D&D 5E Capricious Home Rules and DM Pet Peeves

[kalil]

My pet peeve is interrogations. 9/10 of my worst roleplaying experiences has been associated with interrogations. I go to great length to avoid them as player and DM.

 

[Igwilly]

Well, in a 4e campaign, I thought about banning humans as well as banning all divine and primal classes. I don't remember the reason, but it seems like something interesting.

 

[Colder]

For the final time, I've never told you how to run your game.

I disagree with your interpretation of the rules and have tried to understand your perspective and why you think teleport would not work.

Unfortunately the conversation has gone something like:

colder: the rules are broken, teleport doesn't work
oofta: why?
colder: you can't teleport behind a closed door. Here's a link to the podcast that proves it's a mess.
oofta: but rules say you have to have line of effect to the target. The targets are you and ...
colder: teleport doesn't work.
oofta: huh? Why could you not target yourself?
colder: TELEPORT!
oofta: Ok, sorry to get into an argument. I just don't think you need to change any rules for teleport to work. I think the rule is clear...
colder: YOU AREN'T THE BOSS OF ME!
​

You say you don't mean any offense, but the picture you paint of me isn't exactly flattering. Furthermore, I don't recall much effort on your part to understand my position. From my perspective, you joined the conversation by immediately telling me my interpretation of the rules was wrong without actually addressing why I actually had an issue with my own interpretation in the first place. If you take everything that the rules and Crawford have said into account and apply them to all spells in equal measure, it becomes a real exercise to reason what's supposed to work and what isn't. The rule causes more headaches than it stops, so I plan on ignoring it, simple as that.

But I agree, this has gone on long enough. We both end up in the same place even if how we got here differs.

 

[Igwilly]

My pet peeve is interrogations. 9/10 of my worst roleplaying experiences has been associated with interrogations. I go to great length to avoid them as player and DM.

Too much paladins using "questionable" methods? That happens once in a while in my games.

 

[Oofta]

My pet peeve is interrogations. 9/10 of my worst roleplaying experiences has been associated with interrogations. I go to great length to avoid them as player and DM.

My way of dealing with it is to simply state that torture does not work - torture someone long enough and they will tell you what they think you want to hear but there's no way of knowing if it's true or not. No insight verification or even Zone of Truth will work at that moment either.

I may give people advantage/disadvantage based on what they say for intimidate but that's it. Start describing how you're holding someone's feet to the fire and I just shut it down.

 

[MacConnell]

4) Less of a rule change, more of a rule clarification: Players state their character's intent, then how they propose to realise said intent.

• Done in an effort to standardise player actions and minimize miscommunication during Theatre of the Mind style of play. Before, the DM might find themselves at a loss as to why a player declares their character is performing a certain action, typically due a mismatch between each player's mental representation of the play at the time. This way, the DM can work with a player to help realise their character's intent by providing additional information as and when required, and call for checks accordingly (rather than the player simply stating 'I use X skill).

This is probably the #1 peeve for me as well, especially when having to handle a rules monger who knows all the stats of everything in every book. Who simply says, "Ha! I kill the *whatever*. Here are my rolls.

I have a stated particular for any action that might involve engagement, especially in a PbP where statements are readily made out of order:

• 1) All Players state intentions of Characters.
  2) Players make rolls concerning the actions of those intentions.
  3) I make rolls concerning the results. (There may be applicable modifiers unknown to the player.)

On the opposite of capricious, I employ what I call the Mulligan Rule:

• If a player or players continually make poor dice rolls I allow them the roll 2 sets and take the more advantageous.
• I use this automatically in beginning campaigns.

Gaming is meant to be fun!

PS. I don't care for variant races either. It tends to unbalance game settings.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Just curious. How much input and agency are DMs providing players regarding these house rules?

I've not posted any house-rules in this thread, but the reason why I haven't is the answer to this question: My players and I have to reach a consensus on any house-rule or optional rule before it gets put into use. All our votes are given weight, with my vote as DM usually having the least weight because the rules do not impact my enjoyment anywhere near as much as they can the players', and the player votes are weighted based on how much they care (so if they are ambivalent they have almost no weight, but if they are deeply invested in a particular thing their vote is considered the most important).

 

[Celebrim]

and elves and dwarves aren't?!?

Elves and dwarves in their modern conception obviously owe a great deal to Tolkien. But, the halfling/hobbit is entirely the creation of Tolkien.

All three have departed or evolved from the Tolkien conception. But the elf and the dwarf have a mythic resonance in pre-Tolkien stories and even I think perhaps in our biology that I don't think halflings have. It's bad enough that there seems be one elf or one dwarf for the species, but the Halfling seems even more narrow and a race (like the gnome) that in D&D has been historically in search of an archetype - both of which seeming to migrate most often into simply comic relief. Of course, as I said this a self-admitted "peeve". I'm not saying, "No halflings" as legitimate universal advice.

As for padded armor, the problem with wanting to model armor realistically is that you have to consider its performance against different sorts of attacks. As a point of fact, as I'm sure you know, most of the other armors on the table have a padded jack of some sort as component of their overall armor package. We must assume that they are there in order to assume that they are as protective as the system makes them. If we start talking about what is the AC of mail without an underlying padded layer, or how padded performs nearly as well as mail against certain weapon types, we have to stop having a single absolute AC and start having to have (as 1e AD&D had, or at least tried to have) a relative AC depending on the sort of attack directed against it.

As one of the few people I've ever met that actually used the 1e era weapon vs AC modifiers, I think I'm qualified to offer as general advice and not merely a peeve, the level of complexity you introduce into the rules trying to model the protection of mail or padded versus the range of attacks they can receive is too great to throw on top of 3e's already increased complexity. It might be possible however to throw it into 5e's reduced complexity, provided you wanted more gritty and realistic combat, but I don't know 5e well enough to be able to tell you whether in effect it would be worth it since 5e greatly simplifies armor and greatly reduces the value of armor relative to prior editions. You've just got less wiggle room to play with the granularity and it might end up being fiddlliness without substance.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If someone says "How can illithids exist, they don't make sense" I think it's a reasonable reply to say "You're okay with Flumphs but not Illithids? Really?"

But if someone says "studded leather didn't exist, it's a weird nonsensical fantasy armor," I actually think dismissing this with "yeah but you're okay with fire breathing dragons?" is a categorization error.

It's not as clear a case as say, "yeah, but you're okay with the Spiked Chain?"

But it's still pretty valid. Unrealistic fantasy armor in an unrealistic fantasy game with unrealistic fantasy elements like dragons? Not a big issue.

At the end of the day, all of our fiction has to enable us to suspend disbelief. Everyone has some threshold of believability/credulity that works for them. Those thresholds are gonna be different... wildly different in some cases.

The kicker is when they're wildly different within one case. It's fine to be a purist about leather armor, if you're also at least open to other complaints on the same level - potatoes, for instance, are not uncommonly mentioned in passing, but are anachronistic in a medieval-European setting. The Rapier is anachronistic. There's /plently/ of other errors in D&D on the same level. If you're unaware of some but exercised about studded leather, fine. But if you're selectively indignant/dismissive, well, your complaint may carry a bit less weight.

Make sense?

But overall, I'd say that torches, studded leather, etc. are all items that are generally considered to be part of the "mundane" world of D&D, not the fantastical one.

It's not like there are two separate such worlds. You don't cross a border or step through a circle of mushrooms, or get inducted into Hogwarts, and transition from the mundane to the fantastic - it's a fantastic world. It has some elements in common with the mundane world of historical medieval Europe, and others not. The not range from potatoes, studded leather, and rapiers to dragons, teleportation, and gods walking the earth.

So if someone feels a particular element of "mundane" D&D is nonsensical and breaks their suspension of disbelief, I think that's a legitimate concern.

I believe it breaks their suspension of disbelief, but I don't agree it's a legitimate concern. If your suspension of disbelief is that selectively fragile, either adjust your fragility selector, or get used to doing without disbelief, because you're not putting enough 'willing' into your willing suspension of disbelief.

That said, if a DM wants a world with realistic Brigandine armor and plate-and-mail instead of apocryphal studded and platemail, more power to him. Make the game your own.

I think what he's trying to say is: The existence of the fantastical doesn't mean we remove the onus on the mundane to be within the bounds of credulity. Does that make sense?

It parses OK. It does not seem reasonable.

It's why people change falling damage

The root 'problem' making falling damage unrealistic isn't falling damage, it's hit points. (Sure, it could be a much, /much/ better simulation, but it captures that the greater the height, the more deadly the fall. Which is intuitive enough, however scientifically inaccurate.) Falls from a great height are deadly. We know that. A dagger to the aorta is also pretty deadly, but you don't seem nearly as many people upping dagger damage as fiddling around with falling damage.

Ultimately, heroes in genre survive being stabbed and survive falling from great heights - through various authorial devices (the blade misses the heart by hair's breadth, the hero catches hold of a convenient ledge) - so PCs get hps.

or change non-magical healing, or hate fighter healing, etc. These all stem from the same basic issue,

The fighters-can't-have-nice-things double-standard, yeah. ;P

Seriously, though, that's what pointing out the other anachronistic, fantastic, anachronistic or other genre element is pointing out. That there's a double-standard being imposed.

And, yeah, when it comes to something as utterly subjective as that bar of willingness to suspend disbelief, people /get/ to have double-standards. They just shouldn't be so determined to impose them on others. Let the game have it's less realistic, even on the other extreme, less genre-faithful elements, and just don't use the ones that you have a pet peeve with.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

...

So it just depends. I try to get players to help me shape the world, but there are some decisions I have to make to have a consistent world that fits with my vision.

I think that (getting players to help shape the world) is one of the most powerful things you can do to make a lasting, memorable game. Lots of DMs refer to THEIR games and seem to consider the players as some sort of nuisance trespassers into it. Great games (IMHO) is where the DM provides structure and story but the players feel empowered to appropriately add to the tale in ways that extend beyond their PCs' actions. The MY game becomes OUR game in many ways, even extending to elements of world building.