Bad House Rules

[DungeonmasterCal]

I've made a lousy house rule every now and then, mostly because I like to tinker with the rules. Most work very well, but i've thrown out a clunker. My worst, by far, was...

you could trade 12 skill points for a feat or vice versa. You could also save up skill points to buy feats later on. Add in the factor that I increaed everybody's skill points by 2 and gave the players exceptional ability stats, and it became munchka-mania.

Take it from experience, this is NOT a good idea.

Yeah...I did this... 15 points instead of 12 though. Bad bad bad.

 

[Timeboxer]

sorry to hear others are still experiencing some and new ones at that too.

Well, like I'd said, a lot of these seem to come from GMs not understanding why the rules are the way they are...

Here's another one, actually, that I've just remembered. This summer, my GM was having us face phase spiders, and they were phasing in as a free action, and phasing out as a free action. They didn't provoke Attacks of Opportunity. This made them obviously very difficult to hit. (I realize that this is wrong. Yes, he was doing it wrong. Work with me, here.)

I decide, "Sigh, okay. I whip out my shortbow and ready an action to fire an arrow when a phase spider appears."

"But how do you know what direction they're coming from?"

"It doesn't really matter; there's no facing in D&D. Besides, I'm looking in all directions for them anyway."

"Oh. ...but that makes no sense. You have to be looking in some direction. I'm just going to roll percentile dice whenever they appear, and if it looks like you might have successfully seen one when it shows up, you can fire at it."

"...................okay."

We ended up having to run from the encounter because there was almost no way for us to hit them in any efficient way. Sigh.

 

[buzz]

We used that too! you had to land the "killing blow". People would lurk near the rear of the party until the mighty beast was about to drop. It was stupid and unfair. In retrospect I quite liked it! ;-)

I am currently playing in a game that uses a similar rule, i.e., you get +10% bonus XP for each kill.

You gotta love a rule that both penalizes characters who fill support roles (our cleric is an NPC; big surprise there...) and creates an ever-widening level gap between party members. Whee!

 

[buzz]

By far the dumbest houserule/rule-interpretation I've ever heard of was one that I read about on r.g.f.dnd. Thankfully, I didn't have to actually play under this ruling.

Basically, this DM was saying that he used initiative and combat rounds to track *conversations*.

See, his PCs were sick of occasionally getting jumped/surprise-attacked when they were interrogating NPCs. So, he would just have them all roll initiative and then talk on their turn in the initiative order, basically continually readying actions with weapons so that the NPCs could never whip out a sword or whatever and attack wihtout the PCs automatically getting the drop on them.

I tried to explain to him how this was probably the world's most egregious example of metagaming ("Forsooth, master cleric! Mayhap we should switch to initiative mode forthwith so yon brigand cannot attempt melee while we quesiton him."), not to mention quite stupid, but he just didn't want to listen. It made perfect sense to him.

The only other piece of poor judgement I can remember is that one of my groups had houseruled that no one starts combat flat-footed. After playing this way a few sessions I pointed out that it really hoses rogues, among other repercussions. We dropped it immediately.

 

[molonel]

In my previous campaign I ran, one paladin had an insane Charisma and thus insane saves. Naturally, my bad guys would try to use no-save effects on the paladin...particularily Enervation. The said player of the paladin hated Enervation, and whined about it constantly. Now, in his game, he has banned any kind of negative levels b/c he thinks they're unfair, since there's no save. Whiner. I hate that rule.

Um, actually, I think I'd complain about that sort of targeted BS, myself. How in the world would all the bad guys you encounter know, "Hmmm. That looks like a charismatic fellow. I'll bet he's a paladin! And they get charisma bonuses to saving throws! I better use a no-save spell, instead."

That doesn't sound like a bad house rule. That sounds like an over-reaction to cheesy metagaming.

 

[Kalendraf]

Roll two dice for hp, pick best one. One of the characters at 11th lvl has eight points or something from max.

I'd chalk it up to one lucky roller. That's currently the method we're using in my weekly campaign to roll HPs for the PCs.

In the prior campaign, there was an *EPIDEMIC* of bad hit point rolls which led to some extremely weak PCs. We instituted a rule temporarily called "protection" which meant if the roll was in the bottom 1/3 of the die range, the character would earn protection on his next roll. At the next level-up, a character with protection got to keep rolling their HPs until getting a number that was not in the bottom 1/3 of the die range.

After some quick calculations and real die roll experiments, we found that just rolling 2 dice and keeping the better of the two works out to be fairly similar for the hit points characters get. So far under this method, we've seen the rogue roll snake-eyes and the cleric roll a 1-2, so bad rolls still happen. They're mostly 10th level now, and there's not a single character that close to max hp.

YMMV...

 

[noeuphoria]

1) Magic shops R Us.


another house rule. when played normally within the rules maybe not too harsh.

however, when taken to this extreme look out.

Gold Card magic item...works like a ....credit card...you charge your bank account for items you want from the local Wizard's shop.

and it works in every country...plane...universe...whatever...

Sorry, I just had to do this.

"The Ravagers of Erythnuul will take your family, your property, and your worthless life..... but they won't take Imperial Gold Coins. The new Garl Glittergoldcard.... it's everywhere you want to be"

 

[Chimera]

In the prior campaign, there was an *EPIDEMIC* of bad hit point rolls which led to some extremely weak PCs.

I always go with straight rolls, but I watch where the PCs end up. One player was a bit below average hit points at 10th level, due to a spate of bad rolls. So I gave him max hitpoints on his next level to get him back above the half-way point, as it were. Seemed to break his string of bad HP rolls, as he rolled almost max on the next two levels.

Played a 1e game where we only got XP for what we killed. A game with 15-18 players(!) Boy was that a crapfest. My Thief/Magic-User was still only 1st/1st level when the party fighters were all 4th level. (At which point I quit the game) They'd hover over anything I managed to hit, then finish it off. Magic Missile? Hah! That's just a signal for someone else to leap in and claim the kill.

 

[Hammerhead]

Well, spellcasters in my world know that fighters and rogues generally have weak wills, divine spellcasters have poor reflexes, and arcane spellcasters have weak stomachs. Thus, they know that the blessed, holy knights of Heironeous and Pelor are pretty much immune to any kind of magic that they can resist, well...

In other words, my bad guys are actually intelligent and behave similarily to the PCs. If you prefer to play your bad guys as idiot morons, be my guest, but everyone I play with knows never to try and charm the cleric. My players make intelligent "metagame" decisions and target their spells towards those least likely to resist: charms towards fighters or rogues, necromancies and disintegrates towards wizards, and fireballs towards everyone, but particularily wizards and clerics. I don't think it's particularily metagame to assume that heroes know how to identify who's most likely to succumb to their spell effects.

Also, this character was an extremely famous high level paladin who's pretty much a household name as a famous hero, introduces himself as "Gawain the Paladin of Heironeous," wears holy symbols like pimps wear gaudy jewelry, has a higher Charisma than his deity (assuming Heironeous doesn't have any stuff, of course) and has saves in the mid 30s, yes, my bad guys act quite appropriately.

Also, considering that the removal of negative levels pretty much hoses any kind of necromancer or anyone who wants a decent 4th lvl targeted attack spell, it's not a fair house rule.

Before you call the tactics of my bad guys "targeted BS" and "cheesy metagaming" please, molonel, learn the situation before passing judgement.

 

[ForceUser]

Well, spellcasters in my world know that fighters and rogues generally have weak wills, divine spellcasters have poor reflexes, and arcane spellcasters have weak stomachs. Thus, they know that the blessed, holy knights of Heironeous and Pelor are pretty much immune to any kind of magic that they can resist, well...

In other words, my bad guys are actually intelligent and behave similarily to the PCs. If you prefer to play your bad guys as idiot morons, be my guest, but everyone I play with knows never to try and charm the cleric. My players make intelligent "metagame" decisions and target their spells towards those least likely to resist: charms towards fighters or rogues, necromancies and disintegrates towards wizards, and fireballs towards everyone, but particularily wizards and clerics. I don't think it's particularily metagame to assume that heroes know how to identify who's most likely to succumb to their spell effects.

Also, this character was an extremely famous high level paladin who's pretty much a household name as a famous hero, introduces himself as "Gawain the Paladin of Heironeous," wears holy symbols like pimps wear gaudy jewelry, has a higher Charisma than his deity (assuming Heironeous doesn't have any stuff, of course) and has saves in the mid 30s, yes, my bad guys act quite appropriately.

Also, considering that the removal of negative levels pretty much hoses any kind of necromancer or anyone who wants a decent 4th lvl targeted attack spell, it's not a fair house rule.

Before you call the tactics of my bad guys "targeted BS" and "cheesy metagaming" please, molonel, learn the situation before passing judgement.

Word.

One of the worst house rules I ever played with involves a bit of set-up first: curious to meet a new group of players, I joined the game at ye olde local RPG store. The established PCs were 8th-10th level, but since I was new they made me start at 1st! Imagine being a 1st-level guy tagging along with a group of 8th-level guys and trying not to get killed while they fought level-appropriate foes. I'm proud of myself, though; I put on a game face, rolled a bard, gave them inspire courage for a single evening, and never went back.

It was one of those groups that you hope to never get stuck with. The wizard rolled d8s for fireballs because d6s were "too weak," and the 9th-level paladin dual-wielded - get this - a vorpal sword and a holy avenger. Meanwhile, the 1st level gnome in the back is singing inspire courage and taking 100% cover behind a rock. Whee.