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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 8624754" data-attributes="member: 1465">I was just about posting that Guidance is the only spell in 5e which I exert some sort of regular control over, though I wouldn't call it house ruled.First of all, the spell applies to ability checks, and ability checks only exist when the DM grants you one of them ("rule zero"). The way I typically run the game, you don't actually roll ability checks all the time for everything. Instead, the principle for me is that you roll ability checks when I, as a DM, am undecided whether you should succeed or not. That means I am not going to ask you for a damn dice roll every single tree you try to climb or every single door you try to bash. In many cases, I just look at how agile you are or how strong you are, and decide you succeed outright or that you just can't succeed at all unless you add an extra idea about how to do it. That's because my DMing style gives more focus to players' skills than the usual roll-playing. This is not really about house ruling the spell itself.Another couple of things that make Guidance less terrible in our games, is that a lot of ability checks are reactive and/or group checks*. In theory you could cast the cantrip in advance to cover someone against reactive checks, in practice you won't be doing this unless you expect it will be needed in the next minute. Group checks come up quite often in our games, and Guidance can help you with one of the checks in the group, but not more than one, because of the simultaneity of action.Finally, I also more directly mitigate the Guidance spell by generally not allowing it to work on any check that represents something being done over the course of a time longer than the spell duration (one minute), or not representing an actual action but rather the results of something done in the past. Typically it means it won't work on Knowledge checks that represent what you happened to have learned previously. I guess you could call this one a house rule, but it's debatable.*I don't allow shenanigans like "I keep casting Guidance all day long every 59 seconds" or metagaming like "we sneak past the guard one by one specifically to avoid a group check". If you try shenanigans in my games, I'll use shenanigans against your PC, and soon we won't be playing together anymore.</blockquote>

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