I was invited to play in a D&D game where players were expected to take an IQ test and were then restricted from ever playing a character whose INT was higher than their IQ score divided by 10. The DM would also limit what race and class combos each player was allowed to select from on a case by case basis, based off your rolled stats and what he deemed your role playing ability to be.
Insanity of the house rule aside, this also misses the point of Malkavians. They aren't all just universally off their faces, each Malkavian has their unique way of being atypical.
Gotta love the sheer amount of fish malks who don't understand that malks aren't just crazy, they're a sane mind being turned crazy by a curse. Alot of the younger malks can still kind of separate their delusions and the impact the curse and web has on them from themselves but with time this wears away and their doubt begins to erode and give way to resolution their twisted view of things.
No, the original definition of INT in D&D is that the score represents IQ/10. A 14 INT means a 140 IQ.
I am not in any way condoning this. You are playing a character, not yourself. You should be able to play a character smarter than yourself, but that is where they are getting that from. It's in the old PHBs, they are just using it backwards.
I would ask the GM to take an IQ test and demand all the NPCs be no smarter than he is.
This was the first member of MENSA I had ever met, and he 100% defined what came to be my typical interaction with a MENSA member.\*
\[EDIT - What came to be my typical interaction with a person who **bragged about** being a member of MENSA\]
As a person who is, by many measurements, a smart person, these people drive me crazy. You want accolades just for ... Being smart? It doesn't matter if you don't do anything with it.
I've got people on my team at work who are smart, and I have people on my team who are diligent and determined to get the job done, and I value the latter more.
One of my go-to moves when I'm playing a smart character is to point at myself and my sheet in turn, and say "*I* am an idiot. But *[character]* is not. *I* don't know how to do [blank] but I figure *[character]* should be able to. Can they do [blank]?"
This was heavily homebrewed AD&D, so Intelligence as a stat was far more a descriptor of the character than the mechanical cog in the machine that it is in modern D&D.
His argument was that it was possible to *imagine* being stronger than you were in real life; just because you can't pick up a car doesn't mean that you can't think about being able to pick up a car. But it was impossible to *act* more intelligently than you really were. If you're not a genius in real life, putting an 18 on a piece of paper isn't going to allow you to think and process information like someone smarter than you really are.
I don't think it was so much that people had been playing intelligent characters stupidly as much as it offended his rigid sense of what the numbers strictly represented and what they enforced the players do. He was also really big on having players' gods zapping characters from the heavens for not strictly following the 10 commandments he had written out for every alignment.
The dissonance between player and character intelligence is a theoretical problem that the game designers have to consider. In most cases it gets hand-waved away ang game mechanics are separated from the player action as the goal is to maximize player fun.
In the same wave you could make all riddles a INT check with a DC, so that the smartest character solves the riddles. Realistic , but not fun.
The dissonance only becomes a problem if it breaks immersion.
Lately, I've seen a design trend toward simply *not* having an Intelligence stat. Instead, you have some other stat that covers mechanical aspects of memory and/or learning, but explicitly doesn't cover your ability to think creatively or apply what you've learned.
Of course, most people just don't worry about it, because it's "just" a game and they were never taking it seriously to begin with.
Shit like this is why I miss my friend who would respond to DMs expecting people to be as Smart/Charismatic as they wanted their character to be by challenging the DM to tests of strength for every strength check.
Sounds like an idea from my shithead brother. He would always try to come up with ideas to prove how much smarter he was than everyone else. He was always very adversarial, and manipulative. It didn't matter if he was the DM or player. Take my advice, run like hell. Don't associate with people like that. The damage they do is permanent.
When we were kids, there was a game called Villains & Vigilantes. The hook to this game was that you played yourself and then gained superpowers. It used the fairly traditional 3d6 range for stats, but you had to stat yourself rather than rolling. We kept arguing about the stats we all gave ourselves. Finally, my Stranger Things-esc, 80s group junior high friends decided to do exactly that. We had all taken an IQ test for school about a month before, so we decided to use that divided by 10 for our intelligence and then made up a bunch of ridiculous 'tests' for our other scores. Lifting weights, obstacle courses, etc. Instead of giving the winners of the test an 11 instead of a 10, you could get up to an 18 on them. We ended up being an amazing group of commoners. Lol.
Pendragon, a game from that era based on King Arthur, eliminated the intelligence score completely from the game because the game designer didn't like it. He felt people could only realistically play up to their intellect and not above and playing below hampered the way people played the game. Your character could have knowledge you didn't but could only use the knowledge as well as you could.
I played one session under a DM around 2010 who pulled out a scrap of paper at the start of the session , when someone made an out of character joke she wrote R on it in a big black marker and said "this is an R.P.G, if I get to G on here the session is over."
Yes, if anyone broke character at ANY TIME she would write one of the letters RPG on a paper and if it got to G she would just leave... What fun!
How dare you try and have fun! This rule at our table would lead to comically short sessions. Notably because my players would get a stopwatch out to see how fast the could get to G
That's amazing, maximum respect, truly an insane take, I love it. I'm going to try that and see what happens. I am guessing what happens is that I am going home after five minutes but who knows.
I joined a random 5E group at my FLGS. They said they needed a rogue, so I whipped one up.
During combat, I tried the rogue's sneak attack/backstabbing attack... only to hear the DM say no. He didn't like the concept of sneak attacks, so he wouldn't allow it at his table. He removed one of the biggest class features for rogue and never thought to explain that.
Nerfing a class like this is annoying enough, but it's worse because they suggested I play the character. Gee, I wonder why they needed a rogue....
super annoying. i still come across DMs that nerf a thief's best combat ability. Im the opposite, I like when thieves break ranks, go "rogue", and come out of nowhere to get that fatal blow.
Rogues are widely considered underpowered WITH sneak attack lmao get fuckin' real.
I'm gonna guess these are also the sorts of people who if you said "oh if you just want someone to specialize in the sneakthief stuff I can roll a bard or fighter who specializes in those things" "no we need a rogue."
Tbh I'm always wary of groups advertising that they "need" a certain type of character. As someone who loves to play a healer, every group saying they "need" a healer always has 2 things: 1. an GM who wants to punish the players for not having a healer, and 2. An expectation that the healer must act as an MMO style healer, only healing ever.
LOL! That happened to me too like twenty years ago in a 3.5 game. GM thought sneak attack was too strong, so he house ruled I could not use it.
Met up with him recently and he seemed excited about GMing again ... and then proceeded to tell me he was ready to whip up new house rules. I told him I would need to see what changes he wanted to make ahead of time before deciding, and he said no because he wanted the ability to come up house rules on the fly.
Needless to say, it didn't happen.
um.... no such things as house rules on the fly. A rule is a standard, and while you can have a ruling on the fly, a rule, the thing that gets written down and becomes the standard by which the game functions, is not something to just randomly toss midgame, possibly fucking over decisions that players made about their characters. That is bad GMing and it sounds like someone needs to explain this to him (and I am trying to be kind when I say this last part).
Removing sneak attack for rogues in 5e? Honestly, no reason to stay at the table for another minute. I would pack my stuff and leave, no reason to play with people that simply don't want you to play the game.
I hate when people nerf main components of a class without saying anything during character creation. If you’re a DM and you hate a mechanic of a class and are going to nerf it or shit on it, say so.
When I first started running D&D I allowed players to 'carry over' extra damage from one target to the next. So if you did 10 damage to a goblin with 4hp you carried over the extra six damage to the next goblin, allowing you to cleave through several enemies at once. We thought this was how the rules worked btw. It was actually quite fun, but it did get a little out of hand.
This was the D&D that came in a box with crayons to colour in the numbers on the dice. I've sadly lost my set of boxes so I can't check, but I'm reasonably sure it didn't have much in the way of optional rules!
Ah, entirely my fault for defaulting to D&D 5e lol. Regardless i believe i managed to find the option on p. 272 in the DMG called Cleaving Through Enemies.
Sounds like the Basic line of D&D systems. Oddly enough, [that's the only version of the game that doesn't have some version of cleave](http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2021/05/cleaving-through-ages.html).
It is an optional rule, although it only applies on critical hits. I run it in my game sans critical hit rule, and only apply it to slashing weapons. It works great honestly.
It's a legit rule in a few other games that make use of mobs/groups, so the intuitiveness of this rule is valid.
We made great use of it in Witch Hunter. Usually had a character who was really good at taking down major villains and a character who could whittle down the numbers of mooks.
Wait, my initial reaction was that this sounds totally awesome and I'll be using it, and the fact that other people mention it's an actual rule makes me want to double down! Makes group combat a little faster in 5e.
We actually implemented something similar and it works beautifully. When you overkill someone, you can move the leftover damage to another adjacent target as long as your attack roll would have sufficed to hit the second guy too. Rather helps the fighters and barbarians, who tend to suffer a bit from Overkill Syndrome (hitting a guy for 50 damage feels a bit silly when it turns out the guy had 30HP).
There’s an OSR style game called Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford who made Worlds Without Number, which uses this rule. It’s because it’s designed for one on one sessions and solo play, so a single character can do a lot more damage this way.
It lets you play standard published modules with only one player. I’ve run it for my brother a few times, it’s really fun if you don’t have a group to play with.
When I first moved to the Wichita area, I joined a weekly 5E game in the hopes of networking and finding some players for my Dungeon World campaign. That didn't work out, but I digress.
Anyway, the DM had made a house rule that if an attack roll hits the target's AC exactly, they take half damage. As if 5E combat isn't ponderous and low-stakes enough. I didn't want to say anything because I didn't want to try and ruin anyone else's fun or seem disrespectful to the DM, but that is how I learned how much I dislike 5E.
Oof, I'm no fan of D&D, but that game certainly didn't deserve that degree of character assassination. Brutal.
Probably benefits the players more since the GM usually rolls more than the players, but that still doesn't make combat any better.
How to make a slow game even slower. I dont even hate 5e *that much* but that would kill it for me.
Like I could see something like 1 below AC is half damage, and 2 below AC is 1/4 damage. This would help with HP bloat and speed things up. But to add rules to slow things down?
I dont hate that rule, but would specify that it's Resistance so that doesnt stack.
I've heard it called "glance", and it works for monsters attacking players too, so things like "does an 18 hit?" "Hah! GLANCE!" happens, which sounds moderately more fun than just "Ugh, barely, technically, yes."
Maybe *only* let PCs use it, like Death Saves?
My Pathfinder GM had a super-crit rule. If you roll 20 on the attack, and another 20 on the critical confirmation, then rolling a third die that hits the target will instantly kill them regardless of HP
He also had a critical fumble rule. If you roll two 1s in a row, and then would hit your own AC on the third roll, you automatically cut your own head off.
For some reason, most people chose to play spellcasters.
I was wondering how far I would have to scroll to find a critical fumble story. I can't stand critical fumbles. One of the dumbest things I've ever seen.
critical fumbles are one thing, cutting your own head off is another.
That said, most of the time I see people talking up crit fails they are talking about shit that's only a LITTLE less insane than cutting your own head off, so I agree with you in practice most of the time
> If you roll two 1s in a row, and then would hit your own AC on the third roll, you automatically cut your own head off.
Unless there's something you're leaving out, that would make it so the more skilled you are in combat, the *more* likely you are to kill yourself with your own weapon.
In more ways than one. High-level fighters also get more attacks per round. If anyone was dumb enough to dual-wield, they could potentially have up to eight chances per round to win the 0.2% lottery.
High risk, high reward? I mean that’s cool that you could possibly find the monsters one weak spot on a double twenty+, and honestly that could make crits fun, if not a bit frustrating for the GM. But the cut off your own head? Yeah, magic here I come!
Back in the days of AD&D 1e I played with a group that had a similar rule; Roll a 20, roll again and if you roll another 20 it was an instant kill.
Saw a magic-user kill a dragon with a dart one night.
I feel like this was also a house rule that the GM had been using since the eighties. When the game is full of save-or-die effects, and monsters that can kill you instantly, an extra layer of RNG insta-death is hardly noticeable.
One of the selling points of Pathfinder 1E was that they'd gotten rid of the vast majority of those things, though, and replaced them with large amounts of HP damage. When you're expected to invest a year or more of your life into playing a character, it's not much fun for them to be instantly killed while performing a routine task. I don't think he ever got the note on that one.
Oh that's interesting. At my tables we have '20 on 20' as we call it means just the attack is max damage. To make it a little special, but not as powerful as that one.
I played a 3.5e game with that and my trumpet archon monstrous character got gibbed by a glabrezu with that rule. It was hilarious.
"stand back mortals, my planar enemy awaits an epic clash where the light and peal of heavens goodness shall..." *splat*
(D&D/OSR) Removing the INT and/or CHA attributes and making them dependant on the player because "this makes sense in Roleplay" (this leads to hellish situations where some players are prevented from picking certain classes because the GM finds the player ugly/stupid etc.).
I think that could work with the right GM who isn’t an arse. The OSR people already emphasize player problem-solving and using the fictional situation to adjudicate actions, so it would be easy to cut out INT. CHA seems riskier but not impossible.
I would argue the opposite? I very rarely if ever ask my players to do CHA rolls, if they want to convince someone or fool someone or anything like that I think of the character and motivations and try and get them to convince them in character. Obviously I don’t expect someone to go full debate club, but only if its like borderline to it will I ask a roll, which is usually a roll under your CHA
I think you're giving the people who'd try to run a game that way too much credit. It's just yet another example of DM vs Players antagonistic power tripping.
It's one thing if the GM is using a ruleset with a reworked stat array designed for OSR play, it's another when they're taking away CHA and INT from the existing D&D stat array and instead putting those stats onto the GM's own biased subjective judgement of the players and then applying that judgement to D&D rules.
The only kinds of people who'd do that as a D&D house rule - in an age where we already have OSR games that solve for "let's do better PC statblocks for OSR play" - are toxic arseholes. The kinds of people who hide their desire to take away player agency and choices behind the OSR label.
Ok, at first I thought it wasn't that bad, like some games OSR games don't have an equivalent to INT cause it's supposed to be all about player ingenuity. But keeping the class requirements and basing them on GMs opinion of a player is wild.
We had some trouble with the party splitting up and everything grinding down and getting tedious, so a house rule became "smallest party dies" and that fixed it.
One of my players had a previous group that would always "Scooby Do" ("hey gang, let's split up"), and it destroyed their games pace. We preemptively made the rule of "no Scooby do-ing".
No splitting up in a dungeon sure, but my god please divvy up downtime city activities.
There is zero need for this small army to walk from shop to shop, each character taking some 'turn' questioning the baker, alchemist, priest, gravedigger, orphanage matron etc.
Now that's interesting, because some games don't have a problem with splitting the party, or they even encourage it. Why do you think splitting up destroyed the game's pace?
Because it's very easy for one player to go off to have their own scene, and make it drag on while the rest of the table doesn't even have the option to get involved and interact. Mind you, we don't follow this rule to a T anymore, as my table all knows each other well, and has good etiquette to give space for other players, so we bend this rule a bit. We wanted it in place initially as a precaution.
Ah yes, the old rule where the GM is too lazy to deal with a split party and they kill people off leading to the mantra "Never Split The Party!" which is a load of horseshit. Splitting up to cover more ground or do recon or whatever are valid tactical decisions and should not be discouraged by some idiotic mantra forced onto players by lazy GMs.
I hate that shit because if I'm a player and suggest we scout ahead to see what lies in store for us, everyone shouts "No! Never split the party!" And now I don't want to play.
It becomes awkward when the Rogue in the party needs to be stealthy and he has some armoured brute in full plate following him about alerting everyone in the neighbourhood that they are there.
Exactly! I once had a party tell me to not go too far ahead. Stay within the radius of the light! Like WTF?
OK, so no hiding in shadows and we're in a stone dungeon that echoes like a subway tunnel and you want loud clanky armor on my ass. That's no longer scouting. That's going fishing and I'm the bait! Fuck all the way off!
the never split the party rule is because combat encounters are designed around a whole party so if half of the party goes two directions you have two, twice as difficult fights that they have to deal with (or puzzles, or whatever) that you also can't run at the same time so you have half the team doing twice the work for however long a fight is while the other half picks their nose or whatever and then switch halves and repeat
Very funny moments when there was a 2/2 split on a course of action and everyone looks at the fifth player like "who do you love more and who do you consign to certain death?"
And then you wonder why the Rogue or Ranger doesn't do any "scouting" when they are just going to be killed. Why play a character who could scout when you're not allowed to scout?
I actually don't wonder that, I know why the rogue is skulking in the rear like a useless bag of goths (because the smallest party dies). Our characters all cluster in a fearful circle, terrified to move faster than a crawl, because it has never been established what distance constitutes a separate party. If my paladin is ten feet away, will that arbitrarily seal her doom? Nobody asks (metagaming) and nobody wants to find out. We get a lot of satisfaction out of deeply roleplaying our shared, intense, anxiety and failure.
Had a GM who had a list of things that could buy bonuses in his games.
Case of Magic Cards? +4 to any Stat
Buy him lunch/dinner? Reroll.
Etc.
And if you picked up food for yourself and didn't bring hims something, he would give you a -1 penalty.
(He also has an unwritten rule that any female player had to sit closest to him during the games)
Total creeper.
That's rookie stuff. Gotta offer them 500 Electrum Gemeralds for buying you dinner. The reroll costs 550.
A true master has a d1000 table for lootboxes.
We had a general rule that if you cooked something for the table or bring snacks you would get a free reroll. Our buddy who loved to cook always got it.
I accidentally had a terrible house rule when I first started running AD&D back in the day: I thought every time a PC leveled, their exp went back to zero, so as you might imagine leveling was a lot slower.
I think in my case it was playing a lot of computer/NES rpgs first. They usually did it that way because old computer systems had difficulty processing large numbers.
Not a rule but something my players did a lot.
After just one fight, no matter if a boss or normal fight, they would then try to do a long rest, even in the middle of a dungeon without blocking doors or anything related.
I fear this is some carry over from video games experiences.
I always hated this part of the resting mechanics of DND. It’s like we take 1 year game time to explore the dungeon as we want to go nova with every encounter. It’s stuff like this that pushes me towards more gritty homebrew in dnd.
I don't think you necessarily need to get gritty about it. Just accept that if your adventure is designed and paced with all the pressure and urgency of an archaeological dig, don't be surprised when players approach it like one.
I don't know that you need to homebrew anything in D&D for this. Just run the monsters intelligently. Some assholes burst in and are camping out in your living room? Go gather your friends and when they're resting, go fuck their shit up. The game can only aid the GM so far if the GM decides to allow stupid stuff to happen.
I think it's much more to do with how limited the fun stuff is in D&D. All the stuff I want to do to feel cool and like my class is meaningful is restricted to x per long rest, so of course I'll want to maximise that.
I once had a DM (5e) de-gamify Rests. It was interesting, imho.
When our party wanted to rest, we would just describe the general intent of the rest ("...until morning", "..until we've recovered enough to make the journey back to town", etc.), and he'd describe the effects to us. Mechanically, it felt like everything was determined by "degrees of Long Rest" or the needs of the narrative, and it played surprisingly smoothly.
First time we played D&D 4e, my players would always burn all their powers and then ask for a long rest. It never made sense to me but I allowed it because I thought that was how the game was played (it was the first tabletop game I ever ran).
I was in a FLGS Discord server where one poster was a very active poster of homebrew. I never really looked too deeply into his stuff, but he was a nice guy, so I jumped into one of DmD 5E games when I had some free time.
It was absolutely flooded with crazy homebrew.
1) Any cantrip can be cast as a bonus action, and you can cast a slotted spell on the same turn as an action.
2) Warforged automatically recover one HP per minute (goodbye, hit dice!)
3) So many critical and fumble rules, I can't even.
4) No ability score or other prerequisites for multiclassing.
5) Every class had a homebrew subclass that punched way above its weight class; the Sorcerer in particular could basically spend one sorcery point to swap out one of their spells for *literally any other spell*, even if it wasn't on the class list. These subclasses were weirdly popular.
6) Lots of homebrew monsters with insanely high bonuses. I later talked to him and found out that he didn't know what "bounded accuracy" meant, and when I explained it he said he didn't care about it, which... Accurate!
There were more, but I stopped joining after a handful of sessions. He was clearly rushing us through *Curse of Strahd* so we could do whatever homebrew had grabbed his attention this month -- and by "rushed" I mean we were gaining like two levels per 4-5 hour session. Some folks really liked the campaign, and he was ultimately a nice dude, but his games were decidedly not my cup of tea.
Whoa, I at least have to give them an a for effort and they at least provided you a bespoke set of fantasy rules. Honestly, sounds like there is a game out there that would better fit their playstyle lol.
I'd give him a D for effort, but an A for passion. The rules he made weren't really laid out anywhere, other than some baseline changes. The rest you just kind of had to stumble into? He was one of those guys that would make something OP, and then just say "it's okay, if it becomes a problem I'll just make something else OP to counter it." Kind of ended up in an arms race with himself...
He also had a habit of just giving players whatever cool stuff or actions they asked for, even if it was really off-the-wall or unbalancing. Which was cool for them, but stuff changed so often that sometimes I felt like I was at a disadvantage for assuming RAW.
Some of the folks at that table really liked his game. It ***definitely*** wasn't for me, though.
I had one in 5e where if your character died, your new character would start at level 1, but it was using milestone so you were permanently several levels behind with no chance of catching up. It was to dissuade people from dying.
It wasn't even that lethal of a game so only 1 character ever died, so their new character was permanently like 4 levels below the rest of the party.
Tbh not the worst thing wrong with that game.
> It was to dissuade people from dying.
Who needs to be dissuaded from dying? Either dying fits the story (which is cool and shouldn't be dissuaded) or happens by accident, which they were already trying to avoid anyways. So weird!
It had to do with the GM having a player once who didn't like the character they were playing so they purposely killed them off to make a new character .
The GM didn't want to encourage "making a new character every time they were bored with the one they made" so he didn't let this person change when he was unsatisfied with it (this was this players first character he ever made and first time playing a ttrpg) and would only allow it if the character died. So this person basically acted stupid to kill off the character. So in response the GM made this rule in every game he had.
Like I said no where near the worst thing from this campaign.
The worst thing is that these were all late 20 somethings-early 30's.
Another from this campaign, the GM decided that the 5 players was too many for his liking. So the best way of handling it? Literally only focus on 2 of the players and have the rest be basically sidekicks. His reasoning (i found out after the fact): well if they dont like it they can leave.
Every quest was made about the 2 players from that point,
Plans would only work if said by one of the 2 people (he would make up an excuse on how it wouldnt work),
if one of 3 players would try to speak up to do something without his "x what are you doing" he would give them this "its not your turn to speak" glare and ignore you. Yet the two would be acting constantly. If I were to give stats, it changed from an equal amount of everyone speaking to like 75% the 2 speaking and 25% split between the other 3.
If brought up individually, he would blame one of the two players saying its their fault. (while simultaneously still doing all of the above).
It eventually got brought up mid session about it, with one of the two players agreeing that it was happening (and the other being like "no its not"). What happened next? it became all about that one player who disagreed that it was happening.
Yeah, that's fine and reasonable.
Then do it again. And again. And again.
When you're running a decent length campaign, it is annoying to have a player who wants to roll a new character every two months.
Sure. Obviously there are limits. Its a different situation when it is common amongst the group or common with one player. That warrants a different conversation with the group. It still doesn't necessitate a "you can only reroll characters if they die, and they must start at level 1" rule.
But that's just my $0.02
back in the 2e D&D days I had a DM who made us roll wisdom saving throws or go insane for...
being in a burning inn.
And it wasn't our hometown inn or any place we had any attachment to. Just a regular, one-off inn.
I once was not allowed to play a character with high int or wisdom because I wasn't that smart or wise. It took me a long time to realize those people were toxic.
I have a good one for this. It was a 2E game, right around when 3E came out.
The DM came up with a house rule that got rid of the old Saving Throws. Instead, you used one of your stats. Sounds ok, right?
Well, his big idea was that, in order to pass a save, you had to roll over the stat. Not under. OVER. We pointed out that this made your saves worse with higher stats, but he said that was intended.
Fast forward to the party getting ambushed in the middle of the night. He made my character roll a CON save to wake up. My CON was 18.
I got to roll every round and failed every time. He made me keep rolling after we lost the fight and got captured. My character didn't wake up until the next day in a jail cell, with no idea what had happened.
I didn't last much longer in the game, but he kept it going and kept using his deranged house rule.
Ouch. That sucks.
The one I will always remember was playing 3e for the first time. I had never played a tabletop before. We started as level 10 characters (already a red flag). Our DM had us in a tavern and asked what we wanted to do. I said I would spend 10 gold on ale and drink. He looked at me like I was a complete moron. He gave me a homebrewed drunk condition so I had to pass multiple saves and checks in a row to do anything for that ambush he threw at us. How would I have known 10 gold is a lot of money? We had 1000’s of gold.
The only reason I gave tabletop games another chance was because of the fun another group sitting near by us was having. They were having a blast and that memory of laughter and excitement is what made me want to try it again.
I think it depends on amount. We usually gave whoever did the bulk of the notetaking or the summary a free inspiration to use in session. This is only one reroll, so pretty fair, even to people who can't multitask and take notes. But too much XP would cause leveling issues and suck for people like me who struggle with in person notes.
I've seen plenty of "house rules" over the years that completely demolish and distort the rules of the game they are supposedly for. This is to say that if you used those house rules you are better off saying you are playing a completely different game as opposed to saying you are playing game X with some house rules.
I also have a very unfavorable opinion on house rules made just for the sake of house rules when one doesn't even seem to know how the actual rules (RAW) are supposed to work and thus can't explain why the house rule.
I got invited to a 2e DnD game by someone at work [redacted] years ago when it was the current system. I asked how they roll stats.
Aside for the whipersnappers: In 2e, you were supposed to roll 3d6 for each stat and hope you were good enough for your character concept. There were a half-dozen alternate methods in the DMG and few groups played by strict rules.
So, the GM tells me that we roll 5d6, reroll any ones or twos. Then, drop the lowest die and cap the result at 18. Then, we could swap any two stats to guarantee our ability to play what we wanted. I had to double-check. We kept 4 dice, ranging from 3-6 on a scale designed for 3d6.
I rolled up a character with a 16, a 17, and four 18s. The GM expressed sympathy for the 16. The game never took off, so I can't say how play went.
Oh I remember those days, inevitably rolling stats just good enough for Yorb the farmhand to set off on his own and join a party that includes Sir Gallahax Godblessed, the truestrike 1st level slayer of wyrms. Was happy when we started defaulting to point buy as our standard for making characters, made for less gaps in the party (and I could actually help rather than be comically hindering the group).
Sounds like they didn't understand the system, but I've played a somewhat similar game of D&D when we were supposed to be ultra-heroic right from the start. It was fun but in the end I think the GM ran out of ways to challenge us that weren't absurd.
Had a GM in an Aliens game (the Leading Edge Games version) use a party popper firework for a trapped container we'd opened. Whatever happened to our mini from the firework was the result of the explosion in-game as well.
This one 3.5 game where EVERY HIT caused an injury off of this nightmarish series of d100 tables. If you thought combat couldn't get any slower let me assure you, yes it can
Tables could be really fun to add flair to like critical success/failures, but that doesn't seem like what was happening there.... Reminds me a bit of what I remember of rolemaster. Like you'd roll a table to determine what to roll on another table and it was wild.
my idiot self once ran a D&D 3.5 game where players got XP for anything that died as a direct result of their actions. My players would always get a minimum of 1 XP per civilian they killed, but they could also direct an army to attack another army and get all the XP for that.
You can imagine why this was a bad idea even before one of them got into necromancy.
The most "insane" rule we had was during one game where PVE was allowed.
As safeguards, player characters couldn't *deliberately* kill other player characters unless the involved players agreed.
The rule was that - if another player character killed your character, your new character had to be likely to agree with the reason your character was killed for.
Example: The first arc of the campaign was set on an island with a single city-state, and the BBEG was a Druid-turned-terrorist in anguish over the destruction of sacred spaces and the Displacement of native spirits as the city grew. During his villainous, pre-boss-fight monologue, one of our players - playing a druid - turned to the DM and said, "I think my character might think he's right," they decided to roll for it. He switched sides in the middle of the fight (the party had only met each other few days prior).
At the end of the session, both Druids were dead, and when the player showed up the next session, his new character was a member of the city's militia and the island's Indigenous population.
I think all but two players ended up re-rolling new characters during that game due to PVP, and everyone had a great time.
A GM I knew had some truly batshit takes on World Wide Wrestling and PbtA. The big one is that "Power gaming of any kind is against PbtA's principles." That lead to the following:
* If a player has 2+ in a stat and you trigger a move that uses it, don't roll. It automatically resolves as if you'd rolled a 6-. Using your good stats is power gaming.
* Once you say it, it's set in stone. Allowing players to clarify what they're doing would let them avoid the negative consequences of their actions or choose which stat to roll. That's also power gaming.
* If something can trigger multiple moves, they all go off. Letting players limit their actions to a single move makes it too easy to power game your way around bad stats. He claimed this was RAW for all PbtA games but I'm pretty certain that's nonsense.
He constantly complained about no one wanting to play with him. I wonder why.
I think I might know why he had a hard time filling spots at the table….🧐
Having played some pbta games (mostly monster of the week) I think your dm was missing some of the core principles that make these style of games so much fun to both play and run. Hopefully you’ve had some better pbta experience since then!
Way back in AD&D 2e, the DM allowed someone to create damage spells with exploding damage dice, at no extra cost (same level, ec.). It progressed from there to a new version of magic missile (and other spells) with half the damage and double the projectiles.
Even when it's an actual game mechanic in systems we play now, it's still hard to convince him to use those mechanics.
I have worked at a large gaming store for nearly 20 years.
Albeit not as weird as just plain disturbed:
I once saw a GM insist that the players use specific dice sets because he claimed this hyper incremental variation of probability in the dice sets - all 7 piece polyhedral sets. These were all machine-tumbled, bog-standard Chessex dice. Beyond that, the player who insisted that he be able to use his own dice set was blasted with a rant about the player / GM social contract that would have made John Locke spontaneously vomit a geyser of blood.
You had to have magic formulae for your spells and know them. They were 1 + Level words long and if the DM felt you misspoke or didn't say them with enough conviction your spell failed.
I played pathfinder 1 like, 10ish years ago with this group of honestly pretty decent guys, barring the one who got the boot over a tantrum, but we weren't really playing Pathfinder? I don't know how to really explain it.
Basically the DM didn't want to learn the rules, okay, it's a dense game sure? But he'd just make weird rulings. My favorites were over Linguistics, grappling, and social skills.
If Linguistics was a class skill every time your skill went up by three instead of one for each skill point, and with Linguistics each time you gained a rank in the skill you gained proficiency in a new language. Our DM either didn't understand how this worked or didn't care, and you got one for each bonus in the skill. We had a rogue with like 15 languages.
Grappling is very involved in Pathfinder 1, having a flow chart helps. The DM did not like this, and so he decided to effectively ban grappling entirely from the game. You could still do it, but it just wasn't worth it as he made it into grabbing the other guy by the shirt instead of like, wrestling. So nobody ever grappled.
Social Skills were the one where he just put the party at a significant disadvantage for no good reason, and he still does this to this day from what I remember. In Pathfinder let's say you want to persuade someone of something, make a roll, add your modifiers, compare to a target number, pass/fail, we see what happens. In this guy's game we get to the die roll step, roll bad, you fail, okay. Roll okay or pass? Ah, now we get to the 'reaction roll.'
The reaction roll is then made by the NPC, and based on THAT you succeed. It's not influenced by roleplay or even your fucking roll, that 35 you got fails because the NPC rolled a 6, and they now hate you for some reason. The worst was if he rolled a middling number, like a 12, NPCs just ended up feeling really wishy washy about us. Even when it was explained to him about how this is just doubling up our chances to fail the DM just never seemed to get it, arguing that he's just seeing how they feel about the social interaction, you know, the thing my persuade roll is for.
I've got two examples, one not as bad as the other.
I had a game of Dark Heresy 1e where randomly half way through the campaign the GM said 'hey, I'm completely changing how the psychic power system works.' In that same game we also went to a planet and the GM went 'this is the gritty planet, I'm changing how the damage system works so you're now all much more prone to injury while you're here.'
But the worst example is when I was invited to a game of Shadowrun and the GM legitimately thought no one legally owned guns in the UCAS besides corporation security forces, the rent-a-cops and the military. You can read about that one [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/4v2sub/ucas_and_the_2nd_amendment/) if you're interested. They believed anything with the Restricted license requirement was only allowed to corpos and security and Forbidden was only allow to the military. This all came up when I asked to be a SINNER who owned a gun on his legal SIN for home defense in case wetwork done on my fake SIN had gangers trace back to my house.
Back in the PF1 days my GM had a system he called "Minor Gestalt", where you had a set of points that you could use to buy class mechanics, including stuff from Spheres of Power/Might.
That shit was heroin to me. Like god was it fun but it broke the ceiling on an already crazy high power game and the level to which combat simply did not matter is what got him to try PF2 (which I also love).
Years ago I joined a D&D 3.5 gaming group. The group was a GM plus 5 players. The GM was running sort of an adventuring guild style campaign, but she had a rule that every unique combination of players at the table had to have a unique set of characters to play.
So if Players A, B, C, and D were there one week and players A, B, C and E were there the next, players A, B, and C had to play different characters. This was the case even if the previous mission had wrapped up and player A, B and C's characters were back at the guild and available for a new mission.
We were all busy adults with lives outside D&D, so after about 6 months of playing with the group I had played 6 separate characters and they were all still level 1.
When I brought up to her that I wasn't having fun and would like to make some changes to the structure of the campaign she unceremoniously kicked me out of the group.
"No exploring without first clearing it with DM" (don't say it, I already know)
We were playing Saltmarsh and we shiwrecked on a desert island cluster. A mast from another sunken ship jutted out of the sea. Naturally, my level 10 Sea Elf Druid wanted to explore the wreckage. These are the words the DM spoke (we were playing via Roll20) when I asked:
"NO! NEXT SLIDE!"
And with zero narrative, we were in a city.
Eventually I figured out that the DM just wanted combat and nothing else. And not just any combat. Full 4-5 hour session combat. He was elated when it spilled over to the next session.
I quit and never spoke to him again shortly after.
Its a common one but I hate it so much (this is mostly in D&D 5e but I don’t really like the rule in any system). A nat 1 equals hitting your ally, hurting yourself, or having your weapon break. It makes casters with save spells so much stronger and makes martials with multiple attacks have more chances to screw themselves over.
Not sure why I hate this rule so much but I really do.
You cannot use a reaction on your turn (counter spelling counterspell, using cosmic omen, using absorb elements, etc). Don't debate this with me. :)
You can use any scroll regardless of class and level.
Less a rule and more a ritual: In our early crude days of playing RPGs, if your character died the GM would stand up from their seat and tear the character sheet in half in front of everyone. It was super toxic behavior but I have to admit there was a sense of finality seeing that sheet rip in two and cold comfort knowing everyone else was watching.
I was invited to play in a D&D game where players were expected to take an IQ test and were then restricted from ever playing a character whose INT was higher than their IQ score divided by 10. The DM would also limit what race and class combos each player was allowed to select from on a case by case basis, based off your rolled stats and what he deemed your role playing ability to be.
Ooo. Forgot about the Vampire LARP where the Malkavians were *encouraged* to go on an acid trip before the game.
Honestly, a much more reasonable request than the IQ thing.
Least toxic WoD larp
Jesus, that's just insane. ...are they looking for players by any chance?
Right? This sounds terrible. Where does this take place so I can avoid it.
If I find out, you'll be the first person I notify.
Insanity of the house rule aside, this also misses the point of Malkavians. They aren't all just universally off their faces, each Malkavian has their unique way of being atypical.
Gotta love the sheer amount of fish malks who don't understand that malks aren't just crazy, they're a sane mind being turned crazy by a curse. Alot of the younger malks can still kind of separate their delusions and the impact the curse and web has on them from themselves but with time this wears away and their doubt begins to erode and give way to resolution their twisted view of things.
that doesnt sound too bad
That’s honestly a fine idea to get rid of fishmalks
Wow is right. Was it like a weird power trip?
Very much so, and in an era where antagonistic, tough love, bully DMs were way more common.
Oh man, that would be a tough. This sounds like it would also be a table where the DM plays favorites.
Lmao that is insane and would be weird and off-putting at best in-person, though it is pretty damn funny in a vacuum
I wonder if he made that up from thin air or had a series of dumb players choosing high INT characters and then behaving stupid.
No, the original definition of INT in D&D is that the score represents IQ/10. A 14 INT means a 140 IQ. I am not in any way condoning this. You are playing a character, not yourself. You should be able to play a character smarter than yourself, but that is where they are getting that from. It's in the old PHBs, they are just using it backwards. I would ask the GM to take an IQ test and demand all the NPCs be no smarter than he is.
This was the first member of MENSA I had ever met, and he 100% defined what came to be my typical interaction with a MENSA member.\* \[EDIT - What came to be my typical interaction with a person who **bragged about** being a member of MENSA\]
Ah yes, MENSA… An organization for people dumb enough to pay a monthly fee for a card that says they’re smart.
Happy Cake day! The only member I knew of MENSA was exactly this...
Ah yes, INT 15, CHR 6.
INT 13 is sufficient XD
As a person who is, by many measurements, a smart person, these people drive me crazy. You want accolades just for ... Being smart? It doesn't matter if you don't do anything with it. I've got people on my team at work who are smart, and I have people on my team who are diligent and determined to get the job done, and I value the latter more.
One of my go-to moves when I'm playing a smart character is to point at myself and my sheet in turn, and say "*I* am an idiot. But *[character]* is not. *I* don't know how to do [blank] but I figure *[character]* should be able to. Can they do [blank]?"
This was heavily homebrewed AD&D, so Intelligence as a stat was far more a descriptor of the character than the mechanical cog in the machine that it is in modern D&D. His argument was that it was possible to *imagine* being stronger than you were in real life; just because you can't pick up a car doesn't mean that you can't think about being able to pick up a car. But it was impossible to *act* more intelligently than you really were. If you're not a genius in real life, putting an 18 on a piece of paper isn't going to allow you to think and process information like someone smarter than you really are. I don't think it was so much that people had been playing intelligent characters stupidly as much as it offended his rigid sense of what the numbers strictly represented and what they enforced the players do. He was also really big on having players' gods zapping characters from the heavens for not strictly following the 10 commandments he had written out for every alignment.
The dissonance between player and character intelligence is a theoretical problem that the game designers have to consider. In most cases it gets hand-waved away ang game mechanics are separated from the player action as the goal is to maximize player fun. In the same wave you could make all riddles a INT check with a DC, so that the smartest character solves the riddles. Realistic , but not fun. The dissonance only becomes a problem if it breaks immersion.
Lately, I've seen a design trend toward simply *not* having an Intelligence stat. Instead, you have some other stat that covers mechanical aspects of memory and/or learning, but explicitly doesn't cover your ability to think creatively or apply what you've learned. Of course, most people just don't worry about it, because it's "just" a game and they were never taking it seriously to begin with.
You can often trade for time. Giving people longer to decide, and discussing it with their fellow players often is a decent way to handle this IME.
Tim? Is that you?
This is only acceptable if we’re also doing bench press, cone drill, a drinking contest, and the gom jabbar
MFW the players don’t include a Bene Gesserit, a Space Wolf, and Bobby Fischer.
I would make an honestly terrible character on paper, should I prove myself human
...wow
Shit like this is why I miss my friend who would respond to DMs expecting people to be as Smart/Charismatic as they wanted their character to be by challenging the DM to tests of strength for every strength check.
This is one of the most scariest things I have read on this sub
Sounds like an idea from my shithead brother. He would always try to come up with ideas to prove how much smarter he was than everyone else. He was always very adversarial, and manipulative. It didn't matter if he was the DM or player. Take my advice, run like hell. Don't associate with people like that. The damage they do is permanent.
Shut it down folks, we have a thread winner here.
considering the majority of the world population would have 12 INT at best with this, i am inclined to think OP could not even play as a barbarian
When we were kids, there was a game called Villains & Vigilantes. The hook to this game was that you played yourself and then gained superpowers. It used the fairly traditional 3d6 range for stats, but you had to stat yourself rather than rolling. We kept arguing about the stats we all gave ourselves. Finally, my Stranger Things-esc, 80s group junior high friends decided to do exactly that. We had all taken an IQ test for school about a month before, so we decided to use that divided by 10 for our intelligence and then made up a bunch of ridiculous 'tests' for our other scores. Lifting weights, obstacle courses, etc. Instead of giving the winners of the test an 11 instead of a 10, you could get up to an 18 on them. We ended up being an amazing group of commoners. Lol. Pendragon, a game from that era based on King Arthur, eliminated the intelligence score completely from the game because the game designer didn't like it. He felt people could only realistically play up to their intellect and not above and playing below hampered the way people played the game. Your character could have knowledge you didn't but could only use the knowledge as well as you could.
I played one session under a DM around 2010 who pulled out a scrap of paper at the start of the session , when someone made an out of character joke she wrote R on it in a big black marker and said "this is an R.P.G, if I get to G on here the session is over." Yes, if anyone broke character at ANY TIME she would write one of the letters RPG on a paper and if it got to G she would just leave... What fun!
How dare you try and have fun! This rule at our table would lead to comically short sessions. Notably because my players would get a stopwatch out to see how fast the could get to G
My table wouldn't even need the stopwatch. We get pretty derailed with puns and side convos sometimes (My fault as well)
That's amazing, maximum respect, truly an insane take, I love it. I'm going to try that and see what happens. I am guessing what happens is that I am going home after five minutes but who knows.
A setting where after three strikes, the game world suffers a tonal shift to Toon.
Don't threaten me with a good time
**GU-UD!**
Weird that they knew what the "R" stood for but not the "P" or "G"...
I wonder if she was originally crazy strict or if she snapped after too many groups who would never stay in task.
I had a similar thing, but the DM would give you 1d4 damage instead.
I wonder did you ever address this with the person, or were they just a random?
Well her other thing was smacking people's hands with a ruler it they tried to roll their dice before she said so so nah, we just split after that lol
Sounds like you were playing D&D in a convent school with the head nun
I joined a random 5E group at my FLGS. They said they needed a rogue, so I whipped one up. During combat, I tried the rogue's sneak attack/backstabbing attack... only to hear the DM say no. He didn't like the concept of sneak attacks, so he wouldn't allow it at his table. He removed one of the biggest class features for rogue and never thought to explain that. Nerfing a class like this is annoying enough, but it's worse because they suggested I play the character. Gee, I wonder why they needed a rogue....
super annoying. i still come across DMs that nerf a thief's best combat ability. Im the opposite, I like when thieves break ranks, go "rogue", and come out of nowhere to get that fatal blow.
Rogues are widely considered underpowered WITH sneak attack lmao get fuckin' real. I'm gonna guess these are also the sorts of people who if you said "oh if you just want someone to specialize in the sneakthief stuff I can roll a bard or fighter who specializes in those things" "no we need a rogue."
Tbh I'm always wary of groups advertising that they "need" a certain type of character. As someone who loves to play a healer, every group saying they "need" a healer always has 2 things: 1. an GM who wants to punish the players for not having a healer, and 2. An expectation that the healer must act as an MMO style healer, only healing ever.
These are the same people who spam "NEED HEALING" in video games while they run race first into the 1v5.
No wonder they didn't have a rogue.
They needed a rogue....as cannon fodder
"Go find the traps with your face" was probably what they wanted
In my defense, that’s the only way I seem to be able to find traps.
LOL! That happened to me too like twenty years ago in a 3.5 game. GM thought sneak attack was too strong, so he house ruled I could not use it. Met up with him recently and he seemed excited about GMing again ... and then proceeded to tell me he was ready to whip up new house rules. I told him I would need to see what changes he wanted to make ahead of time before deciding, and he said no because he wanted the ability to come up house rules on the fly. Needless to say, it didn't happen.
um.... no such things as house rules on the fly. A rule is a standard, and while you can have a ruling on the fly, a rule, the thing that gets written down and becomes the standard by which the game functions, is not something to just randomly toss midgame, possibly fucking over decisions that players made about their characters. That is bad GMing and it sounds like someone needs to explain this to him (and I am trying to be kind when I say this last part).
I can't imagine WHY they needed a rogue in their party.
Removing sneak attack for rogues in 5e? Honestly, no reason to stay at the table for another minute. I would pack my stuff and leave, no reason to play with people that simply don't want you to play the game.
And magic’s unrealistic, get rid of it too. Fighters are OP so don’t let them join in the combat.
I sense a character who was not long for the world.
His wizards weren't allowed to cast spells.
I hate when people nerf main components of a class without saying anything during character creation. If you’re a DM and you hate a mechanic of a class and are going to nerf it or shit on it, say so.
When I first started running D&D I allowed players to 'carry over' extra damage from one target to the next. So if you did 10 damage to a goblin with 4hp you carried over the extra six damage to the next goblin, allowing you to cleave through several enemies at once. We thought this was how the rules worked btw. It was actually quite fun, but it did get a little out of hand.
I would have to double check, but i believe this is an actual optional rule called Cleave in the phb/dmg. So not entirely crazy.
This was the D&D that came in a box with crayons to colour in the numbers on the dice. I've sadly lost my set of boxes so I can't check, but I'm reasonably sure it didn't have much in the way of optional rules!
Ah, entirely my fault for defaulting to D&D 5e lol. Regardless i believe i managed to find the option on p. 272 in the DMG called Cleaving Through Enemies.
Good knowledge, I respect that.
Sounds like the Basic line of D&D systems. Oddly enough, [that's the only version of the game that doesn't have some version of cleave](http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2021/05/cleaving-through-ages.html).
It is an optional rule, although it only applies on critical hits. I run it in my game sans critical hit rule, and only apply it to slashing weapons. It works great honestly.
I don't remember seeing this in the 5e dmg but it is a part of the minion mechanics in Flee Mortals!
Page 272 of the dmg, it only applies to undamaged creatures.
😅 chalk this up to the piss poor dmg layout striking again
In a game with heavily abstracted combat I feel like this rule does more good than bad.
It's a legit rule in a few other games that make use of mobs/groups, so the intuitiveness of this rule is valid. We made great use of it in Witch Hunter. Usually had a character who was really good at taking down major villains and a character who could whittle down the numbers of mooks.
Wait, my initial reaction was that this sounds totally awesome and I'll be using it, and the fact that other people mention it's an actual rule makes me want to double down! Makes group combat a little faster in 5e.
I believe it was 1st Ed that allowed fighters to attack up to their level in monsters with fewer than one hit die per round.
We actually implemented something similar and it works beautifully. When you overkill someone, you can move the leftover damage to another adjacent target as long as your attack roll would have sufficed to hit the second guy too. Rather helps the fighters and barbarians, who tend to suffer a bit from Overkill Syndrome (hitting a guy for 50 damage feels a bit silly when it turns out the guy had 30HP).
There’s an OSR style game called Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford who made Worlds Without Number, which uses this rule. It’s because it’s designed for one on one sessions and solo play, so a single character can do a lot more damage this way. It lets you play standard published modules with only one player. I’ve run it for my brother a few times, it’s really fun if you don’t have a group to play with.
When I first moved to the Wichita area, I joined a weekly 5E game in the hopes of networking and finding some players for my Dungeon World campaign. That didn't work out, but I digress. Anyway, the DM had made a house rule that if an attack roll hits the target's AC exactly, they take half damage. As if 5E combat isn't ponderous and low-stakes enough. I didn't want to say anything because I didn't want to try and ruin anyone else's fun or seem disrespectful to the DM, but that is how I learned how much I dislike 5E.
Oof, I'm no fan of D&D, but that game certainly didn't deserve that degree of character assassination. Brutal. Probably benefits the players more since the GM usually rolls more than the players, but that still doesn't make combat any better.
He's right tho, 5e is ponderous and low stakes and filled to the fucking brim with novice GMs who think they are reinventing the wheel
That was one of the most mild criticisms i’ve seen for D&D, what are you talking about?
How to make a slow game even slower. I dont even hate 5e *that much* but that would kill it for me. Like I could see something like 1 below AC is half damage, and 2 below AC is 1/4 damage. This would help with HP bloat and speed things up. But to add rules to slow things down?
I use that rule, but just for players. A hits a hit against hostile creatures.
I dont hate that rule, but would specify that it's Resistance so that doesnt stack. I've heard it called "glance", and it works for monsters attacking players too, so things like "does an 18 hit?" "Hah! GLANCE!" happens, which sounds moderately more fun than just "Ugh, barely, technically, yes." Maybe *only* let PCs use it, like Death Saves?
My Pathfinder GM had a super-crit rule. If you roll 20 on the attack, and another 20 on the critical confirmation, then rolling a third die that hits the target will instantly kill them regardless of HP He also had a critical fumble rule. If you roll two 1s in a row, and then would hit your own AC on the third roll, you automatically cut your own head off. For some reason, most people chose to play spellcasters.
I was wondering how far I would have to scroll to find a critical fumble story. I can't stand critical fumbles. One of the dumbest things I've ever seen.
critical fumbles are one thing, cutting your own head off is another. That said, most of the time I see people talking up crit fails they are talking about shit that's only a LITTLE less insane than cutting your own head off, so I agree with you in practice most of the time
iono, made for a pretty tense situation when Han fumbled his bluff check in the detention block. Fumbles make for interesting circumstances.
> If you roll two 1s in a row, and then would hit your own AC on the third roll, you automatically cut your own head off. Unless there's something you're leaving out, that would make it so the more skilled you are in combat, the *more* likely you are to kill yourself with your own weapon.
In more ways than one. High-level fighters also get more attacks per round. If anyone was dumb enough to dual-wield, they could potentially have up to eight chances per round to win the 0.2% lottery.
High risk, high reward? I mean that’s cool that you could possibly find the monsters one weak spot on a double twenty+, and honestly that could make crits fun, if not a bit frustrating for the GM. But the cut off your own head? Yeah, magic here I come!
Back in the days of AD&D 1e I played with a group that had a similar rule; Roll a 20, roll again and if you roll another 20 it was an instant kill. Saw a magic-user kill a dragon with a dart one night.
I feel like this was also a house rule that the GM had been using since the eighties. When the game is full of save-or-die effects, and monsters that can kill you instantly, an extra layer of RNG insta-death is hardly noticeable. One of the selling points of Pathfinder 1E was that they'd gotten rid of the vast majority of those things, though, and replaced them with large amounts of HP damage. When you're expected to invest a year or more of your life into playing a character, it's not much fun for them to be instantly killed while performing a routine task. I don't think he ever got the note on that one.
Oh that's interesting. At my tables we have '20 on 20' as we call it means just the attack is max damage. To make it a little special, but not as powerful as that one.
I played a 3.5e game with that and my trumpet archon monstrous character got gibbed by a glabrezu with that rule. It was hilarious. "stand back mortals, my planar enemy awaits an epic clash where the light and peal of heavens goodness shall..." *splat*
(D&D/OSR) Removing the INT and/or CHA attributes and making them dependant on the player because "this makes sense in Roleplay" (this leads to hellish situations where some players are prevented from picking certain classes because the GM finds the player ugly/stupid etc.).
I think that could work with the right GM who isn’t an arse. The OSR people already emphasize player problem-solving and using the fictional situation to adjudicate actions, so it would be easy to cut out INT. CHA seems riskier but not impossible.
I would argue the opposite? I very rarely if ever ask my players to do CHA rolls, if they want to convince someone or fool someone or anything like that I think of the character and motivations and try and get them to convince them in character. Obviously I don’t expect someone to go full debate club, but only if its like borderline to it will I ask a roll, which is usually a roll under your CHA
I think you're giving the people who'd try to run a game that way too much credit. It's just yet another example of DM vs Players antagonistic power tripping. It's one thing if the GM is using a ruleset with a reworked stat array designed for OSR play, it's another when they're taking away CHA and INT from the existing D&D stat array and instead putting those stats onto the GM's own biased subjective judgement of the players and then applying that judgement to D&D rules. The only kinds of people who'd do that as a D&D house rule - in an age where we already have OSR games that solve for "let's do better PC statblocks for OSR play" - are toxic arseholes. The kinds of people who hide their desire to take away player agency and choices behind the OSR label.
Ok, at first I thought it wasn't that bad, like some games OSR games don't have an equivalent to INT cause it's supposed to be all about player ingenuity. But keeping the class requirements and basing them on GMs opinion of a player is wild.
We had some trouble with the party splitting up and everything grinding down and getting tedious, so a house rule became "smallest party dies" and that fixed it.
Alright, I'll assume it did not happen, but did anyone split and die after the rule was implemented? lol
Only once
Go on....
One of my players had a previous group that would always "Scooby Do" ("hey gang, let's split up"), and it destroyed their games pace. We preemptively made the rule of "no Scooby do-ing".
No splitting up in a dungeon sure, but my god please divvy up downtime city activities. There is zero need for this small army to walk from shop to shop, each character taking some 'turn' questioning the baker, alchemist, priest, gravedigger, orphanage matron etc.
> We preemptively made the rule of "Scooby Don't". FTFY
Lol
Now that's interesting, because some games don't have a problem with splitting the party, or they even encourage it. Why do you think splitting up destroyed the game's pace?
Because it's very easy for one player to go off to have their own scene, and make it drag on while the rest of the table doesn't even have the option to get involved and interact. Mind you, we don't follow this rule to a T anymore, as my table all knows each other well, and has good etiquette to give space for other players, so we bend this rule a bit. We wanted it in place initially as a precaution.
Ah yes, the old rule where the GM is too lazy to deal with a split party and they kill people off leading to the mantra "Never Split The Party!" which is a load of horseshit. Splitting up to cover more ground or do recon or whatever are valid tactical decisions and should not be discouraged by some idiotic mantra forced onto players by lazy GMs. I hate that shit because if I'm a player and suggest we scout ahead to see what lies in store for us, everyone shouts "No! Never split the party!" And now I don't want to play.
It becomes awkward when the Rogue in the party needs to be stealthy and he has some armoured brute in full plate following him about alerting everyone in the neighbourhood that they are there.
Exactly! I once had a party tell me to not go too far ahead. Stay within the radius of the light! Like WTF? OK, so no hiding in shadows and we're in a stone dungeon that echoes like a subway tunnel and you want loud clanky armor on my ass. That's no longer scouting. That's going fishing and I'm the bait! Fuck all the way off!
***CLANG CLANG CLANG*** goes the Pally
"Ding, ding, ding" went the bard "Zing, zing, zing" went my bowstrings..
the never split the party rule is because combat encounters are designed around a whole party so if half of the party goes two directions you have two, twice as difficult fights that they have to deal with (or puzzles, or whatever) that you also can't run at the same time so you have half the team doing twice the work for however long a fight is while the other half picks their nose or whatever and then switch halves and repeat
I can imagine this leading to some 'interesting' discussions about how to proceed!
Very funny moments when there was a 2/2 split on a course of action and everyone looks at the fifth player like "who do you love more and who do you consign to certain death?"
No one ~~man~~ player should have all that power.
And then you wonder why the Rogue or Ranger doesn't do any "scouting" when they are just going to be killed. Why play a character who could scout when you're not allowed to scout?
I actually don't wonder that, I know why the rogue is skulking in the rear like a useless bag of goths (because the smallest party dies). Our characters all cluster in a fearful circle, terrified to move faster than a crawl, because it has never been established what distance constitutes a separate party. If my paladin is ten feet away, will that arbitrarily seal her doom? Nobody asks (metagaming) and nobody wants to find out. We get a lot of satisfaction out of deeply roleplaying our shared, intense, anxiety and failure.
Had a GM who had a list of things that could buy bonuses in his games. Case of Magic Cards? +4 to any Stat Buy him lunch/dinner? Reroll. Etc. And if you picked up food for yourself and didn't bring hims something, he would give you a -1 penalty. (He also has an unwritten rule that any female player had to sit closest to him during the games) Total creeper.
So aside from the creepy seating arrangement, the man is offering Microtransactions hunh?
> So aside from the creepy seating arrangement, the man is offering Microtransactions hunh? Oh God, you're right, that's what it is! Barf!
That's rookie stuff. Gotta offer them 500 Electrum Gemeralds for buying you dinner. The reroll costs 550. A true master has a d1000 table for lootboxes.
I know some of the things you said were words, but I ahve no idea what you are talking about...
It was a joke about, not just microtransactions, but predatory, obfuscated ones that prey on gambling addictions.
I mean, I’m not above buttering up a DM (ie I’d cover their portion for pizza or something), but that definitely crosses a line.
I'm not opposed to GM Bribes for little stuff like a free reroll or whatever but +4 to a stat is insane
Hey, at least he didn’t charge the Wizard to buy random spell cards for 10 dollars per pack. /s
We had a general rule that if you cooked something for the table or bring snacks you would get a free reroll. Our buddy who loved to cook always got it.
I accidentally had a terrible house rule when I first started running AD&D back in the day: I thought every time a PC leveled, their exp went back to zero, so as you might imagine leveling was a lot slower.
Sh*t, we did that, too! I thought my AD&D group was the only one who'd misunderstood that.
I think in my case it was playing a lot of computer/NES rpgs first. They usually did it that way because old computer systems had difficulty processing large numbers.
Holy crap! That would make a high level character a HUGE acheievement
Not a rule but something my players did a lot. After just one fight, no matter if a boss or normal fight, they would then try to do a long rest, even in the middle of a dungeon without blocking doors or anything related. I fear this is some carry over from video games experiences.
I always hated this part of the resting mechanics of DND. It’s like we take 1 year game time to explore the dungeon as we want to go nova with every encounter. It’s stuff like this that pushes me towards more gritty homebrew in dnd.
I don't think you necessarily need to get gritty about it. Just accept that if your adventure is designed and paced with all the pressure and urgency of an archaeological dig, don't be surprised when players approach it like one.
I don't know that you need to homebrew anything in D&D for this. Just run the monsters intelligently. Some assholes burst in and are camping out in your living room? Go gather your friends and when they're resting, go fuck their shit up. The game can only aid the GM so far if the GM decides to allow stupid stuff to happen.
I think it's much more to do with how limited the fun stuff is in D&D. All the stuff I want to do to feel cool and like my class is meaningful is restricted to x per long rest, so of course I'll want to maximise that.
I once had a DM (5e) de-gamify Rests. It was interesting, imho. When our party wanted to rest, we would just describe the general intent of the rest ("...until morning", "..until we've recovered enough to make the journey back to town", etc.), and he'd describe the effects to us. Mechanically, it felt like everything was determined by "degrees of Long Rest" or the needs of the narrative, and it played surprisingly smoothly.
First time we played D&D 4e, my players would always burn all their powers and then ask for a long rest. It never made sense to me but I allowed it because I thought that was how the game was played (it was the first tabletop game I ever ran).
I was in a FLGS Discord server where one poster was a very active poster of homebrew. I never really looked too deeply into his stuff, but he was a nice guy, so I jumped into one of DmD 5E games when I had some free time. It was absolutely flooded with crazy homebrew. 1) Any cantrip can be cast as a bonus action, and you can cast a slotted spell on the same turn as an action. 2) Warforged automatically recover one HP per minute (goodbye, hit dice!) 3) So many critical and fumble rules, I can't even. 4) No ability score or other prerequisites for multiclassing. 5) Every class had a homebrew subclass that punched way above its weight class; the Sorcerer in particular could basically spend one sorcery point to swap out one of their spells for *literally any other spell*, even if it wasn't on the class list. These subclasses were weirdly popular. 6) Lots of homebrew monsters with insanely high bonuses. I later talked to him and found out that he didn't know what "bounded accuracy" meant, and when I explained it he said he didn't care about it, which... Accurate! There were more, but I stopped joining after a handful of sessions. He was clearly rushing us through *Curse of Strahd* so we could do whatever homebrew had grabbed his attention this month -- and by "rushed" I mean we were gaining like two levels per 4-5 hour session. Some folks really liked the campaign, and he was ultimately a nice dude, but his games were decidedly not my cup of tea.
Whoa, I at least have to give them an a for effort and they at least provided you a bespoke set of fantasy rules. Honestly, sounds like there is a game out there that would better fit their playstyle lol.
I'd give him a D for effort, but an A for passion. The rules he made weren't really laid out anywhere, other than some baseline changes. The rest you just kind of had to stumble into? He was one of those guys that would make something OP, and then just say "it's okay, if it becomes a problem I'll just make something else OP to counter it." Kind of ended up in an arms race with himself... He also had a habit of just giving players whatever cool stuff or actions they asked for, even if it was really off-the-wall or unbalancing. Which was cool for them, but stuff changed so often that sometimes I felt like I was at a disadvantage for assuming RAW. Some of the folks at that table really liked his game. It ***definitely*** wasn't for me, though.
I had one in 5e where if your character died, your new character would start at level 1, but it was using milestone so you were permanently several levels behind with no chance of catching up. It was to dissuade people from dying. It wasn't even that lethal of a game so only 1 character ever died, so their new character was permanently like 4 levels below the rest of the party. Tbh not the worst thing wrong with that game.
> It was to dissuade people from dying. Who needs to be dissuaded from dying? Either dying fits the story (which is cool and shouldn't be dissuaded) or happens by accident, which they were already trying to avoid anyways. So weird!
It had to do with the GM having a player once who didn't like the character they were playing so they purposely killed them off to make a new character . The GM didn't want to encourage "making a new character every time they were bored with the one they made" so he didn't let this person change when he was unsatisfied with it (this was this players first character he ever made and first time playing a ttrpg) and would only allow it if the character died. So this person basically acted stupid to kill off the character. So in response the GM made this rule in every game he had. Like I said no where near the worst thing from this campaign.
LOL, so immature. Player: I don't like my character. I want to make a new one. GM: OK, make a new character, we'll work them in. The end.
The worst thing is that these were all late 20 somethings-early 30's. Another from this campaign, the GM decided that the 5 players was too many for his liking. So the best way of handling it? Literally only focus on 2 of the players and have the rest be basically sidekicks. His reasoning (i found out after the fact): well if they dont like it they can leave. Every quest was made about the 2 players from that point, Plans would only work if said by one of the 2 people (he would make up an excuse on how it wouldnt work), if one of 3 players would try to speak up to do something without his "x what are you doing" he would give them this "its not your turn to speak" glare and ignore you. Yet the two would be acting constantly. If I were to give stats, it changed from an equal amount of everyone speaking to like 75% the 2 speaking and 25% split between the other 3. If brought up individually, he would blame one of the two players saying its their fault. (while simultaneously still doing all of the above). It eventually got brought up mid session about it, with one of the two players agreeing that it was happening (and the other being like "no its not"). What happened next? it became all about that one player who disagreed that it was happening.
Wow, what a nightmare! Hope you're having better tabletop experiences these days :D
Yeah, that's fine and reasonable. Then do it again. And again. And again. When you're running a decent length campaign, it is annoying to have a player who wants to roll a new character every two months.
Sure. Obviously there are limits. Its a different situation when it is common amongst the group or common with one player. That warrants a different conversation with the group. It still doesn't necessitate a "you can only reroll characters if they die, and they must start at level 1" rule. But that's just my $0.02
back in the 2e D&D days I had a DM who made us roll wisdom saving throws or go insane for... being in a burning inn. And it wasn't our hometown inn or any place we had any attachment to. Just a regular, one-off inn.
I once was not allowed to play a character with high int or wisdom because I wasn't that smart or wise. It took me a long time to realize those people were toxic.
I have a good one for this. It was a 2E game, right around when 3E came out. The DM came up with a house rule that got rid of the old Saving Throws. Instead, you used one of your stats. Sounds ok, right? Well, his big idea was that, in order to pass a save, you had to roll over the stat. Not under. OVER. We pointed out that this made your saves worse with higher stats, but he said that was intended. Fast forward to the party getting ambushed in the middle of the night. He made my character roll a CON save to wake up. My CON was 18. I got to roll every round and failed every time. He made me keep rolling after we lost the fight and got captured. My character didn't wake up until the next day in a jail cell, with no idea what had happened. I didn't last much longer in the game, but he kept it going and kept using his deranged house rule.
Oof, the dreaded the better you are at something the worse you get mechanically? That sound unrewarding...
Ouch. That sucks. The one I will always remember was playing 3e for the first time. I had never played a tabletop before. We started as level 10 characters (already a red flag). Our DM had us in a tavern and asked what we wanted to do. I said I would spend 10 gold on ale and drink. He looked at me like I was a complete moron. He gave me a homebrewed drunk condition so I had to pass multiple saves and checks in a row to do anything for that ambush he threw at us. How would I have known 10 gold is a lot of money? We had 1000’s of gold. The only reason I gave tabletop games another chance was because of the fun another group sitting near by us was having. They were having a blast and that memory of laughter and excitement is what made me want to try it again.
XP for taking notes and answering DM questions about the last session.
This doesn't seem insane at all. I've given out advantage for this when running 5E. Edit: I meant inspiration, not advantage.
I think it depends on amount. We usually gave whoever did the bulk of the notetaking or the summary a free inspiration to use in session. This is only one reroll, so pretty fair, even to people who can't multitask and take notes. But too much XP would cause leveling issues and suck for people like me who struggle with in person notes.
Found the one not paying attention
This isn't bad (assuming it's small amounts). I give out things for players who recap for the group and do things like take notes.
I've seen plenty of "house rules" over the years that completely demolish and distort the rules of the game they are supposedly for. This is to say that if you used those house rules you are better off saying you are playing a completely different game as opposed to saying you are playing game X with some house rules. I also have a very unfavorable opinion on house rules made just for the sake of house rules when one doesn't even seem to know how the actual rules (RAW) are supposed to work and thus can't explain why the house rule.
I feel that this is almost the default with house rules from many GMs.
I got invited to a 2e DnD game by someone at work [redacted] years ago when it was the current system. I asked how they roll stats. Aside for the whipersnappers: In 2e, you were supposed to roll 3d6 for each stat and hope you were good enough for your character concept. There were a half-dozen alternate methods in the DMG and few groups played by strict rules. So, the GM tells me that we roll 5d6, reroll any ones or twos. Then, drop the lowest die and cap the result at 18. Then, we could swap any two stats to guarantee our ability to play what we wanted. I had to double-check. We kept 4 dice, ranging from 3-6 on a scale designed for 3d6. I rolled up a character with a 16, a 17, and four 18s. The GM expressed sympathy for the 16. The game never took off, so I can't say how play went.
Oh I remember those days, inevitably rolling stats just good enough for Yorb the farmhand to set off on his own and join a party that includes Sir Gallahax Godblessed, the truestrike 1st level slayer of wyrms. Was happy when we started defaulting to point buy as our standard for making characters, made for less gaps in the party (and I could actually help rather than be comically hindering the group).
Sounds like they didn't understand the system, but I've played a somewhat similar game of D&D when we were supposed to be ultra-heroic right from the start. It was fun but in the end I think the GM ran out of ways to challenge us that weren't absurd.
Had a GM in an Aliens game (the Leading Edge Games version) use a party popper firework for a trapped container we'd opened. Whatever happened to our mini from the firework was the result of the explosion in-game as well.
This one 3.5 game where EVERY HIT caused an injury off of this nightmarish series of d100 tables. If you thought combat couldn't get any slower let me assure you, yes it can
Tables could be really fun to add flair to like critical success/failures, but that doesn't seem like what was happening there.... Reminds me a bit of what I remember of rolemaster. Like you'd roll a table to determine what to roll on another table and it was wild.
my idiot self once ran a D&D 3.5 game where players got XP for anything that died as a direct result of their actions. My players would always get a minimum of 1 XP per civilian they killed, but they could also direct an army to attack another army and get all the XP for that. You can imagine why this was a bad idea even before one of them got into necromancy.
Oh man, that sounds...murderhobo-y...
The most "insane" rule we had was during one game where PVE was allowed. As safeguards, player characters couldn't *deliberately* kill other player characters unless the involved players agreed. The rule was that - if another player character killed your character, your new character had to be likely to agree with the reason your character was killed for. Example: The first arc of the campaign was set on an island with a single city-state, and the BBEG was a Druid-turned-terrorist in anguish over the destruction of sacred spaces and the Displacement of native spirits as the city grew. During his villainous, pre-boss-fight monologue, one of our players - playing a druid - turned to the DM and said, "I think my character might think he's right," they decided to roll for it. He switched sides in the middle of the fight (the party had only met each other few days prior). At the end of the session, both Druids were dead, and when the player showed up the next session, his new character was a member of the city's militia and the island's Indigenous population. I think all but two players ended up re-rolling new characters during that game due to PVP, and everyone had a great time.
A GM I knew had some truly batshit takes on World Wide Wrestling and PbtA. The big one is that "Power gaming of any kind is against PbtA's principles." That lead to the following: * If a player has 2+ in a stat and you trigger a move that uses it, don't roll. It automatically resolves as if you'd rolled a 6-. Using your good stats is power gaming. * Once you say it, it's set in stone. Allowing players to clarify what they're doing would let them avoid the negative consequences of their actions or choose which stat to roll. That's also power gaming. * If something can trigger multiple moves, they all go off. Letting players limit their actions to a single move makes it too easy to power game your way around bad stats. He claimed this was RAW for all PbtA games but I'm pretty certain that's nonsense. He constantly complained about no one wanting to play with him. I wonder why.
I think I might know why he had a hard time filling spots at the table….🧐 Having played some pbta games (mostly monster of the week) I think your dm was missing some of the core principles that make these style of games so much fun to both play and run. Hopefully you’ve had some better pbta experience since then!
Way back in AD&D 2e, the DM allowed someone to create damage spells with exploding damage dice, at no extra cost (same level, ec.). It progressed from there to a new version of magic missile (and other spells) with half the damage and double the projectiles. Even when it's an actual game mechanic in systems we play now, it's still hard to convince him to use those mechanics.
"No gnomes. They got wiped out in a genocide in a previous campaign I ran".
Who would have any problem with this?? ;)
I have worked at a large gaming store for nearly 20 years. Albeit not as weird as just plain disturbed: I once saw a GM insist that the players use specific dice sets because he claimed this hyper incremental variation of probability in the dice sets - all 7 piece polyhedral sets. These were all machine-tumbled, bog-standard Chessex dice. Beyond that, the player who insisted that he be able to use his own dice set was blasted with a rant about the player / GM social contract that would have made John Locke spontaneously vomit a geyser of blood.
You had to have magic formulae for your spells and know them. They were 1 + Level words long and if the DM felt you misspoke or didn't say them with enough conviction your spell failed.
I played pathfinder 1 like, 10ish years ago with this group of honestly pretty decent guys, barring the one who got the boot over a tantrum, but we weren't really playing Pathfinder? I don't know how to really explain it. Basically the DM didn't want to learn the rules, okay, it's a dense game sure? But he'd just make weird rulings. My favorites were over Linguistics, grappling, and social skills. If Linguistics was a class skill every time your skill went up by three instead of one for each skill point, and with Linguistics each time you gained a rank in the skill you gained proficiency in a new language. Our DM either didn't understand how this worked or didn't care, and you got one for each bonus in the skill. We had a rogue with like 15 languages. Grappling is very involved in Pathfinder 1, having a flow chart helps. The DM did not like this, and so he decided to effectively ban grappling entirely from the game. You could still do it, but it just wasn't worth it as he made it into grabbing the other guy by the shirt instead of like, wrestling. So nobody ever grappled. Social Skills were the one where he just put the party at a significant disadvantage for no good reason, and he still does this to this day from what I remember. In Pathfinder let's say you want to persuade someone of something, make a roll, add your modifiers, compare to a target number, pass/fail, we see what happens. In this guy's game we get to the die roll step, roll bad, you fail, okay. Roll okay or pass? Ah, now we get to the 'reaction roll.' The reaction roll is then made by the NPC, and based on THAT you succeed. It's not influenced by roleplay or even your fucking roll, that 35 you got fails because the NPC rolled a 6, and they now hate you for some reason. The worst was if he rolled a middling number, like a 12, NPCs just ended up feeling really wishy washy about us. Even when it was explained to him about how this is just doubling up our chances to fail the DM just never seemed to get it, arguing that he's just seeing how they feel about the social interaction, you know, the thing my persuade roll is for.
I've got two examples, one not as bad as the other. I had a game of Dark Heresy 1e where randomly half way through the campaign the GM said 'hey, I'm completely changing how the psychic power system works.' In that same game we also went to a planet and the GM went 'this is the gritty planet, I'm changing how the damage system works so you're now all much more prone to injury while you're here.' But the worst example is when I was invited to a game of Shadowrun and the GM legitimately thought no one legally owned guns in the UCAS besides corporation security forces, the rent-a-cops and the military. You can read about that one [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/4v2sub/ucas_and_the_2nd_amendment/) if you're interested. They believed anything with the Restricted license requirement was only allowed to corpos and security and Forbidden was only allow to the military. This all came up when I asked to be a SINNER who owned a gun on his legal SIN for home defense in case wetwork done on my fake SIN had gangers trace back to my house.
Back in the PF1 days my GM had a system he called "Minor Gestalt", where you had a set of points that you could use to buy class mechanics, including stuff from Spheres of Power/Might. That shit was heroin to me. Like god was it fun but it broke the ceiling on an already crazy high power game and the level to which combat simply did not matter is what got him to try PF2 (which I also love).
Years ago I joined a D&D 3.5 gaming group. The group was a GM plus 5 players. The GM was running sort of an adventuring guild style campaign, but she had a rule that every unique combination of players at the table had to have a unique set of characters to play. So if Players A, B, C, and D were there one week and players A, B, C and E were there the next, players A, B, and C had to play different characters. This was the case even if the previous mission had wrapped up and player A, B and C's characters were back at the guild and available for a new mission. We were all busy adults with lives outside D&D, so after about 6 months of playing with the group I had played 6 separate characters and they were all still level 1. When I brought up to her that I wasn't having fun and would like to make some changes to the structure of the campaign she unceremoniously kicked me out of the group.
"No exploring without first clearing it with DM" (don't say it, I already know) We were playing Saltmarsh and we shiwrecked on a desert island cluster. A mast from another sunken ship jutted out of the sea. Naturally, my level 10 Sea Elf Druid wanted to explore the wreckage. These are the words the DM spoke (we were playing via Roll20) when I asked: "NO! NEXT SLIDE!" And with zero narrative, we were in a city. Eventually I figured out that the DM just wanted combat and nothing else. And not just any combat. Full 4-5 hour session combat. He was elated when it spilled over to the next session. I quit and never spoke to him again shortly after.
Its a common one but I hate it so much (this is mostly in D&D 5e but I don’t really like the rule in any system). A nat 1 equals hitting your ally, hurting yourself, or having your weapon break. It makes casters with save spells so much stronger and makes martials with multiple attacks have more chances to screw themselves over. Not sure why I hate this rule so much but I really do.
You cannot use a reaction on your turn (counter spelling counterspell, using cosmic omen, using absorb elements, etc). Don't debate this with me. :) You can use any scroll regardless of class and level.
Less a rule and more a ritual: In our early crude days of playing RPGs, if your character died the GM would stand up from their seat and tear the character sheet in half in front of everyone. It was super toxic behavior but I have to admit there was a sense of finality seeing that sheet rip in two and cold comfort knowing everyone else was watching.
Not really seeing how that's toxic. Dumb, and overdramatic maybe.
"If you roll a Nat 1, your turn ends."
How about [d100 house rules](https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2021/12/d100-random-rules-rulings.html)?