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I didn't answer the poll because it doesn't apply to my "Brotherhood of Rangers" game, which is the only D&D I've run in years. It's 3.5e instead of 5th edition, and the players are all gestalt-rangers and thus blessed/tainted with those class abilities. That said, the two fighter-ranger...

And this is the sort of thing rules are useful for: When the ridiculous (breaking an anvil by hitting it with a sword) collides with the absurd (magical adamantine sword of absurd sharpness). Because those are the cases where common sense says "Pass!"

I'll play using rule sets that use the metric system. That doesn't mean I won't prefer to keep feet and pounds in my D&D games. The Fantasy Trip used metric, and so does my homebrew based on it. There are ways to handwave the use of metric in pseudo-medieval settings. For example: A...

The big issue, in the game, is the character needing to stay on the surface to breathe. That's where I'd apply the full penalties for trying to swim while wearing armor. For a character who can breathe underwater, I'd greatly reduce the penalties for swimming in armor, possibly even to zero...

I'd require waterskins having a total encumbrance, when filled with water, to equal the weight of the armor. That should be quick and close enough. So if the armor weighs 40 lb, and the standard waterskins weigh 4 lb each when filled with water, then my answer is 10 air-blown waterskins.

In practice, Charisma is used as the "make friends and influence people" ability score. So while Dwarves, Half-Orcs, and Orcs might have strong and forceful personalities, those personalities are also off-putting. Their penalty to Charisma can be attributed to their strong personalities rubbing...

A "Mallet of Luck" really ought to work on Constructs too ("Percussive maintenance!") If introducing it into one of my games: Spells required: Both magic weapon and magic fang Cost: 4,000 gp

I use my own house-rule hybrid system: Roll 3d6 for each ability score, in order, to set the minimum scores. Characters can then increase those scores until the total of the six reach a campaign-specific value (85 for my Brotherhood of Rangers game), with 18 being the maximum for any score...

In settings where I use D&D, I'll either use the standard generic 3.5e elves, orcs, etc. or I'll model them on the elves, orcs, etc. of the D&D Cyclopedia/Mystara Gazetteers. For my old, now-non-D&D Etan campaign, the "humankin" races are cosmopolitan to the point where even the barbarian clans...

Yes and no, in my case. Many of those other systems have elements that I absolutely detest, so it can be less work to hack D&D than to hack one of those other systems. (I dislike "critical hit" systems and utterly detest "fumbles," so if I ever ran Rolemaster (after hell froze over, thawed out...

OK thoughts: Your "loony" side is showing. (see "Real Men, Thespians, Brains, Loonies, & Munchkins") Why the 2.5 day (an odd time period) saturation requirement? Does saturating the arrow consume the (un)holy water the arrow soaks in? Does the archer have to make a regular ranged attack or a...

Rules for weapons breaking is something I house-rule removed from my TFT game. My view is that game and house-rule designers tend to set the breakage probabilities too high, and that weapon-breaking rules should be limited to cases where a figure is using a weapon that's noteworthy for being...

A variant is wanting relatively low powered magic that alters the setting in a measured way, mostly to justify that idealized pastoral / Hollywood vision and avoid a "dung ages" version of a pseudo-medieval setting (or a pseudo-pre-modern setting more generally). An extreme case would be...

Mileage varies. As a DM this is often a chore. As a player, I like these sorts of encounters. I don't have to 'pretend' they're fun; they actually are fun. Of course a monotonous diet of this sort of encounter and nothing else would be boring and undesirable - but a monotonous diet of any one...

My experience is that increased randomness generally appeals more to DMs than to players.

<Raises hand> This old USENET post isn't by me, but I unreservedly endorse it. RPGs and video games differ from most ordinary board games in that there doesn't have to be a loser. I think it's reasonable that they attract mindsets which aren't very interested in losing; and a lot of RPG...

I'm for a happy medium on this point. Some uncertainty is good, and both too much and too little can be bad. There's temptation in both directions. "If some uncertainty is good, then lots and lots of uncertainty must be better!" and "If limiting uncertainty is good then eliminating uncertainty...

Brides traditionally join their husband's family while still retaining a link to their old family. That makes a half sister's illegitimacy in her old family less important when she marries into her new one. Of course, as Cobalt Meridian pointed out above, you can have a different, fictional...

One house rule I apply to replace any "bleeding out from negative hit points" rules in whatever system I may run is to to have dying be a pure players option (or GM option for NPCs) when a character is reduced to negative hit points in the still-alive-but-bleeding-out range. The player may...

From a "humanity" point of view, even an illegitimate half-sibling can still be Family. From an "aristocratic politics" point of view, even an illegitimate half-sibling - especially a half-sister - still has some value as a marriage-and-alliance token. This sort of thing happened often enough...