Back in 1E all my house rules were stuff I cribbed or adapted from Dragon Mag.
2E started the same way, but as time went on and there was a glut of "Complete" books and other supplements to deal with, I ended up going from a house rule document of a few pages to a full binder (that included dozens of specialty priests for all the gods of the homebrew setting, and some classes like Monks). When 3E came out I was in the process of using 2E and some of the stuff from Combat & Tactics and Skills & Powers to basically create my own game tied closely to my homebrew setting and game style - but before I could finish that long-ass project - 3E came out and I just decided that took care of enough of my problems and introduced new stuff. We already used minis for combat - so the mini-focused rules worked for us.
With 3E we started with lots of house rules grandfathering some 2E stuff, but those gradually fell away - but as time went on tons of other house rules stayed or came into the game (adjusting all spell ranges, knockdown rules, critical hit and fumble tables, different rules for crafting magical items, etc. .) Eventually it became so complex we created a wiki for the game/setting (which no longer exists, unfortunately - though I have a back-up on my computer).
Skipped 4E - flirted with Pathfinder - but it was still too close to 3E to me.
For 5E I decided to go with the fewest house rules possible, but with the understanding that some others might come into play as we experimented with the rules and just played. I was tired of having to remember so much outside of the book. .. actually, that is a lie - I was tired of
reminding players - I never forgot. But then if the rules were "just for me" for the most part, why was I inflicting them on the players, who didn't care as much? basically, house rules suffer from diminishing returns. Also, this was a group of mostly newbies learning the game, I didn't want to make them have to learn some rules just to unlearn them for my game.
that said, if a whole group hates a rule and really want to change it - or if the DM wants to at least
try something I am all for it.
So these are my current house rules (and the fact that I can list them all here shows how little I have changed compared to past iterations):
- Stat Draft for character creation
- Ready & Delay are grandfathered from 3E so - it changes you position in initiative. Otherwise, reactions work the same.
- Goodberry: You roll for the berries 1d6+spell casting mod. (that up to ten berries thing rubbed me the wrong way - eitehr we have to keep track of how many berries the PCs collects to transform them (and who wants to do that) or else people just make 10 every time - rolling seemed like a compromise).
- You can do a bonus action in place of a regular action (so you can do two bonus actions in a round - but for spells one has be a cantrip to cast two)
- No Warlocks (for now - I just didn't want to learn a new class's BS
- Dragonborn replaced by two sub-species of lizardfolk (water and tree)
Other stuff is just cosmetic, like "Crusader's Mantle" was changed to be called "Hero's Mantle" because Crusaders can suck it, and I created a background for a player called "Itinerant Preacher" so their bard has religious bent.
Edit to add: Here is a link to the
House Rules page of our current campaign wiki (if anyone wants to see the details)
