D&D General DMs - What makes You...

[overgeeked]

More specifically, what makes you, as a DM, sit down and change a rule?

Because the rule-as-written sucks. If it’s something I can deal with or put up with it’s easier not to fight over it and play it straight. Any house rule will be a fight with some player, so unless I’d rather not play than play with that rule-as-written I’ll leave it.

What makes you craft different lore for your world?

Because I want to. It’s creative and fun. It’s also easier to invent lore than memorize someone else’s lore. And not having infinite time, I cannot be an expert in the lore of a world I didn’t create. Also, no one can correct me on the lore of my world. Less aggravation when you make it up as no one at the table will have spent more time with it than you and you can change details without arguments.

What makes you not allow the presence of certain races, classes, backgrounds?

Because they’re broken, don’t fit the world, or I’m tired of seeing the flavor of the month.

What makes you not allow certain combos?

Power gamers and charop. 5E is already so ridiculously tilted in favor of the PCs just winning all the time that exploits and power gamer builds drain what little fun there is left in the game.

What makes you use certain books and not use others?

Money and who wrote it. I’m not going to buy every book and I don’t allow 3PP stuff in play. The WotC designers have a hard enough time avoiding power creep and most 3PP seem hell bent on broken stuff.

The flip side of these questions can be put to players. Like why optimize in a game that’s already so laughably easy? Why write an epic backstory for a 0 XP, 1st-level character? Why insist on certain races, classes, or backgrounds?

 

[Jer]

Hello Dms.

Seeing the lore discussion and about a dozen others on mechanics, races, rules, etc, I can't help but wonder one simple question - why?

More specifically, what makes you, as a DM, sit down and change a rule?

If its not working or it leads to boring play.

What makes you craft different lore for your world?

Story? Because my world building is collaborative with the players at the table? This feels like a really odd question - without lore for a world you don't really have a world? In this kind of game literally the only way to build a world is to craft lore - without lore you've got nothing.

(Or do you mean take a pre-published world and alter the lore for it? If that's the question then the answer is "story" - though generally I'm doing the opposite.)

What makes you not allow/or insist on the presence of certain races, classes, backgrounds?

I don't. My players figure out what they want to play, I work within those constraints.

What makes you not allow certain combos?

See above. I don't. I used to in previous editions of the game where balance mattered more or I believed that balance mattered more, but the games I currently run don't really seem to have those problems. If it does, see question 1 above - we'll just tweak the rules around the concept to make it work.

What makes you use certain books and not use others?

There's stuff in the books that I use that I want to use? I usually use published books to get ideas for a game. Different books have lots of different ideas in them - some things will be right for one campaign and not mesh well with others. Or even they'd be fine but the kind of game we're running doesn't deal with the things in those books. Like if I'm not running a game where horror is a theme, I'm probably not cracking open any Ravenloft books to look for ideas.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel like each of your questions is extremely deep and the answers required complicated, so I'm going to stop here for now and just answer this first one.

I change rules for a lot of reasons. I think it would be overly simplistic to say that it makes the game more fun, but that's the underlying reason behind all the more specific reasons.

The most common reason to change a rule is probably balance. For example, the rule as written either makes the option too attractive so that everyone is going to be steered to making the same choices or not attractive enough discouraging anyone from making the choice. Balancing rules effectively gives players more freedom and agency while at the same time allowing for more skillful play because there isn't necessarily one hammer you can pound to solve every problem you come up against. Balance also encourages spotlight sharing and team play since no one character has the tool for everything. Ultimately, balancing rules is required of Celebrim's 1st law of RPGs - Thou Shalt Not Be Good at Everything. In D&D specifically, this most often is making spells a little less effective so that they aren't win buttons that make the rest of the party superfluous.

Another very common reason to change a rule is silence of the rules on something that I feel will come up almost immediately in play or which in fact has come up in play. A lot of the time my rules are created directly as a result of finding I don't have a rule for that during play. Rulings are rules. Players all the time make reasonable propositions where the rules don't cover the request or where the rules forbid the request explicitly or by implication even though it is a natural request or where the rules don't deal well with the specific circumstances the proposition is being made in. So a lot of times I'm extending rules to make them more flexible and make clear what the ruling is in circumstances the RAW is silent on.

But this category goes well beyond just having rulings for every situation that comes up. D&D in particular has traditionally lacked whole subsystems for things like evasion and chases, crafting, dominions, etc. What the rules are silent on very often neither the players nor the GM can do, and indeed what the rules are silent on very often the players and the GMs can't do because they never even think about the possibility of doing them. And this category often covers CharGen options which are added in theory by the game makers for the same reason I add homebrewed CharGen options, the silence of the rules on how to create characters of fiction which a player might want but for which the rules provide no options.

Further, this category can include things that I want to be important and specific to my setting, but which the game is silent on because traditionally those things aren't important to the setting. For example, I have explicit rules for divine intervention because unlike most games, in my game divine intervention isn't something that occurs to cover a rare event but something that likely happens a dozen times in a campaign. The gods in my campaign world are very active, and curses and blessings and miracles on behalf of both PC's and NPCs happen frequently enough that they need rules. This category can include monsters that I want in my world but which don't exist in the official rules, or monsters that I conceive differently in my world than in the official rules. And it includes things like naturally sacred ground and holy sites, or the purpose and value of having a roadside shrine.

Yet another common reason to change the rules is verisimilitude. I consider it really important for the success of the proposition-fortune-resolution cycle, that a player that is forming a potential proposition in their head can without any knowledge of the rules develop a sense for the likely outcomes of a proposition. That is to say players need to be able to interact directly with the game fiction without knowing what the rules are and have some confidence that when the fortune test is made the outcome of the proposition will fit within common sense and will fit within common sense at about the probabilities you'd expect. What you imagine as the fail and success cases for the action ought to be what the fail and success cases actually are in the rules, and the rules ought to produce reasonable chances for success or failure depending on what you are proposing to do. As an extreme example, leaping a small puddle ought to be easier than leaping the Atlantic Ocean. I would argue that this verisimilitude test is probably the real reason we bother to have rules at all, because a game system that didn't care about verisimilitude wouldn't actually need many rules.

One of the most complex reasons for changing a rule is addressing rules bloat. Rules bloat come about when makers of a game system recognize the rules limitations of their own rules and begin patching the rules in a peice meal way, often with no more than the intention to sell more rules.

An example of rules bloat common to D&D would be the proliferation of classes and subclasses to cover increasingly small niches. Probably one of the worst rules bloat situations in all of D&D history is late 3.5 edition where CharGen options were sold in every book for economic reasons rather than game reasons resulting in huge numbers of unnecessary and often overlapping classes, which in turn did all sorts of awful things to the game balance. However, a parallel situation existed in 2e D&D with the proliferation of spells to the point of silliness. One of the things I try to do when revising rules for D&D is offer the same number of options while using less words to do it. Sometimes writing rules decreases the total number of rules at your table by reducing the number of rules supplements actually being used at your table. Yes, I do have a 585 pages house rule document for 3e D&D, but this statement becomes less ridiculous when you realize it is a full rules system that replaces all the chargen options in 3.5 D&D while in my opinion allowing even greater flexibility and better balance (eliminating the most broken aspects of the "lonely fun" CharOp minigame all the 100's of CharGen options in 3.5 created). I actually had less rules than most 3.X tables; I just didn't have them spread over 15+ 300 page rules supplements. All the things that were allowed were in one handy place. No need for players to buy $1000 worth of books and combing through them for optimizations, much as I no that in fact some players enjoy that - arguably more than they enjoy playing D&D.

To be fair, Chargen options are present in every non-adventure (and some adventure) releases for 5e as well. That's not an edition thing, its a money thing.

 

[Charlaquin]

what makes you, as a DM, sit down and change a rule?

I enjoy theory-crafting all kinds of house rules because I like armchair game design, but I usually only use very few house rules in any given campaign. Typically what makes me decide to actually implement a house rule is when I have a specific gameplay dynamic I want a campaign to have, and I think the house rule in question will encourage that dynamic.

What makes you craft different lore for your world?

I find the default lore (which is more or less Forgotten Realms) pretty boring.

What makes you not allow/or insist on the presence of certain races, classes, backgrounds?

To emphasize a certain tone in the campaign or the setting.

What makes you not allow certain combos?

I can’t think of any time I’ve ever done this. I suppose this might be more of a thing if I was running 3.Xe or something where unintended interactions between rules from different sources could create broken stuff like Pun-Pun.

What makes you use certain books and not use others?

Usually I don’t use books that are setting-specific if I’m not running a campaign in that setting. Otherwise I’m usually willing to allow options from any books, so long as they aren’t banned for tone reasons as mentioned above.

 

[Celebrim]

To be fair, Chargen options are present in every non-adventure (and some adventure) releases for 5e as well. That's not an edition thing, its a money thing.

I get why they do it, but I don't like the approach at all. I've long said that the economic model of D&D needs to depend not on selling rules but on selling intellectual property. And the health of the game of D&D depends not on cultivating players, but cultivating DMs. It's why Matt Mercer has often been doing more to sell the brand than WotC is.

In my head I have an ideal and complete rules set. And it looks nothing like what WotC is printing, which is why I tend to just stick to buying adventure books for the last 20 years. I hate that WotC considers it more important to print power inflation in CharGen and has since 3.5 for "money" reasons than it does to print decent abstract battle system and naval combat rules, decent crafting rules and equipment guides, decent chase/evasion rules, actually useful and modular monster manuals, etc. It's all random crap with usable page counts too small to justify the economic outlay for. Which is why I end up spending more money on third parties than WotC, and end up doing more rulesmithing than rules purchasing.

 

[James Gasik]

More specifically, what makes you, as a DM, sit down and change a rule?

There can be a few reasons. 1, I don't think it's fun. I can come to this conclusion by just imagining how I would react to it as a player, or just watch my players groan about it.

For example, the bulk of my gaming career, D&D was a game about going into dungeons and finding cool magic items. In earlier editions, magic items were used as a way to give players new abilities, and potentially could be used to adjust balance (though it can go the other way as well...). So I adjusted the rules for attunement. First by making attunement equal to 1+proficiency bonus, then by removing attunement from most items; now, if an item has an attunement, it's not a requirement to use the item at all, but it unlocks an additional power or feature.

2, it might be confusing, or arbitrary, with no real explanation of why it works the way it does.

A good example of this would be something like see invisibility not overcoming the invisible condition. That just confuses people.

3. A player might have made a choice that turns out to be sub-par for no good reason. Like deciding to play a lizardman monk and finding that your natural armor is redundant, or picking a spell that sounds cool, but for whatever reason is weaker than other spells of it's level.

What makes you craft different lore for your world?

I'm a creative person, and sort of a lore junkie, so I like to add older lore to my 5e games, or sometimes put a new twist on an old concept, just to make the game more interesting. I'm the kind of player who loves the thrill of discovering lore about a setting, and this way, there are mysteries that you can't read about in a book, and can only find out by engaging with the world.

What makes you not allow/or insist on the presence of certain races, classes, backgrounds?

Either it better reflects the lore I have created for my setting, or it's an attempt to get people to play things they normally wouldn't. I have a friend (hi Andrew!) who only has two real character concepts- he either wants to be a necromancer and have undead minions fight for him, or he wants to be a simple fighter that does the same thing turn after turn. For him, D&D is about turning his brain off (he's actually a fairly bright guy, and an EMT) and having fun. That's great, but you get tired of seeing "Human Champion Fighter #4" after awhile (and his foray into being a Necromancer Wizard didn't turn out to be very much fun for him).

So I'll be like "in this setting, there are no humans", or "this is a curated list of races and subclasses". As for backgrounds, I did once run a game where all the characters were Elven Nobles, scions of great Elven families, who had to travel to distant lands as ambassadors. So there, it fit the story.

What makes you not allow certain combos?

I don't do this often, but the way I see it is, if a particular combination is so good that it makes others seem obsolete, there's a problem. Why would anyone not seek out this combination? Surely NPC's in the campaign would have realized "hey man, if a Sorcerer makes a pact with a Demon and then ever sleeps, he can become all powerful!", and either anyone who can be a Coffeelock became one, or the non-Coffeelocks got together and murdered any Coffeelocks (or the superior Cocainelock) they could find! Not that I've had to ban this combo, but if someone asked, I'd probably put some limits on it.

What makes you use certain books and not use others?

Every D&D campaign is a black hole of creativity, sucking up any good idea that comes it's way. So it's rare that I would disavow an entire book, rather, I'd pick and choose the parts I liked. In 5e, I haven't had to toss any book yet, but in previous editions, it happened from time to time.

In 2e, for example, the Complete Class Handbooks offered Kits, a sort of weak precursor to Subclasses. The first few of these stated, in no uncertain terms, that multiclassed characters couldn't have kits.

Then the Complete Dwarves' Handbook offered multiclass Kits, and I was skeptical, but nothing seemed ridiculous.

Then the Complete Elves' Handbook came out, and not only did it have powerful multiclass Kits (at least, they seemed powerful to me at the time), but you suddenly had the book claiming all these extra racial powers for Elves, like resistance to extreme temperatures, immunity to normal disease (for a race with a penalty to Constitution, no less!), and even a "mystical communion with nature and elvenkind, which replaces sleep, leaving you aware of your surroundings". Oh and Elven subraces with bonuses to Strength and Dexterity, beyond the limits of the races in the PHB.

In 3e, there were some odd subsystems that I didn't understand at first, so I was reluctant to use them initially- Magic of Incarnum, The Tome of Magic, and The Tome of Battle come to mind. Oh and the Expanded Psionics Handbook. When I eventually did allow them, only the Tome of Battle got any use, sadly.

And then there's the Book of Exalted Deeds and the Book of Vile Darkness. Yeah no. I'm not going to go into those abominations here.

 

[CleverNickName]

Hello Dms.

Seeing the lore discussion and about a dozen others on mechanics, races, rules, etc, I can't help but wonder one simple question - why?

More specifically, what makes you, as a DM, sit down and change a rule?
What makes you craft different lore for your world?
What makes you not allow/or insist on the presence of certain races, classes, backgrounds?
What makes you not allow certain combos?
What makes you use certain books and not use others?

I would like to state, that we all understand these are preferences. There is no right or wrong way. I am insanely curious about the why though.

As always, thanks to everyone in advance for participating in the discussion.

What makes me change a rule?
Usually it's a style choice: usually I'm trying to make the game behave in a manner more closely resembling an older edition of the game. Very rarely, I will stumble upon a better way of doing things...the RAW is great and all, but they aren't perfect for my group.

I started playing D&D with the red box rules, and I don't need to tell you how much the game has changed since then. Well, every now and then I'll encounter a rule that departs from the way I used to play, the way I remember playing, or my expectation of how they should work. Gargoyles are forever Constructs in my game, and kobolds are more like dogs than lizards, and gnomes are just dwarves. That is how it will always be at my table, because that's how it will always be in my imagination.

Most of the changes that I make to the rules aren't even changes, though. Usually I just implement some of the optional rules in the PHB and DMG and call it good. Spell points instead of "Vancian" magic. Feats and multiclassing. Honor. Point buy instead of 4d6. Gritty Realism. Mixing potions, scroll mishaps, wands that don't recharge...it's all in there. I just flip the switches and turn the dials until the game runs the way that I want it to.

About the only true "house rule" I have written is the one where healing potions always heal the maximum amount, but cost 50% more. (So a potion of healing always heals 10 hp, and always costs 75gp.) I did this to make potions more reliable in combat, a purely stylistic choice.

What makes me craft different lore for my world?
Lorecrafting is the best part of D&D, to me. If I wasn't excited about writing my own stories, drawing my own maps, and inventing my own villains, I don't think I would enjoy being a Dungeon Master. I have a deep and abiding love for the classic D&D modules like "Keep on the Borderlands" and "The Isle of Dread," but I don't treat them as holy writ. I regard them more as 'good staring points,' and not really 'the way things should be.'

What makes me not allow or insist on the presence of certain races and backgrounds?
The players. At Session Zero (we call it a "rolling party") everyone rolls up new characters--any character they want, using all of the WotC materials that I own (Xanathar's, Volo's, Tasha's, etc.) Now I have 5 players, so at the end of the night I have up to 5 different races and subraces.

Those five races become the major 5 races in my campaign, and all others can be ignored, or removed completely. I'm not going to write 30 pages of lore for tabaxi if none of my players are interested in the tabaxi, for example. Unless something is going to be a major villain or faction in my game world, I drop them. Sure, there might still be tabaxi in the world, but if there are they're just hanging out in the background more like scenery than anything else.

I've never heard of people not allowing certain backgrounds until I read this thread, though. This is a first for me; I'm not sure how to comment.

What makes me not allow certain combos?
Nothing. (shrug)

I've read lots of stuff online about "game-breaking combos," especially on Reddit, where people will go into great detail about synergy between certain race, class, feat, and multiclassing options...but I've never seen it in real life. The worst I've seen was a "CoffeeLock" inspired warlock that someone put together from a guide they found online. It was fine for 2, maybe 3 gaming sessions, but the player quickly got bored with it and asked to roll up a different character. So I guess these 'combos' aren't really a problem for my group, or at the very most they seem to be self-correcting problems.

What makes you use certain books and not allow others?
The players again. When we're rolling up new characters, I pull out all of my books and add them to the game Compendium (we play over Roll20). The players can pick anything they want to use, from all of the sourcebooks. If nobody chooses anything out of Fizban's, I remove it from the campaign. Unless I need something for a particular NPC or Faction, the players pretty much control what gets added and what gets removed.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

I’ve implemented rules for my most recent campaign that are a mix of official alternate rules, rules from 5E Hardcore Mode, and my own mad creations.

I wanted to run a classic dungeon crawl but felt the rules as written wouldn’t help capture that feeling of dread associates to plundering mouldering tombs and barrows. So I turned down the power levels of the game, made new weapon and armour lists, and implemented gold for xp to encourage going back to the dungeon.

Ultimately I believe I did this just to shake things up as stock D&D 5E was getting a little stale to run.

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

More specifically, what makes you, as a DM, sit down and change a rule?
I almost never change rules. But I do ignore a bunch, such as encumbrance, daily upkeep and probably some other bookkeeping exercises that I consider optional extras.

What makes you craft different lore for your world?
I don't change the lore. I just can't be bothered to read all the stuff that is out there. It is less work to draft the bits that I need myself if a quick search doesn't give me the answers I need.

What makes you not allow/or insist on the presence of certain races, classes, backgrounds?
If I never read the books, then the races/classes/backgrounds will not feature in my game.

What makes you not allow certain combos?
If you mean multiclassing: Everything is allowed, but a PCs 2nd class should be linked to roleplay.

What makes you use certain books and not use others?
Laziness, and/or reluctance to read the huge mountain of material that is out there.

 

[MNblockhead]

Whew! I was worried what was going to come after the elipses!

Hello Dms.

Hi!

Seeing the lore discussion and about a dozen others on mechanics, races, rules, etc, I can't help but wonder one simple question - why?

More specifically, what makes you, as a DM, sit down and change a rule?

Because I'm a control freak who likes to legislate other people's fun! But beside that...

I generally stick to a system's rules as written, but I will make changes or additions to fit a certain style of play or setting. My first campaign (100% home brew world and adventures) really didn't change much, my campaign "home rules" mainly covered which optional rules in the PHP and DMG we would be using. My second campaign (Curse of Strahd) only changed the leveling/XP to a system for the adventure I found on DTRPG that encouraged a mix of exploration, defeating important foes, and finding important macguffins. My current campaign has the most rule changes. That is because I'm running it as an "old school" inspired mega dungeon that using GP for XP. It is a years long campaign and so I have a mix of third-party and self written additions to better cover strongholds, followers, factions, reputation, etc.

What makes you craft different lore for your world?

I would hate to deprive my players of my creative genius!

Mainly, because I enjoy it and I can remember the lore I create myself better than I can published lore.

What makes you not allow/or insist on the presence of certain races, classes, backgrounds?

Grognard chauvinism.

Nah. In my first, homebrew, campaign for 5e, I limited races to fit the setting and lore I created. But for the last few years, I don't. The current campaign is anime-level gonzo. One player plays a worg that was "cursed" with fiendish goat hooves that allow for better jumping and then contracted lycanthropy from a were tiger. And this is a setting (third-party publisher) that has copraphagi as a playable race (roach people, who eat...)

What makes you not allow certain combos?

The only Combos allows at my table are the traditional cheddar-cheese filled Combos. Anything else is anathema. But I've been known to make exceptions for peanut-butter filled combos.

What makes you use certain books and not use others?

I like adventure books and settings that are not available on DnD beyond and which my players don't own. Curse of Strahd being the one exception.

I avoid adventures and settings that are based on popular and lore-rich IP. I am not the type of fan and don't have the right mental makeup to keep true to something like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc. and players that would be attracted to playing in such settings would be disappointed in how I would run them.

For crunch/rules - I buy the systems I like. If there are things I want to add to support certain playstyles, I'll look for expansions or third-party materials that support it and which are not overly complicated and which my players and I think are fun. Any changes to system RAW are discussed with players first.

I would like to state, that we all understand these are preferences. There is no right or wrong way.

Quite a stretch to write "we all" understand. Are you new to this hobby? ;-)

I am insanely curious about the why though.

Oh no! I should have read ahead. Did I just create a new stalker‽

As always, thanks to everyone in advance for participating in the discussion.

You are welcome. Please don't stalk me.