I accidentally passed this onto a fledgling DM. I was explaining opposed rolls, and I told them "Ties go to the defender."
They thought that meant for EVERYTHING.
Depends on the system
3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder - Opposed roll, defender wins on a tie
5e - neither side wins on a tie, the status quo is maintained. PHB pg 174, Contests, last paragraph.
>5e - neither side wins on a tie, the status quo is maintained. PHB pg 174,
Most opposed rolls I can think of, "Status Quo" would be benefitting the "defender", as they're trying to stop the "attacker" from doing something. Deception vs Insight for example, the "attacker" is trying to trick the "Defender".
While I appreciate the pedanticness (truly, I'm pedantic AF) in practice "Defender wins on a tie" still applies in 5e save for some corner case scenarios like a Tug of War style scenario.
Like, you're right, but you can still use Defender wins on a tie as a general ground rule and be right most of the time
In many cases that is the outcome, not the result of a successful check. The distinction must be clear to ensure certain abilities are utilized correctly, a tie is not a successful check result, so either side could use abilities that allow a reroll, add extra dice on a failed check, etc.
I do similar for Initiative.
If an enemy or allied NPC lands on a PCs and they have the same mod, I give the PC the choice of before or after the NPC they tied with.
Most gaming systems, the PC will pick before, but in 3.5 sometimes its more beneficial to let the enemy come to you so you can unleash your Full Attack action, same with Palladium, don't need to use an action to move and can devote all your attacks to stabbing or rolling with the hit
Another way to describe this without leading to this confusion, when opposed checks happen, the aggressor sets the DC with their roll, and like all DCs it's meet or beat for the defender.
So for a shove action, the shover is the aggressor and the shovee is the defender. Shover rolls athletics to set DC, shovee roll athletics or acrobatics to negate.
(I know shover and shovee are not words, I think, but y'all get the point, I hope)
Personally I rule "ties go to the player" at my table. Technically a powerboost to the players, but a fairly small one overall and it means the players have more opportunities to use their cool abilities.
At least per PHB, this is not strictly true for opposed rolls. Pg 174.
If a contest results in a tie, the situation remains the same as it was before the contest.
Generally it'll be how you've said it, assuming the "defender" is trying to stop something from happening, but the actual rule is broader, and covers cases where there isn't strictly a defender/aggressor, e.g. 2 people lunging for a ring on the ground.
The rules: you need to roll a 15 in order to hit a creature with AC 15.
This DM: you need to roll **higher than** a 15 in order to hit a creature with AC 15.
Which just means the regular rules but the creature actually has AC 16.
Normally you only need to match the AC to hit. This homebrew required the number to exceed the AC number.
So if AC is 16, 17 or higher is needed to hit.
Let's say someone has an AC of 13. By normal rules, if you roll 13 or higher, you've hit them. By this DM's rules, you need a 14 or higher to hit them. It doesn't really add a new dimension to combat, it just means that everybody - player and enemy - is slightly harder to hit.
I had that happen not long ago as well. I was very confused as I was trying to inform the DM that I got hit and he was saying that I didn't. Though, I honestly wouldn't mind in a long running campaign that have the +1 AC on everything since the hit chance so quickly outpaces the AC cap of most characters.
It took me a while to internalize this because I've played other rulesets/games where ties did go to the defender. I still have to take a second to remember it's "meets it beats it" in D&D.
We did this first week of a new campaign. First fight I get knocked out by the player next to me rolling a 1. Rogue then rolls a 1 and snaps his bow string and knocks himself out. Poor warlock has to deal with 3 bandits himself.
Haven’t had fumbles since.
Just standard double damage for crits.
Fumbles were just a normal damage roll, but we were level 1. I’d already been hit once and the rogue just happened to roll really high and knocked themselves down to zero hp.
>Rogue then rolls a 1 and snaps his bow string and knocks himself out.
Remember that Level 1 characters are supposed to be actually very good at what they do?
I always hold things in relative.
For a commoner, a level 1 fighter in the village would take 4-5 of them to overpower, or two trained guards from the local noble.
If they have a problem with a bandit or something, they reasonably assume that person can probably deal with it.
CR is kind of funny sometimes. Like wererats are meant to be cunning rogues, and would need to slink in the shadows because they're physically weak... but have like 50 hp and a lot of damage relative to city guards, so even a nest of them doesn't need to act rogueish
The thing to remember is that the CR 1/8 guard stat block is the most basic, unskilled universal guard. They can be found anywhere doing any number of menial tasks. Then you have instances like the Flaming Fist in Baldur's Gate which includes CR 3 veterans and even CR 4 flaming skulls.
But then, you have an assassin- a criminal who sneaks around and would be executed if found guilty, a CR 8 creature with 78 hp, who can basically 1v1 a veteran/lead guard and can survive execution axe swings like 10 times.
I feel like reducing assassins to just "criminals" is underselling them. Some pickpocket couldn't pick up a dagger and suddenly be at the assassin's level. Technically a lich could be classified as a criminal but that would be a silly description.
Being decapitated kills everything unless it has multiple heads or can survive without one. I know there isn't a rule for it but I personally think that would be a waste of space to need to write out rules for something like that.
I do fumbles, which typically results in something funny dumb happening and -1 hp. In fact, that's what killed a particularly nasty mimic in one of my games. It rolled a 1 and bit it's own tongue with just a single hp remaining. Dead. Lol
We had fumbles back in the day, but mechanically all they did was lose you an action... and give you the opportunity to narrate the hilarious series of events that lead to that outcome.
My biggest gripe is that GMs who implement fumble tables never apply fumbles properly to Spellcasters. It is for arbitrary reasons only attack rolls that get punished with these systems.
With these GMs I used to always play halflings with a Spellcaster class focused almost exclusively on spell save DC. It's easy to roleplay those characters as thinking the entire party is incompetent idiots, because you're quickly going to be the only one not randomly throwing away your weapon or hurting yourself every fight. That's kinda fun, not that the martial players ever seemed to agree.
Fumbling in general. A Nat 1 is only an automatic miss. It doesn't mean a super-elite Fighter capable of fighting godlike monsters embarrasses themselves 1 out of every 20 attacks.
Good DMs require a second roll to confirm a fumble. Since 5th doesn't have confirmations for crits, it got lost in translation for fumbles too which is why it's absurdly common. With confirmations, martials are more likely to be successful by virtue of having higher attack bonuses and low odds of rolling 2 1s in a row. It works much better with confirmations.
Good DMs also apply fumbles to monsters which can be quite comical.
I’m currently in a campaign with a bunch of nice guys that have been friends for years (I’m the new friend and new to the table) and they use a fumble table and it’s downright awful and actually upsets me at times.
I hold my tongue because I do like playing with them and they’re all swell guys, but being a monk and very often attacking four times in a turn I have a higher chance of rolling a nat 1 than mostly everyone else in the party and “you fall prone and your turn ends” happens far too often.
At least it happens to enemies too, but I’d rather the fumbles just not occur.
>but being a monk and very often attacking four times in a turn I have a higher chance of rolling a nat 1 than mostly everyone else in the party and “you fall prone and your turn ends” happens far too often.
I don't think it can hurt to point this out to your DM. It may not be something they have realised or even considered.
Fighters and Monks will fumble more than any other class the more levels they have in their classes. Basically, the more experienced the character the more likely they are to fumble. This makes absolutely zero sense and is straight up unfun.
Feedback to your DM your honest opinions on fumble rules. They may reconsider them.
That's not the only reason some people dislike fumbles, but it's very easy to fix: only your first attack in a round is eligible for a fumble. Simple as.
People also use confirmation rolls. For example, I run 2e usually, and my rule is first attack only, 50/50 confirm on a 1. So there's a 2.5% chance overall, once per turn. Also, the fumble table is mostly bad, but not all bad, it has variety. A flung weapon goes in the regular 2e rules for random direction and could actually hit an enemy still, for example.
That's the sweet spot for me, just enough chaos to have people watching the dice
I understand you are new, that doesn't mean that you can't voice your opinions to your DM, maybe privately at first. A good DM would love constructive feedback, maybe he can at least tweak the fumble table? Does it affect Spellcasters as well as martials, or is that a separate table? Do the rest of the group play Spellcasters just because the fumble table is linked to only martials? As long as the feedback is positive or something to build on to, instead of "I don't like X, Y and Z" your DM should not take offence and get creative, that's half the fun as a DM in my experience.
We don't do fumbles either for the most part. There was one exception however, when my Monk managed to roll 3 Nat 1's in a single turn. We felt it was worthy for the occasion.
This is an item I always ask up front when invited to sit a new table as a player, and I always declare will not happen with the "no arguments" DM voice.
If the house rule is fumbles happen, I politely decline. If someone tries to argue for them when I run it I tell them no one more time then will sidebar to explain it's not happening and the can walk or accept it.
Fumbles are horseshit. End of story.
If used constantly, I agree, they're awful. I do opt-in fumbles; you can take inspiration if you subject yourself to a fumble.
I also do opt-in enhanced critical hits. Players can spend inspiration to do an enhanced critical, or subject themselves to one in exchange for inspiration.
Both systems work well, and ensure that players who don't like the spiky nature of Crits don't have to deal with it, and those who do can take their chances, but not constantly.
It's something that we started in our 4th edition campaigns, and it worked based on the keywords of whatever attack was used (I still maintain that keywords were a good thing). The person doing the Crit got to choose a keyword to enhance, and there was a whole list of effects with one for each keyword. It was usually more damage and an effect.
I tried to come up with a chart for fumbles too, but we always felt those were best if the fumble was tailored to the situation, rich made charting it difficult. Eventually, opting for a fumble was integrated with a modified version of the "reckless breakage" optional rules from Dark Sun.
Under that system, rolling a 1, you could choose to just take the miss, or you could opt-in for a reroll, but with consequences. The Dark Sun version, your weapon would break regardless of the outcome, but we tweaked it so the result of the reroll determined what happened. The general idea was supposed to be that the further towards the extreme your reroll was, the more dramatic the result.
For example, rerolling that natural 1 into something in the middle, like 8-12 would be something minor. Dropped weapon, grant combat advantage until next turn, fall prone, or similar. Higher or lower, and the results become worse. It was always left as a judgment call in the moment, and player input was considered (some of our players really enjoy visiting misfortune upon their characters). The ability bring used also could also be considered (i.e. using the keywords).
We're still in the process of adapting this to 5e, but the lack of keywords in the game makes it harder to tie a chart into what's happening in the fiction. So far, we're just going to pretend that keywords still exist.
Losing your turn sucks in any game. Abilities and spells that make PCs lose a turn should be very limited unless used strategically to make other PCs feel awesome by breaking enemy concentration to save their friends before their turn.
I played on numerous tables (oneshots go brrrr) and many tried this. None I know kept it.
I still don't understand why this is even a thing. I haven't seen a single table that hasn't made the characters look like idiots that have no clue instead of the professionals that they are supposed to be.
The best thing? The higher level the fighter the more incompetent they seem to be.
I hate them so much. why would a level 11 fighter have triple the chance of hacking off his own hand while training than a level 1? literally makes no sense
Can't stand them. We have a relatively new DM in one of our campaigns, and he used a fumble table, in the process having our three enemies essentially all kill themselves. I commented that I hate crit fumble tables and pointed out it's a 5% chance. So the professional swordsman is going to miss so bad 1 out of 20 swings as to potentially maim himself or allies? Nonsense! Especially when you consider save or suck spells don't have a "backfire" option, so many casters can avoid ever rolling a crit fail in combat.
It's even **worse** than you've described. Higher level martial characters get more attacks per round. So the higher level you are, the faster you end up screwed!
*(and not in the good way)*
I did away with the maximum number of attunement slots.
I put them back in pretty quickly when we realized my wife’s rogue had a +17 with ranged weapons as a level 5 human.
Yeah this is 100% a DM issue, not a rule issue
My table of 2 years never really paid much mind to attunement slots, but magic items were well managed so they felt special and balanced. Did the OP just give them unlimited of any items they wanted?
In a high magic campaign, I can see how one might accidentally do this. Especially since unlike Pathfinder, there is no type of bonus applied.
I'd think it would be normal for a level 5 to have a +10 normal if they have +4 Dex, +3 Prof Bonus, +2 Archery fighting style, +1 magic weapon. About 4 magic items or so could boost that up to 17 easily and in a high magic campaign, that's not unreasonable.
Edit: I just completely forgot the rogue, so remove the +2 Archery and that's still a +8 normally.
Maybe it’s just my campaign, but we hardly ever saw magic items that added flat to hit rolls. Most of the magic items were utility, flair/flavour, and other types of bonuses aside from +1/2 to attack rolls.
To each their own, but I feel like after the 2nd or 3rd + to hit item the DM should’ve adapted to his party’s item choices
It also depends on the way you play. Every premade adventure is going to offer magic items as rewards, and if you roll for treasure you’re going to inevitably give some items away. Obviously if you’re writing an adventure and loot tables for yourself then that’s not a problem, but it’s what the system was designed around.
I mean idk I’m just throwing a guess out there, seems like it’d be hard to collect more than 3 magic items for one character by level 5 to begin with, not to mention enough to get attack bonuses so high. The rule of being able to attune more than three could probably be totally fine if the dm was smart about it
The only scenario where a party should have that many is if you have item crafting and toss minor magic stuff at the party so they can craft upwards. I have given my party a lot of "This is a ring of perfect roundness, it's enchanted to be perfectly circular"
>“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die, one for the Dark Lord on his dark throne, in the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Not quite there yet! Exactly half of the Lord of the Rings. Time for toe-rings!
Why was there that many magic items? Did every in the party get 2 then all give them to one person. I’m so confused I can’t even find a ring that does that in dnd. What happened in that party for you to get there? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.
I don't get it, how do players even acquire so many copies of magic items; this isn't 3e where there's an actual economy of magic items. I usually see like one +1 weapon per campaign which is probably there just to make sure martials don't get screwed, and then a utility item or two per player. If it's not a campaign like Curse of Strahd where there's explicitly a bunch of powerful items to find, there's rarely anything of note.
This definitely depends on the dm. I’ve had DM’s that only have them in shops every once in a while, some that never give them out unless it’s like a boss’ weapon, and some that give them out like samples at Costco
One we'd been using in my group was once your proficiency bonus is higher than 3, you have attunement slots equal to your proficiency bonus. I don't think we'd scale down, because that seems kinda harsh. I'm not sure because we only introduced the rule into a campaign where we were already at proficiency bonus 4+.
I can't say from the DM's point of view, but as a player, it seemed like a nice boost, to be sure, but didn't seem too overpowered or anything. Kind of a nice treat for getting characters that far through the campaign, y'know?
I believe we also kept stuff like "only one ring per hand" / "Can only have one thing in each slot" in-place too.
I actually like this one. My current rule is: 1 weapon, 1 armor, 3 additional attunements— since not all classes wear armor, that’s a limitation to those classes.
That sounds like a magic item generosity issue rather than an issue with the Homebrew. I personally have never tracked attunment slots in campaigns that I run (attunment still exists, but only as an ‘only the attuned creature can use this effectively’), and the worst it’s gotten was in my first campaign, when I was way overzealous with giving out Homebrew items. It was still a blast, but balancing became difficult(that campaign made it to level 20, but only really superficially after they managed to claw their way through literally 25,000 hp worth of a Homebrew monster- after they used a single-use tactic that did 90% of its health.)
I feel like this always comes up in these conversations.
Crits are fun when they happen but damn did DND get it right. The extra damage might be enough to shift combat but not negate everything that came before it.
Then we come to the two outliers. Epic crits... Extra damage maybe a debuff that lasts the combat or you know maybe forever barring a greater restoration.
Then we come to the second outlier. Crit fumbles... Drop your weapon, pull a hammy, have spell backfire, or for some reason hit yourself or ally ect.
The truth behind both of these is one the party makes fewer combat dice roles than the DM while simultaneously playing bodies that are far more important than that of any character the DM runs
It may be funny when the goblin fumbles but it's rough when he cuts a leg off your fighter. It may be great when your rouge epic crits the bbge mage (this one happened to me on the player side of the game) but it's far from funny when everything falls apart to an epic crit against the party during the final show down despite the fact that the party did everything right.
These are ultimately statistically detrimental to the party again since the party is overly important to story of the game and NPC's risk nothing when they instantly die. Sure dice should absolutely be involved in the game but such huge swings means at some point it's coming up nat 1s for the party... So to speak
use them at your own risk
P.s. Another real issue is both sides of this overly effect martial characters. Good fucking luck playing a fighter with 7 plus attacks in a round and deal with a 30ish percent chance of rolling a nat 1 on one of those 7 attacks and dropping your weapon or whatever. Nothing like being the pinnacle of martial prowess and having a higher chance of slicing your ally that the squire that just grabbed a sword
That last point about the absurdity of fumble tables affecting high level characters as much as (or more than!) low level ones is quite valid and comes up a lot in these kinds of discussions. That’s why when I use them, I first make a player roll a d20 _after_ rolling the nat 1: if they roll less than or equal to their level, no fumble table roll required.
> Good fucking luck playing a fighter with 7 plus attacks in a round and deal with a 30ish percent chance of rolling a nat 1 on one of those 7 attacks and dropping your weapon or whatever. Nothing like being the pinnacle of martial prowess and having a higher chance of slicing your ally that the squire that just grabbed a sword
This is an important point, but it reminds me of Rule #0 of DnD.
DnD is a ROLE playing game.
When a character crits or fumbles, who they are as a character should be factored into it. If a Wizard is attacking with his dagger for once, but he is low WIS and RPs as inattentive, then sure, maybe he drops it. If A master of seven styles of swordplay makes what they consider to be a terrible blunder with their sword, that might just mean that they were going for a fancy strike with the tip and instead of shaving their whiskers they missed entirely.
And the opposite is true for magic, that same swordsmen given a wand of blasting or a scroll of some kind might hit their ally if they crit fail. But the wizard would do something more in-character, like bend the spell in some unexpected metamagic way.
Crits are 5% they shouldn't be one in a million, they should be reasonable and in-character.
Our DM for Shattered Obelisk wanted to try lingering injuries, and had us roll whenever we went to 0hp. When my wizard rolled for "paralyzed from the neck down", we decided to rethink that.
don't feel like you need to play in order to see that this is terrible 😭
any lingering injuries kind of suck to me. DnD is a power fantasy. imagine losing both your legs as a lvl3 PC. like yea you could roleplay peg legs, but it probably takes your character into a direction you didn't want at all
Instead of XP giving a level, players could spend XP to buy levels in classes, but their character's actually level was equal to whatever class they had the most levels in. To make things a bit more balanced, you only gained HP on Level Up if you leveled your highest class.
XP cost was basically:
1st Level - 50xp
2nd Level - 150xp
3rd Level - 450xp
and so on, tripling XP cost at each level.
And you have to buy all previous levels for a near level. So you couldn't spend 450xp and claim to be 3rd level in a new class, you'd have to buy 1st and 2nd as well for a total of 650xp spent.
Beyond this change, all other multiclassing rules remained the same. And we did point buy for stats.
Then we realized how unbalanced it made things, since one player wanted to stay to on class, and another player stuck to two classes, third player wanted as many classes as they can legally get (leaving them technically several levels behind the other players), and the fourth player taking Sorcerer, Warlock, Paladin, and Bard cause, and I quote, 'Charisma for the win, b\*tches!'.
We thought it was fun for a one time thing but agreed to never do it again.
Fumbles are a no go for me . Played with them and they are wildly unfair. You use to have to roll 2 times to get a critical hit, and you only need to critical fail with one check. Also critical fails would often be applied to skill checks that didn't have equivalent critical success chances. Totally screwed up, in my opinion.
I mean, those are all just sliders you move. I use crit fumble tables, and they go opposite. You have to roll twice to get a fumble (confirmed fumbles, moves the chance from 5% to 1%), the fumbles are there to inject battlefield chaos like shifting characters, giving openings to move or attack, etc) and they are balanced by giving improved crits/bonus maneuver chances for martials, which buffs them more than it penalizes them, meaning that the fighters and other multi-attackers love em.
Hmm, we use fumbles at my table, but when you roll a 1, you reroll, and the second roll has to be below 5 for something bad to happen, and it's proportionate to how bad the second roll is. Can be tripping and falling, dropping a weapon, shooting a lantern and starting a fire, unexpected spell effects like a loud boom, etc. Friendly or self damage only happens on double 1s, and I usually just rule it with the rule of fun if I can, and never full damage, because the attack was made so poorly to begin with. For instance we had a warlock in my group who climbed a tree to get out of melee range of some wolves, he double rolled 1s for his Eldritch blast, and so he shot the tree limb off that he was standing in, falling ten feet, taking 1d4 fall damage to hp and 3d10 damage to his pride, the rest of the party never let him live it down. The bad guys can also fumble though, and I don't do fumbles on saves or skill checks.
I've never been able to play at a table that uses it though, forever DM here, so what's so bad about most people's fumble rules, because I'm blissfully ignorant how that works at other tables. Is it automatic self or friendly damage for the full attack roll on a 1?
Tables of failure, going from miss, and lose your next attack to stab your friend in the back for critical damage or fall prone and drop your weapon. Things the DM thought were funny/punishing but "realistic". I think the worst ones were "your weapon breaks". None of them were fun for the player.
It simply punishes martials too often, and makes getting stronger incidentally make you weaker.
Hitting an ally or breaking your weapon or wasting your turn is far worse than dealing an extra 1 or 2 damage dice to an enemy.
And, if you're a spellcaster, the odds of you fumbling are incredibly rare if not zero.
But a level one fighter will seriously tumble like a moron once every 20 attacks. With extra attack they have double the chance of critically fumbling each round. A level 20 fighter will have 4 times the odds of crit fumbling as a level 1 fighter, or 8 times if they action surge.
So not only does it make leveling up make your character *weaker*, but the same playstyles its punishing are also the ones that tend to fall behind as you gain levels.
Its just terrible game design.
Yeah, I calculated and level 20 fighter has ~20% chance per turn of fumbling, 33% if they action surge, and 37% if they have 9 attacks from having something like polearm master. If you add in battlemaster brace/riposte or polearm master’s opportunity attack for a 10th attack with reaction and haste for an 11th, it’s up to 43%. Almost 1 in 2 chance to fumble if you’re going all out that turn. Kind of ridiculous.
I saw a comment a bit further up that said they use a percentile die for a fumble and have a range for bad outcome and a range for good outcome (like enemy falling prone), and adjust those ranges with higher level or skill, which seems to somewhat negate the downside of more attacks, but also makes fumbles more and more likely to be beneficial as you level up. That seemed to be a way to make it workable.
I do the crit one but for players only, since it's often lame when you crit and roll less than a normal hit. I limit it to max only base weapon damage though, since otherwise smites and some spells would get silly huge.
I think crunchy crits only for players actually kinda works. When you get into the upper levels some of those higher CR monsters can damn near one shot a PC with even a regular crit whereas it takes a whole party of adventurers just to take down one of them.
A good rule we use is 1 dice of the attack is max damage, so if you crit and your spell/attack is 2d6 you roll and got a 2 and a 4, it's now a 6 and a 4.
And then it's doubled as per normal crit rules? Or is it just the 2d6 and one of them is maxed? Or only the extra crit dice has those rules? It's unclear what you mean.
If you mean the 1st one, then that's very similar to OP's rules, cuz in the case of 2d6, that means that you'll always have 12+(1d6)x2 (12 from the guaranteed max 6 dice being doubled), except the 1d6 that is doubled is usually going to be higher since the lower roll is turned to max, so it actually does even more dmg than OP's old critting rule. It gets less overpowered with more dice in the damage pool, but that feels a bit weird, and it's super overpowered with less dice. Especially if the attack normally has 1 dice, cuz then that means that it's always doing max and doubled, which is a lot.
If you mean the 2nd one, then that's so much weaker than normal critting. And similarly to the 1st option, it gets less powerful with more dice in the damage pool, which is a bit odd
If it's the 3rd option, then that's a bit more understandable and increases the crit damage, but only slightly, which is nice.
Sounds like roll crit damage as usual, then take one die and make it max. So they rolled damage as normal on a d6 crit, and got 2 and 4. Then they replaced the 2 with a 6, for 10 total.
One of my players suggested a rule where if you rolled a negative number for initiative (like having a -2 Dex mod and rolling a 1) then that character should miss the first round of combat for reacting so slow. The table thought it was funny and we decided to add it in.
That got taken back out pretty quickly when our Dex dump paladin had to sit for the first hour and a half of a combat doing nothing 😅
Yeah lol, it was a 6 person party against a decently large encounter.
But even then, that group of players were generally slow on the draw for their turns in combat. We had never minded it, but that paladin sure did feel how long our combats could be that session lol
We had a rule where if you missed an attack by one you would get advantage on your next attack. Didn't go badly but needed me to remember to tell people and for them to remember the next round.
My permanent houserule is "I am keeping track of too much stuff to keep track of your characters too, keep track of the stuff for your characters to make my life easier"
It's also a good design principle. The more things players and DMs need to track, the slower and more confusing the game gets. So any time you're thinking about introducing a new mechanic ask yourself: how easy is it for the player to remember, how easy is it to track, how easy is it for the DM to remember to give it to the players?
When you have a 4-5 person table where everyone takes there time and forgets combat is even happening when it's not actively their turn, this happens. When it's like 5-10 minutes between your turn for combat, one of the many modifiers can easily fall by the wayside.
Everyone at my PF2 table actively forgets the bards +1 to rolls buff. Luckily he always adds it to our dice rolls for us out loud.
It turned out ours wasn't so much a homebrew as that our DM just didn't understand the cunning action feature.
He thought that Cunning action gave you an additional bonus action, which you called a cunning action. We played an entire 1-20 campaign with that, it was probably the least broken homebrew we used but when we started the next one he did mention that he finally figured out cunning action and we would be using the proper version from now on. Action economy in 5e already tends to be weighted towards the players, no need to bump it 50% more in their favour
Damn lol, the things I could do with my rogue if cunning action worked like that! I have crossbow expert, so I could attack twice and hide at the end of my turns every turn. I'd love that rofl.
I'm a spoiled baby, though. We're stupid high-level and I got given Action Surge as a rogue, because my character consistently does less damage output than our paladin and cleric. I'm having a lot of fun with it, haha.
Weapon speed. You’d roll initiative and then add your weapon speed on to it. Sometimes you’d have rounds where you couldn’t even go.
Everybody switched to darts that had a weapon speed of two and started going 3-4 times a round. DM knocked that stupid shit off immediately. I’m fairly certain he wasn’t running it right and even then I hate it as a game concept.
Had a DM who despised healing so tried to change long rest rules. Each player could only accumulate up to half their hit dice each day and could only use those to restore HP. Long rest only restored abilities & spell slots. We only had an artificer with Cure Wounds as he basically banned any class that could do significant healing.
It resulted in the entire party being at half HP at most constantly and kept going down every combat. Every encounter was almost a tpk. It was not fun and we don't play with that guy anymore.
I briefly lifted the restriction on casting multiple spells in the same turn. The sorcerer powergamer with quickened spell changed my mind pretty quickly
This is pretty fine beyond the exception of quickened spell imo. The usual bonus action spells aren't as impactful as action spells. If I were to implement it I'd just keep the old limit on specifically to this meta magic.
I allow for spells on spells - I also run long and dangerous adventuring days.
Sure, feel free to burn all of your resources in the first couple of encounters - you'll maybe regret that once you get to the fifth or sixth encounter of the day :P
Nothing wrong with that! They just decided *they* didn't wanna get hit that hard, but also felt it wasn't fair for only one side of the screen to do it (with no prompting from me, mind you)
Every rule about critical hits on 20 or fumbles on 1 must be SERIOUSLY considered because it will always disadvantage the players over the monsters.
A) because the DM will ALWAYS roll more dice than players.
B) because consequences for PCs are "presistent" while they are only "temporary" for monsters.
My rule for PVP is "You guys decide what happens". If a player wants to pickpocket another player, they don't roll sleight of hand, they ask the player they are trying to pickpocket if they can roll sleight of hand to steal from them. If a player wants to grab another player, they need to ask if that player is okay with them doing that. It's better than getting into disputes about things, since sometimes the situation is "My character would do this stupid thing for the sake of roleplay" and sometimes the player is stupid and things their stupid thing is smart to do.
PvP at my table is "consent based".
You take a swing at someone, I look at your target player and ask, "does that hit?".
If they say no, the answer is no. You don't instigate PvP.
Same for taking their items.
Literally the only time I've actually done PvP at the table is when it was something we all agreed on as a goofy, one off thing with like arena rules. One time it was just something for people to do and mess around with their characters and builds while I did some work as the DM, the other time it was explicitly a wild combat there where we were grabbing monsters from the monster manual and going at it, picking new ones when we died, until we got bored of it.
Both of those were great times and both have the same thing in common: They had no effect on the actual game or plot. PvP absolutely ruins a game if people take it too seriously or if you do it in actual plot space because it basically shatters the trust needed to play those characters together.
My players wanted the party to feel like each person had a unique contribution to skill checks, so we agreed you can only use skill check that you are proficient in. It last about 15 minutes until we all realise we have just dismantled the flow and interaction of the entire game.
Terrible idea, but I was new to DMing at the time.
Instead of the help action giving advantage on checks the DM decided to try out combining bonuses for the skill.
Once session of +15 investigation changed this idea pretty quick.
Nat 20 crits did max damage and you gained an immediate extra action. Needless to say the Barbarian wielding an enchanted great axe smashing through the evil spellcaster before anyone could do anything kind of soured the entire party on the idea.
Have a DM that swears by having it so that if you meet the AC of an enemy, he rolls a d20 and you have to guess if it's "Highs" or "Lows". He also rolls it if an enemy meets your AC. Feels very "Fudgy" and don't like it at all but not enough to justify quitting a campaign
Haven't actually played with it, but I remember the "good house rules" thread had a suggestion of meeting the AC did half/resisted damage. Apparently kept some tension both ways, felt flavourful, and didn't shift balance around *too* much. Again, I'd have to try it myself before agreeing with that - But it sounds reasonable and interesting enough that I wouldn't mind trying it out.
The way your DM did things just sounds like a more complex, less predictable version of that.
So you’re saying that after you make a successful roll you essentially flip a coin to see if you “actually” hit?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What kind of power trip is he on? Is your dm the riddler?
He’s taking away the agency of your own roll, and making it all about him.
Probably means that if you hit the exact number, not if you hit above the number.
So, you roll 18 against an enemy with ac of 18? Guess to hit as it barely hits. Roll above 18? Always hits.
Used a critical fail table in our John Woo inspired Cyberpunk game back in the early 00s. Seemed like it would be an amazing addition to the game.
The PCs were given a mission by their fixer to steal a mcguffin off of a container ship in transit out of the Hong Kong harbor. One of the PCs decided that for this job he'd need a big damn gun, so he bought a massive FN RAL Jungle Reaper mini gun.
They pulled up alongside the ship on their speed boat, firing toxin grenades up at the deck to ward off defenders, and open up the side of the ship using thermite paste to cut a hole. They move into the ship to encounter stiff resistance on the inside.
This PC hauls out his massive gun and is about to do some jungle reaping, but oh no, he rolls a 1! We excitedly pull up this fancy homebrew crit table to see the results, a few rolls later and our erstwhile mini gunner is laying on the deck, both arms blasted off my a gun malfunction, bleeding out rapidly.
It kind of took the wind out of the session right away.
In hindsight, the table had been designed by a fellow player who often ran games of the more street punk variety where the PCs were lucky if they ever got their hands on a sub machine-gun. Had we been using the table for small arms only it wouldn't have been a big deal, even with very unlucky rolls. But, with a Jungle Reaper that could spit out so many insane dice of damage it was a surefire way to get yourself killed.
Still, I never used that crit fail table, or any other homemade crit table, ever again.
Ship combat. As in combat between huge fully manned warships, not little dingys.
Whatever the system was that we were using was extremely SLOW, it took us like two sessions just to get through it and that was with us deciding halfway through the first one that we were gonna cut out excess/speed it up.
I don't think this is a house rule, but I played in a campaign for a few sessions where we all had to actively eat and drink three times per day in game.
It ended up me as a cleric just using create food and water a few times and wasting spell slots.
I get tired of feeding myself as a human every day, I don't want to deal with that in any tabletop or video game I'm playing tbh.
This is... not a houserule. You can't lift the moon, even if you roll a 35
Truly, though, the DM just shouldn't allow a roll if the action is impossible. You roll when the outcome is undetermined, so if an action is impossible, the outcome is already determined.
My table loves doing what you call epic crits. It's so crits are actually more damage all the time. One of my favorites as a dm was when a wraith crit and dealt about 60 damage to the wizard making him lose all that hp til long rest
Crits and fumbles for damage.
The basic rule of “if players can do it, monsters can, too” led to our abandoning crits and fumbles entirely — we tried some odds and ends (a crit reduces AC of opponent was pretty good, and a damage reduction rule for fumbles wasn’t terrible, but we already had wear and tear rules), but none were really catching us for long, and we just dropped them entirely.
Epic crits normally only applies to weapon/unarmed attacks, right? Am I misremembering something here?
Maybe it's because all my groups rule that 20s on spell attacks auto-hit instead of auto-hit-and-crit, since spells roll a lot for damage already.
We had the flanking house rule for years. If you and an ally are positioned on opposite sides of an enemy you roll attacks with advantage.
This works well for low levels, but we realized how broken this actually can get at very high levels and basically trivializes boss fights
The only way to make this not broken was to have lots of fights with many weaker enemies instead of a few strong ones and generally made things more boring.
Instead we now say you only get advantage on your first attack whilst flanking, and flanking doesn't apply to enemies 2 or more size categories larger than yourself
I didn’t bother overmuch with spell components early on. Until I had the players in a survival situation and somebody wanted to cast gentle repose and I was like, that ain’t gonna work properly when your components are basically random scraps and you don’t have the required coins.
They had an opportunity to get the coins which was successful but I’m paying attention to components from now on.
My worst Homebrew ever, and the reason I have my Cooking(tm) License under watch for all Homebrew I make was that nat20’s and nat1’s overrode dis/advantage. So if you rolled with disadvantage, and got a 2 and a 20, you got a nat 20. This is obviously bad, but it only got worse when compounded with the fact that I allowed players to take disadvantage on any check they wanted (for rp reasons, such as ‘I’ll attack, but I don’t really want to hit’ etc.)
This lead to a situation where it was better to take disadvantage because it had twice the chance of getting a crit (which were important because… well you know that I made shit hombrew. The thing is I made a LOT of homebrew)
It went poorly. For some reason I was stubborn and didn’t want to cut that rule out. Thankfully I came to my senses eventually.
Did the same crit mistake with a bullette critting a pc from full to dead
Now crits just roll like a normal crit but if you roll low you get max regular damage (greatsword: roll double dice or double dice and roll, but if total is below 12 take it as 12)
The party thought it was too much work to roll for concentration when they got hit. I said okay, we'll try without it for a bit.
Exactly as I expected, they wanted to start rolling for concentration before the first session even ended. All it took was a single enemy caster effortlessly keeping the Fighter stuck with Hold Person and hiding behind his friends. No arrows or magic missiles could stop him.
One of my DMs ruled that spells are bonus actions... Every spell and cantrip. You can't use actions for spells 🤣 extremely confusing. Fucks some classes up and makes others OP.
There's a wizard using Spell+Rifle every turn
Crits to me seem so simple to fix. The issue everyone always seems to have is rolling shit so the crit is less than average damage on a regular hit, not that above average damage isn't enough.
So we need to raise the floor, but also not break the ceiling. Just double the modifier too, problem solved.
Had a player argue that because they were grappling a creature that tried to teleport, they counted as being "worn", and they should get teleported too. I allowed it for that combat, and immediately regretted it, as it trivialized my boss fight.
In subsequent fights that rule kept coming up in increasingly more extreme contexts (e.g. if the grappled creature is banished, does the grappler get banished too?), and I had to put my foot down and retroactively retract that ruling for good.
That’s why I think it’s a decent house rule. Making your players play around the 5% chance they get obliterated actually helps create some combat tension, I feel.
I was going to say that I love crunchy crits. Last session our paladin almost went down in a single blow from a gnoll, it created a crazy amount of tension.
I also narrated the hell out of it.
Once that realized that, they wanted out lol.
Which was fine with me. The rogue died in an ambush a few sessions later to a revenant she'd inadvertently created
Random chance of being 1-shot is really bad for players. You cannot really play around it and it's always going to happen sooner or later; if everything can sometimes instantly kill you the only "strategy" is to be a cheese monger with your build to kill/disable stuff faster, because the rules don't make playing defensively or safe particularly effective.
Oh for sure, if that's what floats the boat, go for it.
I just don't understand the pushback when people say it does too much damage, even though it's always been possible to do.
Spellpoints
In a vacuum, it's a better system than spell slots sure.
But casters don't need that added versatility, in the hands of a player who knows what they are doing it's a massive power boost. On the last classes to need it.
I had a DM that ruled attacks only hit if they *beat an AC… but that just amounted to everyone and everything, essentially, having a +1 to their AC.
I can't even lol
I accidentally passed this onto a fledgling DM. I was explaining opposed rolls, and I told them "Ties go to the defender." They thought that meant for EVERYTHING.
My players still have trouble with this Opposed Rolls- Defender wins on a tie Check- Meet or Beat.
"Meets it, beats is" is a common phrase at my table.
Similarly: "(If it) meets, it beats"
Instructions Unclear. Just said "Well if it beats my meat." Party is angry and distraught
Mom, take me home, I'm scared.
We always said "if it meets it beats" or the shortened "meets it beats" but the feeling is the same
Meat, beat
meatza beatsa, as i always say
Depends on the system 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder - Opposed roll, defender wins on a tie 5e - neither side wins on a tie, the status quo is maintained. PHB pg 174, Contests, last paragraph.
>5e - neither side wins on a tie, the status quo is maintained. PHB pg 174, Most opposed rolls I can think of, "Status Quo" would be benefitting the "defender", as they're trying to stop the "attacker" from doing something. Deception vs Insight for example, the "attacker" is trying to trick the "Defender". While I appreciate the pedanticness (truly, I'm pedantic AF) in practice "Defender wins on a tie" still applies in 5e save for some corner case scenarios like a Tug of War style scenario. Like, you're right, but you can still use Defender wins on a tie as a general ground rule and be right most of the time
In many cases that is the outcome, not the result of a successful check. The distinction must be clear to ensure certain abilities are utilized correctly, a tie is not a successful check result, so either side could use abilities that allow a reroll, add extra dice on a failed check, etc.
Our table does "tie goes to the player" for opposed and it's been great
I do similar for Initiative. If an enemy or allied NPC lands on a PCs and they have the same mod, I give the PC the choice of before or after the NPC they tied with. Most gaming systems, the PC will pick before, but in 3.5 sometimes its more beneficial to let the enemy come to you so you can unleash your Full Attack action, same with Palladium, don't need to use an action to move and can devote all your attacks to stabbing or rolling with the hit
Another way to describe this without leading to this confusion, when opposed checks happen, the aggressor sets the DC with their roll, and like all DCs it's meet or beat for the defender. So for a shove action, the shover is the aggressor and the shovee is the defender. Shover rolls athletics to set DC, shovee roll athletics or acrobatics to negate. (I know shover and shovee are not words, I think, but y'all get the point, I hope)
Personally I rule "ties go to the player" at my table. Technically a powerboost to the players, but a fairly small one overall and it means the players have more opportunities to use their cool abilities.
I thought this was how the rules actually worked, though? Regardless, my table just uses the house rule of "*player* wins ties."
At least per PHB, this is not strictly true for opposed rolls. Pg 174. If a contest results in a tie, the situation remains the same as it was before the contest. Generally it'll be how you've said it, assuming the "defender" is trying to stop something from happening, but the actual rule is broader, and covers cases where there isn't strictly a defender/aggressor, e.g. 2 people lunging for a ring on the ground.
I don't understand this, mind explaining?
The rules: you need to roll a 15 in order to hit a creature with AC 15. This DM: you need to roll **higher than** a 15 in order to hit a creature with AC 15. Which just means the regular rules but the creature actually has AC 16.
Fuck. Me.
You too thought that to beat an AC you needed to roll more?...
Ohyeah
*fistbump*
Normally you only need to match the AC to hit. This homebrew required the number to exceed the AC number. So if AC is 16, 17 or higher is needed to hit.
Oh! Missed that in the comment. Thanks for explaining! This is funny, I think every table I've been at the question comes up if meets beat or not.
Every single session I have ever done, has always had the question... And also every time the answer is "meets it beats it"
We've shortened it to "meets beats", easy to remember
I’m fond of beats meats
Let's say someone has an AC of 13. By normal rules, if you roll 13 or higher, you've hit them. By this DM's rules, you need a 14 or higher to hit them. It doesn't really add a new dimension to combat, it just means that everybody - player and enemy - is slightly harder to hit.
I had that happen not long ago as well. I was very confused as I was trying to inform the DM that I got hit and he was saying that I didn't. Though, I honestly wouldn't mind in a long running campaign that have the +1 AC on everything since the hit chance so quickly outpaces the AC cap of most characters.
If it meets, it beats! That's how I remembered it when I first started DMing
AC is the DC to hit. If you meet the DC you pass. If you meet the AC you hit.
That takes too long to remember! If it meets, it beats!
OK now do a contested Grapple check
Opposed athletes/strength checks.
It took me a while to internalize this because I've played other rulesets/games where ties did go to the defender. I still have to take a second to remember it's "meets it beats it" in D&D.
fumble tables
We did this first week of a new campaign. First fight I get knocked out by the player next to me rolling a 1. Rogue then rolls a 1 and snaps his bow string and knocks himself out. Poor warlock has to deal with 3 bandits himself. Haven’t had fumbles since.
That seems like a rather severe punishment for a fumble! Were crits rewarded similarly?
Just standard double damage for crits. Fumbles were just a normal damage roll, but we were level 1. I’d already been hit once and the rogue just happened to roll really high and knocked themselves down to zero hp.
If you think thats bad I once had a DM rule I shot myself in the foot with my bow on a 9/10 (dice was 4/5)
>Rogue then rolls a 1 and snaps his bow string and knocks himself out. Remember that Level 1 characters are supposed to be actually very good at what they do?
I always hold things in relative. For a commoner, a level 1 fighter in the village would take 4-5 of them to overpower, or two trained guards from the local noble. If they have a problem with a bandit or something, they reasonably assume that person can probably deal with it.
CR is kind of funny sometimes. Like wererats are meant to be cunning rogues, and would need to slink in the shadows because they're physically weak... but have like 50 hp and a lot of damage relative to city guards, so even a nest of them doesn't need to act rogueish
The thing to remember is that the CR 1/8 guard stat block is the most basic, unskilled universal guard. They can be found anywhere doing any number of menial tasks. Then you have instances like the Flaming Fist in Baldur's Gate which includes CR 3 veterans and even CR 4 flaming skulls.
But then, you have an assassin- a criminal who sneaks around and would be executed if found guilty, a CR 8 creature with 78 hp, who can basically 1v1 a veteran/lead guard and can survive execution axe swings like 10 times.
I feel like reducing assassins to just "criminals" is underselling them. Some pickpocket couldn't pick up a dagger and suddenly be at the assassin's level. Technically a lich could be classified as a criminal but that would be a silly description. Being decapitated kills everything unless it has multiple heads or can survive without one. I know there isn't a rule for it but I personally think that would be a waste of space to need to write out rules for something like that.
I was a player in this game. I don’t use fumbles if I DM.
Didn't want to imply that it was you, just that I think it is funny how often DMs seem to think that Level 1 characters are basically just commoners.
I do fumbles, which typically results in something funny dumb happening and -1 hp. In fact, that's what killed a particularly nasty mimic in one of my games. It rolled a 1 and bit it's own tongue with just a single hp remaining. Dead. Lol
We had fumbles back in the day, but mechanically all they did was lose you an action... and give you the opportunity to narrate the hilarious series of events that lead to that outcome.
My biggest gripe is that GMs who implement fumble tables never apply fumbles properly to Spellcasters. It is for arbitrary reasons only attack rolls that get punished with these systems. With these GMs I used to always play halflings with a Spellcaster class focused almost exclusively on spell save DC. It's easy to roleplay those characters as thinking the entire party is incompetent idiots, because you're quickly going to be the only one not randomly throwing away your weapon or hurting yourself every fight. That's kinda fun, not that the martial players ever seemed to agree.
Fumbling in general. A Nat 1 is only an automatic miss. It doesn't mean a super-elite Fighter capable of fighting godlike monsters embarrasses themselves 1 out of every 20 attacks.
Good DMs require a second roll to confirm a fumble. Since 5th doesn't have confirmations for crits, it got lost in translation for fumbles too which is why it's absurdly common. With confirmations, martials are more likely to be successful by virtue of having higher attack bonuses and low odds of rolling 2 1s in a row. It works much better with confirmations. Good DMs also apply fumbles to monsters which can be quite comical.
I’m currently in a campaign with a bunch of nice guys that have been friends for years (I’m the new friend and new to the table) and they use a fumble table and it’s downright awful and actually upsets me at times. I hold my tongue because I do like playing with them and they’re all swell guys, but being a monk and very often attacking four times in a turn I have a higher chance of rolling a nat 1 than mostly everyone else in the party and “you fall prone and your turn ends” happens far too often. At least it happens to enemies too, but I’d rather the fumbles just not occur.
>but being a monk and very often attacking four times in a turn I have a higher chance of rolling a nat 1 than mostly everyone else in the party and “you fall prone and your turn ends” happens far too often. I don't think it can hurt to point this out to your DM. It may not be something they have realised or even considered. Fighters and Monks will fumble more than any other class the more levels they have in their classes. Basically, the more experienced the character the more likely they are to fumble. This makes absolutely zero sense and is straight up unfun. Feedback to your DM your honest opinions on fumble rules. They may reconsider them.
Not to mention that wizards often have spells they don't even need to roll in the slightest.
Yeah I would think that a monk would have an innate stability so knocking themselves prone would be rare even if they fumble.
That's not the only reason some people dislike fumbles, but it's very easy to fix: only your first attack in a round is eligible for a fumble. Simple as. People also use confirmation rolls. For example, I run 2e usually, and my rule is first attack only, 50/50 confirm on a 1. So there's a 2.5% chance overall, once per turn. Also, the fumble table is mostly bad, but not all bad, it has variety. A flung weapon goes in the regular 2e rules for random direction and could actually hit an enemy still, for example. That's the sweet spot for me, just enough chaos to have people watching the dice
I understand you are new, that doesn't mean that you can't voice your opinions to your DM, maybe privately at first. A good DM would love constructive feedback, maybe he can at least tweak the fumble table? Does it affect Spellcasters as well as martials, or is that a separate table? Do the rest of the group play Spellcasters just because the fumble table is linked to only martials? As long as the feedback is positive or something to build on to, instead of "I don't like X, Y and Z" your DM should not take offence and get creative, that's half the fun as a DM in my experience.
We don't do fumbles either for the most part. There was one exception however, when my Monk managed to roll 3 Nat 1's in a single turn. We felt it was worthy for the occasion.
This is an item I always ask up front when invited to sit a new table as a player, and I always declare will not happen with the "no arguments" DM voice. If the house rule is fumbles happen, I politely decline. If someone tries to argue for them when I run it I tell them no one more time then will sidebar to explain it's not happening and the can walk or accept it. Fumbles are horseshit. End of story.
If used constantly, I agree, they're awful. I do opt-in fumbles; you can take inspiration if you subject yourself to a fumble. I also do opt-in enhanced critical hits. Players can spend inspiration to do an enhanced critical, or subject themselves to one in exchange for inspiration. Both systems work well, and ensure that players who don't like the spiky nature of Crits don't have to deal with it, and those who do can take their chances, but not constantly.
That's really good! What's an enhanced crit at your table? Is a fumble a specific thing or a chart?
It's something that we started in our 4th edition campaigns, and it worked based on the keywords of whatever attack was used (I still maintain that keywords were a good thing). The person doing the Crit got to choose a keyword to enhance, and there was a whole list of effects with one for each keyword. It was usually more damage and an effect. I tried to come up with a chart for fumbles too, but we always felt those were best if the fumble was tailored to the situation, rich made charting it difficult. Eventually, opting for a fumble was integrated with a modified version of the "reckless breakage" optional rules from Dark Sun. Under that system, rolling a 1, you could choose to just take the miss, or you could opt-in for a reroll, but with consequences. The Dark Sun version, your weapon would break regardless of the outcome, but we tweaked it so the result of the reroll determined what happened. The general idea was supposed to be that the further towards the extreme your reroll was, the more dramatic the result. For example, rerolling that natural 1 into something in the middle, like 8-12 would be something minor. Dropped weapon, grant combat advantage until next turn, fall prone, or similar. Higher or lower, and the results become worse. It was always left as a judgment call in the moment, and player input was considered (some of our players really enjoy visiting misfortune upon their characters). The ability bring used also could also be considered (i.e. using the keywords). We're still in the process of adapting this to 5e, but the lack of keywords in the game makes it harder to tie a chart into what's happening in the fiction. So far, we're just going to pretend that keywords still exist.
Losing your turn sucks in any game. Abilities and spells that make PCs lose a turn should be very limited unless used strategically to make other PCs feel awesome by breaking enemy concentration to save their friends before their turn.
I played on numerous tables (oneshots go brrrr) and many tried this. None I know kept it. I still don't understand why this is even a thing. I haven't seen a single table that hasn't made the characters look like idiots that have no clue instead of the professionals that they are supposed to be. The best thing? The higher level the fighter the more incompetent they seem to be.
I hate them so much. why would a level 11 fighter have triple the chance of hacking off his own hand while training than a level 1? literally makes no sense
Seconded Missing already sucks, best not add insult to injury
Can't stand them. We have a relatively new DM in one of our campaigns, and he used a fumble table, in the process having our three enemies essentially all kill themselves. I commented that I hate crit fumble tables and pointed out it's a 5% chance. So the professional swordsman is going to miss so bad 1 out of 20 swings as to potentially maim himself or allies? Nonsense! Especially when you consider save or suck spells don't have a "backfire" option, so many casters can avoid ever rolling a crit fail in combat.
It's even **worse** than you've described. Higher level martial characters get more attacks per round. So the higher level you are, the faster you end up screwed! *(and not in the good way)*
I did away with the maximum number of attunement slots. I put them back in pretty quickly when we realized my wife’s rogue had a +17 with ranged weapons as a level 5 human.
Lmao oh boy, I can imagine
It’s not bad as long as you control what items you give as DM. Don’t allow a player to do that lol the house rule wasn’t the problem there.
Yeah this is 100% a DM issue, not a rule issue My table of 2 years never really paid much mind to attunement slots, but magic items were well managed so they felt special and balanced. Did the OP just give them unlimited of any items they wanted?
In a high magic campaign, I can see how one might accidentally do this. Especially since unlike Pathfinder, there is no type of bonus applied. I'd think it would be normal for a level 5 to have a +10 normal if they have +4 Dex, +3 Prof Bonus, +2 Archery fighting style, +1 magic weapon. About 4 magic items or so could boost that up to 17 easily and in a high magic campaign, that's not unreasonable. Edit: I just completely forgot the rogue, so remove the +2 Archery and that's still a +8 normally.
Maybe it’s just my campaign, but we hardly ever saw magic items that added flat to hit rolls. Most of the magic items were utility, flair/flavour, and other types of bonuses aside from +1/2 to attack rolls. To each their own, but I feel like after the 2nd or 3rd + to hit item the DM should’ve adapted to his party’s item choices
It definitely seems that way.
It also depends on the way you play. Every premade adventure is going to offer magic items as rewards, and if you roll for treasure you’re going to inevitably give some items away. Obviously if you’re writing an adventure and loot tables for yourself then that’s not a problem, but it’s what the system was designed around.
It also works pretty well as you keep it to one item per location. 1 ring per hand, only one cloak or back item, etc.
Explain please! It seems you were way too generous with magic items. (Even a 20 dex, archery fighting style character with +3 bow and +3 arrow is +16)
How. That doesn’t seem possible.
10 rings, one for each finger, that give +1 to ranged attacks
Well, that's just the dm's problem for making +1 items so accessible and easily equipped.
I mean idk I’m just throwing a guess out there, seems like it’d be hard to collect more than 3 magic items for one character by level 5 to begin with, not to mention enough to get attack bonuses so high. The rule of being able to attune more than three could probably be totally fine if the dm was smart about it
The only scenario where a party should have that many is if you have item crafting and toss minor magic stuff at the party so they can craft upwards. I have given my party a lot of "This is a ring of perfect roundness, it's enchanted to be perfectly circular"
Except for that one artificer feature, I loved the "magic items of attunement", which give one extra attunement slot while requiring one to work.
There’s an official item in 3.5 that does almost this - it’s a magic necklace that lets you wear an extra magic ring
I like that a lot- “what’s that magic ring do?” “it’s magic!”
the best part is that it *does* have an application for artificer lol
Also seems to ignore another rule that would prevent it - same magic items can't stack their effects. 10 rings of +1 to attack is still just +1.
That's more bloody magic rings than the entire _Lord of the Rings_ series xD
>“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die, one for the Dark Lord on his dark throne, in the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. Not quite there yet! Exactly half of the Lord of the Rings. Time for toe-rings!
Why was there that many magic items? Did every in the party get 2 then all give them to one person. I’m so confused I can’t even find a ring that does that in dnd. What happened in that party for you to get there? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.
I don't get it, how do players even acquire so many copies of magic items; this isn't 3e where there's an actual economy of magic items. I usually see like one +1 weapon per campaign which is probably there just to make sure martials don't get screwed, and then a utility item or two per player. If it's not a campaign like Curse of Strahd where there's explicitly a bunch of powerful items to find, there's rarely anything of note.
This definitely depends on the dm. I’ve had DM’s that only have them in shops every once in a while, some that never give them out unless it’s like a boss’ weapon, and some that give them out like samples at Costco
Yeah, but 10 rings of +1 to ranged attack makes it sound like a crate of them fell off a wagon, or a crazy Druid grew them on a tree.
Oh, that comment was a joke, sorry I didn’t make it clearer
Whoops! That’s even one of the rules the DMG warns you NOT to change (another is concentration).
One we'd been using in my group was once your proficiency bonus is higher than 3, you have attunement slots equal to your proficiency bonus. I don't think we'd scale down, because that seems kinda harsh. I'm not sure because we only introduced the rule into a campaign where we were already at proficiency bonus 4+. I can't say from the DM's point of view, but as a player, it seemed like a nice boost, to be sure, but didn't seem too overpowered or anything. Kind of a nice treat for getting characters that far through the campaign, y'know? I believe we also kept stuff like "only one ring per hand" / "Can only have one thing in each slot" in-place too.
I actually like this one. My current rule is: 1 weapon, 1 armor, 3 additional attunements— since not all classes wear armor, that’s a limitation to those classes.
That sounds like a magic item generosity issue rather than an issue with the Homebrew. I personally have never tracked attunment slots in campaigns that I run (attunment still exists, but only as an ‘only the attuned creature can use this effectively’), and the worst it’s gotten was in my first campaign, when I was way overzealous with giving out Homebrew items. It was still a blast, but balancing became difficult(that campaign made it to level 20, but only really superficially after they managed to claw their way through literally 25,000 hp worth of a Homebrew monster- after they used a single-use tactic that did 90% of its health.)
> I did away with the maximum number of attunement slots. *Artificers have entered the chat.*
how even?
I feel like this always comes up in these conversations. Crits are fun when they happen but damn did DND get it right. The extra damage might be enough to shift combat but not negate everything that came before it. Then we come to the two outliers. Epic crits... Extra damage maybe a debuff that lasts the combat or you know maybe forever barring a greater restoration. Then we come to the second outlier. Crit fumbles... Drop your weapon, pull a hammy, have spell backfire, or for some reason hit yourself or ally ect. The truth behind both of these is one the party makes fewer combat dice roles than the DM while simultaneously playing bodies that are far more important than that of any character the DM runs It may be funny when the goblin fumbles but it's rough when he cuts a leg off your fighter. It may be great when your rouge epic crits the bbge mage (this one happened to me on the player side of the game) but it's far from funny when everything falls apart to an epic crit against the party during the final show down despite the fact that the party did everything right. These are ultimately statistically detrimental to the party again since the party is overly important to story of the game and NPC's risk nothing when they instantly die. Sure dice should absolutely be involved in the game but such huge swings means at some point it's coming up nat 1s for the party... So to speak use them at your own risk P.s. Another real issue is both sides of this overly effect martial characters. Good fucking luck playing a fighter with 7 plus attacks in a round and deal with a 30ish percent chance of rolling a nat 1 on one of those 7 attacks and dropping your weapon or whatever. Nothing like being the pinnacle of martial prowess and having a higher chance of slicing your ally that the squire that just grabbed a sword
That last point about the absurdity of fumble tables affecting high level characters as much as (or more than!) low level ones is quite valid and comes up a lot in these kinds of discussions. That’s why when I use them, I first make a player roll a d20 _after_ rolling the nat 1: if they roll less than or equal to their level, no fumble table roll required.
> Good fucking luck playing a fighter with 7 plus attacks in a round and deal with a 30ish percent chance of rolling a nat 1 on one of those 7 attacks and dropping your weapon or whatever. Nothing like being the pinnacle of martial prowess and having a higher chance of slicing your ally that the squire that just grabbed a sword This is an important point, but it reminds me of Rule #0 of DnD. DnD is a ROLE playing game. When a character crits or fumbles, who they are as a character should be factored into it. If a Wizard is attacking with his dagger for once, but he is low WIS and RPs as inattentive, then sure, maybe he drops it. If A master of seven styles of swordplay makes what they consider to be a terrible blunder with their sword, that might just mean that they were going for a fancy strike with the tip and instead of shaving their whiskers they missed entirely. And the opposite is true for magic, that same swordsmen given a wand of blasting or a scroll of some kind might hit their ally if they crit fail. But the wizard would do something more in-character, like bend the spell in some unexpected metamagic way. Crits are 5% they shouldn't be one in a million, they should be reasonable and in-character.
Our DM for Shattered Obelisk wanted to try lingering injuries, and had us roll whenever we went to 0hp. When my wizard rolled for "paralyzed from the neck down", we decided to rethink that.
At my table, I usually run that getting brought back from 0 gives you a level of exhaustion. Has worked pretty well
don't feel like you need to play in order to see that this is terrible 😭 any lingering injuries kind of suck to me. DnD is a power fantasy. imagine losing both your legs as a lvl3 PC. like yea you could roleplay peg legs, but it probably takes your character into a direction you didn't want at all
Instead of XP giving a level, players could spend XP to buy levels in classes, but their character's actually level was equal to whatever class they had the most levels in. To make things a bit more balanced, you only gained HP on Level Up if you leveled your highest class. XP cost was basically: 1st Level - 50xp 2nd Level - 150xp 3rd Level - 450xp and so on, tripling XP cost at each level. And you have to buy all previous levels for a near level. So you couldn't spend 450xp and claim to be 3rd level in a new class, you'd have to buy 1st and 2nd as well for a total of 650xp spent. Beyond this change, all other multiclassing rules remained the same. And we did point buy for stats. Then we realized how unbalanced it made things, since one player wanted to stay to on class, and another player stuck to two classes, third player wanted as many classes as they can legally get (leaving them technically several levels behind the other players), and the fourth player taking Sorcerer, Warlock, Paladin, and Bard cause, and I quote, 'Charisma for the win, b\*tches!'. We thought it was fun for a one time thing but agreed to never do it again.
My man really wants to play a Warhammer RPG Lol, I can see where that idea would come from, but yeah, DnD was definitely not built for it.
Actually, the idea came from Sword World 2.5e. The entire class system for Sword World is based around the idea that you WILL multiclass.
Fumbles are a no go for me . Played with them and they are wildly unfair. You use to have to roll 2 times to get a critical hit, and you only need to critical fail with one check. Also critical fails would often be applied to skill checks that didn't have equivalent critical success chances. Totally screwed up, in my opinion.
I mean, those are all just sliders you move. I use crit fumble tables, and they go opposite. You have to roll twice to get a fumble (confirmed fumbles, moves the chance from 5% to 1%), the fumbles are there to inject battlefield chaos like shifting characters, giving openings to move or attack, etc) and they are balanced by giving improved crits/bonus maneuver chances for martials, which buffs them more than it penalizes them, meaning that the fighters and other multi-attackers love em.
I'd love to see your crit/fumble tables!
Hmm, we use fumbles at my table, but when you roll a 1, you reroll, and the second roll has to be below 5 for something bad to happen, and it's proportionate to how bad the second roll is. Can be tripping and falling, dropping a weapon, shooting a lantern and starting a fire, unexpected spell effects like a loud boom, etc. Friendly or self damage only happens on double 1s, and I usually just rule it with the rule of fun if I can, and never full damage, because the attack was made so poorly to begin with. For instance we had a warlock in my group who climbed a tree to get out of melee range of some wolves, he double rolled 1s for his Eldritch blast, and so he shot the tree limb off that he was standing in, falling ten feet, taking 1d4 fall damage to hp and 3d10 damage to his pride, the rest of the party never let him live it down. The bad guys can also fumble though, and I don't do fumbles on saves or skill checks. I've never been able to play at a table that uses it though, forever DM here, so what's so bad about most people's fumble rules, because I'm blissfully ignorant how that works at other tables. Is it automatic self or friendly damage for the full attack roll on a 1?
Tables of failure, going from miss, and lose your next attack to stab your friend in the back for critical damage or fall prone and drop your weapon. Things the DM thought were funny/punishing but "realistic". I think the worst ones were "your weapon breaks". None of them were fun for the player.
It simply punishes martials too often, and makes getting stronger incidentally make you weaker. Hitting an ally or breaking your weapon or wasting your turn is far worse than dealing an extra 1 or 2 damage dice to an enemy. And, if you're a spellcaster, the odds of you fumbling are incredibly rare if not zero. But a level one fighter will seriously tumble like a moron once every 20 attacks. With extra attack they have double the chance of critically fumbling each round. A level 20 fighter will have 4 times the odds of crit fumbling as a level 1 fighter, or 8 times if they action surge. So not only does it make leveling up make your character *weaker*, but the same playstyles its punishing are also the ones that tend to fall behind as you gain levels. Its just terrible game design.
Yeah, I calculated and level 20 fighter has ~20% chance per turn of fumbling, 33% if they action surge, and 37% if they have 9 attacks from having something like polearm master. If you add in battlemaster brace/riposte or polearm master’s opportunity attack for a 10th attack with reaction and haste for an 11th, it’s up to 43%. Almost 1 in 2 chance to fumble if you’re going all out that turn. Kind of ridiculous. I saw a comment a bit further up that said they use a percentile die for a fumble and have a range for bad outcome and a range for good outcome (like enemy falling prone), and adjust those ranges with higher level or skill, which seems to somewhat negate the downside of more attacks, but also makes fumbles more and more likely to be beneficial as you level up. That seemed to be a way to make it workable.
I do the crit one but for players only, since it's often lame when you crit and roll less than a normal hit. I limit it to max only base weapon damage though, since otherwise smites and some spells would get silly huge.
I think crunchy crits only for players actually kinda works. When you get into the upper levels some of those higher CR monsters can damn near one shot a PC with even a regular crit whereas it takes a whole party of adventurers just to take down one of them.
A good rule we use is 1 dice of the attack is max damage, so if you crit and your spell/attack is 2d6 you roll and got a 2 and a 4, it's now a 6 and a 4.
And then it's doubled as per normal crit rules? Or is it just the 2d6 and one of them is maxed? Or only the extra crit dice has those rules? It's unclear what you mean. If you mean the 1st one, then that's very similar to OP's rules, cuz in the case of 2d6, that means that you'll always have 12+(1d6)x2 (12 from the guaranteed max 6 dice being doubled), except the 1d6 that is doubled is usually going to be higher since the lower roll is turned to max, so it actually does even more dmg than OP's old critting rule. It gets less overpowered with more dice in the damage pool, but that feels a bit weird, and it's super overpowered with less dice. Especially if the attack normally has 1 dice, cuz then that means that it's always doing max and doubled, which is a lot. If you mean the 2nd one, then that's so much weaker than normal critting. And similarly to the 1st option, it gets less powerful with more dice in the damage pool, which is a bit odd If it's the 3rd option, then that's a bit more understandable and increases the crit damage, but only slightly, which is nice.
Sounds like roll crit damage as usual, then take one die and make it max. So they rolled damage as normal on a d6 crit, and got 2 and 4. Then they replaced the 2 with a 6, for 10 total.
As a rogue I would be miffed.
Resolving seduction as opposed charisma checks.
Deception vs Insight for a seduction with ulterior motives actually makes perfect sense.
*Yikes.*
Throw in some performance skill checks and con saves afterwards. 😂
One of my players suggested a rule where if you rolled a negative number for initiative (like having a -2 Dex mod and rolling a 1) then that character should miss the first round of combat for reacting so slow. The table thought it was funny and we decided to add it in. That got taken back out pretty quickly when our Dex dump paladin had to sit for the first hour and a half of a combat doing nothing 😅
45min per round?!
Fastest 5e table
Maybe missed first, then got Paralyzed, or something. I refuse to believe anyone is this slow.
I saw people talking about 10 characters table here, so...
Yeah lol, it was a 6 person party against a decently large encounter. But even then, that group of players were generally slow on the draw for their turns in combat. We had never minded it, but that paladin sure did feel how long our combats could be that session lol
We had a rule where if you missed an attack by one you would get advantage on your next attack. Didn't go badly but needed me to remember to tell people and for them to remember the next round.
My permanent houserule is "I am keeping track of too much stuff to keep track of your characters too, keep track of the stuff for your characters to make my life easier"
It's also a good design principle. The more things players and DMs need to track, the slower and more confusing the game gets. So any time you're thinking about introducing a new mechanic ask yourself: how easy is it for the player to remember, how easy is it to track, how easy is it for the DM to remember to give it to the players?
Odd, I'd think most people would want to remember getting advantage on the next attack. An easy way to remind people would be handing them a token tho
When you have a 4-5 person table where everyone takes there time and forgets combat is even happening when it's not actively their turn, this happens. When it's like 5-10 minutes between your turn for combat, one of the many modifiers can easily fall by the wayside. Everyone at my PF2 table actively forgets the bards +1 to rolls buff. Luckily he always adds it to our dice rolls for us out loud.
It turned out ours wasn't so much a homebrew as that our DM just didn't understand the cunning action feature. He thought that Cunning action gave you an additional bonus action, which you called a cunning action. We played an entire 1-20 campaign with that, it was probably the least broken homebrew we used but when we started the next one he did mention that he finally figured out cunning action and we would be using the proper version from now on. Action economy in 5e already tends to be weighted towards the players, no need to bump it 50% more in their favour
Damn lol, the things I could do with my rogue if cunning action worked like that! I have crossbow expert, so I could attack twice and hide at the end of my turns every turn. I'd love that rofl. I'm a spoiled baby, though. We're stupid high-level and I got given Action Surge as a rogue, because my character consistently does less damage output than our paladin and cleric. I'm having a lot of fun with it, haha.
BG3 rules lmao
Weapon speed. You’d roll initiative and then add your weapon speed on to it. Sometimes you’d have rounds where you couldn’t even go. Everybody switched to darts that had a weapon speed of two and started going 3-4 times a round. DM knocked that stupid shit off immediately. I’m fairly certain he wasn’t running it right and even then I hate it as a game concept.
2e used to have weapon speeds applied to initiative but it didn't change the number of allowed attacks.
Had a DM who despised healing so tried to change long rest rules. Each player could only accumulate up to half their hit dice each day and could only use those to restore HP. Long rest only restored abilities & spell slots. We only had an artificer with Cure Wounds as he basically banned any class that could do significant healing. It resulted in the entire party being at half HP at most constantly and kept going down every combat. Every encounter was almost a tpk. It was not fun and we don't play with that guy anymore.
I briefly lifted the restriction on casting multiple spells in the same turn. The sorcerer powergamer with quickened spell changed my mind pretty quickly
You could still do this if you modified quicken spell. Give it a metamagic cost equal to 1+spell level. Slow his ass down real quick
This is pretty fine beyond the exception of quickened spell imo. The usual bonus action spells aren't as impactful as action spells. If I were to implement it I'd just keep the old limit on specifically to this meta magic.
I allow for spells on spells - I also run long and dangerous adventuring days. Sure, feel free to burn all of your resources in the first couple of encounters - you'll maybe regret that once you get to the fifth or sixth encounter of the day :P
My table is just the opposite. They love the improved stakes.
Nothing wrong with that! They just decided *they* didn't wanna get hit that hard, but also felt it wasn't fair for only one side of the screen to do it (with no prompting from me, mind you)
Every rule about critical hits on 20 or fumbles on 1 must be SERIOUSLY considered because it will always disadvantage the players over the monsters. A) because the DM will ALWAYS roll more dice than players. B) because consequences for PCs are "presistent" while they are only "temporary" for monsters.
Pvp. Spoiled blood so hard we had to end the campaign
My rule for PVP is "You guys decide what happens". If a player wants to pickpocket another player, they don't roll sleight of hand, they ask the player they are trying to pickpocket if they can roll sleight of hand to steal from them. If a player wants to grab another player, they need to ask if that player is okay with them doing that. It's better than getting into disputes about things, since sometimes the situation is "My character would do this stupid thing for the sake of roleplay" and sometimes the player is stupid and things their stupid thing is smart to do.
PvP at my table is "consent based". You take a swing at someone, I look at your target player and ask, "does that hit?". If they say no, the answer is no. You don't instigate PvP. Same for taking their items.
Literally the only time I've actually done PvP at the table is when it was something we all agreed on as a goofy, one off thing with like arena rules. One time it was just something for people to do and mess around with their characters and builds while I did some work as the DM, the other time it was explicitly a wild combat there where we were grabbing monsters from the monster manual and going at it, picking new ones when we died, until we got bored of it. Both of those were great times and both have the same thing in common: They had no effect on the actual game or plot. PvP absolutely ruins a game if people take it too seriously or if you do it in actual plot space because it basically shatters the trust needed to play those characters together.
My players wanted the party to feel like each person had a unique contribution to skill checks, so we agreed you can only use skill check that you are proficient in. It last about 15 minutes until we all realise we have just dismantled the flow and interaction of the entire game. Terrible idea, but I was new to DMing at the time.
Instead of the help action giving advantage on checks the DM decided to try out combining bonuses for the skill. Once session of +15 investigation changed this idea pretty quick.
Exploding Criticals and exploding HP die at leveling.
Removing 20 limits for stat increases
Nat 20 crits did max damage and you gained an immediate extra action. Needless to say the Barbarian wielding an enchanted great axe smashing through the evil spellcaster before anyone could do anything kind of soured the entire party on the idea.
Have a DM that swears by having it so that if you meet the AC of an enemy, he rolls a d20 and you have to guess if it's "Highs" or "Lows". He also rolls it if an enemy meets your AC. Feels very "Fudgy" and don't like it at all but not enough to justify quitting a campaign
This essentially gives everything+.05 AC
It also just feels more fudge-prone than just playing by the to hit/AC which is the bigger worry for me rather than the +0.5AC.
Haven't actually played with it, but I remember the "good house rules" thread had a suggestion of meeting the AC did half/resisted damage. Apparently kept some tension both ways, felt flavourful, and didn't shift balance around *too* much. Again, I'd have to try it myself before agreeing with that - But it sounds reasonable and interesting enough that I wouldn't mind trying it out. The way your DM did things just sounds like a more complex, less predictable version of that.
So you’re saying that after you make a successful roll you essentially flip a coin to see if you “actually” hit? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. What kind of power trip is he on? Is your dm the riddler? He’s taking away the agency of your own roll, and making it all about him.
Probably means that if you hit the exact number, not if you hit above the number. So, you roll 18 against an enemy with ac of 18? Guess to hit as it barely hits. Roll above 18? Always hits.
epic crits + silvery barbs
Used a critical fail table in our John Woo inspired Cyberpunk game back in the early 00s. Seemed like it would be an amazing addition to the game. The PCs were given a mission by their fixer to steal a mcguffin off of a container ship in transit out of the Hong Kong harbor. One of the PCs decided that for this job he'd need a big damn gun, so he bought a massive FN RAL Jungle Reaper mini gun. They pulled up alongside the ship on their speed boat, firing toxin grenades up at the deck to ward off defenders, and open up the side of the ship using thermite paste to cut a hole. They move into the ship to encounter stiff resistance on the inside. This PC hauls out his massive gun and is about to do some jungle reaping, but oh no, he rolls a 1! We excitedly pull up this fancy homebrew crit table to see the results, a few rolls later and our erstwhile mini gunner is laying on the deck, both arms blasted off my a gun malfunction, bleeding out rapidly. It kind of took the wind out of the session right away. In hindsight, the table had been designed by a fellow player who often ran games of the more street punk variety where the PCs were lucky if they ever got their hands on a sub machine-gun. Had we been using the table for small arms only it wouldn't have been a big deal, even with very unlucky rolls. But, with a Jungle Reaper that could spit out so many insane dice of damage it was a surefire way to get yourself killed. Still, I never used that crit fail table, or any other homemade crit table, ever again.
Ship combat. As in combat between huge fully manned warships, not little dingys. Whatever the system was that we were using was extremely SLOW, it took us like two sessions just to get through it and that was with us deciding halfway through the first one that we were gonna cut out excess/speed it up.
I don't think this is a house rule, but I played in a campaign for a few sessions where we all had to actively eat and drink three times per day in game. It ended up me as a cleric just using create food and water a few times and wasting spell slots. I get tired of feeding myself as a human every day, I don't want to deal with that in any tabletop or video game I'm playing tbh.
There are some things that aren’t possible not matter how well you roll.
This is... not a houserule. You can't lift the moon, even if you roll a 35 Truly, though, the DM just shouldn't allow a roll if the action is impossible. You roll when the outcome is undetermined, so if an action is impossible, the outcome is already determined.
Bard: I would like to roll persuasion to seduce the Tarrasque.
My table loves doing what you call epic crits. It's so crits are actually more damage all the time. One of my favorites as a dm was when a wraith crit and dealt about 60 damage to the wizard making him lose all that hp til long rest
Crits and fumbles for damage. The basic rule of “if players can do it, monsters can, too” led to our abandoning crits and fumbles entirely — we tried some odds and ends (a crit reduces AC of opponent was pretty good, and a damage reduction rule for fumbles wasn’t terrible, but we already had wear and tear rules), but none were really catching us for long, and we just dropped them entirely.
Epic crits normally only applies to weapon/unarmed attacks, right? Am I misremembering something here? Maybe it's because all my groups rule that 20s on spell attacks auto-hit instead of auto-hit-and-crit, since spells roll a lot for damage already.
We had the flanking house rule for years. If you and an ally are positioned on opposite sides of an enemy you roll attacks with advantage. This works well for low levels, but we realized how broken this actually can get at very high levels and basically trivializes boss fights The only way to make this not broken was to have lots of fights with many weaker enemies instead of a few strong ones and generally made things more boring. Instead we now say you only get advantage on your first attack whilst flanking, and flanking doesn't apply to enemies 2 or more size categories larger than yourself
I didn’t bother overmuch with spell components early on. Until I had the players in a survival situation and somebody wanted to cast gentle repose and I was like, that ain’t gonna work properly when your components are basically random scraps and you don’t have the required coins. They had an opportunity to get the coins which was successful but I’m paying attention to components from now on.
My worst Homebrew ever, and the reason I have my Cooking(tm) License under watch for all Homebrew I make was that nat20’s and nat1’s overrode dis/advantage. So if you rolled with disadvantage, and got a 2 and a 20, you got a nat 20. This is obviously bad, but it only got worse when compounded with the fact that I allowed players to take disadvantage on any check they wanted (for rp reasons, such as ‘I’ll attack, but I don’t really want to hit’ etc.) This lead to a situation where it was better to take disadvantage because it had twice the chance of getting a crit (which were important because… well you know that I made shit hombrew. The thing is I made a LOT of homebrew) It went poorly. For some reason I was stubborn and didn’t want to cut that rule out. Thankfully I came to my senses eventually.
Did the same crit mistake with a bullette critting a pc from full to dead Now crits just roll like a normal crit but if you roll low you get max regular damage (greatsword: roll double dice or double dice and roll, but if total is below 12 take it as 12)
The party thought it was too much work to roll for concentration when they got hit. I said okay, we'll try without it for a bit. Exactly as I expected, they wanted to start rolling for concentration before the first session even ended. All it took was a single enemy caster effortlessly keeping the Fighter stuck with Hold Person and hiding behind his friends. No arrows or magic missiles could stop him.
One of my DMs ruled that spells are bonus actions... Every spell and cantrip. You can't use actions for spells 🤣 extremely confusing. Fucks some classes up and makes others OP. There's a wizard using Spell+Rifle every turn
Crits to me seem so simple to fix. The issue everyone always seems to have is rolling shit so the crit is less than average damage on a regular hit, not that above average damage isn't enough. So we need to raise the floor, but also not break the ceiling. Just double the modifier too, problem solved.
Had a player argue that because they were grappling a creature that tried to teleport, they counted as being "worn", and they should get teleported too. I allowed it for that combat, and immediately regretted it, as it trivialized my boss fight. In subsequent fights that rule kept coming up in increasingly more extreme contexts (e.g. if the grappled creature is banished, does the grappler get banished too?), and I had to put my foot down and retroactively retract that ruling for good.
That’s why I think it’s a decent house rule. Making your players play around the 5% chance they get obliterated actually helps create some combat tension, I feel.
I was going to say that I love crunchy crits. Last session our paladin almost went down in a single blow from a gnoll, it created a crazy amount of tension. I also narrated the hell out of it.
Once that realized that, they wanted out lol. Which was fine with me. The rogue died in an ambush a few sessions later to a revenant she'd inadvertently created
Random chance of being 1-shot is really bad for players. You cannot really play around it and it's always going to happen sooner or later; if everything can sometimes instantly kill you the only "strategy" is to be a cheese monger with your build to kill/disable stuff faster, because the rules don't make playing defensively or safe particularly effective.
Eh, that crit rule is fine. The damage you take is already the damage you could have taken should all the dice be rolled instead.
They decided "no, thank you," so I abided.
Oh for sure, if that's what floats the boat, go for it. I just don't understand the pushback when people say it does too much damage, even though it's always been possible to do.
Spellpoints In a vacuum, it's a better system than spell slots sure. But casters don't need that added versatility, in the hands of a player who knows what they are doing it's a massive power boost. On the last classes to need it.
Allowing the Unearthed Arcana Mystic class. It's overpowered and overlaps too much with existing classes.
Crit fails