Part of it is that I enjoy playing roguelikes and one thing I like about them is having limited identification resources and occasionally taking a risk with an attempt to "use-ID" an item, i.e. drinking a
fizzy pink potion of who-knows-what or putting on that
bone ring of I don't know what that ring is going to do my finger (one of the cursed items in my RPG SPLINTER is the "Ring of Oh-God-My-Finger!" which pretty much just slices off your finger when you put it on, but I digress) in a situation desperate enough for you to take that kind of risk. To my mind, making identification something any character can do with a short rest makes it a far duller process.
5E has kind of doubled down on cursed items being a thing, so this makes more sense to me now than ever. Also FWIW I have always let identify detect cursed items and have always thought it was the utmost nadir of Gygaxian BS in 3.5 where cursed items specifically
identified as uncursed items. Eff that!
With cursed items around and it being the only reliable way to identify a spell, I think that Identify is great and in its way a very powerful spell. But when anyone can just know what a magic item is by taking a one hour nap (and incidentally, I've found that the adventures/modules where the time pressure is so great you think twice about taking even a SHORT rest are few and far between), Identify shouldn't even be a spell. When I played a wizard that both learned and prepared Identify, I had a couple of DMs just ask me for an Arcana check upon getting a magic item,
without even the already-basically-meaningless short rest. Needless to say, this was vexing in the extreme. By RAW, Identify is a trap option and no one should ever take it. For my own game, I prefer having magic-item-identification be a resource to be managed, a la roguelikes. Like I don't even have a problem with it being a class tax, back in 3.5 I was fine with trying to decide whether to prepare identify or not, but with the way preparation works in 5E
As for the Save DCs...I am not a 100% believer in "Bounded Accuracy"...I have a rough understand of the concept...I've read its harshest critiques from its harshest critics...for the most part it seems to be working, but the Save DCs is an area I think they got it wrong. If a 2 point increase to save DCs causes it to be impossible for some non-proficient characters and a bad relevant stat to make a save...oh well? It also makes it impossible for a ton of monsters to make their saves against PC spells. And in either case, it's not actually impossible, right, because a natural 20 always succeeds a save so everyone's got a 5% chance to get lucky. (And in case "a natural 20 always makes a saving throw" is one of those things that I
think is RAW but actually
isn't, I'd put that in there as a house rule anyway. Even if I wasn't bumping up the save DCs. Which I am.)
Glad (and honestly...relieved) to see so many people agree that crit fails/fumbles are BS...does anyone like my idea of potentially-fatal-comedies-of-errors being able to happen to NPCs/monsters and not PCs?
I'm not a fan of any of these house rules except the identification one.
Well, kind of balances out most other respondents, who generally seemed to like everything but the identification house rule. : )
As far as spell resistence, if I were to alter it to account for spells with attack rolls, I'd either have it impose disadvantage on the attack roll or have the creature take hald damge from the spell.
Ooh, I like that. I think I'm going to switch it to that. That's MUCH more symmetrical than a conditional +2 bonus to AC, especially since "AC vs. this as opposed to AC vs. that" is another thing 5E did a way with. It took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that there was no such thing as a touch attack in 5E. It still feels really weird to me that a Wizard throwing a Chromatic Orb of lightning is much less likely to hit a character in plate than in leather armor...but I understand why it's a huge step towards streamlining the game and making it more accessible, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
All-in-all, house rules are okay if the entire table is fine with them.
I really don't mean to sound like an elitist grognard jerkwad saying this but...I disagree with that generally on the basis that (at least in my current situation) I almost always have more experience GMing than everyone else at the table has with roleplaying
combined. Usually, I have
several time the combined roleplaying experience of every other player at the table. And--again, I know this makes me sound like a conceited prick and I assure you I'm not--I have developed a dozen tabletop RPGs and published six of them. Most of the time--with the dramatic exception of that one time that I playtested
Systems Malfunction with Ron Edwards and Vincent D. Baker (this is a real thing that actually happened)--the rest of the table doesn't know much about game design and/or the opinions they have about game design are
badong ("critical fumbles are great", "when I DM I have my own critical fumble tables", "I miss THAC0"). So no, I don't personally feel like I need the unanimous approval of every person at the table to make what are, to me, clear improvements to the game.
But don't get me wrong...DMs can (and have been for years) make house rules that are arbitrary, un-fun, and unfair and if any house rule I made caused a player to actually get upset, I would closely reexamine it. Incidentally, my table, or I should say my regulars, since it's a slightly different crowd every week, are all fine with these house rules FWIW.
Thing I Didn't Know: Save DCs "max out" at 20? Does anything else in the game max out like that? I also just noticed (wow am I slow on the uptake sometimes) that apparently all items that granted enhancement bonuses to ability scores have been removed from the game? So cloak of charisma, gloves of dexterity et al are gone?