Dropping Some Knowledge
You never forget your first group. Sometimes, that presents a bit of a challenge.
For those of you who have followed her career, you may have noticed that Magus struggles with mechanics. Well here’s part of her origin story explaining why. I doubt that Thaumaturge manged to keep his teaching license at that School for Unruly Ladies, but the damage was already done. When you learn the rules in a heavily house-ruled campaign, they stop being house rules. For a new player, those house rules become the de facto way to play the game. Subsequently, if that new player goes on to another table later in her career, she’s going to struggle with the transition.
I saw this phenomenon not so long ago when I joined a long-standing group. Suffice it to say that I was more of a stickler for the rules-as-written than the rest of that crowd. The first combat of the first session rolled around, and somebody dropped a 15 to hit against an out-of-the-box drow prison guard.
“Sorry,” says the GM. “15 is his AC. That’s a miss!”
There weren’t any moonshine and horseradish shots, but there might as well have been. I tried to tell them that you have to meet (not exceed) AC to hit a monster in 5th edition. They replied that it was an easy mistake to make, since you had to beat AC to hit in 3.5 D&D. When I pointed out that, well actually, you only have to meet rather than exceed in 3.5 as well, there were blank stares… tumbleweeds rolled by… and then someone suggested that my book must be from a later printing.
That brings me to my question of the day. Have you ever had a “we play different” experience out in the wild? Maybe that weird other group used botches and fumbles, handed out mechanical bonuses for RP, or only awarded XP for getting the killing blow on a monster. Let’s hear about your bizarre house rule experiences down in the comments!
UPDATE: Back in July we’d asked all the good little heroes over on our Facebook page to tell us how Team Bounty Hunter first met. Since the majority of our readers likely missed out on this information, here was the winning suggestion: “They went to the same School for Unruly Ladies. And then burned it down.” There was even a sketch of our young heroines to commemorate the occasion.
I’m less sure how Thaumaturge managed to land a teaching position at that prestigious institution. I can only conclude that there was a teacher’s strike on account of all the unruliness, and they had to take who they could get.
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Not really a “we play different” experience but it could turn into one. We made a modern zombie adaptation of 5th ed for a few oneshots, had a idea for a armor system degradation. Any attack that passes 10+ dec but is below your AC would damage your armor (ruled as it protected you) allowing for our scraping and crafting rules to have a necessity, pretty sure you could toss that rule into a normal 5th ed game for some armor degradation and cause some chaos to the by the book crowd…
That’s a cool idea from a simulation standpoint. Armor breaks down over time, slowly getting replaced with scavenged Mad Max style oddments. However, you run into game balance stuff pretty quick, shifting play in favor of DEX-based defense and making casters a more attractive option than melee. That’s the thing about house rules. You implement them: they do the cool thing you intended. But they also do half a dozen things you didn’t intend.
Ooooh boy, I have definitely had an experience with that. After his first session of D&D, my friend got permission to invite me over. This game was big on house rules and using the rulebook as a guide. Just last session, the DM couldn’t bring the rulebook due to real life reasons and just house ruled everything that came up.
The only problem was that we only met roughly twice every three-four months, which my friend and I couldn’t handle; we’d fallen in love with the game. So we started a home game!
After playing around four sessions.
Without any of the veteran players, just new players that we were teaching.
And we only had half-remembered house rules and pdfs to go on.
There were sooo many rules mistakes. We misremembered a house rule and thought that a natural one means that you automatically hit an ally. That included disintegrates, meaning that our sorcerer very quickly burnt through our diamond supply.
But hey, we had fun and that campaign is currently my first and only campaign to survive all the way up to level twenty.
I guess that goes to show that it’s not the rules that matter, it’s the laughs and the friends.
Lol. “Hit an ally” botches are the fastest way to turn Lord of the Rings into Monty Python.
There’s a reason I framed today’s question in terms of moving between groups. House rules only become an issue when you leave the house, so to speak. As long as your pals stick with, have fun, and enjoy the campaign, everything is great. When they try to go to a convention or join organized play though….
I wish I could remember where I read it, but I believe Gygax cited frustrations with non-standard play as a primary reason for inventing organized play. Whether that is wrong-headed or not remains a subject of debate.
We had a rule like that, but only when you shoot at an enemy behind an ally. The barbarian got A LOT of bolts in his back – like, at least two per fight.
Out of curiosity, did that archer acquire a reputation for being a bit of a klutz? I mean, it’s hard to feel like Legolas when there’s a one in twenty chance you’re doing the Blinkin thing: https://orig00.deviantart.net/7223/f/2012/128/c/4/rage___blinkin_style_by_xholyxlightx-d4yz954.gif
She got some glares from the barbarian, the rest didn’t care. Players were pretty amused though.
For the longest time as I played 5e, when it comes to making off-hand attacks, the o my caveat was that you can only do so after you attack with a one-handed melee Weapon, and unless you have the Dual Weilder feat the second attack has to be a light weapon. Simple enough, so much that even now that’s how I think two-weapon fighting works.
Cut to recently where I’m playing my Bladesinger. Fighting off a gang of baddies who have resistance to slashing weapons thanks to some weird mutation, so I’m using green flame blade to help do the damage and cut down some baddies. I also throw in an off-hand Attack as my bonus action if I don’t need it for a spell. Then comes in another player, not a first time player but first time I played with him, who said I could t do that.
Rules as written, I can only do an off hand attack when I make an Attack action. And while Green-Flame Blade does have me attack with my main weapon (a scimitar), That isn’t an attack action, it’s casting a spell. Even though I’m still slashing my sword at the bad guys. Suffice to say that caused a slight pause as a other player in the group, a kung-fu Druid, had also gotten confused because he’s always just been using his quarterstaff for cool martial arts move followed by round house kicks as off-hand attacks, only for it to be revealed that despite literally being empty handed, unarmed strikes are NOT light weapons. Or finessable.
The GM was cool about it and allowed it to happen anyways since even with an off-hand Attack we weren’t doing that much damage, but it was certainly a reminder that my usual means of doing things isn’t the lawfully “right” way of doing things.
Yeah… It’s tough when you have been playing for a while. Do you offer a rebuild? Ignore the problem?
For what it’s worth, I like your GM’s “judge on a case-by-case basis whether it’s OP or not” solution here.
Is this the bit where I remind DMs that Nat 1’s are just normal misses, and not horrible, combat altering events like disarming yourself, destroying your weapon or injuring yourself or an ally? Because otherwise you cripple any characters making full-attacks, an already at-risk population?
Oh, I just did? Cool.
Houserules aren’t all bad though. Remember that 90% of non-Society people are playing with full HP from their class hit dice, and not rolled health. Some people let Clerics spontaneously cast Breath of Life as a 5th lvl spell. Some people probably let Paladins get full caster level instead of level-3, just because they missed that bit. They let Rangers pick companions from the full list of Druid-allowed companions. And that’s alright.
“A ranger may select from the alternative lists of animal companions just as a druid can, though again his effective druid level is half his ranger level. Like a druid, a ranger cannot select an alternative animal if the choice would reduce his effective druid level below 1st.”
– http://www.d20srd.org/srd/classes/ranger.htm
It is alright. Unless you’re unaware that it’s a house rule. This is an issue that pops up when you’re moving between groups, not when you’re staying within the same.
My pals had a fabulous time not hitting AC. That doesn’t mean you can go down to the local Adventurer’s League and do the same.
Every new table you sit down at is a renegotiation of the rules. That customization makes the game great, but it also offers a challenge for mobility between play groups. TLDR: If you use house rules, don’t assume that they’re universally beloved. See Ramsus’s comment about introducing fumbles for an example.
On the subject of meeting or exceeding DC’s or AC, my personal house rule I use for games I run, is that if a roll is made that meets the DC/AC of a creature, the dice favor the PC’s.
(or the defender if the roll is made by and against multiple PC’s/NPC’s).
As for games that did not have a very clear understanding of the rules, the one that comes to mind didn’t quite understand how vancian prepared spellcasting works. Prepared casters (wizards, clerics, etc) would cast spells like 3.5’s spirit shaman (or worse, the sorcerer, drawing upon the entire spell list as spells known).
Apparently he Glass Cannon Podcast played their Pathfinder wizards like sorcerers (Vancian like spontaneous), until enough people wrote in to complain. Nothing will trigger a response in gamers like somebody “playing wrong!”
At least they admitted from day 1 that that was a houserule. They knew that wasn’t how it worked. Also, they didn’t do ALL their spells like spontaneous, they only allowed it for spells either one or two levels below their highest. So their strongest spells still had to be Vancian.
I mean it was still OP, so I understand the complaints and subsequent abandoning of the houserule, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds.
Still my favorite Podcast. Saw them at their Atlanta show last month. Was good times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVtPhOlrbWE
In the town I grew up in, all the D&D groups (admitedlly, there wasn’t that many) had a houserule about crits : two consecutive nat 20’s were insta kills. End of discussion.
It was, of course, ridiculously imbalanced, but none of the group ever questionned the rule. Everyone seemed to think it was a regular rule, and it’s only many years later that I learned it wasn’t.
To this day, we still don’t know where that rule came from.
I hear that rule referenced all the time, but I’ve never seen a real game where it was actually enforced. Funny old world, innit? I’m guessing there’s some old Dragon Magazine out there somewhere that mentioned the two-20 kill as a neat option, but that’s base speculation on my part. Fingers crossed that someone out there in the comments knows the real answe.
Hey! I know the answer!
It’s actually a variant in the 3.5 DMG. It requires a third roll to confirm like a crit (20/20/hit). It probably has a longer history than that, but I know it’s at least in 3.5 core.
+5200 XP to HisHighestMinion!
At my table 20/20 gets your crit damage rolls maximized which I think is a nice bonus but not game breaking.
I like Magus’s schoolgirl outfit. I guess this is where her Maggy S. Purrson vigilante social identity got her doctorate.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/behaving-intelligently
Perhaps the archetype of her one level of Vigilante is Magical Child? She’s certainly dressed for it.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/vigilante/archetypes/vigilante-archetypes-paizo-inc/magical-child/
We know she knows “Conjure Pony”, so a level of Summoner spellcasting is not out of the question. But then what could her familiar be…?
Check out the update in the blog for some additional context about Magus’s outfit.
Also, I don’t envy the small, vulnerable creature that got the job of being Magus’s familiar. Girl has poor impulse control. That’s dead mouse walking right there!
Three questions:
What is the problem with combining alcohol and RPG-gaming? Once, in a stormy day, my group decided to do that, by the third combat we needed to call off the game because of general drunkenness. For my it was a funny experience, mainly because i don’t drink.
Second. Why is Magus-chan dressed like a Japanese school girl? I for one, think that is very racist for cat-people 😉
Third. What books are they speaking about?
Drinking penalties are fine as a sometimes food. When it’s every game…
That’s the dress code at the School for Unruly Ladies. You’ll have to take it up with the headmistress.
Textbooks. They’re in a school after all.
It was just one game and after the hangover, and my morning special-opera-singing-wake-up, they have not drink again. They are my friends and i like to help them 🙂
School for Unruly Ladies? And here i was thinking that was the Ecchi-school for anime cat-girls 😐
I still have this wild theory that the world of the Handbook of Heroes is based in some sort of RPG. I just need to find which one and then i will show them, I WILL SHOW THEM ALL!!!
In any case good job and good luck with the arcane rules of the many D&D editions.
I realized my error this morning. I’d assumed that everyone read the Facebook post from a while back about the Team Bounty Hunter origin story. This comic is a flashback. Check out the update in the blog for some additional context about Magus’s outfit.
Read the answer, check.
Read the update, check.
Have a flashback of a clockwork orange, check 🙂
I din’t know it was a flashback, knowing Magus, i was thinking she was trying to improve herself. Also knowing Magus is obvious she would accept the help of Thaumaturge, for what is worth. Poor girl, someone please use a light cantrip to cheer her 🙁
Actually, I’m usually the guy whose job is to know the rules for the rest of the table, and they usually defer to me.
“You have to give me +10% of the loot for being the party treasurer. Sorry guys. That’s the rules.”
Actually I’m not the treasurer, as I hate taking notes, and my penmanship is atrocious.
Also, part of the reason I’m trusted to be “The rules guy” who even the DM will defer to is because I don’t lie ever. I’ll point out when the rules are disadvantageous to me as well.
Unless of course you’re lying right now. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lEbwF_HVFmo/TUahztGjtPI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/yrwrN6ebLuE/s1600/Labyrinth-Two-Door-Riddle.jpg
So the GM I play with the most uses 20 as an automatic crit, even in Pathfinder and 3.5, and you only roll critical threats if your weapon has an extended range, such as a longsword or rapier.
I once played with a GM that absolutely hated the concept of battle-healers, and started giving out exp only to people that helped take down a target. His classification of help was very hard to play with though: enchanters could get exp as well as those wizards and clerics using crowd control or evocation spells, but Illusionists and Healers were out of luck. I did not like playing with him though, and found another dm shortly.
As for unspoken rules that need speaking, I have two personal rules (one of them is specific to editions such as 3.5 and Pathfinder). These are more of a “Player to Character Build” rule though, and really, they’re more what you call guidelines, than actual rules.
The first is that any barbarian that survives past level 5 (in 3.5) and 10 (in Pathfinder, though it is a variable level) is playing Barbarian wrong. In those editions, Temporary Hit Points granted through Rage are spent after all other hit points. In 3.5 you die at -10 hp; so any barbarian that is left with single-digit health after level 5 as he ends his rage might just instantly die. Pathfinder rules death at “Negative hit points equal to its Constitution score”, so the level you die at instantly changes. But if the barbarian must be in the face of enemy combatants, then they will inevitably take lots of damage, and thus the Barbarian is unlikely to survive past level 5 if played as a shock trooper (which it seems to be designed to be played as).
The second of my personal rules is that every front-liner should be built so that should they ever fail a will save against a domination effect, they will kill at least one teammate. Even if they plan to have a high will save, they better also have that damage output available.
One day I will solve my issue of longwindedness. But it is not this day!
Now see, I think it’s the mark of a good front-liner to plan for the domination. Produce good damage, but not so much that you one-shot your party members when the inevitable mind control rolls around. All you need is power attack and a greatsword to do viable damage. Everything else is overkill. Choosing the amount of overkill is down to player’s preference.
Oooooh, do I have a plan for the domination! I play a bloodrager (barbaric sorcerer) in PFS, and have failed my Will twice (so far).
The first time I was unprepared, but it was only a Charm Monster – so I did a lot of “why are you attacking her, she’s good, now stop, we can all be friends!” while bull-rushing and tripping and blocking passages (it didn’t help that I was Large and Long Armed, and the sorceress was doing her evil magic from behind me). As a result I prolonged the fight a few rounds and was knocked out.
The second time it was a Dominate, and I nearly killed an eidolon BUT I was ready! My plan sucked though. By that time I had acquired a lyrakien familiar, who was equipped with a wand or Protection from Evil and could poke me with it, giving me another save. Poor girl. Luckily, I critically failed 3/5 attacks against her, and a bloodrager’s familiar is surprisingly sturdy (5/evil ftw!), so all ended well. She died later, filming our fight with a demigod.
Your comment about barbarians not surviving past level 10 in Pathfinder isn’t quite accurate, since there are a couple fairly standard ways to bypass “sudden barbarian death syndrome”.
The most obvious is to play the unchained barbarian. Their hp buff is true temporary hp (unlike that of the basic barbarian, which isn’t actually temporary hp but a temporary boost to constitution, which is why you lose the hp last). Unchained barbarian loses their bonus HP first, so when they drop out of a rage, whatever HP they have left (assuming the temp stuff was eaten through) they keep.
The second method is the Raging Vitality feat. It allows you to continue to expend rage rounds while unconscious and increases the Con bonus you get with a normal barbarian. This means that dropping unconscious does not instantly end your rage, giving your party enough time to heal you before your hp drops to death. I might also note that your example of being in single digit hp won’t often lead to death (unless you are out of rage rounds) since you are allowed to remain in rage even after the combat finishes, so you should be downing a potion or two during the rounds immediately after combat if you are that close to death.
Then there are the diehard feat / ferocity special ability (available to half-orcs with an alternate trait, full blooded orcs, and some other races). These both let you stay conscious all the way to death, so if you are conscious, you are still able to consume rage and not die until you actually take the damage needed to kill you. Course these are often more risky than raging vitality because 1) if you are still a threat, enemies will still attack you whereas they’ll often ignore an unconscious enemy and 2) you are dropping 1 hp a round if you take a standard action. But still, you can use your time in the negatives now to pop a potion.
Nothing I can recall aside from standard things like “nobody actual cares about encumbrance” and the dreaded “nat 1s and 20s auto-fail/succeed regardless of how little sense that makes” kind of stuff.
My GM for a recent D&D game tried to institute fumble mechanics at the start of a game but I immediately shut it down because 1) GODS NO! and 2) They did not at any point warn us they would be used or ask for an opinions on the idea until in the midst of a combat so it was hardly a fair time to declare the mechanic to exist.
Speaking of mechanics, a question popped into my head the other day.
“If the world of D&D is assumed to be operating under the same mechanics even when the PCs aren’t there, do the citizens of that world actually need adventurers for anything? How many Commoners would it take to kill an ancient dragon? Surely given the action economy not more than 100 right? But let’s be fair, they have soldiers and town guards. Which have at least marginally better stats than Commoners. So if we’re talking less than 100 soldiers to slay even the most extreme of threats….. they don’t really need PCs for anything do they? Unless for some reason it just turns out this is cheaper somehow…. but I kind of doubt it.”
The concept of DR makes the commoner strategy less viable.
Also the concept of morale. It’s going to take an especially brave commoner to stand his ground and fire on command with Smaug coming at him.
Also the concept of wings. The dragon gets to choose where the fight happens. Why would it head straight for the mass of armed troops rather than waiting for cover of night and using its superior senses to implement hit-and-run tactics?
My partymate who believes that every problem can be solved by a sufficiently large number of peasants with muskets would like to have a world with you.
…Though he has conceded that they might occasionally need some enchanted/specialty bullets to get through DR. Surely a major kingdom can drop a few thousand gp on +1 cold iron musketballs, right? No wonder all of Earth’s dragons were killed off long ago!
Well, DR is a non-thing in 5e so they wouldn’t even need that. Though thinking on it more, you would need a lot more than 100 commoners just because of a few things.
Amusingly the flying doesn’t matter one bit as unless the dragon chooses to flee the fight (ie losing a fight to a punch of peasants and proving my theory correct) it has to remain at all within the reach of ranged weapon fire. If it tries hit and run tactics it just endlessly runs into a worse situation for it, hundreds of held actions to attack once it gets in range.
The issues are (listed in order of impact)…
#1 the fear effect which is probably going to debilitate half the opponents or more. This feature right here is probably the main in setting reason this kind of fight doesn’t occur. When your forces only hit on a nat 20, most of them having disadvantage makes things a lot harder.
#2 the fact that it has a good chance of rolling better on initiative than half these low CR opponents and gets the chance to wipe too many of them out before they get their first turn. Because combat is probably only a single round or two rounds long. Any longer and the non-dragon side is clearly going to lose.
#3 its breath weapon and wing attacks which will take out many foes at once.
In 3.5 or other systems with DR…. yeah the cost of weapons to bypass DR would probably outweigh the gains.
On the other hand maybe not. You only have to pay for all that special ammo the once. And there are many dragons and other monsters hoarding valuables in the world.
I see. We’re coming at this from different angles. You’re imagining a “totally accurate battle simulator” in which the two sides run at each other until one of them dies. I’m imagining the in-world logistics of keeping 200 armed men ready to fire at a moment’s notice while a giant monster circles from half a mile up waiting for them to make camp.
In my mind it’s not about winning a battle. It’s about winning the war.
Well, I did start the subject with the assumption that we’re looking at it from a mechanical standpoint.
If we look at it from a story-telling standpoint, that obviously doesn’t work because if it did the setting would functionally not exist and adventurers would already be a non-thing long before the time of whatever game was set.
Unless your setting is in a time before big armies were a thing. That’d certainly be interesting.
I’ve often wanted to do cave man adventures. It would solve a lot of problems.
I am now trying to imagine what cave man Wizards act like.
I used to house rule that if you did more than half the full damage in one hit it would knock the enemy out of the fight. Used mostly with scrub enemies, and worked really well in a d20 Star Wars game my friend and I were playing, as we hacked limbs off as Jedi instead of mercilessly butchering everyone.
The other rule I like to use that actually surprised a friend I DMed for recently, is that when you crit all damage is doubled. So roll your dice, add any modifiers, and then double it all. Pretty sure RAW says to either double the dice you roll or double what you roll on one die, and then add any modifiers to that. I like the idea that a critical hit is a nasty wound to the neck, or getting stabbed in a lung, and it’s gonna hurt. A lot.
Depends on system for crits. People tack on extra effects all the time though, so I think you’re at least in “common house rule” territory.
I dig you minions rule. I’m most familiar with it in terms of “massive damage,” where it’s save or die if you take more than half your hp from a single hit. That’s the sort of thing that kills players though!
In my Exalted 2.5 game, we rolled our DVs for the first combat. When the second fight rolled around, I asked our ST if we could not, and she said that was fine. Combat still takes forever in our game, but it took a little less time after that.
Is rolled DVs a thing in 2.5? My experience has been exclusively from 2e, but I wills say that I generally find fewer rolls to be better. Pacing is hard to do as is, so any tweak you can make to help it along is OK in my book.
Big point of confusion for PFS in our area is how non-lethal damage is run. I was at a table where part of the mission criteria was to ensure we did not kill anyone as we broke in. I crit with a non-lethal attack and was told that I killed an NPC, even though I tried to explain that non-lethal is a different pool and that the non-lethal had to exceed the creature’s total hit points before dealing any lethal damage. Got told I was wrong, failed the mission, and she handed out chronicle sheets right then and there while refusing to look at the rulebook we provided.
Ouch. I mean, nonlethal crit with raging greatsword and power attack at level one with will inst-gib a goblin (4d6+18 > 24[6hp x 2 + 12 Con]), but even then you’re looking at a very specific set of circumstances. Why wouldn’t you look at a book?