Your favorite house rules

[Quickleaf]

Character theme song music providing "spotlight" bonuses for that PC. I thought it was cheesy until I tried it once. Then I knew it was cheesy. And awesome.

 

[Squire James]

My current negative HP rules:

On his turn, a character with negative HP gets a Fortitude save with DC 5+ HP below zero. If he succeeds by 5 or more, he stabilizes. If he succeeds by less than 5, he does not stabilize but loses no HP that round. If he fails, he takes 1d6 damage.

Death occurs when the Fortitude save becomes impossible (i.e. when rolling a 20 would not be good enough).

 

[Elf Witch]

These are my house rules.

A Natural 20 on a skill roll is a +10 a natural 1 is a -10

A 1 on an attack role is critical failure you roll again if you hit your target nothing happens if you miss depending by how much you drop your weapon, lose your turn, break your weapon if it is non magical and non masterwork.

No evil characters and no loner types.

I reserve the right to veto any feat, class, spell outside the PHB.

One of my favorite house rules that we played with forever but my group now a days hate was the no 5 step we just got rid of it. Made feats like combat casting way more important. And made casting in combat more risky.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

A 1 on an attack role is critical failure you roll again if you hit your target nothing happens if you miss depending by how much you drop your weapon, lose your turn, break your weapon if it is non magical and non masterwork.

My house rule on this is that if you roll a 1 you roll to hit your target again. If the second roll would have hit the target then you simply miss. If your second roll would have also missed then you give up an AoO.

Sort of my version of a reverse critical hit. I couldn't come up with something appropriate for ranged characters though. Maybe it could be that your attack hits an ally instead?

Olaf the Stout

 

[Oryan77]

4. Characters die at -10 minus their constitution modifier (instead of -10).

1. I allow characters to die at minus their Con score. So if they have a 16 Con, they die at -16 instead of -10.

2. If you roll a natural 20 for the threat and another natural 20 for the confirmation, you deal the maximum damage from all your dice. No need to roll, just add up the max damage.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

1. If you only use Core rules when you create your character (some extremely rare exceptions are allowed), you can add +2 to any ability.
2. You don't need to confirm criticals. It's a punishment enough if you roll low damage.
3. Why are there lots single-class NPC fighters around? Well, the reason is this house rule: I use fumble-rules (nothing too deadly) but single-class fighters have a special immunity against fumbles. Dip, and it's gone... Some rare PrCs are allowed.

 

[S'mon]

For my Pathfinder Beginner Box game, my only house rule is to include Readied standard actions. PBB seems pretty much perfect as-is; though I have to make a few ad hoc rulings for stuff like tripping and grappling that's not in the PBB rule book.

I remember in 3e I banned the floaty shields, too.

In 4e I halve monster hit points and give minions a damage threshold, half that to bloody them. The game runs much better that way IME. I limit allowed sources following a couple bad experiences with the Power books, that's not really a house rule though IMO.

In 1e AD&D Fighter classes add their level to damage, instead of getting their level in #attacks vs creatures below 1d8 hd.

 

[Elf Witch]

My house rule on this is that if you roll a 1 you roll to hit your target again. If the second roll would have hit the target then you simply miss. If your second roll would have also missed then you give up an AoO.

Sort of my version of a reverse critical hit. I couldn't come up with something appropriate for ranged characters though. Maybe it could be that your attack hits an ally instead?

Olaf the Stout

I was doing that for awhile but it really seems to suck the fun out of the game when you hit an ally. I now handle it by they lose a turn.

 

[Soraios]

For 3.5e:
For almost all campaigns, I use a "no prestige classes" rule.

This. PrCs need to be linked to the gameworld so they don't become an exercise in game-breaking.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Our 3E Spell Lists and casters.

We made more use of the Descriptors (originally mainly energy types, but included Plant, Polymorph, etc) and made several of our own (Celerity, Combat - Ranged, etc). Then each type of caster was granted access to the Universal spells and a few descriptors depending upon the caster.

Eg: Hexblades: Universal, Combat - Melee, Curse. (Off the top of my head).

Some, like druid, got to choose from several descriptors. Anyway, it took Monte's Arcana Unearthed even further and made each class's spell list flavourful. Felt like different classes.