D&D General What rule do you hate most from any edition? (+ Thread)

[Seramus]

Every edition: druid can slaughter puppies, burn forests and ride a spaceship, but will not wear armor with a piece of metal in it because bad!

Especially not dwarven druids of the earth, who care nothing for plants, animals or non-elemental biomes!

 

[CleverNickName]

My DM: You have scale mail on your character sheet.

Me: Yep! It cost me a fortune, too.

My DM: Um, but you're a druid.

Me: Indeed! Is...is that a problem?

My DM: Druids won't wear metal armor.

Me: Oh. But this is scale armor.

My DM: Okaaaay...explain?

Me: Like, it's made of actual scales.

My DM: ...actual scales.

Me: From like, a giant fish.

My DM: . . .

Me: or a giant snake, perhaps.

My DM: . . .

Me: giant pangolins? monitor lizards? Oh, dinosaurs! They hav--

My DM: . . . enough, I get it. It's fine.

 

[Maxperson]

I like the concept of level drains, but it's always been a far-too clunky rule to have, since it needs so much calculation. I would change it so that it gives you a long-lasting or even permanent -d4 to your rolls (then a d6, then a d8, etc.). Or something like that. Level Up uses Strife.

I liked 3e's version of level drain, but say with only 1 save instead of 2. With 2 saves, I literally never saw a single level drained and I played 3e from the day it came out until 2 years ago. What I didn't like about the 1e-2e version was that it not only took the level with no save, but even if you did manage to get the level back you still lost all the exp that you accumulated towards your next level.

 

[edosan]

B/X: Save or die rules. Race as class. No real rules for anything outside of combat.

AD&D: Low level magic users, weapon type vs AC (did anyone use this?), level drain, poorly thought out saving throw names (this could apply for any pre v3 game - Fort/Will/Reflex is the best system they ever came up with), inconsistent skill resolution (roll high/roll low/roll a D20, roll percentiles/roll d6)

2E: The beginning of "the more books you own the better your character is" (not really a rule, but still)

3/3.5: The overreliance on feats, multiclassing, and magic items. Sometimes I just want to level up without having to agonize about it. Grappling.

5: Too many races with darkvision, no drawbacks to choosing a race and no compelling reason to be a human.

Bonus: Monks. I like them in a way (my favorite AD&D char was a monk) but it also irritates me how they don't fit into the fantasy paradigm.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

"Druids will not wear armor made of metal. This will never be explained. Get creative!"

I thought I remembered pre-5E versions explaining it, but maybe I am just remembering something from a Dragon article or a 3PP book. But basically, it does not restrict the flow of magic the way it does for a mage, but it is because the land was defiled to dig it up and then polluted to refine it. But then there are still lots of other things that druids can use that are just as bad for the planet. Of course, it could just be because they are tree-huggers and not rock-huggers. lol

 

[CleverNickName]

I thought I remembered pre-5E versions explaining it, but maybe I am just remembering something from a Dragon article or a 3PP book. But basically, it does not restrict the flow of magic the way it does for a mage, but it is because the land was defiled to dig it up and then polluted to refine it. But then there are still lots of other things that druids can use that are just as bad for the planet. Of course, it could just be because they are tree-huggers and not rock-huggers. lol

Hm. That's right, every edition has included an explanation for it, of varying quality.

I should have written, "This will never be explained to your satisfaction."

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's also one fo those rules where if you pretend to care about it or RAW just straight up steals your agency over your character.

 

[Mad_Jack]

I hate that rule that says I'm not allowed to bludgeon the other players with my dice bag when they're loudly talking over everyone else on my turn....

Wait... is that just a house rule?

So, um...

AD&D 1st Ed. weapon speeds... Yeah, that was annoying.

 

[Malmuria]

Oh, alignment restrictions, especially druid as true neutral. Hated that.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

2e: Thac0. It’s so obvious, in nearly every facet of life that has any math at all, that the simplest possible situation is counting up and adding relatively small numbers. It’s hog wild to me that someone said, “let’s completely redesign how hitting things works, mathematically, but let’s focus on subtraction, with a scale that goes from a basically random positive number down to a basically random negative value!

3.5: (other than most of it) Bard songs taking you’re whole entire action to start. Just let characters be effective at the thing they’re thematically defined by! Really, all the weird fiddly restrictions and limitations that were mostly just frustrating at a gameplay level, without actually adding anything thematically.

4e: The refusal until Essentials to let a class have two power sources, meaning a wholly mundane Ranger, and making it impossible to have build options that make the other martial classes have a touch of magic.
Also the vancian-esque single use of a given power. Boggled my mind that we didn’t have power slots and known powers, with wizards getting to swap out powers during rests.
The math. Hated it less than 3.5’s math, but sweet baby Cthulhu I hate a numerical power scale so wide that the two ends simply cannot exist on the same board.
The weird decision to make it take 4 feats to fully mix power sets of two classes. It should have taken 1 feat. You MC, gain a skill and a minor version of a defining feature of that class, and you can now take powers from either class. Done.

5e: We houserule and homebrew 5e more than any past Edition, so it’s harder to remember the things I don’t like.

Definitely having to choose between ASI and feats, while also having a relatively low pointbuy (I think it’s 25 pts?). I know that you can play with a character with nothing higher than 14, but it feels off, and contributes to people feeling (even if erroneously) that they need to take ASIs rather than feats.

The relative lack of advice or rules for followers, home base, organization, magic item costs that make sense and are usable in worlds where magic items that aren’t rare or higher…aren’t rare.

The low number of skills many classes get.

no way to gain more skills other than new class feature, feat, or multiclass.

Making so many downtime activities not involve any variability that could lend to rolling dice.

Backslding on inclusive/sensitive depictions of the world, in favor of appeasing a specific part of the old guard, leading to things like Volo’s descriptions of orcs and Gnolls,

The Sundering.