RIDICULOUS House Rules - A Place to Vent About Your Crazy DM

I have take the theme from www.wizards.com where they also have a forum. It's very funny to see al those crazy house rules a DM can think about, thats is very ridiculous...

BTW I don't try to blame all DM only few of them

You must not have moved your maximum movement for the round if you wish to attempt a Reflex Save against area effects (i.e. you mush have enough move to get out of the area).

Entering a square provokes an AoO if you do not attack (though I think this was just a misinterpretation).

Speaking is NOT a free action.

Spells have no components.

Some not-so-nifty things I've seen in person.

some houserules from the site -

you cant sneak attack a person if he/she can follow you with his/her eyes...

NPC are to cool to be flanked/tripped/disarmed, they are immune to it, bad joke for rogues...

I had one DM who was a real class act. This was in 2E, and he had every book on earth. He made his own minis, had his own copy machine, wrote his own adventures with color coding for referense... I mean, the guy was an uber DM. I have no idea how he managed to work and live alongside his habi-- er, hobby.

You'd think a guy like that would have a solid grasp of the rules. Nope.

I can't recall any specific houserules of his, but some rulings that didn't surprise his regular players. Like seventeen gnolls with longspears attack from behind a wall with holes, all of them in 4 squares. A 5' by 20' area.

Or when my character knocked himself unconscious because I slapped a normal spider on my shoulder. He said roll for damage, I did, and did something like 5 points of subdual damage. Out I go! I can't even remember most of his crazyness, thankfully.

A different DM actually was the KING of houserules. It was right when 3.5 came out, and he and his regular players used every D&D book they had. Social Status from 1E UA, MR from 1E DMG, chances of Wild Talent from the 1E PHB, kits from everything 2E. Specific houserules included rolling at character generation for chances of photographic memory and spellfire, rolling 1d30 (yes, a 30-sided die) for hit location with each individual number being a different location with wacky different effects, feinting as a FREE action and benefits your full round of attacks(!), and on and on.

I only played with them about 4 times, and I never got a handle on their incredible houserules. It didn't help that NONE of them were written down, and each person remembered each obscure houserule slightly differently.

Yet the weirdest thing about that DM was that he was such an incredible roleplayer. Voices, inflection, facial expression, emotion... the guy could amazingly portray any character so vividly. He could give actual speaches. Like, for minutes(!) without any notes or anything! And I'm talking quality stuff. So was the guy an actor or anything like that? Nope, ex-marine

One day I'm going to be looking at this thread and discover that my players have posted nasty things about me....

I've played with DMs who railroaded characters shamelessly: "Not going the way I want you to? You start aging 1 year per round until you do!" Never more than once, though.

I've played with DMs who didn't know the rules as well as I did, but who insisted on running high-level (ie, many option) games. "You can do that? Wow! Okay, then, Tiamat's dead...." (The guy in this example was just finding his way, though, and his next game was better!)

Most of the time, I've been sitting in the DM's chair. This goes back to December of 1979, when I bought the D&D boxed set for my younger brother as a Christmas gift. Over the years I've tried my hand at writing dozens of house rules, some with better results than others.

Since 3e, no houserules, as we learned to not do the same errors twice!

Me as the DM: I created a spell point system, where I converted all spells slots per day (total number of spell levels a wizard can cast each day) so I got a number of spell points. Then, no componenets and the wizard can cast any spell he knows at the cost of 1 spell-point per spell level. This proved to be a disaster, especially when the 10th level mage destroyed all by herself a horde of trolls in a tunnel with fireballs after fireballs. Ridiculous!

Another DM: A new system of magic, where wizards, clerics, etc., disappeared, and the class of mage was really weird: basically 1 level of mage equal 2 level of wizard in terms of XP. Then, a lot of houserules to adjust to that class. Furthermore, paladins, rangers, and bards would get this system which had the side effect of overpowering them in term of spellcasting. Then the campaign was based on Saurian races that nobody really liked. The end result has been disatisfaction among players who slowly all deserted.

Im on a boarding school where we have a DM and some who try to be a DM... one of the weirdest person as DM is a person called Leonard.. anyways he believed that a vampire could turn into the aligment neutral, because the vampire had lost his memory, he believed that a bartender surely could be a cleric of lvl 5 :S I was nearly crying, and he belived that most of townfolk have a evil aligment.... "No i'll won't buy your sword... SLASH... dead..." he is very weird as DM have only played with him once, and I never do it again