What's Your Favorite House Rule?

[jgsugden]

My flanking rule for 5e: Rather than grant advantage (DMG optional rule), a flanked PC provokes an OA if it moves.

No XP. All level advancements are milestone based.

I have a convoluted vision system that includes normal vision, darkvision, low light vision, infravision, ultravision, devil sight, blindsight, sonar, tremorsense, and true sight. Each works differently and plays a large role in the tactics of monsters. For example, orcs have infravision rather than dark sight. Infravision allows you to see heat sources in the dark and has no range restrictions, allowing orcs to be excellent night hunters. Gnolls, on the other hand, have low light vision which makes them prone to attacking when the light is failing, but not gone - making them late dusk and early dawn hunters.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

A few of you mention starting from level 1 if a PC dies. Do you have any anecdotes about how this went down at the table? I'd imagine that this approach would cause issues for making all of the players feel included and able to contribute. If that was an issue, how did you tackle it? If not, do you have any insight into why it worked?

Anecdotally, the major effect is that PCs just don't die. It's actually pretty hard to kill a character off entirely in most editions of D&D, as long as the player is invested in keeping them alive. This rule encourages players to keep the character they have, even through death, instead of giving up and starting a new character at no penalty.

I probably wouldn't use that rule if I was playing one of the older editions of the game, when levels were gained more slowly and death was harder to avoid.

 

[DM Howard]

No Monks. Yeah, I said it!

 

[Smith Peter]

No resurrection magic
No point-buy - stats are always rolled
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“Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.” - Papers Please apk

 

[GMMichael]

In my games, character creation is always possible without rolling dice. I.e. there's point-buy for stats and averages for hit points (if the system uses hp).
And for d20-type games, there's also always a method for retraining of some sort.

The reason behind both rules is that nothing sucks more than being forced to play a character you don't enjoy playing.

Some things suck more, but that's true: playing a character you don't enjoy sucks.

I like your removal of die-rolling from character generation, but why the retraining rule? Isn't that sort of like allowing a PC to re-write his own history?

"You know, I loved the underwater-basket-weaving class that I took on my last vacation. But I'm never underwater enough to use my new skill. I'll go through Rekall on my next vacation, forget that class, and learn how to be a double agent instead..."

 

[Razjah]

Favorite house rule: retraining allowed at low levels to adjust a PC to be something more fun for the player. If someone didn't realize how a skill or feat or something would play out during the game, I let them adjust it during the first adventure.

Most common: adjusting races and classes to craft the setting.

 

[Bleys Icefalcon]

Hehe.... We have a really, really silly house rule. If anyone, or any reason rolls 00-07 (007) on %, instead of saying what their % is they have to play the James Bond theme on their phone. Also the DM will roll again to see if he gets plus or minus 7 of 07 (00-.14) - if THIS happens they now have "a licence to kill", redeemable once. The licence can be given to any law enforcement officer, any judge, justice or magistrate, even to a King or Emperor in exchange for clemency for a death they have caused which may be something the authorities might have a problem with.

 

[Scoobs]

Never tell the players what they're doing, it seems obvious but some DMs can't help it when their narrative gets disrupted.

In addition to that, I don't punish players for not following the story. It's my world but it's their game, if they want to spend a session drinking in a tavern and end up getting exiled from town because of a bar fight that turned genocidal then that's the way the story goes.

 

[Jhaelen]

I like your removal of die-rolling from character generation, but why the retraining rule? Isn't that sort of like allowing a PC to re-write his own history?

When I'm a player, I mostly use it to replace feat or power choices that turn out to not work as well as I imagined. It's not always easy to tell from a written description how it will play out.

Another interesting application allows players to choose an ability that is most useful to their character 'right now' without suffering any long-term disadvantages.
As a DM I consider this beneficial because some players like to plan out their character's entire career from level 1. Many of these 'builds' result in characters that don't really play well for many levels.
If they're able to retrain, they can be at their best at any level _and_ still follow their long-term build goals.

And I didn't say that retraining should (always) come without cost. It will almost always require time and often money. You aren't re-writing the past, you're adapting.
You learn a bunch of new things, but that causes some of your neglected abilities to 'atrophy'.

I actually consider that pretty realistic. E.g. in school I used to be very good at drawing and was doodling all the time. At university, I did this less and less.
These days after two decades in my job, I find that I can no longer draw well, at all. But I picked up a lot of skills to make up for it.

In my experience, retraining prevents players to become bored with their characters. Being able to constantly tweak them, keeps them interesting to play.
I prefer this over players deciding they want to roll-up a new character.

And while it theoretically allows a player to completely 're-write' their character over time, it's something I very rarely see.

If a player wants a more radical change they'll still prefer to create a new character.
But the reasons for this are more often related to non-mechanical aspects of a character.

 

[Razjah]

I haven't used this house rule in a while because it was from a group in college. Any donkey/mule named Mark has a limited Dimension Door type effect. Whenever the donkey is faced with some daunting task like crossing a chasm, scaling a sheer cliff, or some other pretty much donkey impossible task- it will Dimension Door to a safe point where the party is going, so long as it is unobserved by the party.

This started as a joke from The Gamers where Mark missed the session and the players would randomly remind the GM that the character was present. This left Mark basically teleporting into the middle of battles, or joining the marching order from behind a tree.

When I was GMing a game, I lost track of the donkey and had it show up where the party was heading. They later figured it could only have gotten there from some kind of teleportation style effect. It quickly became a joke that they would just leave Mark, the donkey, one one side of a perilous situation to find him waiting for them on the safe side. This let them keep lots of various loot they couldn't otherwise carry.

Throughout college, there would be friendly NPCs who had a bunch of mules or donkeys and talked of a legendary stock of donkey that could appear anywhere. The party would get lucky with their choice of beast of burden- and always named it Mark.