D&D 5E What are your favorite/non-favorite house rules?

[Ath-kethin]

Yea but you did not confirm my speculation: Where those best friends one and the same or two unrelated people because then it would be almost a case for the X-files?

The two GMs did not even know each other as far as I'm aware, and I don't think there were any other players in common aside from me and the other guy I mentioned.

 

[Jd Smith1]

The counter-point, never let the narrative get in the way of great mechanics!

As a counter-counterpoint, great mechanics generate great narrative!

 

[delphonso]

Speaking of great mechanics:

Favorite that I forgot about,
We used the Story Point system from FFG's Edge of the Empire in a campaign basically in place of Inspiration. Players could flip a point for advantage, or I could flip one to give them disadvantage. We also used them narratively - such as, "Hey, I know this guy." or "naughty word we need rope, good thing we bought it earlier."

 

[Blue]

It's interesting different table's preferences for different game balances. Like, a least favourite for me would be all-alpha-all-the-time, which is a consequence one sees when players always have spells/limited abilities up. I'm interested in sometimes-alpha, sometimes-attrition.

I'm not knocking the all-alpha approach. One benefit is that once that is the assumption it is hard for players to take further advantage of recovery rates. Also, for fluff-focused tables, it might be rather moot: perhaps their combats are always rare and epic.

I'm with you. Especially because the balance point between weapon wielders and full casters is not at the "we are at full spells every encounter" point.

I have friends who play like that, and I guess they are just calibrated from earlier editions that full casters should be much more powerful, but 5e makes some great strides towards narrowing that gap from 3.5 and earlier editions. (4e resolved it orthogonally to the current resource management design.) But it needs attrition and a decent number of encounters per day that burn resources to make that happen. Still (a lot) more room to go on that gap, especially utility magic outshining mundane solutions in other pillars of play, but I'd rather play the game so to let the design do the work of balancing them instead of giving players all their resources all the time. If I wanted to play a system that did that, I could.

 

[Imaculata]

My misfire tables for guns, and my random table for alcohol effects. In third edition the rules for alcohol are pretty silly, to the point of players even taking temporary ability damage from alcohol. I came up with a far more entertaining list of random effects, that encourages fun roleplaying. Plus I came up with my own houserules for when those things take effect.

 

[Warforged DK]

I happen to like Critical fail tables- I use them as DM and they definitely apply to enemies. I don't like overly harsh failures- missing the attack is bad enough, my crit fails range from: first attack against you has advantage, to your speed becomes 0 for the rest of the turn and all the way up to you hit yourself and are stunned. I actually hate that one, because I rolled it and it turned my BBEG final battle into very anti=climactic, but also very funny encounter.
Going forward, I plan on using a Critical hit deck and critical failure deck. Crit fails will like end up somewhat failing forward- roll again, if you hit, deal half damage, but first enemy has advantage on you. Give the player a choice- flat out miss, or chance to exert yourself and have 75% chance of something happening on your turn. But nothing that flat out ends the player's turn. That's super lame.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

.

 

[Jd Smith1]

What then happens if a PC gets/wears the cursed Girdle of femininity/masculinity?

I never put stuff like that in my game.

 

[Legatus Legionis]

.

 

[Jd Smith1]

And if they randomly roll it off a treasure table?
Heck, in my group, if they roll something, they get that item, unless they happen to have a Luckstone to which they can use its properties to get something else.

I don't use random treasure tables.