Common Houserules?

[77IM]

Are we counting rules that so many people just get wrong that it's almost like a common set of house rules?

• I've seen a lot of DMs allow PCs to ready a full attack, or ready a spell without casting and holding it and requiring concentration (actually, I do this latter one, too, as an explicit house rule).
• I've seen lots of players cast healing word (bonus action) followed by a non-cantrip spell, and nobody ever calls them on it.
• I've seen many groups that allow Inspiration to be spent after you roll, as a kind of retroactive advantage.
• I've seen so much confusion over two-weapon fighting and bonus actions (i.e., a PC makes a bonus-action off-hand attack and doesn't realize its a bonus action and tries to take another bonus action on the same round) both from players and DMs that I wonder if it's intentionally confusing.
• Every group I've ever gamed with has had at least a few people who thought that 20 was auto-success and 1 was auto-fail on skill checks and saving throws. (Personally, I think this works better and should be the official rule.)

 

[Ogre Mage]

The XP/encounter tables in the DMG are useless crap, figure out something else.

 

[bmfrosty]

In most of my games - including where I play AL - a critical hit is the maximum of the dice plus the rolled value. A crit should mean something, and snake eyes on a crit sucks!

 

[cbwjm]

I have the following house rules. Pretty sure this is all of them, most haven't come into use. The only player that wanted to run a sorcerer with the brass dragon bloodline was still put off by the lack of acid spells on the sorcerer spell list.

Classes

Sorcerer
Sorcerers may choose any spell from any list which matches their bloodline. I.e. a storm sorcerer may choose the 3rd-level spell Call Lightning as one of their spells known. A black dragon sorcerer may choose Melf’s acid arrow as one of their spells known.

Wizard
Wizards may learn to read captured spellbooks without needing to scribe the spells into their own spellbook. It takes the same amount of time to decipher the peculiarities of the captured book as it would take to scribe into their own spellbook but without having to spend money on inks.

Multiclassing

Combining Caster Levels when Multiclassing
Rather than rounding down, you instead add together all of your effective levels among the caster types to determine your spell slots. Only add class levels if the class has gained the spellcasting feature.

Example. An Eldritch Knight 4/Wizard 1 has a caster level of 3. 2 caster levels from Eldritch Knight and 1 caster level from their wizard.

Normally in this scenario, they would have a caster level of 2 as the Eldritch Knight levels are divided by 3 and rounded down to 1.

• Casters with 1/3 caster level combine levels as long as they have the spellcasting ability. Eldritch Knight 5/Arcane Trickster 3 has a total combined caster level of 3 (as if an 8th level Eldritch Knight. Would normally be 2 as the 5 eldritch knight levels would be divided by 3 and rounded down).
• Casters with 1/2 caster level combine levels. A paladin 2/Ranger 2 would have a caster level of 2. A Paladin 2/Ranger 1 would have a caster level of 1 as the ranger levels do not yet grant spellcasting.

Spellcasting

Bonus Action Spells
If you cast a spell as a bonus action, you may cast any other spell that requires an action instead of only a cantrip.

• Quickened Spell now has a sorcery point cost of 1 + level of the spell (cantrips have a cost of only 1 sorcery point)

 

[Sword of Spirit]

- Nobody cares about your spell components, you either have them on you or you don't. We don't want to track them.

This is the actual rule. All you need is a spell component pouch unless you are dealing with the rare expensive components.

This was also the rule in 3e. (And 4e didn't have them at all, but different rules paradigm so not directly comparable.)

Spell components themselves were optional in 2e.

I'm not sure how many decades of D&D you have to go back to get to an edition where you actually were supposed to track individual non-costly spell components.

And yet, somehow the myth that that is the official rule remains.

 

[Tormyr]

I am with [MENTION=1465]Li Shenron[/MENTION]: try vanilla 5e for a while first, get used to it, make changes or add optional books like Xanathar's as appropriate. Also as mentioned before, 5e is fairly well balanced out of the box. So different DMs have different things that they don't like (certain feats, gnomes, paladins, gnomish paladins, etc.), but there is not really a universal "apply this list of fixes" which has made me pretty happy. As for house rules in my game:

A chance of failure when bringing back the dead. Once a party reaches level 5 and gets access to revivify, death is likely not permanent. In my 3-year 5e Age of Worms campaign, I really only had 1 permanent death, and that required having a large creature swallow the unconscious PC and talk his body away into the darkness to return as a favored spawn of Kyuss. I have adopted Matt Mercer's resurrection rules. https://geekandsundry.com/use-critical-roles-resurrection-rules-in-your-own-campaign/ They add a chance of failure, allow other party members to contribute to the resurrection process, and make resurrection more difficult the more times you bring someone back from the dead.

More perilous falls. Falling is a fairly low danger in 5e, especially once a party hits about 10th level. Damage caps at 70 (20d6) after 200 feet. This meant that in my campaigns, a PC could fall 1,500 feet and walk away with just the damage. So I looked into how fast a 6-foot tall person falls at various distances and wrote up a table. http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1410 Falling does slightly more damage, hitting 93 damage at 200 feet instead of 70 (20d6), but the damage keeps on going until the creature hits terminal velocity at 1500 feet (174 damage for a Medium creature). This damage is enough to knock most high-level characters out and kill outright some medium characters. It is offset by allowing the creature to use its reaction to break their fall, reducing the fall damage by the value of a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check. A creature that jumps down on purpose has advantage on the check. In this way, a commoner can die from a 10 foot fall but also has a 50% chance to take no damage with a 10 or better Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, and very high-level creatures have a chance to scrape themselves off the pavement even after reaching terminal velocity.

This got used in our game last Sunday. The 4th-level party was traversing a stone bridge that had known weak spots that would give way. In the midst of combat, one PC (monk 3 / rogue 1) missed a square and ran through it. He failed the Dexterity saving throw and fell through the hole 60 feet to the ground below. This would do 45 damage, and his Dexterity (Acrobatics) check was only an 8. The resulting 37 damage knocked him out on landing, and he was in the midst of flaming brush and caught on fire. The bard dashed across the bridge and leaned through the hole to cast healing word, giving the first PC the chance to get to a safe spot and put out the flames.

The regular rules would have him take 21 (6d6) damage, which he might have been able to just walk away from.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I don't really like house rules and the ones I see used I don't really consider absolutely necessary.

The only thing I might agree on is that it's a hassle to track inventory, especially item weight, so doing away with weight tracking is fair I guess. (I didn't really do away with it myself, but I'm telling my players they should keep track of it, so I don't need to check it.)

 

[thorgrit]

Only thing I can think of so far that hasn't been mentioned is the prevailing use of Dexterity in a lot of builds. It can be used for attack rolls *and* damage rolls on most ranged weapons, on a few melee weapons including the rapier, is used for initiative checks, a lot of save-for-half saving throws, a lot of reactionary attribute (skill) checks, and so on. Not necessarily a problem, but it can feel weird when 80% of the world uses rapiers and ignores the rest of the diversity of the weapons list. Some have removed the rapier, others added additional weapons for the sake of variety. I myself don't have Dexterity modifying initiative.

More to suit my own shortcomings than anything with the game, I've adopted dealing playing cards each round for a dynamic initiative, similar to Savage Worlds. In this way, I don't have to write a list and worry about skipping people as I cycle around, I can just scan the table and see who hasn't turned in a card, and what the turn order is.

There's a lot of variant rules listed in the DMG to try, and some rules some might consider "core" in the PHB that you don't have to use. I like not having feats and multiclassing turned on by default, from a new or simple player perspective, as it doesn't overwhelm them with choices they might feel they "have" to make.

 

[Sadras]

3.) Flanking: I do not use the DMG optional rule. Instead, a flanked creature provokes OAs if it moves out of the flanked square. The optional rule from the DMG trivializes advantage in my experience - most attacks are made with advantage when it is used.

What about enemies flanking PCs which might be more common? I mean when there are 5 on 1 do none of them get advantage?

 

[Gnome]

I appreciate all of the input. I am not dying to create house rules off the bat, but I wanted to make certain there weren't any glaring issues that seemed to keep up in people's games and these discussions. It doesn't sound like that is the case. It has been interesting hearing how different people like to modify the game for their purposes, though. Other editions have had more issues going out the gate, so that's why I was asking.