Most Amusing Rule Misinterpretation?

[Plane Sailing]

My friends kept rerolling ALL their hitpoints at every level; depending on their rolls, they might have had less at 5th lvl than they did at 4th.

Interestingly the original Empire of the Petal Throne game from c1976 had a very similar explicit rule - at each level you rolled all your HD again, keeping the higher of the old total or the new total. One thing that was neat about it was that a low roll on a HD only penalised you for a single level rather than your characters entire gaming life ("Your fighter rolled a 1 again? Sucks to be you!")

Cheers

 

[WayneLigon]

When I did Traveller for the first time, I thought I was such an old hand at any form of chargen that I either didn't bother to read the stat generation rules or my eyes just glazed over that portion that said you rolled two d6 instead of three. Two! The mind boggled! It was, um, quickly pointed out to me that no way was I starting with a 17 Dex...

 

[Thanee]

Interestingly the original Empire of the Petal Throne game from c1976 had a very similar explicit rule - at each level you rolled all your HD again, keeping the higher of the old total or the new total. One thing that was neat about it was that a low roll on a HD only penalised you for a single level rather than your characters entire gaming life ("Your fighter rolled a 1 again? Sucks to be you!")

A german RPG (Midgard) also uses this rule, but you always get to keep your score, if it is higher, than the new one.

Bye
Thanee

 

[diaglo]

saw a guy try the bag o' rats in a game.

i nearly peed myself i was laughing so hard.

 

[Psion]

Well, it never got anywhere before I corrected to poor soul, but one player had a cleric with, of course, the turn undead ability.

He thought this let you turn into an undead creature.

 

[Zappo]

I find it extremely funny, that the rules actually state, that you cannot use item creation feats while raging!

Yeah, it's pretty unreasonable. I mean, I don't know about item creation, but while I'm trying to write a moderately complex Windows program I get enraged fairly often, and I still eventually get it done.

 

[Thanee]

fun with psionics (3.0)

Spoiler

When looking at the 3.0 Psychofeedback power, we all laughed heartily and started looking for how this power was actually meant to work... until we found out, that it really was meant to work like this!

*smiles innocently*

Bye
Thanee

 

[Zappo]

Oh, I finally recalled our biggest rules blunder. Maximize Power affects the D20 roll used to determine a power's DC. Scary...

 

[dreaded_beast]

I remember reading about one of the forefathers of DND, forgot if it was 2nd or 3rd edition, but they were young and had to run a game for their even younger relatives.

Anyway, the young relative was a cleric, so whenever the cleric attempted to "turn" undead, the DM ruled that the undead just "ran around in circles (turning)" for a few rounds then went back to attacking.

I guess that could be considered a form of "fleeing" in the rules, but I thought that was funny the first time I read it.

 

[Quasqueton]

In our first games, back in 1980 with the Basic D&D rules:

We thought giant rats were. . . well, GIANT. We had rats the size of cars blocking the dungeon hallway after we killed them. A couple random encounters completely sealed off sections of the dungeon from our explorations.

We couldn't figure out exactly what silver daggers were used for. The guy acting as DM for our first series of adventures somehow figured out they automatically hit when used.

In our very first combat, the DM allowed the two 1st-level clerics in the party to raise a fallen PC. The DM reasoned that if a cleric could pray for one hour and fully heal a character (note, as 1st-level BD&D characters, we only had around 6 hit points), then they could pray for two hours and bring a dead character back to life. (It was forgotten at that moment that 1st-level clerics in BD&D didn't get any spells.)

I started playing with the old basic box but I quickly moved to AD&D. We messed with rounds segments. In the way we interpreted, spells would take several rounds, not segments, to be casted. As such, a magic-user would have to concentrate for three rounds before he could cast a fireball.

It is a completely different way to play the game. Not bad, at all means. It took us one year to figure out the mistake.

I made this same mistake when switching from BD&D to AD&D1. But even after realizing the mistake, I kept this interpretation as a house rule for my homebrew low-magic campaign world. Our groups never lacked for MUs (or any spellcasters), but it did support the low-magic flavor. And it kept higher-level MUs in check when it took 4+ rounds for them to get off those amazingly powerful spells effects in AD&D.

Quasqueton