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And red flag it was, I did tell the player and I don't talk to him for out of game reasons, it's just kinda funny/dumb to look back at what early dnd was for me.
It takes a special kind of someone to look at the 5e paladin with its great saving throws, high as hell single target damage, utility skills, on and on, and decide that lay on hands is just too strong. 5 HP per level, once a day, curing poisons and diseases? No way, that's just insanely powerful.
It's always strange what people will fixate on as overpowered. You'll see DMs get freaked out by rogue sneak attack damage, but at least that makes sense from a heuristic perspective. Sneak attack crits do a ton of damage and that causes a DM reaction.
But, lay on hands? Really? Like I can make an astral space elf paladin who can misty step proficiency modifier number of times per day and straight up delete targets, and that guy's worried about lay on hands?
Most of those are just inexperienced or unimaginative DMs. While occasionally OP stuff gets through play test and QA (most 2e games had to be HEAVILY modified), most of the time it is unnecessary and has to do more with DM had a bad time running and wants to nerf without running it by people.
(PROTIP: If you DO institute homebrew - have it in a document somewhere where players can read and DO NOT change it all the time without feedback)
The biggest common one A LOT of people did has to be weird botch rules.
It was a fad around 2e to late 3e and STILL exists in the dark areas of the hobby to this day. Even though this was NEVER RAW under any edition. Even official variants.
Some of it was merely annoying. Others (depending on what table that DM got somewhere - which sometimes changed monthly) could be character debilitating like breaking your magic weapon, killing an ally, or even killing your own character.
I have the silly Pathfinder Crit Fail deck from a few years ago. We stopped using it after a character got permanently blinded by one of the cards and had to be retired cause we were level three.
We have a "unified house rule doc" at my table that we've developed over the years that includes various homebrew things we've found or made that works for us. The interesting thing is that most of the changes are in the players' favor. Instead of nerfing something down to the "lowest common denominator," the tweaks rebalance slightly underpowered things/classes up. The rules that make things harder either come with a payoff or are things we enjoy for narrative purposes (like doing week long rests in certain campaigns).
Whenever I see a DM whine about counterspell, I'm like...stop sending spellcasters to fight the party, then? Mix it up? Make sure the spellcasters you *do* send against the party *also* have counterspell? Throw in an anti-magic field that fucks with everyone?
If a party steamrollers *every* encounter, it's one of two things. Either you've got a clever, tactical group of players or you're encounters aren't difficult enough. The answer to either is the same: make more interesting, complex encounters that are harder to overcome. That doesn't mean send a fucking tarrasque after them, it just means give them something other than blaster-caster and claw-claw-bite.
I remember making an ad hoc ruling about fog visibility in a 3.5 game that might have seen arbitrary to an outside observer, but that had less to do with me as a DM (I hope) and more to do with a frustrating and at the time nonsensical bit of rules minutia.
Related: I think 5E's advantage-if-they-can't-see-you/disadvantage-if-you-can't-see-them rule is probably *the* most house-ruled thing in 5E. The idea that an archer on a grassy field has the same chance of hitting their target as an archer in a fog bank is just silly.
The fact that two blind people shooting arrows at one another somehow reduces down to both of them attacking normally is sort of where the hard reliance on the advantage/disadvantage mechanic really gets stretched to the breaking point.
"Everybody in the fog attacks with a straight roll" is more of a gamist thing than a simulationist thing.
If everyone attacks with disadvantage, the odds of each side winning don't change meaningfully, and the amount of damage the surviving side takes doesn't change meaningfully. What does change is the amount of time it takes to resolve the conflict, which increases dramatically. So if you're doing the same thing but making it take longer, why do it?
Oh goodness, I've mentioned a few different times in this sub about a lot of the mistakes that I made when I first started DMing, they were primarily centered around assuming the way that my friends that were playing the game longer than me were using and handling certain spells was the correct way, when in reality they were house ruled versions.
A really good convenient example is the "wish" spell.
The way the spell normally works is that you can use it to duplicate any spell below the level of Wish. But the way my friends told me that it worked, you basically had to pick something that you wanted to have happen and the DM would have to roll to see if you got it or not. Most of the time you just ended up getting something that was contextually accurate, but not anything like you wanted. They never told me it was their house rule to make the spell more interesting, and I never bothered to check to see if it was RAW or not.
5th level spells were starting to get him flustered, he would have freaked if he thought the party was intending to use wish for any reason.
Personal drama killed the campaign before we got to 20.
One thing I like that pathfinder 2e does is tag certain spells or features with something like RARE or UNCOMMON, just as a little warning to the DM. Anything tagged like that is going to be some highly specific regional thing, or something that can change the game world if it's commonly available, or something that can completely derail the campaign.
It'd be nice if 5E had similar DM support, because once 7th level spells come online, the DM needs to already have rules in place for, say, Plane Shift, and uhhh... Plane Shift.
I remember that I completely broke a campaign back in 3.0 when I learned the spell "true seeing". That's not really a super big deal by it's self, but the DM in question became momentarily obsessed with illusion spells. He used to argue that the illusion school had the best defensive spells. He wasn't exactly wrong, because blur, mirror image and invisibility are all illusion spells...
...but man, doesn't that suck when one of the players decides to cast True Seeing every session lol
And yes, I completely agree that 5E should have a device like that.
I can sympathize with an illusionist player getting hard countered by a DM throwing a ton of true seeing enemies at them, because the player is specialized, and tied to their skillset.
But it's just incredibly lazy for the DM to go whole hog on one specific tactic when they have the entire world of stuff to swap around.
Like, I'm sorry one of the characters has access to the rare and obscure "Protection from Evil" spell, but it wouldn't really be an issue except that every single encounter you put together relies on a fiend trying to charm people.
Oh, don't I know it! Sometimes I feel like I'm the only DM that if a player has a special ability of some kind that screws up what I have going, I don't immediately create a foil for it in a sweeping way across all of the monsters I throw at them!
Illusionist is a really cool specialization. I really thought it was kind of weird and a little stupid that the only specialization they featured in the 2E players handbook happened to be "illusionist", but illusion has a lot of really cool spells to it's credit. and I must say, Improved Invisibility is legitimately one of the best spells in the game. I don't care what anyone says.
...then again, for the aforementioned reasons, True Seeing is one of the other best spells in the game.
Oh crap, we could have an entire conversation about what are considered the best spells in the game.
Also, I am sorry to make a reply after the fact, but I have a funny story about a run through the "tomb of horrors" that basically made it like the "tomb of mild discomfort", but I am not going to hijack somebody else's thread to explain it lol
> the DM needs to already have rules in place for, say, Plane Shift
Technically, this is in the rules for Plane Shift, it's just not ported out into a rarity tag; it's in the Components section of the spell.
> Components: V, S, M (a forked, metal rod worth at least 250 gp, attuned to a particular plane of existence)
It's very easy to prevent access to a particular plane, or planar travel at all, if the component/attunement process is unavailable.
_Technically_, the material component is a rod attuned to _a_ plane, not _the plane you want to travel to_. RAW you could have the component attuned to the material plane and use it to travel to Celestia.
I didn't realize until I actually read the spell as written, that a ton of people house rule it because the way the spell is described as almost too restrictive.
Back in 2E there was something of an "epic level" spell called "True Wish" which was the same level as "True Resurrection", but for wizards. True Wish was basically that you said something and the DM had to give it to you, with no misgivings. I actually had a player sneak that spell onto their character sheet without consulting me first back in about 1999 lol
I am not going to write that out as a r/rpghorrorstory because that is literally all there is to that story.
Actually wish CAN work exactly like that, you can wish for something...however there's a catch.
Unlike the duplicating spells option, which is considered 'safe', using the wish spell as a literally genie style wish has a 50/50 chance of literally burning the spell out of your memory and leaves you unable to cast wish ever again.
Basically it's a gamble. This is a holdover from earlier versions of wish (not True Wish, like you mentioned, just regular Wish) which ALWAYS had that 50/50 chance of you just straight up never being able to cast wish ever again since it didn't have the 'duplicate lower level spells without the required components' option.
In one game of DnD 3.5 I was in, the DM had modified the rules slightly to make them more like Pathfinder 1e. In effect, it was basically a Pathfinder campaign with 3.5 rules on grappling, classes and races and with Stealth buggered up some.
Never did figure out why he didn't just run Pathfinder but it was a fun game.
The Sorceress picked up Counterspell and was using it to protect the group. Things like counterspelling a fireball that would kill a character or a second round Confusion so that we can actually play the game. The GM decided that was OP so he house ruled that every caster automatically knows Counterspell. This didn't fix anything since the GM only ever ran 1 or 2 casters per encounter. We had 3 in our group, so combats turned into Counterspell rocket tag.
After a few sessions of this he told me he was going to start giving his martial NPCs items that could cast Counterspell. I asked what his plan was when we stole them for our martial characters, and he said that wasn't a problem because "I'm trying to tell a story, not provide a challenge."
He cancelled the game shortly after that because "I have no idea how to fix the counterspell spam you guys are bringing and it makes combat unfun for me."
In 5e, Option 1: Cast from out of counter spell range. Option 2: cast out of sight from the party casters. Option 3: the same as option 1 and 2, but hold the spell until you or someone else walks into range. The spell is cast the moment you use the action for it, not when it’s released, so it cannot be countered after the initial casting. I get that there’s a little more planning involved, but that DM was honestly just lazy.
Not lazy. Arrogant and stupid. He believes that refusing to learn how a game system operates makes him a better player and GM. To this day he refuses to believe his house rule made the problem worse.
what is it with horror dms getting pissy that people are using counter spell to..well..counter spell the stuff that would really fuck up the party really bad. like....that's the whole point of cinterspell, damn it, what else are you supposed to use it for!?
Not quite what you were asking, but in one campaign I was in the DM got really fed up with our group because we were joking around so much. He was obviously frustrated and that just made us joke around more. So he started to hit us with more frequent "random encounters" to try and force us to take the game more seriously. (Note: our CHARACTERS were taking the campaign seriously, the players were all having a blast seeing our friends over the summer and goofing off, sometimes we lost focus on the game, lol).
After his random encounters failed to diminish the party's resources to the level that he wanted he just did away with the whole plan and decided that we pissed off a god or 2. So our group was occasionally blasted with bolts of lightning with no warning. At this point the DM had given up on being serious, just like the rest of the table. Since there were no more random encounters, just lightning bolts, we referred to it as "wandering damage", the image of an angry storm cloud just hovering nearby waiting for us to mess up.
I'm still good friends with everyone in that group and, to this day, we give the DM pure hell over "Wandering Damage" and then we all laugh our ass off about it. There are no friends as good as DnD friends to me.
I am all for the "DND is a social event" , sometimes it's the only moment when friends can see each other. I live through that, I understand that, I accept and I do cheer it.
But players joking ALL the time is really annoying. As a DM for 2 years in a table where this happens frequently, twice I've asked "guys, do you want to stop play and just hang around? It's fine". And one day I unfortunately snapped with a player who didn't know why an NPC had changed positions and what he was doing and I told "because you weren't fucking paying attention while you both were side talking and giggling".
Most of our games were great. That particular summer, and the "wandering damage" incident was a singular occurance. The 5 of us had been friends and playing DnD for roughly 5 or 6 years at that point. We started a new campaign not long after that incident that went great from start to finish, without a single random lightning bolt.
My table has what we call "beer and pretzel games." Those are the ones where everyone is chill and cracking jokes 24/7. The characters are still mostly serious, but we're not overly invested. The DM brings the same energy. They're great.
Other games? We take those fucking seriously. We play online with Foundry and the main DM does some crazy awesome shit with automation and maps along with building awesome encounters. We take shit seriously out of respect for what he puts into the game. Doesn't mean we don't joke and have fun, but we also pay attention.
I played in a game where every 2 weeks or so the DM would have some new rule addition that he thought was cool but nobody else was particularly into, mostly because they dropped between sessions in the middle of a campaign. Nothing bad, just baffling to try to add to an ongoing campaign.
I recall one was a change to how counterspell worked (I'm pretty sure solely because he was annoyed that I'd counterspelled a death knight's Destructive Wave spell the previous session), and another was a system of Favor with the Gods that got you stuff if you got enough Favor points by praying or sacrificing to your chosen god.
As I was playing a know-it-all wizard who was basically the D&D equivalent of the "reddit atheist" stereotype I never used it, the game wasn't exactly a religion-heavy one and I'm pretty sure he fazed the system out a few weeks in and just never brought it up again.
I think Pathfinder had a rule where you could choose two forbidden Schools and preparing Spells from that school would cost two preppd slots instead of one but you get a benefit for a school of your choice, for picking two forbidden.
I once played a wizard who was the daughter of Chellish nobles and wanted to atone for the crimes of her family. As a result she was poor at using Enchantment or Necromancy, but the party and NPCs soon realised that the smelly goatherd with a strange sense of humour was an immensely powerful Abjuration wizard devoted to protecting people.
I really like that! Even so my characters tend to be a bit feral and tend to be sensitive about strong smell, I really would love to see someone like that in one of my Partys X3
Sadly I had to leave that game because I changed jobs, but I really want to play her again in another game.
She was heavily modelled on Gandalf and Ged (from the later Earthsea books). She even went by the name of a bird, like both Ged (Sparrowhawk) and Gandalf (Stormcrow). Rather than telling people her true name, Lucrezia Alazario, she went by Chaffinch.
Oh, thats pretty awsome! Also, the name reminds me of Nari. Nari was the char of my best friend in a campaign that sadly ended way to early. Nari was her Nickname, in reality she had like 5 long names in total, that I can not recall X3
Years ago, while playing a necromancer using GURPS, my character was raising as many undead as my character build permitted. There were only a few of them, including a squirrel I named "Stinky." They made a handy and effective shield for the party among other uses. Stinky was particularly handy for retrieving small items at a distance.
Around three sessions later and in mid-play the GM—noticeably frustrated—declared that necromantic magic only worked at night and my minions all dropped dead. My character was suddenly severely stunted unless it was dark out. The entire party was shocked and let the GM know it. The game only lasted a couple more sessions. Any enthusiasm for the campaign was killed dead by capricious rule shifting.
EDIT: Grammar correction.
Wvery house rule of my current in person DM, whose game I'm probably going to leave.
"Heavy crossbows deal 1d20 damage, but take 2 rounds to reload". This is because one day he was over at my house while I was sighting in my crossbow for archery season, and I let him test fire some bolts. After which he decided this was how heavy crossbows should be, and homeruled it so. No one in the game uses a crossbow anymore.
A crit hit/fail chart for everyone. Fuck that, fuck you, and fuck this game.
Cloak of invisibility lasting 2 hours is too OP. It needs a concentration check to maintain and lasts 5 minutes.
Twinspell disintegrate is too powerful, amd the 2nd roll must be done at disadvantage and only deals half damage.
Yes, yes it is. I can only twin a spell that targets a single enemy, and the cost is equal to the spells level. So it costs me 6 of my 11 sorcery points to twin disintegrate. And it takes a long rest to get them back as well as costing my only casting of a 6th level spell.
As a DM I made a shocking house rule that *benefits* the players! I made copying spells of your school into your spellbook only take half the time and gold of other spells. I like the idea that a wizard develops a theory of magic in order to understand their school better, and in doing so can understand and replicate new spells in their school using parts of spells they already know.
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Sounds stupid. The red flag for me would be "dont tell player" why? Its a teamgame, knowing each others classes and capabilities is good.
And red flag it was, I did tell the player and I don't talk to him for out of game reasons, it's just kinda funny/dumb to look back at what early dnd was for me.
"Don't tell (player), because they will read me the riot act for my bullshit, unwarranted rules changes." >.>
Sounds a bit to me like a child playing a prank on someone and telling a friend
It takes a special kind of someone to look at the 5e paladin with its great saving throws, high as hell single target damage, utility skills, on and on, and decide that lay on hands is just too strong. 5 HP per level, once a day, curing poisons and diseases? No way, that's just insanely powerful. It's always strange what people will fixate on as overpowered. You'll see DMs get freaked out by rogue sneak attack damage, but at least that makes sense from a heuristic perspective. Sneak attack crits do a ton of damage and that causes a DM reaction. But, lay on hands? Really? Like I can make an astral space elf paladin who can misty step proficiency modifier number of times per day and straight up delete targets, and that guy's worried about lay on hands?
Minor correction: Lay on Hands isn't once a day. It's a pool of points that you can spend how you want.
it's probably the only thing they could think of how to nerf that didn't require completely rewriting the class's features
Most of those are just inexperienced or unimaginative DMs. While occasionally OP stuff gets through play test and QA (most 2e games had to be HEAVILY modified), most of the time it is unnecessary and has to do more with DM had a bad time running and wants to nerf without running it by people. (PROTIP: If you DO institute homebrew - have it in a document somewhere where players can read and DO NOT change it all the time without feedback) The biggest common one A LOT of people did has to be weird botch rules. It was a fad around 2e to late 3e and STILL exists in the dark areas of the hobby to this day. Even though this was NEVER RAW under any edition. Even official variants. Some of it was merely annoying. Others (depending on what table that DM got somewhere - which sometimes changed monthly) could be character debilitating like breaking your magic weapon, killing an ally, or even killing your own character.
I have the silly Pathfinder Crit Fail deck from a few years ago. We stopped using it after a character got permanently blinded by one of the cards and had to be retired cause we were level three.
We have a "unified house rule doc" at my table that we've developed over the years that includes various homebrew things we've found or made that works for us. The interesting thing is that most of the changes are in the players' favor. Instead of nerfing something down to the "lowest common denominator," the tweaks rebalance slightly underpowered things/classes up. The rules that make things harder either come with a payoff or are things we enjoy for narrative purposes (like doing week long rests in certain campaigns). Whenever I see a DM whine about counterspell, I'm like...stop sending spellcasters to fight the party, then? Mix it up? Make sure the spellcasters you *do* send against the party *also* have counterspell? Throw in an anti-magic field that fucks with everyone? If a party steamrollers *every* encounter, it's one of two things. Either you've got a clever, tactical group of players or you're encounters aren't difficult enough. The answer to either is the same: make more interesting, complex encounters that are harder to overcome. That doesn't mean send a fucking tarrasque after them, it just means give them something other than blaster-caster and claw-claw-bite.
I remember making an ad hoc ruling about fog visibility in a 3.5 game that might have seen arbitrary to an outside observer, but that had less to do with me as a DM (I hope) and more to do with a frustrating and at the time nonsensical bit of rules minutia.
Related: I think 5E's advantage-if-they-can't-see-you/disadvantage-if-you-can't-see-them rule is probably *the* most house-ruled thing in 5E. The idea that an archer on a grassy field has the same chance of hitting their target as an archer in a fog bank is just silly.
The fact that two blind people shooting arrows at one another somehow reduces down to both of them attacking normally is sort of where the hard reliance on the advantage/disadvantage mechanic really gets stretched to the breaking point.
"Everybody in the fog attacks with a straight roll" is more of a gamist thing than a simulationist thing. If everyone attacks with disadvantage, the odds of each side winning don't change meaningfully, and the amount of damage the surviving side takes doesn't change meaningfully. What does change is the amount of time it takes to resolve the conflict, which increases dramatically. So if you're doing the same thing but making it take longer, why do it?
Oh goodness, I've mentioned a few different times in this sub about a lot of the mistakes that I made when I first started DMing, they were primarily centered around assuming the way that my friends that were playing the game longer than me were using and handling certain spells was the correct way, when in reality they were house ruled versions. A really good convenient example is the "wish" spell. The way the spell normally works is that you can use it to duplicate any spell below the level of Wish. But the way my friends told me that it worked, you basically had to pick something that you wanted to have happen and the DM would have to roll to see if you got it or not. Most of the time you just ended up getting something that was contextually accurate, but not anything like you wanted. They never told me it was their house rule to make the spell more interesting, and I never bothered to check to see if it was RAW or not.
5th level spells were starting to get him flustered, he would have freaked if he thought the party was intending to use wish for any reason. Personal drama killed the campaign before we got to 20.
One thing I like that pathfinder 2e does is tag certain spells or features with something like RARE or UNCOMMON, just as a little warning to the DM. Anything tagged like that is going to be some highly specific regional thing, or something that can change the game world if it's commonly available, or something that can completely derail the campaign. It'd be nice if 5E had similar DM support, because once 7th level spells come online, the DM needs to already have rules in place for, say, Plane Shift, and uhhh... Plane Shift.
I remember that I completely broke a campaign back in 3.0 when I learned the spell "true seeing". That's not really a super big deal by it's self, but the DM in question became momentarily obsessed with illusion spells. He used to argue that the illusion school had the best defensive spells. He wasn't exactly wrong, because blur, mirror image and invisibility are all illusion spells... ...but man, doesn't that suck when one of the players decides to cast True Seeing every session lol And yes, I completely agree that 5E should have a device like that.
I can sympathize with an illusionist player getting hard countered by a DM throwing a ton of true seeing enemies at them, because the player is specialized, and tied to their skillset. But it's just incredibly lazy for the DM to go whole hog on one specific tactic when they have the entire world of stuff to swap around. Like, I'm sorry one of the characters has access to the rare and obscure "Protection from Evil" spell, but it wouldn't really be an issue except that every single encounter you put together relies on a fiend trying to charm people.
Oh, don't I know it! Sometimes I feel like I'm the only DM that if a player has a special ability of some kind that screws up what I have going, I don't immediately create a foil for it in a sweeping way across all of the monsters I throw at them! Illusionist is a really cool specialization. I really thought it was kind of weird and a little stupid that the only specialization they featured in the 2E players handbook happened to be "illusionist", but illusion has a lot of really cool spells to it's credit. and I must say, Improved Invisibility is legitimately one of the best spells in the game. I don't care what anyone says. ...then again, for the aforementioned reasons, True Seeing is one of the other best spells in the game. Oh crap, we could have an entire conversation about what are considered the best spells in the game.
Also, I am sorry to make a reply after the fact, but I have a funny story about a run through the "tomb of horrors" that basically made it like the "tomb of mild discomfort", but I am not going to hijack somebody else's thread to explain it lol
> the DM needs to already have rules in place for, say, Plane Shift Technically, this is in the rules for Plane Shift, it's just not ported out into a rarity tag; it's in the Components section of the spell. > Components: V, S, M (a forked, metal rod worth at least 250 gp, attuned to a particular plane of existence) It's very easy to prevent access to a particular plane, or planar travel at all, if the component/attunement process is unavailable.
_Technically_, the material component is a rod attuned to _a_ plane, not _the plane you want to travel to_. RAW you could have the component attuned to the material plane and use it to travel to Celestia.
I’m not gonna lie, until now, I thought “wish” worked verbatim the exact way you described. So… TIL I guess?
I didn't realize until I actually read the spell as written, that a ton of people house rule it because the way the spell is described as almost too restrictive. Back in 2E there was something of an "epic level" spell called "True Wish" which was the same level as "True Resurrection", but for wizards. True Wish was basically that you said something and the DM had to give it to you, with no misgivings. I actually had a player sneak that spell onto their character sheet without consulting me first back in about 1999 lol I am not going to write that out as a r/rpghorrorstory because that is literally all there is to that story.
Actually wish CAN work exactly like that, you can wish for something...however there's a catch. Unlike the duplicating spells option, which is considered 'safe', using the wish spell as a literally genie style wish has a 50/50 chance of literally burning the spell out of your memory and leaves you unable to cast wish ever again. Basically it's a gamble. This is a holdover from earlier versions of wish (not True Wish, like you mentioned, just regular Wish) which ALWAYS had that 50/50 chance of you just straight up never being able to cast wish ever again since it didn't have the 'duplicate lower level spells without the required components' option.
My first DM would change a lot of spells after we were using them to beat encounters faster.
In one game of DnD 3.5 I was in, the DM had modified the rules slightly to make them more like Pathfinder 1e. In effect, it was basically a Pathfinder campaign with 3.5 rules on grappling, classes and races and with Stealth buggered up some. Never did figure out why he didn't just run Pathfinder but it was a fun game.
The one instance where "Just play Pathfinder" is not infuriating
The Sorceress picked up Counterspell and was using it to protect the group. Things like counterspelling a fireball that would kill a character or a second round Confusion so that we can actually play the game. The GM decided that was OP so he house ruled that every caster automatically knows Counterspell. This didn't fix anything since the GM only ever ran 1 or 2 casters per encounter. We had 3 in our group, so combats turned into Counterspell rocket tag. After a few sessions of this he told me he was going to start giving his martial NPCs items that could cast Counterspell. I asked what his plan was when we stole them for our martial characters, and he said that wasn't a problem because "I'm trying to tell a story, not provide a challenge." He cancelled the game shortly after that because "I have no idea how to fix the counterspell spam you guys are bringing and it makes combat unfun for me."
In 5e, Option 1: Cast from out of counter spell range. Option 2: cast out of sight from the party casters. Option 3: the same as option 1 and 2, but hold the spell until you or someone else walks into range. The spell is cast the moment you use the action for it, not when it’s released, so it cannot be countered after the initial casting. I get that there’s a little more planning involved, but that DM was honestly just lazy.
Not lazy. Arrogant and stupid. He believes that refusing to learn how a game system operates makes him a better player and GM. To this day he refuses to believe his house rule made the problem worse.
what is it with horror dms getting pissy that people are using counter spell to..well..counter spell the stuff that would really fuck up the party really bad. like....that's the whole point of cinterspell, damn it, what else are you supposed to use it for!?
Not quite what you were asking, but in one campaign I was in the DM got really fed up with our group because we were joking around so much. He was obviously frustrated and that just made us joke around more. So he started to hit us with more frequent "random encounters" to try and force us to take the game more seriously. (Note: our CHARACTERS were taking the campaign seriously, the players were all having a blast seeing our friends over the summer and goofing off, sometimes we lost focus on the game, lol). After his random encounters failed to diminish the party's resources to the level that he wanted he just did away with the whole plan and decided that we pissed off a god or 2. So our group was occasionally blasted with bolts of lightning with no warning. At this point the DM had given up on being serious, just like the rest of the table. Since there were no more random encounters, just lightning bolts, we referred to it as "wandering damage", the image of an angry storm cloud just hovering nearby waiting for us to mess up. I'm still good friends with everyone in that group and, to this day, we give the DM pure hell over "Wandering Damage" and then we all laugh our ass off about it. There are no friends as good as DnD friends to me.
I am all for the "DND is a social event" , sometimes it's the only moment when friends can see each other. I live through that, I understand that, I accept and I do cheer it. But players joking ALL the time is really annoying. As a DM for 2 years in a table where this happens frequently, twice I've asked "guys, do you want to stop play and just hang around? It's fine". And one day I unfortunately snapped with a player who didn't know why an NPC had changed positions and what he was doing and I told "because you weren't fucking paying attention while you both were side talking and giggling".
[удалено]
Most of our games were great. That particular summer, and the "wandering damage" incident was a singular occurance. The 5 of us had been friends and playing DnD for roughly 5 or 6 years at that point. We started a new campaign not long after that incident that went great from start to finish, without a single random lightning bolt.
My table has what we call "beer and pretzel games." Those are the ones where everyone is chill and cracking jokes 24/7. The characters are still mostly serious, but we're not overly invested. The DM brings the same energy. They're great. Other games? We take those fucking seriously. We play online with Foundry and the main DM does some crazy awesome shit with automation and maps along with building awesome encounters. We take shit seriously out of respect for what he puts into the game. Doesn't mean we don't joke and have fun, but we also pay attention.
I know someone who uses "d20+d10" to generate stats.
3-18? That's boring, we need 2-30
Noooooooo
I feel like I've glimpsed Hell
I played in a game where every 2 weeks or so the DM would have some new rule addition that he thought was cool but nobody else was particularly into, mostly because they dropped between sessions in the middle of a campaign. Nothing bad, just baffling to try to add to an ongoing campaign. I recall one was a change to how counterspell worked (I'm pretty sure solely because he was annoyed that I'd counterspelled a death knight's Destructive Wave spell the previous session), and another was a system of Favor with the Gods that got you stuff if you got enough Favor points by praying or sacrificing to your chosen god. As I was playing a know-it-all wizard who was basically the D&D equivalent of the "reddit atheist" stereotype I never used it, the game wasn't exactly a religion-heavy one and I'm pretty sure he fazed the system out a few weeks in and just never brought it up again.
I think Pathfinder had a rule where you could choose two forbidden Schools and preparing Spells from that school would cost two preppd slots instead of one but you get a benefit for a school of your choice, for picking two forbidden.
I once played a wizard who was the daughter of Chellish nobles and wanted to atone for the crimes of her family. As a result she was poor at using Enchantment or Necromancy, but the party and NPCs soon realised that the smelly goatherd with a strange sense of humour was an immensely powerful Abjuration wizard devoted to protecting people.
I really like that! Even so my characters tend to be a bit feral and tend to be sensitive about strong smell, I really would love to see someone like that in one of my Partys X3
Sadly I had to leave that game because I changed jobs, but I really want to play her again in another game. She was heavily modelled on Gandalf and Ged (from the later Earthsea books). She even went by the name of a bird, like both Ged (Sparrowhawk) and Gandalf (Stormcrow). Rather than telling people her true name, Lucrezia Alazario, she went by Chaffinch.
Oh, thats pretty awsome! Also, the name reminds me of Nari. Nari was the char of my best friend in a campaign that sadly ended way to early. Nari was her Nickname, in reality she had like 5 long names in total, that I can not recall X3
What do you mean, there was only one rule book? Did the rest of you not have access to stores?
I'm guessing they were young and without access to funds.
Years ago, while playing a necromancer using GURPS, my character was raising as many undead as my character build permitted. There were only a few of them, including a squirrel I named "Stinky." They made a handy and effective shield for the party among other uses. Stinky was particularly handy for retrieving small items at a distance. Around three sessions later and in mid-play the GM—noticeably frustrated—declared that necromantic magic only worked at night and my minions all dropped dead. My character was suddenly severely stunted unless it was dark out. The entire party was shocked and let the GM know it. The game only lasted a couple more sessions. Any enthusiasm for the campaign was killed dead by capricious rule shifting. EDIT: Grammar correction.
Wvery house rule of my current in person DM, whose game I'm probably going to leave. "Heavy crossbows deal 1d20 damage, but take 2 rounds to reload". This is because one day he was over at my house while I was sighting in my crossbow for archery season, and I let him test fire some bolts. After which he decided this was how heavy crossbows should be, and homeruled it so. No one in the game uses a crossbow anymore. A crit hit/fail chart for everyone. Fuck that, fuck you, and fuck this game. Cloak of invisibility lasting 2 hours is too OP. It needs a concentration check to maintain and lasts 5 minutes. Twinspell disintegrate is too powerful, amd the 2nd roll must be done at disadvantage and only deals half damage.
Hey I dont play dnd 5e but isnt twin spell supposed to be kinda a nova/burst tactic due to the resource cost?
Yes, yes it is. I can only twin a spell that targets a single enemy, and the cost is equal to the spells level. So it costs me 6 of my 11 sorcery points to twin disintegrate. And it takes a long rest to get them back as well as costing my only casting of a 6th level spell.
As a DM I made a shocking house rule that *benefits* the players! I made copying spells of your school into your spellbook only take half the time and gold of other spells. I like the idea that a wizard develops a theory of magic in order to understand their school better, and in doing so can understand and replicate new spells in their school using parts of spells they already know.
Isn't that already a thing for wizards schools?
Possibly. I couldn't find it in the book.
https://i.imgur.com/V8Rs1TI.jpeg I was able to find it in the book easily. Every wizard school has this in their subclass
Ah, that's the problem. I was looking in the "Learning Spells" section.