D&D General Harshest House Rule (in use)?

[see]

Harshest house rule?

"The thief, Black Leaf, did not find the poison trap, and I declare her dead."

 

[CandyLaser]

I mostly prohibit multiclassing in 5e; I have a couple of players who are avid optimizers, and I find that eliminating multiclassing gets rid of a good swathe of the stuff that annoys me. I don't mind optimization, but I like to make sure that the optimizers and the non-optimizers are both able to meaningfully contribute. I also typically make some campaign-specific tweaks; when I ran a 5e Birthright game, I used the lingering injury rules and created a seventh ability score to model bloodline strength, while when I ran Eberron in 5e I just restricted a few spells, mostly long distance teleportation effects, which I wanted to have as the exclusive provenance of House Orien.

I never bothered much with house ruling in 3e/3.5 or 4e - 4e because it mostly worked, though in my last campaign I did give everyone a free Expertise feat, and 3e/3.5 because that was also the heyday of my optimization habit, so I enjoyed the arms race effect as I pitted my builds against those of my players.

 

[Lanefan]

Harshest house rule?

"The thief, Black Leaf, did not find the poison trap, and I declare her dead."

"I am not dead!" Black Leaf protests loudly. "But someone will be if I don't find some treasure soon!"

(I currently have a character in play named Black Leaf...)

 

[bloodtide]

These two seem to be in conflict with each other. If you never tell the players anything about the game how do they figure things out?

The player must play their character to learn things and figure out things in the game.

 

[pukunui]

*In general, unless your character discovers or figures something out in the game, I'm never going to tell the players anything about the game.

Some of the guys I played with until recently liked to tell a story about a DM they used to play with who would use pieces of cardboard to represent monsters in the game. He wouldn't tell them what it was they were facing - not even a description. So they would joke about how their PCs died to a piece of cardboard.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

The player must play their character to learn things and figure out things in the game.

But how do they play their character if you don’t tell them anything about the world?

How do I play a player with 18 strengths? If I’m not told that age string teen strength means. Or 18 intelligence and I’m really not that smart.

Isn’t the whole point of playing a game like DND to role-play a character that can do things that I cannot do?!

 

[TerraDave]

I have used:

*New characters in otherwise veteran party start at level 1
*Fumbles
*Item saves (with crafting could bring these back)
*Chance of not resting in rough conditions (and still do)
*Crit tables
*Higher damage crits (and still do)
*Lasting penalties for being dropped like exhaustion (and still do)
*%chance of no coming back from dead (and still do)
*No dip multiclassing rules (and still do)
*No or fewer 2014 feats
*Feats to cast spells

 

[mikeburke]

For those using “new characters start at level 1” - I assume this is with XP progression instead of milestone? Hard to see how the player has a chance of catching up otherwise (unless that is not a priority for players, and/or death is reasonably commonplace)

 

[aco175]

Some of the guys I played with until recently liked to tell a story about a DM they used to play with who would use pieces of cardboard to represent monsters in the game. He wouldn't tell them what it was they were facing - not even a description. So they would joke about how their PCs died to a piece of cardboard.

The dreaded cardboard golem, not as tasty as the gummy bear ooze or the M&M humanoids.

I recall the old assassin rules where a note could be passed to the DM describing the assassin action and the DM just telling me, "Your dead." Fun times.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

“Thou shalt not be funnier than the DM.”