he assumed nobody else could either, and banned the class so people wouldn't play a class HE couldn't enjoy playing.
Well, I did play a monk I could not figure out how to make work. But that was because I rolled one single 12 and it also was a game where everything was at least one skill check. Want to ask NPCs about a person you just met? That is History and Persuasion.
LOL! This sounds like Ron Swanson responding to a bad DM (and I mean that in the best way possible)
DM: "Rangers are bad. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. You're better off playing something else."
Ron: "Son, I've been playing rangers since before you were born. Don't tell me what I would enjoy."
"Before we start, yes, I know my hair looks bad!"
Me: Look at this smooth as fuck nice head of hair on Crispy.
Yeah. I get up every morning with a larger forehead. Any hair is good hair to me.
@@davidtherwhanger6795My bald self felt that one. Oh well, at least I can grow out a beard and cosplay Kratos
Rule Four: Yeah, insta-death is trash; I just imagine that the third nat-one is trying to, like, flirt with a waitress and the player character suddenly exploding or something.
the dies of cringe rule
Rule One: I mean, if you're going into the desert to hunt orcs, why not find a Ranger who knows how to track orcs and how to survive in the desert? That seems like it makes sense, and that's on the DM for not preparing against that eventuality in a game literally called "Hunting Orcs in the Desert". Maybe make the orcs a lesser threat, or one of several; they could've teamed up with some goblins, or are working for a dragon, for example, or have a base with a portal to a jungle where their actual stronghold is, making the Ranger's desert knowledge useless. There are a ton of ways to get around that ranger, and the fact that the DM's response to not knowing how to do so led to them banning them altogether just screams "bad DM".
Honestly I get a DM not liking the favorite terrain feature very much, since it can make survival situations a bit boring. If I was worried of that I'd probably ask the ranger to take tashas deft explorer feature instead, but not ban the class...
Rule Two: Cool. So if I polymorph the BBEG into a wizard NPC we've befriended, he'll just help us out, right? No? Then why did I turn on my friends when I was a dragon? The wizard is lawful good, so that means that the BBEG's alignment changes to that, right? No? Interesting.
About the multiclassing rule, there is a similar concept (namely in Pathfinder, but it can work in 5e or possibly other systems too, with some tweaking) called "Gestalt". This is where, basically, player characters have two classes that they level up in simultaneously. (Universal features like hit points don't stack between the two, but you take whichever has the better version. A fighter+barbarian character would get the barbarian's d12 hit dice over the fighter's d10. A wizard+artificer would get the wizard's number of spells per day, etc.)
The difference between what I've described and the terrible house rule you mentioned is that in this case, it's something EVERY character gets, and everyone is aware of (and hopefully on board with) from the beginning. As a replacement for multiclassing, it doesn't work. The DM also has to adjust combat difficulty accordingly, and it can be unpredictable, so while it can be fun, it's more of a gimmick or novelty than anything else, and it's going to be wonky. Attempt at your own risk. I certainly wouldn't recommend it except maybe if the group is really chill and not antagonistic or argumentative.
A Polymorphed creature doesn't retain their mental stats... its one of the things that separates it from Wildshape.
You DO however keep your personality and alignment so no a PC Polymorphed into a red dragon does not turn evil.
About the XP only on kills though... I can also think of a video game example for why that's a dumb idea...
The original Disgaea was like that. Only the character who made the last hit would actually get XP, which sucked for any character that specialized in healing. Yes I could have given them an offensive weapon, but that would make them worse at healing... and if they had the ideal "weapons" for healing they may do one or two HP of damage on an enemy at their same level... it was not fun...
Later games in the series made it so healers got XP from doing what they were supposed to. HEAL.
Made those games so much more fun to play since I didn't have HOPE an enemy would get down to only one or two HP so that the healer could get the final kill..
Odd thing was, I remember when you did get XP for kills in 2nd edition D&D. But you also had other options. And these seemed to be bonus awards. Yes, Wanda the Warrior gets 10xp per level of goblin she slays. But if Mike the Mage casts an illusion that makes the goblins walk single file into Wanda's swords, that counts. And if Pat the Priest talks the party out of being arrested on sight when walking into town covered in gore and blood, that's a bigger award.
my wife at least has us tell her when our characters are bathing, if we do not state this she will use the "this person seems offended by your odor" kind of thing which, is actually pretty cool for roleplay, eating is obviously something to keep track of again for roleplay and such but... bathrooms and monthly cycles that... that's unnecessary, bathroom is like an automatic thing if you gotta pee well then you just freaking go. I like the realism of arrow tracking, armor damage/repair, eat/sleep/bath you know stuff that a clever DM can put to use... I've personally used the arrow tracking one, got my archer player to let me know they were resupplying where they could if they didn't find some along the way... even in combat they started asking if a downed enemy had spare arrows they could use... good stuff!
I’m the same way when I DM. You have to keep track of things like food, ammunition, water, and bathing. Going so far as keeping track of your bathroom use or menstrual cycles is a bit much though, as it doesn’t help with the role playing.
On the older character sheets, there were actually charts for keeping track of your arrows, food, and water. Which makes sense, unless your character has an enchanted quiver that never runs out, or a Myrlund’s Spoon, Ring Of Sustenance, or magical Soup Kettle, and a Decanter of Endless Water. And generally speaking, you didn’t get those until your character is much higher in level. Lower level characters HAD to keep track of their consumables.
Tracking Arrows: If you run out of arrows, you can’t use your bow.
Tracking Food: If you run out of food, you’ll go hungry and begin to weaken the longer you go without.
Tracking Water: If you run out of water, you can die of thirst. Especially if you heavily exert yourself or are going through especially harsh terrain, like a desert for instance. In real life, a person can die of thirst in three or four days.
Bathing: Go too long without bathing, you start to stink. This tends to hamper one’s social interactions. In game, this could lead to ever increasing penalties on CHA based skill checks, especially Diplomacy and a bard’s seduction attempts. And if a DM wants to get REALLY nasty, going too long without bathing could lead to illness or infection.
@@Thundarr100tracking all this staff takes time from actual game and it makes sense only in situation when you are in deficit. So if you are in town best way is just assume that you got all of this and spend n coins to it every day, if you are traveling but spend money to prepare fore this and have some way to transport big weight you also dont need it. In crisis situation (like finding youself in dungeon with no way out) or in not so good equipped journey it can make some sense.
There’s actually a term for leveling up two classes at once: Gestalt. It is very overpowered, but it can be fun if every PC is equally overpowered and the DM is equipped to still challenge them.
It is also a great system to use when you are running very small groups. I actually enjoy using the rule for mini campaigns or 2 player games
Any Gotcha! houserule that is secret and gets revealed when triggered.
Like a natural 1 on an attack roll means you hit an ally, or a natural 1 on a saving throw doubles the damage which only gets revealed when you roll a natural 1. Or a grapple attack ending barbarian rage, revealed after the grapple attack has been made.
"No, you cannot Regenerate his cut off arm since it was cut by a creature stronger than you"
I think the nat 1 hits an ally can be funny if it makes sense with how the characters and situation makes it seem like plausible. I would usually only do this for laughs and if the battle is very srrious I usually choose another penalty for the nat 1 and not something like this.
Rule Three: The only time I've ever seen bodily functions matter in D&D was recently. My party and I got locked up in jail, and my cellmate played the old "hand in warm water" prank on me while I slept, which made my character piss himself an obscene amount. This was cleaned by a janitor's prestidigitation spell, and upon awakening, I was the only member of our group that didn't suffer Exhaustion because I'd expelled so much.
bodily functions can be interesting if they're stuff players should actually have to keep track of depending on the campaign. like if you're playing a wilderness campaign, your players should be keeping track of something like food or sleep, but you would need to discuss that with your players before hand. let them know they have to hunt/gather for food, find a safe place to camp, making sure you share the watches so everyone gets enough rest, etc, even bathing I can see as an interesting mechanic for when you visit civilization and you haven't bathed in a while damaging your cha or if you don't bath regularly you might get a disease or your wounds might get infected. But you can't just start big with that, but you things can progressivly get worse if you don't take care of it. bathroom stuff though, isnt' one of them because of a lot of reasons but a big one is that your players don't control how time passes in the game. The DM has a lot more control of how time passes and making sure how to track random shit liek having to take a piss when youre traveling or about to invade the 9 hells isn't fun, it's a frustration feature like you said
I mean, just my gut reaction here after immediately hearing it but.... If the logic is that Red Dragons are covetous, wouldn't it still go after the god-like entity due to it having more power and, therefore, more to covet? Or am I missing something?
Exactly! The dragon would be like: "You can't conquer and enslave these people, only *I* can conquer and enslave them!!!
The DM was trying to treat the polymorphed player as a lycanthrope...
It would depend on whether or not the dragon believed it could win. Something to remember about dragons is that they're not stupid, especially the really old ones. Their vanity and greed doesn't often tend to win out over their self-preservation, although they will defend their treasure hordes to the death.
And wouldn't it just see the party as minions at worst? Evil can still have friends!
Also, red dragons (as well as most characters and most players [about half of the time]) aren't idiots and know that a god trying to kill you is a bigger threat than the people fighting said god with you. Can't covet shit if you're dead
In the West Marches game I'm in, there's a choking-on-potions rule... but it's for if you use feats/items/whatever to be able to drink too many potions in a round, so your chance of choking goes up the more you chug. It was put in place to bonk stick our powergamer who tried to drink 10 potions in a round one time........ it wasn't in any way meant to apply to healing unconscious characters.
I had a GM once who declared all potions were one quart. This made them heavy (4 pounds including container) and took longer to drink, and the player had to chug a 32 ounce soda while GM timed them with a stopwatch.
Not the only time I disagreed with that GM.
Regarding leveling up by kills only, I have a story. Once upon a time I was playing Tomb of Annihilation and the druid acquired a hummingbird friend, who was happy to scout the jungle for us in exchange for access to the gallon on honey our Alchemy Jug produced every day. The party became quite fond of this hummingbird and at one point we met a highly leveled NPC caster and someone asked if they could cast Awaken on the hummingbird. The GM hesitated, clearly debating how broken this would be, then to our great joy agreed. We now had a sentient hummingbird friend, Protector-of-the-Red-Flowers-from-those-Evil-Yellow-Bellied-Sapsuckers, accompanying us. (We called him Protector for short.)
The next time we leveled, we asked if the hummingbird could level as well. The GM said no, he was just a companion, he didn't share our xp. We said, "But what if he DID share our XP? What if he got some kills?" The GM laughed and said he was a hummingbird with 1 hp and a peck attack that did 1 point of damage, did we really want to take him into fights? We said, "We don't have to. We've got this."
The next fight, we very carefully incapacitated two of the enemies, knocking them down to zero hp without dealing lethal damage and tying them up. We then said, "These creatures are helpless. Protector can safely coup-de-grace them with his single point of damage." The GM laughed again and said, "All right, I'll allow it." We then proceeded to knock down enemies and let the hummingbird finish them off each fight until the GM gave in and let Protector level as a druid with a focus in blasty spellcasting, with the condition that he would be a GMPC and not under our direct control. Given that Protector was already somewhat OP due to having true flight and a high AC from his tiny size, we were fine with that. (The GM also refused to allow him to Wild Shape or cast Polymorph, citing balance issues, which we felt was fair given that we already had a Moon Circle Druid in the party.)
Long story short, that hummingbird continued with the party as a GMPC until we had another player join and our amazing GM let them take over Protector-of-the-Red-Flowers as a fully-fledged PC. To avoid spoilers, I will just say that the hummingbird druid was AMAZINGLY useful in the Tomb proper and actually ended up getting the killing blow on two of the three final bosses. Good times.
Actually, the level of exhaustion every time you hit 0 HP Cripsy has is a rule my DM has :)
Funny, I had come up with houserule as well to keep players from abusing game mechanics.
I can see bodily functions being an issue in a game with a lot of hunting and tracking. Real-life hunters do pay close attention to their quarry's excretions, so if your PCs are being hunted and trying to hide their trail, that sort of thing would get folded into it. But I would think you could just knock a few miles off their daily walking distance to cover the time that would take, rather than keeping specific accounts.
Regarding the house rule of having 2 classes advancing at the same time, there was an optional rule in either 3E or 3.5E that allowed just that, it was called gestalt classes.
When you levelled, you would get all the features of both classes, but where you would roll the HP dice for both classes, you only got to use the highest roll. The one character was a Barbarian / Sorcerer, and consistently rolled higher on the sorcerer's d4 for hit points than on the barbarian's d12 🤣
We only every used it in two campaigns, and that was because the DM wanted a high powered campaign, and insisted that ALL the characters were had gestalt classes. With all character being OP, no one character took all the spot light and it was kind of fun.
I think your hair looks great! Long hair on men is underrated.
So, about the bodily fluids rule: I would start paying very close attention to whether the DM placed toilets in their maps, because they better start tracking this for NPCs...
The "3 nat 1s = death" thing could work in something like paranoia (screwing up so much is treasonous)
I sometimes forget that nat1 could mean something extra bad is a house rule because I've played so many other systems that include things like that.
Had a funny nat1 story from a recent game when one member of the party rolled a 1 to spot two snipers, but they both also rolled 1s to attack him. I ended up ruling that he failed to see them but did notice something on the floor and they accidentally shot each-other when he knelt down to look.
Ad&d had that style of multiclassing but you split the xp you earned between classes
Thus your multiclass character would always be 2-3 levels lower than everyone else
8:33 now I'm just thinking of one player who joined our (technically public) game expecting this. Apparently, he was lied to about this being a published rule at his previous table and built his rogue for the express purpose of sniping kills. First session we had him in, he was rubbing his alleged success in our faces (especially to the players with support characters) until he learned we shared xp. Judging by his expression hearing this, he must've gone through all stages of grief and invented new ones to cope with this news. He accepted it and moved on but started to do things to "get ahead" in the game. Like roping in one or two players into some dungeon crawling shenanigans while the others just wanted to enjoy some downtime activities, just so he'd have fewer people to share xp with. For context over why that was a very bad idea, we were playing Dungeon of the Mad Mage. A module that punishes players for splitting the party. This was not his worst trait, and he eventually left the group due to life stuff, but that's another story for another day.
This is the result of starting with bad players: you view the party as competition, not allies
@common viewer in all fairness, the other players were great to play DnD with, just a little squirrely from being young and new to the game. This guy was just a later addition to the group before we had to dissolve it for life reasons (a good chunk of them were leaving town to start college). He only got a couple players to go along with his shenanigans, but even they had their lines to draw. For example, he tried to talk one of the other players into killing a friendly NPC because she had a sword he wanted and was "probably worth a lot of xp." The other player was instantly against the idea, partially because he was the one who hired her to tag along, partially because everyone in the group enjoyed her himbo personality and would be upset if anything happened to her out of PC greed. Thankfully, our problem player dropped the issue, which seemed to be a running thing anytime he was met with opposition from the other players. Granted, we've had our share of weirdos being a public game, but this guy stood out for having a bunch of smaller problems stuffed into one problem player sack. Fam, it takes a lot to top the guy who had an obvious thing for goblins (but thankfully kept it away from the minor players) AND the guy who literally shrieked at another player for trying to be diplomatic in a situation that called for diplomacy.
The first one is so baffling. Imagine being angry at a player for... making a character that's useful to the campaign.
Thank you Crispy. I also totally forgot to write down my houserules somewhere for my players to access. I mean I write session notes, have tables with actions, choices and consequences, long elaborate backstories etc. but nope all my house rules, just in my head. But no longer! Thank you for that.
In my current campaign (modified 1e pathfinder with some pf2e and dnd5e elements), I use vigor and wounds whenever characters take wound damage there is a chance of minor injuries. Small bleeds, an early knockout, temporary penalties to movement and such or permanent scars/marks.
In my system a roll crits when the total beats the ac of the target by 10, these crits deal normal damage instead of double but deal a small amount of damage directly to wounds which can cause these debuffs.
In addition I have added a called shots rule, where you can declare a crit. If don't beat the targets ac by 10 or more you miss, but if you do score the crit you can deal major injuries like the loss of a limb. This is of course rarely used and is mainly reserved for the use of the pcs to show off if they encounter some low level mooks or for exceedingly strong enemies to quickly tell the players they should not be fighting something.
I have heard of the "if you go down you get exhaustion" rule, and i honestly hate it.
The problem is that it only addresses part of the issue, it only actually feels like it addresses the GMs side, while ignoring the player side of the problem.
A big part of why yoyoing is often the go to is that most 5e healing sucks balls. The amount that any given spell heals is so often tiny compared to the damage the enemy dishes out.
Your friend is low enough that they may go down the next time they're hit, so, you heal them? Pretty good chance that they'll still go down the next time they're hit.
Second problem is how quickly they can die once down. You've only got a couple of rounds, or possibly only one round if the enemy is likely to go for a finish off.
Third, related to second, it's often easier or the same amount of action to heal compared to stabilising, so you only stabilise when you're out of heals.
So if you're going to punish yoyoing, please power up healing (you could reduce the number of casts while upping the power if you want, action economy is part of the issue), stretch out death saving throws, and make stabilisation easier/faster.
I feel like the first one, (powering up heals) is probably the most important. A game where heals are fewer, but more significant and getting downed is more meaningful could work quite well. It will lead to situations where someone gets downed and it's worth saving your last heal to try and keep someone else up while rushing over to try and stabilise the downed player.
Also, the irony of the "yoyoing, sucks but is better if exhaustion" bit being just after the "don't change multiclassing, the game designers knew what they were doing" amuses me :P
I do think the custom multiclassing rule was bad, but yeah, the designers barely knew what they were doing for half of 5e. So many holes and issues.
@@sleepinggiant4062 I'd be surprised if they didn't run in to yoyoing. Especially as the whole "heal from 0" was a specifically highlighted new feature of the rules, so they really should have looked at it's effects. This issue is such a widespread problem because it is such a logical result of the system. This isn't a secret tactic spread by the community, just something that many people at tables end up doing because it's what the system encourages.
All the other flaws and holes in the system indicate they were either not really the best at game design (whether that's the fault of the individuals, or something exacerbated by circumstances i can't say, i can only look at the results) or they weren't given adequate time, possibly both.
Plus, as I've highlighted, there are multiple problems with healing and dealing with downed characters, which are their own issues, but contribute to this tactic.
And on top of that, they've not, as far as I'm aware, made any attempt in all the years since release, to address the issue. Despite being plenty happy to introduce many alternate rule options in subsequent releases.
Which is evidence that it is functioning as intended, that this is what they balance for and is part of their whole crappy 6-8 encounters per day strategy.
@@sleepinggiant4062 I'd be surprised if they didn't run in to yoyoing. Especially as the whole "heal from 0" was a specifically highlighted new feature of the rules, so they really should have looked at it's effects. This issue is such a widespread problem because it is such a logical result of the system. This isn't a secret tactic spread by the community, just something that many people at tables end up doing because it's what the system encourages.
All the other flaws and holes in the system indicate they were either not really the best at game design (whether that's the fault of the individuals, or something exacerbated by circumstances i can't say, i can only look at the results) or they weren't given adequate time, possibly both.
Plus, as I've highlighted, there are multiple problems with healing and dealing with downed characters, which are their own issues, but contribute to this tactic.
And on top of that, they've not, as far as I'm aware, made any attempt in all the years since release, to address the issue. Despite being plenty happy to introduce many alternate rule options in subsequent releases.
Which is evidence that it is functioning as intended, that this is what they balance for and is part of their whole crappy 6-8 encounters per day strategy.
Actually, only wildshape allows druids to retain their intellectual stats. Polymorph - and true polymorph, assuming one uses it to turn into a dragon - will replace your mental stats with the creature's. However, your alignment and personality both stay the same, so it doesn't affect your way of thinking. Only your capacity for it!
This is part of why druids' ability to wildshape is so useful for scouting if nobody has a familiar, since turning a party member into a beast, which is all normal polymorph can do, will make it hard for them to focus on the task and retain relevant information. Which is all part of the fun~
I'm a part of a small group that develops our own unusual ttrpg system and we had quite a dispute with the main author of it. The thing is, in this system you can choose how to level up: you can either just pick a normal human skill without any risks or you can try to obtain a powerful magical skill or go beyond normal human ability scores but then you need to roll d100 to see if you... instantly die in the process or not. And every time you do it, the chance of death grows. I like the idea but despise the instant death penalty the main author is holding on so hard, so in my alternative version of the game, if you fail the roll, you just fall into a coma for one day and lose a bit of your max health and your max morale - feels much more fair this way.
The worst single tabletop game campaign I ever was involved in was one that used the "You only get xp based on kill count" rule. This rule was compounded by the fact that the system we were playing was Palladium Rifts, and if anyone here is familiar with Rifts (and Palladium games in general), you know that there is basically no such thing as class balance. So, long story short, due to the fact that we had one character who was a dragon hatchling (with some questionable rule-bending min-maxing going on) and a freaking Elven Ninja Juicer, you can guess who got pretty much ALL the kills in the party, and thus all the XP. I tried to play as a fair-go Mystic Ronin (who are badass, but nowhere near as badass as a freaking dragon hatchling with mystic martial arts or a ninja JUICER), but by the time I got to go (and I almost always went last, because I had the lowest PP/Agility), the Ninja & Dragon had already downed every enemy, so I just kept getting farther & farther behind the rest of the party. At the time, I thought I was just bad at making effective characters in TTRPGs (this was the same year I got into TTRPGs, so I was still a bit of a noob), and that my character was trash, and I ended up literally burning her character sheet out of spite.
It wasn't until later that I realized that both the Dragon & Ninja Juicer's players were borderline Munchkin-level power gaming and that the DM was just bad & lacked the spine to either (a) tell the OP players to tone their shit down a bit or (b) find ways to power up the weaker players to level the playing field. In fact, said DM did the opposite: I had a badass suit of armor that would have let me be the party tank, no question about it (like only the dragon character had more MDC than my armor), but he would force me & the other players to remove our armor for every fight, claiming, "It's to level the playing field." (No, seriously), which meant that my character usually ended up getting knocked out of action first, while the Ninja Juicer, with his insane bonuses to parry & dodge just parried & dodged everything except for the very rare times he rolled a nat 1, and the dragon, having a massive MDC pool unarmored could just take any hit short of a direct anti-matter bomb without any problem....
Needless to say, said house rule combined with blatant, unchecked power gaming on the part of two of the players (who I'm still friends with... They admitted they were kinda being munchkins & jerks at the time), really soured me to tabletop gaming for almost a year afterwards. This happened over 20 years ago, and just thinking about it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
4:06
Had a DM once that gave the party a ring that did random shit. Level 1 characters, 3.5 D&D. We're dealing with spiders, I am healing people from unconscious to full, giving my all. He decided to make my leather armor into a metal breast plate. Everyone was cheering my upgrade and I had to shout them down so I could tell the DM, "That is your right, but if this is your choice, the party is dead". He asked me to explain myself. "I am a healer". He got confused "Clerics can wear heavy armor" I had to tell him to look at the sheet, because I am NOT a cleric, I am a healer and not only am I not proficient, using this forbidden armor will shut down all my healer magic and stuff. Had to show him Page 8 of the miniatures guide to prove what he was doing would kill the party. He chose to upgrade someone else.
I use the unconscious/ehaustion rule in my game and it makes a real difference, and makes the PC's more aware of not just dropping down and getting back up like yo=yo's.
I feel like a lot of these can be really fun in very specific gameplay. Like you said, the main issue is when people take a specific rule and apply it generally instead. This video kind of makes me want to mash all these house rules together for a crazy, wonky overpowered game. Sort of like monopoly when you're already winning lol
"House rule"
I have to say, I hate "confirming a crit."
Why do I need to confirm it? The DM saw my 20. The other players saw it. There's no need to roll it again to make sure it's a 20.
Crispy, listen, your hair rocks and I think you’re rather handsome.
Got the 3 nat 1s to die thing is so ridicules. As someone who plays Call of Cthulhu, a D100 system, the idea that getting 3 1's in a row is instant death is absurd! Like what is the math on that... 0.5%, IE 1 in 200? I've gotten two 1's in a roll in Call of Cthulhu before and even in a game as hyper lethal as CoC that would STILL feel like total nonsense as a blanket rule! And in D&D, a game about long term character progression that can take months or even years to play... a 1 in 200 chance across hundards and hundreds of dive rolls REALLY isn't that crazy....
1 in 200? How did you get that number? The probability to roll 3 consecutive nat 1s with a d20 is 1/20*1/20*1/20, 1 in 8000 (0,0125%)
@@andreacallegari7137 1/20 * 1/20 * 1/20 = .0125% which is still over 1 in 10,000 which is high, but not impossibly so. If we assume in an average game a player makes 15 rolls between combat and skill checks (a somewhat conservative estimation) it would take them 666 games to randomly keel over and die from a random roll. Multiply that by the number of players, lets say 5 we have a nearly 1% chance that in any given session, someone is going to die from this stupid rule.
It always pays to inform your players ahead of time before implementing any house rules. Let them know what you've changed and why. Ask them how they feel about the rule. If they don't like, swallow your pride and sheve it for another group. No house rule is worth ruining the game for your players.
Crispy idk what planet (maybe Krypton?) you from but here on Earth that cool hair 😭😭😭 Also ready for buzzcut 2010's FPS protag haircut 💪💪💪
I run a house rule where if you roll a Nat 20 on an attack roll, you add max damage to your damage roll for guaranteed high damage. This applies for enemies as well.
The three nat ones killing you is actually a pretty common old rule. You used to see it at 3.5 tables full of grizzled meat grinder players. It was a counter part to the triple 20 being an instant kill at a lot of tables. And both only ever applied to combat. You rolled a 1. You roll again for a fail table, if you roll another 1, you hurt yourself. Roll again, if you roll another 1 you just basically triple 20d yourself and die.
And yeah. It sucked as an idea, though I never saw it actually happen to anyone.
Banning Ranger: Yeah, that DM was basically being salty his player was taking advantage of the setting to make a useful build. Perhaps a tad overpowered given the concept, but that's what Ranger is supposed to do; be good at one thing. Banning Ranger just for that is being petty. More DMs should work with their players to make their PCs compatible and even effective in-game.
Killing XP only: I think some old TTRPGs had that rule, or maybe just some old grognard DMs. Either way, it was unfun, and only encouraged playing heavy martial or strong mage classes, while supports got shafted. Not fun.
Polymorph Gotcha: Yeah, that was just being a jerk.
Multiclassing: ...Oh god. Monk/Rogue comboes, Barbarian/Paladin comboes, etc... work just break the game. EVERYONE would be multiclassing since not doing so would mean being left behind. Twice the ASIs, twice the HP die, etc...
Bodily Functions tracking: No. Just no. Not only would it be incredibly unfun, but to be realistic you'd have to roll for them hourly (a person takes a piss every 4-6 hours on average)
Realistic injuries: Might be fun, but only for some people. Also, some injuries are less fun (and more disgusting) than others.
Regarding the Multi-classing: thats how it worked in 1st and 2nd edition, both classes gaining XP and advancing together.. not one or the other, as in 3rd and 5th editions. Character would divide their XP by the number of classes they had and apply the result to each class. What was multi-classing in 3rd an 5th was/is a sort of in-between the 1st/2nd eds and those editions 'Dual Class' rules for humans.
Idk, I like longer hair on guys. I say you should keep it. But you do you, dude.
I’d love to hear some of your Homebrew rules and how they work.
Also I listen to a D&D podcast where the DM implemented at think where if the played rolled X amount of nat 20’s he’d get a move against the party and on the flip side if they rolled X amount of nat 1’s they’d get a move against him. It was a pretty interesting rule and added something to the game.
The Multiclass rule was about the DM losing sight of the issue. He overestimated the problem with the base rule, and in trying to "fix" it, removed the check against the *real* problem.
We do exhaustion every time you drop as well but exhaustion is also completely different. We do -2 to hits, saves and your dc
the two players who died in the our current campaign certainly earned it, lol
one of them attacked the BBEG in what was supposed to be a roleplay encounter and the rest of us decided to support that fool, so half the party died XD
Hahaha the three nat 1s rule is one that my friends and I use, mostly as a joke, cause its a reference to a book series we all love
The realism speech I feel can apply to any sort of story. It is possible to always lean so far into realism that it becomes distracting as if you assume the audience can’t suspend their disbelief a little bit.
I once ran a oneshot, the plan was to eventually make one of the player betray the party. The group knew about this but not who the traitor would end up being.
In the first session I made them keep track of who dealt the finishing blow on which enemy. This was not for xp, they did not even know what kind of impact this would have on anything.
Before I had a chance to even get to the part where anyone could become a traitor, one of the party members betrayed the rest to try and hog kills.
It was an hilarious one shot, but damn do people get quick to betray eachother.
2:27 The only time doing something like banning a class is acceptable is when it is part of the theme of the campaign. Back during 4E, I always wanted to do a "No Divine Classes" campaign (because 4E would let you do that because there were martial, arcane and Psionic healing classes that were just as good at healing as clerics), but couldn't get anyone to do it, and I'm not a good enough GM to do it myself.
7:37 The only time I've seen "three nat1s equals instant death" was when we were fighting the Terrasque and it rolled three nat1s in a row and ripped out it's own throat in a botched attack. Which was mostly a "holy shit, that actually just happened" moment rather than anything else.
11:42 From my experience with Dark Heresy, and games based on it, which does have built -in tables for more permanent affects on injuries, it can be pretty interesting and adds to the tension when things go poorly. But that sort of thing is also a core conceit of the game, and so is to be expected. Warhammer 40k is not a nice place. Especially for (mostly) baseline humans.
I like your hair. long hair looks great.
Crispy, your hair looks fine!
6:35
This actually happened to me recently. My Level 2 Circle of Stars Druid rolled a 1 when trying to cast Guiding Bolt. Our group house rule is that when rolling a 1 on an attack with allies in range, you wind up hitting one of them. We all have slight modifications to this depending on who's GMing - I give the player about to get hit with friendly fire the option to use his reaction to dodge his ally's errant attack for example - and the GM for this campaign had me roll another d20.
My guess is he was seeing if my attack would actually get past the AC of whoever he decided I was going to accidentally hit. Nope, another nat 1 on that. So then he had me roll ANOTHER d20, and wouldn't you know it, it was a nat 1 hat trick. He had me roll damage, explained how the something went horribly wrong with how I attempted to cast the spell, and it exploded in my face, permanently scarring one of my hands and leaving me with 3 HP.
We survived the fight, thankfully, but given how I could've hit our Paladin who was hanging by a thread with 1 HP against a horde of Kua-Toa, I took it and we all had a collective laugh and sighs of relief. And I was able to heal the Paladin on my next turn, so it all worked out in the end.
I recall accidentally banning Divination Wizards from my campaign. Me and some of the players were looking at homebrews just to have some fun, looking at what's available. I ended up finding one that used a similar mechanic to the School of Divination's Portent feature, which lets you start the day rolling 2-3 D20's at the start of the day and just kinda pocket them for the rest of the day. I made some comments about how I feel like it takes the stakes out of somethings to just be able to declare at any point that, actually I just succeed. We ended up talking about how I'd feel weird about it at my table for a while before a veteran player joined the call and listened in before saying "You know that's a real ability in the official game, right? It's actually like base-PHB." I've never had a Wizard or played a Wizard in any of my campaigns, so I really didn't know anything about it. So I relented into allowing it, but at this point, my players all knew my feelings on it, so they made a silent pact that no one would use it.
I know a DM who bans wild magic barbarians, because he banned wild magic sorcerers for being disruptive but does not want any player to say wild magic sorcerers should be allowed, because wild magic barbarians are allowed.
@@schwarzerritter5724 Funny you mention that. In one of my current campaigns, I play a Beast Barbarian that subclassed Wild Magic Sorcerer (for lore reasons). That DM would hate me.
House rules ! Your hair looks great in this vid ❤
I am not against banning certain classes. I mean if you want a low magic more grounded fantasy game.
For an example of another system, I have some rules about playing Jedi in my campaigns that means it is restricted in some eras to a limited number of players in some and in others I would actually recommend a full party if Jedi. The main thing is if it makes sense lore wise at the time. I am not running a full Jedi party at the height of the Galactic Empire’s reign. Force Adept get more leeway, but I would still run it like Mage the Ascension with paradox replaced by Inquistors.
I had a DM house rule that nat 1s provoke attacks of opportunities. Problem is we were all level one playing DiA over Roll20. We didn’t last very long because the dice algorithm was not in a our favor.
The only time I implemented a different multiclassing system was in a "godslayer" campaign where the entire point of the narrative was that the world was destroyed by an evil lovecraftian god and the players were the last survivors trying to take it down by any means necessary. In this campaign we had a rule called omniclassing, where whenever you level up, you can take the class features of any class from that level, so you had like the Cleric's 1st level abilities, the Paladin's 2nd level abilities, the Rogue's 3rd level abilities, etc, to make their own "custom" ultimate class, and the ONLY REASON this worked is that the entire narrative point of this campaign was fighting an elder god for the fate of the universe, so I let them be as overpowered as they wanted and then gave them a boss fight worthy of that level. In a campaign, this would ruin everything xDDDDD
The multiclass rule thing actually, I can see it happen. Gestalt classes can work in a high powered game, with a small party (3-4 max) and a DM, who badly wanted to throw some tough creatures at the party, but had to hold back.
I don't have a lot of house rules for my game, but they are all written and pinned in the campaign discord server.
Nothing outrageous, a short list of banned things. Which potion, ASI, and rest rules I'm using, and the lack of flanking rules. This doesn't stop one of my players from not reading them
Entertaining list of bad house rules.
Going to the pot is not resource management. Any character would get a prompt to go to the nearest stall before they burst
I could see the "3 nat 1's to death" rule implemented in a Tomb of Annihilation game. It'd be tricky, but it might enhance the lethality that that campaign has
Fun fact on the multiclassing thing - that's probably based on an old 3.5/PF system called "Gestalt"; and there _are_ Gestalt rules for 5E. However..... gestalt is notoriously high power scaling. You can't just slap Gestalt on a game and expect CR to hold up like a normal game.Not that CR holds up under the weight of the vanilla game, but I digress. Anyway you have to plan for Gestalt.... it's not hte kind of house rule to just throw in willy nilly.
Man just throws casual shade at keyleth
The two classes at the same time is called gestalting, started in 3.5 it was to have best of both worlds. Found good homebrew for the rulings and find it fun in 5e if for a solo or a group accepted thing like my group is going to use those rules once they get level 7 or so.
Actually, levelling up two or more classes at the same time dates all the way back to 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D. Back then, if you were playing a multiclassed character, you split your awarded XP between your various classes. As a result, you levelled up slower than your fellow players who were only playing a single character class. This kept the power level more or less equal.
@@Thundarr100 oh thank you! Most of my experience came from 3.5, 4e and 5e with pathfinder and other ttrpgs mixed in. Thank you!
@@WhyYouMadBoi yeah, I’m old. I have to remind myself to say BAB and not THAC0.
The old system worked okay. But it does have its faults (which is likely why they changed it for 3rd Edition and made players level up each character class one at a time). For one thing, back then different classes levelled up at different rates.
Rogues and clerics levelled up the quickest, as they had fewer hit points than fighters while still being likely to find themselves in the thick of the combat. Fighters levelled up slower, and at the steadiest pace of all the classes (required XP was always double what it was previously). Barbarians, rangers, and paladins required more XP than fighters at the lower levels to balance out their special class abilities, but less at the higher levels so that they could catch up with the other classes. Wizards required similar XP to clerics at the lower levels, but then needed more than the paladins at higher levels. This allowed PCs to stay at similar power levels in combat in regards to hit points and THAC0. But for multi classed characters, it made one of the characters classes level up more quickly than the others. Which could be frustrating when one class is levelling up while the other stays behind, let alone the fact that everyone else in the party only has one class and are levelling up much quicker.
And of course there’s the hit points. The hit dice for multi classed characters were added together and then divided by the number of classes. So for a Fighter/Mage, when the mage levels up before the fighter, the player rolled 1d4 for the hit points, and then divided the result by 2. Then when the fighter half caught up, the player would roll 1d10 and again divide the result by 2. At best a fighter/mage would get 7 hit points + CON modifier every level.
Once they managed to get caught up with the other characters though? While they would always be a little behind in XP, they could get to be insanely powerful. Just imagine a 10th level fighter/mage hurling fireballs and lightning bolts at a distance, and then closing in for melee with a badass sword.
@@Thundarr100 Thank you. Came here to say this, but you did it much better than I would have.
@@sherylcascadden4988 you’re welcome. A lot of people seem to forget that D&D has been around a lot longer than 23 years, and that we haven’t always used the d20 OGL system.
3 nat 1s = death, means that people in the campaign world die once out of 8000 times anybody try to do any series of things. Rarely should anybody make it to their adulthood if that were the case considering how often people do stuff.
Re: choking on the potion - The potion is magical. It doesn't care if it is in the lungs or the stomach. It activates once it is in the body. It's not like you need to wait for a digestion time when properly drinking the stuff.
Be upfront with house rules, and discuss what they're for. They aren't for everyone.
Crispy, imma be honest I'm 95% sure the bodily function tracker is because the GM has some kind of urination/defecation fetish
Please tell me I'm not the only one that saw the phone background
Pretty sure thats his DnD character. Changeling I think
who in their right mind, saw wizard casting in plate at level 2, and thought, this multiclassing isnt strong enough?
Instant Death, or Longterm Crippling Problems as possible consequences for simply getting an unlucky roll while trying to do something else, is a profoundly Gygaxian kind of ruling. The old rules, and many modules, were just FULL of things that, if you happened to roll badly, could end you in one of a variety of violent and annoying ways. To wit, I direct you to 1st and 2nd edition Psionics.
In 1st edition AD&D, anyone could try to unlock their psionic potential. This required rolling a percentile die on a chart - this could result in you having some random selection of major or minor powers on a 'good' roll; on a bad roll, these could permanently lower your mental stats from backlash, or indeed, KILL the character outright on the worst possible roll. Yes, a character could die *during character generation* from brain damage while trying to unlock their latent psionic potential.
In 2nd edition, a not only did a variation of the 'brain damage' table exist for 'dabbling' characters trying to unlock latent psionic abilities, but there was also an entire Psionicist class, who you would THINK would at least be able to learn and use psionic abilities (which their entire class is built around) safely. NOPE! Every single psionic power had an 'activation roll', a d20 against a flat difficulty (with only the possibility of a tiny adjustment from a good stat); failing the roll would cause you to lose the spent power points as well as the spent action as your power fails you activate entirely. Even the simplest low-end powers had a one in four or so chance of just not working when you went to use them, while the more potent effects might fail more than half the time. And no, you didn't get better at these checks as you got higher in level - they were as difficult at level 15 as they were at level 3. Worst, of course, was that you could roll a natural 1 on these checks, which caused a 'backlash' effect, which varied depending on the power you were using, which usually involved the power rebounding against you in some way, often for damage or debilitating effect - at least a few of them were functionally 'instant death' backlash effects. Just for using a power *your class is meant to be good at*.
Any GM that channels the spirit of the Gygax to insert punishing crippling 'consequences' like this needs to brush up on what the last 50 years of evolution of tabletop games have become - players care about their characters, and this is a good thing; players don't want to have to throw half a dozen characters into a meat grinder just to clear one dungeon; that is not the game that we are playing anymore.
This sort of thing also applies to 'gotchas', which are, by and large, a staple of the Adversarial DM Style in which the GM is the 'enemy' of the players, rather than the choreographer of the threats that face them. Giving your players no way to know what was going to happen, in or out of game, and thus no way to understand or prepare for it until its too late, whether it be a house rule or an in-game event, is dicks. Surprise! your players have no changed the rules of your game so that they are now playing with someone else as the GM!
The DM in my first 5e campaign ruled that the the Identify spell consumed the pearl.
Here is a House Rule that I've made up that I do think people should go with:
No Shop, in any town, on any continent, no matter how wealthy, will ever sell you anything with a greater value than a 'rare' magical item, or +3 enchantment value in 3.5, unless I choose to make a special, limited exception. If you want the highest level loot, the best items for your character, inform the DM, explain what type of items you're looking for, try to set up a side quest or add something to the next appropriate loot table.
Why this rule? Mainly because it invites players to make their desires clear to the DM, rather than sighing over random loot tables that gave them things they're just going to pawn; I recall getting a Manual of Stone Golem Creation in a party with a Rogue, a Cleric, and a Knight, so nobody *could* make a golem anyway, alongside a Dual Scythe of Animal Slaying +4. Would've been cool if it was a particularly large knife, but okay. And I've also been in campaigns where the DM just 'went off the book' and create a Metropolis where the party just *bought* +5 everything, which is nice, but we were entirely OP from there forward, without much to find in the world. This rule means they have to search for the things they want, the DM can assist them in getting it, and the items can have relevance to the plot instead of coming off loot tables.
Your hair looks fine, dude. Wouldn't have noticed, and honestly still don't notice, had you not said anything.
I actually made a joke about the hair in the last video, but deleted it because I thought it could be taken the wrong way. Glad to see I wasn't alone.
I liked this one a lot. I've gotten a lot of rude comments over the years due to the inclusion of critical attack fails in some of my campaigns. It's something I grew up playing in games with. I don't typically use the double 1 self own rule anymore, but the confirm your 1 and then roll a d8 for the direction you throw your weapon/your bow unstrings/you trip rule is still around.
Exp only gained through killcounts?
RIP support roles and melee classes
The levelling in 2 classes simultaneously is just "Gestalt", it's not a house rule, it's something that's been around since like Advanced D&D, I had a gestalt spellthief/rogue in 3.5 (to be fair, the spellthief on it's own is so terrible if you weren't Gestalt with rogue to kind of 'balance it out' it wouldn't even be worth playing.).
So Gestalt rules are fine if either A) it helps bring an underpowered class up to the level of a normal class, or B) Everyone is Gestalt (but then that's why Pathfinder has the 'hybrid classes' which are basically gestalt classes).
About the first one: if you name your campaign “Hunting the Desert Orcs” you should expect your players to roll characters good at hunting Desert Orcs. How many horror stories do we hear about players insisting on a character that doesn’t fit into the campaign? This isn’t the place for my swashbuckling pirate.
Already on the first one: I MET the DM that banned rogues for being good at B&E, and the DM who banned fighters... ostensibly because they were "boring" but found out it was because even a core option only Pathfinder 1 fighter can be built to be busted as fuck, very specifically when optimized for hitting things. Yeah, apoarently Generic Cleave Path Fighter #4 was too much for this guy to handle.
"Get a haircut ya hippie!" 😆
Your hair looks fine! Don't even worry. :)
Gestalt characters are powerful, but if every character is gestalt then its not too broken, especially in 5e. Action economy is still a thing and you should already be working on using combats that push your players that aspect.
About the multiclass, that's how 2ed AD&D worked, and it's was fine. To be fair, a multi class did then only get half xp, or 33% if they was triple class. Human did not become multi class, but Duel Class, that's work as Multi Class do now.
Dragons are not Beasts. So, you can't polymorph into a red dragon. Problem solved.
I don't think there's anything wrong with your hair
When I DM I use real physics in the game . 'I shoot my Long bow at the goblin at max range down this long hallway .' The shot will hit the floor after medium range not enough arch in the shot to make it to max range other than skipping , and sliding down the hall . 'I shoot my long bow at the goblin at max range across the Grand Dwarf Hall . ' Now there is a chance for a dramatic last ditch shot to stop the fleeing goblin.
In my experience, realism rules make the game objectively worse, because they accomplish nothing but make marital classes worse to play:
"I want to shoot him with my bow." "The ceiling is too low." " I want to shoot him with Eldritch Blast." "Sure, go ahead."
"You forgot to bring your equipment to the blacksmith, so all weapons and armor have -2 now." "Do spells also get -2?" "Of course not."
"There is not enough room to use a two-handed weapon here." "Is there enough room for magic?" "As long as no enemy is withing 5 feet of you."
14:25
Yanno, it makes sense since you really shouldn't give anything orally to an unconscious person....
Maybe it’s me, your hair is fine.
The only house rule I can think of is if the players score a nat 20 they can play their theme song... and yet no one has picked a theme song T_T
I like slightly longer hair crispy...
my personal experience anyhow full that is not stated up front. but that's also a different thing entirely
"permanent injury table" is just.. Yeouch. I mean, we had permanent injuries when we were downed in a game that ended in a sort of fizzle due to some low grade 'horror' in the background I stayed mostly out of (Mainly one player not... Really playing and just clinging to another character and making rp ALL ABOUT clinging to this other player character... And also only playing cosplays of characters from FFXIV. It was pissing off two other people, but when they switched out a character for a cosplay of an Endgame SPoiler character and one of the players is a managing to get through the game without being spoiled, the other friend of mine who'd been dealing with this problem player since they got booted from ANOTHER game we were all involved in.. Or rather took themselves out when asked to actually involve themselves and instead spent the time the DM was DMing distracting the player they clung to in this OTHER game... Well they snapped and basically told the DM that the two of them would leave if the problem player didn't switch out the character from this spoiler character.. And the DM just ended the game completely rather than put their foot down. I was busy irl when this happened but I came back to this but yeah. Not fun) and my character got massive scars down his side and, being a tiefling with horns that looked like antlers, lost one almost completely and had another damaged, all cause he got 1 hit knocked out by an adult black dragon breath attack. However it didn't cause him to lose any charisma or anything. He just sort of went with acid scars down the entire leftside of his body and had to buy new clothes and his magic tattoo design of brass dragonscales, when expanded to the next level for improved AC, got some oak bark stylizing to take advantage of the new skin texture.
One of the characters got breath weapon knocked out by a Green dragon and all their exposed skin got bleached a couple shades lighter -- it would have slowly darkened back up over time (before the Campaign would be able to end naturally - so it'd remain for the rest of it if it hadn't fizzled) but it was like a farmers tan in reverse. The damage made sense for what took them down to 0 but wasn't something that effected our abilities, and if we REALLY didn't like something it'd be 'lessened'.
Like I personally went "mess me up just don't try and force me to make my character something they're not" to the DM and took the scars, the sudden more demonic twisted rusted metal antlers being added via him doing Druid Craft to make false ones, the fact that his voice altered when he spoke or translated infernal into something more echoey and demonic, being polymorphed into a blue baboon by an ancient magic trap turned my demonic antlers perma-blue, and other characters got upset about changes and they were made less permanent and more a temporary issue. Some people LIKE getting messed with, but not in ways like "poops in a bag cause their intestines got mangled in a *Crit*"
I also had been holding onto ingredients for reincarnate from a random loot drop the DM had on fantasy grounds early on, and when one of our characters got MANGLED in the last fight shortly before the game ended, I gave them the option -- I was basically the only one who could bring them back without a deus ex machina deal with the devil other characters were offered, BUT it's REINCARNATE. The "Makes you a totally random body" Revival spell. I offered, and thankfully the player was PSYCHED to keep their player but get a randomized race... They kept it as "its X but as a Y" change, but *did* opt to randomize sex, even if gender remained the same. So our Lady Half-elf Bonk (Bard Monk) ended up a Male Dhampir twin of her past life with some 'demonic' elements to it (because every spell of my druid got twisted by the DM to have a demonic lean to it more and more as time went on. I had basically gifted him "my druid doesn't know his parents' and turns out his mom was a Night Hag. Fun!) But I NEVER would have forced it: If they didn't want to do the Reincarnate I could roleplay it as my guy forgetting he even had the components because it was EARLY GAME he found them and maybe didn't even realize it was a spell component and just was keeping it cause it smelt nice.
Polymorph only applies to beasts, so using polymorph, the PC couldnt turn into a red dragon. Theyd need true polymorph, a 9th level spell.
Otherwise, my 5e PC wouldve finished her quest to return to her true dragon nature (she was a bronze dragon true polymorphed into a human to protect her as a wyrmling)
I would say don't do that to all of these house rules, they're pretty bad.
What’s wrong with your hair? Looks cute to me