Optional
Today’s blog is not for the feint of heart. Some readers may rage. Some may flash back to unfortunate high school games. In rare cases, you may experience increased blood pressure, projectile vomiting, darkened soul, or the sudden urge to hurl your PHB into the sun. Consult your GM if you experience any of these symptoms.
Do you dare to venture forth anyway? Alrighty then. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Without further ado, I now present The Top 10 Rules Not to Spring on Your Players.
- Critical Fails: “You rolled a natural 1? Tough luck. Your professional warrior just chucked her ancestral sword in the river.”
- Resurrection: “There’s no divine magic in my game. Your next character starts at level 1. Roll 1d10 for starting gold.”
- Sneak Attack: “No no no. You have to be behind the enemy to get sneak attack. I don’t care what it says in the book.”
- Critical Skills: “The king hands you his crown, a stunned look on his face. He mutters, ‘I can’t believe I was an impostor the whole time!'”
- No Multiclassing: “You should have checked with me before writing your backstory. Here, just play this pregen for today.”
- Permanent Injuries: “Don’t worry. It just makes combat a little more realistic. We’ll roll on this chart I found on THE INTERNET and… huh. Maybe you can get a seeing eye dog in the next town.”
- Mandatory Spell Components: “Let me see your character sheet. Yeah, sorry. There’s no bat guano in your inventory. Your fireball fizzles.”
- Extra Realistic Realism: “As you pull back to fire, your bowstring snaps with a twang. Come on bro, what did you think would happen? It’s raining.”
- Chaos Magic: “You know how the wild magic sorcerer gets a fun chart? In my games, everyone has a fun chart! Your charm person also… transports you to the astral plane. Fun!”
- Kender: “I allow kender in my game.”
I suspect that this list could be slightly longer. No doubt Barbarian has a suggestion to make. Therefore, in an effort to create a more comprehensive list of rage-inducing “oh by the way” addenda, what is an awful “surprise rule” that a GM sprung on you mid-session? Was it an all-around awful rule, or was it just the sudden curve ball that set your blood boiling? Let’s hear all about your least favorite, least expected GM calls down in the comments!
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Variant Rest Rules: “Oh, I forgot to mention in session 0, but a short rest is going to require 8 hours, and a long rest will require 1 week of complete downtime in comfortable settings.”
My friend’s wizard was… displeased, to say the least. They also went around 7 sessions without managing a short rest, and the DM just handwaved any complaints they had and constantly broke their party down to nothing and then Deus Ex Machina’d them out of dying.
Meanwhile I had to ask for feedback after every session for weeks to make sure everyone was on board with the ‘Crunchy Crits’ rule that we’d agreed to in Session Zero. Turns out NOBODY likes rolling a crit and then getting 1’s and 2’s on the dice! So, new rule! Crit equals your maximum normal damage, plus whatever you roll on the extra dice critting would normally give you.
This has resulted in a wolf being bisected by a flaming hammer, and our Tortle Cleric/Druid/Massive AC tank having his first, “Wait, I am not untouchable?’ moment in the same session. Much to everyone’s amusement on both!
We use a variant of those crit rules. When we first started playing 5e (porting across a long running campaign), we were initially playing it as you describe… the dice you’d normally roll get maximised, and any extra dice for the critical hit get rolled.
That got adjusted a little after the GM realised just how many dice a high-level rogue can be rolling on a critical hit sneak attack, and that his rule meant that a bad damage role was still dealing 70 points minimum, and over 100 on average.
We ended up with the rule that you get to maximise any three of your damage dice, and roll the rest. Can’t complain too much, since while that dragged the minimum down a bit, it’s still a brutally large number on average.
Holy cow, I knew rogues could be scary, but geeze. I don’t have anyone playing one in my game with the rule implemented, but I will absoLUTELY keep that variation in mind if that changes!
So far everyone’s still around level 4, so no major craziness with the rules yet. Also, for better or worse, I’m probably the most number-crunchy person at the table, which is to say that almost nobody is, so thus far I’ve yet to have a player work to ‘abuse’ the rule.
If I remember the math correctly, sneak attack dice are equal to half level rounded up, so by the time you’re at level 16 or so, you’re rolling an 8d6 on most attacks, in addition to whatever weapon using, so call it 9d6 base. Double that to 18d6 on a critical, and throw in a magic weapon that added a couple more, so yeah… something on the order of 20d6. That won’t happen often, but it’s going to make a mess when it does.
That said, I did say high-level. A 16th level rogue can hand out 9d6 to single targets on almost every turn… but a wizard of the same level is doing similar amounts of damage to everything within a 20ft radius, albeit by expending limited spell slots.
The variant rest rules are great, IF AND ONLY IF the rest of the adventure is designed around it. I love not feeling like I should cram several encounters into each individual adventuring day or find an excuse for the heroes to take an hour off in the middle of the dungeon…
…but if you try to cram those rules into a typically-paced dungeon, you’re gonna have a bad time.
What did the Crunchy Crits do before you fixed them up like that?
BTW, those rules are used by the Glass Cannon podcast crew in their Giantslayer AP.
Hee, nice to hear I’m not the only one who likes the crunchy variant!
The campaign I’m using that rule in has used it since the start, but it was decided on because I’d heard no less than three of my players complain at different times about critting, then rolling nothing but 1’s and doing less than their average damage. I also played in a d100 homebrew system that only has a 2% crit chance (rolling the exact number, or rolling a 1). I personally have crit on that and done pathetic damage, so yeah… feels bad, man.
See, people hate rules lawyering, that’s fine and all, but when a GM’s “I don’t care what it says in the book” or even just a misinterpretation of the rules-as-written completely throws off the game’s balance and I try to tell them, I am supposed to be the baddie?
Also, while we’re at “misinterpretation throws off balance”: Critical fails are bullshit even when they don’t come as a surprise. Nothing like high-level fighters cutting themselves, hitting their allies, or breaking their swords an average of twice per minute. ‘Course, there’s nothing more realistic than a bow’s string snapping after approximately 20 shots.
yes i’m a tad miffed about this how could you tell
I’ve slowly phased Critical Fails out of my games, but the rule I eventually settled on for them is solid. It amounted to ‘spell fizzles’ or ‘dropped weapon.’
I don’t even use that anymore-I feel that blowing your action in a TURN BASED GAME is sufficient penalty enough, really.
Most of the rules listed in the post are utter garbage even when they’re official core rules. “No resurrection” and “No multi-classing” are fine if part of the core system (plenty of old-school systems without either) or clearly announced before character creation. The rest? Just uggh.
In general, springing ANY rules on the players without prior discussion of the ones that diverge from RAW are pretty solidly bullshit
The worst part is that the person who KNOWS the rules and how they ARE balanced already, is usually also the SAME person who the DM THINKS is OP, because they know the rules better than the DM, so the DM is constantly getting blindsided by strategies and ability-synergies that are completely legitimate.
The worst part is, I’m perfectly willing to help out the DM will rulings, hell even strategies to take advantage of stuff, but I’m not going to support the DM vs player mentality. You can already decide everything that we encounter in a game; learn the rules and follow them.
(in pathfinder \3.5 d&D)
i used a second d100 roll after any1 roll a nat 1.
the check was 5% per bab bonus. so a level 1 fighter would fumble if he rolled a nat 1 followed by a d100 of 6-100. while a level 20fighter would only fumble if he roll a nat 1 followed by a 100 in a d100.
point is the better you are at fighting the less common it is for you to fumble. but the more you attack you still have a higher chance to fubmle compared to some1 who doesn’t full attack.
It wasn’t so much a surprise rule but a surprise spell. I can’t even remember what the system was called but it was a 3.5 3rd-party setting, I think based on some obscure series of fantasy books I’ve never heard of, and a first time GM to boot (so didn’t see the impending danger), and in the second session a villain pulled out one of the “cool new spells for this setting” which was called Eyeball Implosion, and did exactly what it sounds like: Destroys the targets eyes, permanently.
Fortunately I wasn’t the target, the party Wizard was. One failed save later, permanently blind Wizard who can no longer memorise his spells, target anything, or in fact be anything other than a massive liability. Next session the GM rolled the effect back, as he realised how punitively crippling it was, but it soured any hope the rules/setting had any hope of being sensibly built.
Pathfinder 1e has the spell Blindness/Deafness be permanent, and I don’t really know why. Remove Blindness/Deafness is a 3rd-level Cleric spell, so if you can find a Level 5 Cleric in town (which is not THAT difficult) and pay them a few hundred gold, you can fix it, but it is extremely annoying if you’re in the middle of a dungeon in the middle of the wilderness and don’t have a Cleric in the party. (Pathfinder 2e at least made it “blind for 1 minute unless you critically fail the saving throw.”)
In general I am against permanent crippling effects against players, even if they can be healed if you have the right class of spellcaster. That just doesn’t seem fun to me.
Any time someone brings up the “nat 1” on something that isn’t an attack roll or death save, I die a little more.
Most of that can come up with any low-level campaign. Though making new characters start at level 1 is just a way to ensure they have an excuse to write as many character backstories as they want.
Controversial opinion, but epic-level bluffs are hilarious.
Grod’s Law was coined over this exact rule. On a semi-related note…
…ever notice how “realism” only ever serves to nerf the most realistic (ie least magical) characters, while leaving the obviously unrealistic spellcasters unaffected?
Kender are great under one condition—when the people they annoy and the audience do not overlap. In TRPG conditions, this is…difficult.
I’ve come to the realization that any DM who claims “realism” in his game actually just means “everything is homebrewed to be difficult as fuck regardless of realism”. Oh sure, they’ll give you a few token examples that support their rules, but when you provide a counter argument thy just pull out the Rule 0 and tell you to get bent.
And of course realism only ever applied to PLAYERS. At best the nameless mooks might suffer from some “realism injuries” or whatever, but any named or considerable threat is just as powerful and blindly determined as they would be otherwise, but now armed with new tricks that are “realistic”. Like giants being able to do more damage to you with a stomp than they do with their great clubs, or wolves capable of grappling, shoving, and biting you all in one attack (which incidentally the druids wild shapes cannot do for some reason).
Tl;dr any DM who claims realism are shit DM trying to wank their DMing credentials. Proceed with caution.
Oh wow, this is a lot less comprehensible without the numbers…
(It was specifically referring to rules #2, #4, #7, #8, and #10.)
As a big fan of including kender in less serious games as a deliberate in-joke, I love that image you linked as much as the next reformed Dragonlance fan—but maybe I’d think twice before linking it without at least a warning tag. A few of the creator’s little editorial comments don’t age well.
I maintain that player characters, at least martial player characters, should have their missed attacks narrated as bad luck or the opponent defending skillfully rather than your level 11 knight whiffing like a dumbass.
They’re Hobbits with a ton of traits Hobbits didn’t have and none of the things that made Hobbits fun to read about.
If our Mummy’s Mask game used massive damage, we’d end up triggering it for every single crit on Gunslinger and Samurai, doing 80-150 damage in one hit.
Not to mention we’d be dead ages ago on account of how easily single-attacking monsters (which are usually vital-strike users on steroids) or casters (via AOE or huge-damage spells two spell levels higher than the party has access to) can do over half of your max hp in damage and end up gibbing you.
Anyone trying to play a mundane or magic crafter in Pathfinder will be sorely disappointed if they don’t grab alternative/optional rules that fix them up.
In addition to requiring feats, specific skills and (for magic items) caster levels (which screws over Alchemists) to even begin, the rules flat out make them unfeasible for a typical adventure with any kind of time pressure or lack of months-long downtime.
Not only are the calculations illogical and unfeasible/clunky (crafting a ball of iron takes less time than a ball of gold) but you spend literal ages crafting anything. Plate armor takes months to craft for a mundane smith (which is realistic, but useless in a typical adventure).
To make matters worse, a wizard avoids most of these problems with Crafter’s Fortune, Fabricate and maxing Spellcraft, the crafting god-skill. Whilst an Alchemist has to go through hoops with feats and can’t build the most basic Golem without a caster to help them with the spells they never get.
Read the official rules for Pathfinder Society some time. They make it very apparent that Paizo does not want crafted items in games.
The Pathfinder Society frowns upon self sufficiency. They’re basically the Harpers and like the Harpers put on a veneer of doing good whilst witless players commit atrocities on their behalf and become a slave to their system.
Pathfinder Society generally bans anything remotely overpowered or allowing the players to bypass their strict rules and limited resources, e.g. builds or items that let you heal infinitely. Certain classes that rely on economics (e.g. Gunslinger) are also banned.
Because PFS games are supposed to be difficult and resource-straining.
You can’t craft because otherwise every player would make their own gear, which you can otherwise only ‘permanently’ get by spending a lot of sessions in a season playing and buying it as an item you can take for future adventures – all other gear is gotten mid-session.
Coup De Grace feels like one of those things in this game that stands out in how it both breaks the game in the PCs favor, makes TPKs laughably easy for certain enemies / certain simple enemies extremely deadly, yet does nothing to help with the classic ‘stealth-kill an enemy’ scenario which you’d think would be viable for it.
A group of Ghouls/Ghasts is either an interesting encounter, or a complete slaughter, depending on whether they intelligently use the fact they can paralyze the PCs and then coup them (sometimes with no PC able to stop them, if they gang up on someone and act one after another).
On the flip side, spells like hold person and slumber become ‘save or die’ spells for the PCs, winning fights instantly by offering that Coup to either heavily damage or instakill the enemy.
It’s why I’m glad it’s gone in 2e.
The way my GM did it when he ran Rise of the Runelords Book 2: Ghoul Spam was that he interpreted “coup de grace provokes attacks of opportunity from threatening opponents” as “coup de grace cannot be done if the attacker is threatened”, which seems logical enough to me (hard to single out someone’s jugular and also keep that swordsman from getting a clean hit on you). Combined with the fact that coup is a full-round action (so you can’t move up and do it) and it was fairly easy and fun to cover paralyzed allies by having a PC run over and stand on their face, thereby forcing us to adjust our tactics. (Sometimes led to bizarre situations, like the Monk being paralyzed, the Cleric standing on him and being paralyzed and then my Magus with 4 Mirror Images standing on top of both of them.)
In that campaign we also used Sleep + coup a lot (had a very powerful enchantment Sorcerer), but it never felt overpowered to us, because there would always be a ton of other enemies to deal with, and we had a number of things (like the Gunslinger’s musket firing) that were ruled to wake up sleeping foes. The highest-level boss we ever took out with a coup de grace we first had to destroy multiple Mirror Images of, counter a Displacement with Faerie Fire, set her on fire and grapple her in mid-air (she was flying), all while dealing with her minions. That coup was one of the most satisfying moments we had in that campaign.
We also once used it on a bunch of sleeping enemies in the enemy fort we’d infiltrated, so that was nice.
What is Colin/Laurels opinion on the ‘Elephant in the room’ feat tax rules?
https://michaeliantorno.com/the-elephant-in-the-room-feat-taxes-in-pathfinder-page/
I think they’re sorta balanced / fair, but never tried them outside of small variations (my game uses ‘you don’t need point-blank shot to grab precise shot / the prerequisites are flipped around’ rule).
“Death saving throws are made at the end of your round, so if you roll a nat 20, all enemies get to have a go at you before you can get to safety.” Combined with the (actually sensible) rule of getting knocked to 0HP gives you a level of Exhaustion, rolling nat 20 is actually worse than a fail.
Similarly, getting KO’d is worse than dropping to 1 HP in Pathfinder. One is likely to have monsters leave you alone and have enemies swap targets, letting you live… And the other has you die instantly because you took 2-3 times your CON in damage to an attack, crit, or AOE spell effect.
2e fixes this by having you take wounds instead, regardless of the damage (crits still suck, though), and moving your save in initiative so that there’s always time before your death save triggers (as well as a limit on wounds you can take from damage).
A rule that can blindside people – equipment damage. ANY time you roll a nat1 on a save for an AOE spell, something you are wearing/carrying gets damaged along with you. And some DMs can enforce that for ANY environmental hazard.
There’s also some clunkyness with flight rules (you can’t ‘float’ without feats or such, or the checks are just impossible to fail later on), mounted combat (getting dropped off your horse from damage), and concentration checks in storms/rain/anything other than a sunny day.
Oh, yeah that’s probably the rule I know of that’s ignored the most.
It’s right there in the book but I have never seen anyone play with it. In part because of how long the check takes and in part because people just don’t like them. (though I just noticed that unlike 3.5 dnd where each carried/worn item took damage, with the magical ones getting their own save, in the pathfinder rule only one item, randomly selected from the four most likely items according to a chart, takes damage.)
Though in general it seems like most significant items are treated, by most groups, as invulnerable to attacks that don’t specifically target them. I mean when was the last time you heard of the wizards fireball destroying the loot from the orc that the fighter killed the round before which is after all now lying on the floor unattended instead of being carried by a creature making their own saves and a +1 great axe do only have a kill number of 27 (7 hardness and 20 hit points, 54 if using an elemental attack that the DM doesn’t judge is particularly suited to destroying greataxes).
In my Pathfinder game, the GM switched to using Inherent Advancement around level 6-7, which meant some drastic character changes and a lot of gold being moved since we couldn’t buy any stat boosting items. Easily adjusted though.
The other annoying change happened at 10th (current) level. Now, this is conjecture, but I think he noticed that another player and I built essentially the same character; mine was a backup, the other their new PC so it wasn’t destroying party dynamics. What I think he was annoyed by was that both of these casters had a negative Charisma. Simply put, Charisma was being dumped entirely (as was str but the carry capacity was punishment enough I think).
Seeing this as a problem (everyone is dumping charisma) he changed the rules so that you could only attune to a number of magic items equal to your charisma modifier +3, with an easy way to get another +2 if people wanted it. As the only person in the party with a charisma score above 12, this means nothing to me but almost everyone else was abruptly losing a magic item. A lot of people had decided to spread out the gold because of the Advancement constraining how we spent it, so now we’re moving to more expensive items out of necessity.
Not discussing a houserule (That includes flanking and critical fails on ability checks/saves) ahead of time is DM malpractice.
A Hill Giant (Which I’m pretty sure is what Barb is fighting) hits for an average of 18, and crits for an average of 32. It attacks twice in a turn. It’s DM malpractice to have an opponent with multiattack who can hit for half a creature’s max HP fight the party.
3.5’s massive damage rule (and, I assume, Pathfinder’s) uses a flat “massive damage” value of 50 (in a single attack). Then again, 3.5/PF’s hill giants only deal 19 damage with their clubs, so that’s one hell of a crit.
Pathfinder’s rule is 50 or more and at least half total hit points, so harder than 3e. On the damage front, hill giants have power attack, so that and a crit could account for enough damage to proc the saving throw.
Jesus christ Nr. 10 is horrifiying, just finished it on 1d4chan. But nope, my DMs didn’t do anything of the sort. Except that one time where I got introduced to the DM’s “Dice off the table don’t count”-rule when rolling a crit on the floor.
Sanity, mind control, or any effect where the player didn’t think it existed in the campaign until suddenly their PC’s love interest, best friend since childhood, and person they swore a blood oath to for saving their lives – that is, the rest of the party – are suddenly their mortal enemies just because some foe cast a low-level spell (and the PC might have failed a save, or there may have been no save).
A few weeks ago, I had the inverse situation. A player took Massive Damage, got huffy, and rolled a (failed save). They X’d their character out on the R20 board.
I had to practically stop the game, haul them aside, and demand WTF they were doing. When they told me they failed their save vs Massive Damage, I was like “Dood. Massive Damage only applies to weak enemies that I literally want you guys to chew through so we can get on to fun things.”
I tend to allow my enemies to suffer the full brunt of absolute failure that gets leveled in optional rules against players, but a lot of that stuff isn’t fun to have done to your character. Even then, it’s ‘tend’ to allow them to crit fail. I don’t have a hard rule on it, so if I want my encounter to have a little more teeth, they are competent enough to NOT critically fail. Since enemies typically outnumber PC’s 3:1, this is usually pretty reasonable.
I quite like the “critical fail” because it makes the combat feel a little more nuanced than just two guys standing there flailing at each other like the sprites in Baldur’s Gate. However, I think that they should be narrated carefully and not have a huge penalty, because as you point out it can easily become unfun. Personally, I like to narrate it as a jarring impact or a slip on uneven ground that maybe makes the character flat-footed for the next strike or similar.
The worst I’ve had though was “no group xp”. In a game where I was playing a doctor, but where there was no opportunity to do doctor stuff because heal potions were safer (failed doctoring rolls cause permanent damage) so no one was willing. Turns out being stuck at level 1 while everyone else gains levels is not much fun.
My players keep asking about making fort saves against massive damage I keep reminding them they’re level 3 all attacks are “massive damage”.
so basically, Kender are cleaned up version of 1e Pathfinder Goblins?
Not really. PF1E Goblins are “almost universally despised” (direct quote from the SRD).
Meanwhile, Kender are presented as adorable and adored, a bunch of little buggers that everyone loves. Which exacerbates all their issues because you’re supposed to brush them over and think it’s cute when it’s really not, it’s chaotic stupid at its worst.
I don’t see disagreement here,
behavior wise 1E Goblins sound like an ugly version of Kender. Or Kender like a cute version of Goblins.
It’s not about being cute or not. It’s goblins provoking a realistic reaction, while kenders for some reasons do not.
It’s like the race as a whole has plot armor.
Weird example from the GM’s perspective – the most recent campaign I’m running has had, entirely by accident, an almost comical level of ability damage done to the Level 3 – Level 5 PCs. The sea hag so ugly that looking at her causes STR damage? Sounds funny (and it was). Reefclaw pinches have a poison effect? Well, I’m sure it’s not- HOW DID YOU FAIL A DC 13 FORT SAVE FOUR TIMES IN A ROW!?!? [Answer: More than one natural 2.] Then there was the radiation hazard (which I explicitly changed from “CON drain then STR damage” to “STR damage then CON damage” because come on, drain? Really?). And the vampire got to drink a lot more blood than I expected. It got to the point where not only is the party’s favorite NPC the Witch who knows Lesser Restoration, but when they left, she gave them a scroll of Lesser Restoration because they needed it so often, AND THEY USED THE SCROLL THAT VERY SESSION! With the Investigator now knowing Lesser Restoration and the Oracle likely to pick it up in the future, this will probably be less of an issue from now on, but it did end up causing a lot of frustration to both the players and myself, as I really didn’t realize so many of the monsters I wanted to use did ability damage.
The biggest house rule I’ve used (at least in terms of “the book says it works this way and I say otherwise”) was loudly declared when it first popped up, and entirely beneficial to the players – it is stupid that a Level 20 Wizard’s Celestial Healing is exactly as good as a Level 1 Wizard’s Infernal Healing (and a Level 19 Wizard’s Celestial Healing is actually worse). So when they found a wand of celestial healing, I declared “the spell works just like Infernal Healing because there’s no reason that it shouldn’t.”
My players are generally aware that I really don’t like save-or-die effects or permanent-until-healed status conditions like blindness/deafness. That just never struck me as fun for either player or GM. When I want to screw my players over (and, believe me, I do), I want it to be because the party is horribly outnumbered or a PC was suddenly incapacitated or a big robot just grabbed you by the face (enemies that use combat maneuvers are often quite memorable, I’ve found) or the attacker keeps moving around and going invisible and stuff like that. (“Save-or-you’re-down-for-this-fight” is fine – it’s the permanent stuff that bugs me.) That might be setting all of us up for a rude awakening in the upcoming “Let’s find out what high-level combat is like by running AP books from Levels 10 to 18 exactly as the book says” campaign. We’ll have to see.
Critical Fails have to be confirmed, just like Critical Hits.
I DM without resurrection, but set a cost of GP to per hitpoint per minute to replace it. So you don’t need 5000GP in diamonds for a resurrection 2 rounds after someone got knocked over, just add xGP worth of Diamond Dust per HP below the CON value to the standard cure spell.
just … No
where dis the numbering go?
line one had a „1“ with a „.“ in front of it.
line two a „2“ and the „just no“ was in reply to 3-9
Me: I cast planar shift.
Five minutes later:
DM: Roll Conviction + integrity to prevent blood bond.
Me: WTF man?!?!?!
DM: Also roll for sanity and corruption points 😛
I still don’t get why Kender are considered particularly bad. Isn’t any chaotic character race a potential excuse to be chaotic stupid?
Or playing a bard too. They’re musicians who are required to be chaotic. Clearly they’re supposed to be like drugged up rockers and rappers destroying hotel rooms and getting inappropriate with women, and shooting each other gecause they’re from the wrong coast. Or they’re an actor and they’re like Charlie Sheen or something. Winning!
I very much disagree with the statement on Bards. I have played with and seen played a number of bards that are not played like that. The game I am in now has a lore bard that is played more like a collector and distributor of stories. The concept of a chaos engine really only applies to a wildmage, and even then, I am sure you could play one that is not trying to be chaotic, but doesn’t have a choice.
Because where other chaotic stupid characters might suffer consequences from it, kender are supposed to get away with it.
I think it’s because the lore for Kender is specifically written to encourage playing them as Chaotic Stupid while discouraging retribution because their antics are canonically supposed to be “innocent and silly”.
Plus, there’s probably quite a few people out there who have decided to play a Kender mostly for the in-universe justification to do whatever they feel like doing regardless of how the other people at the table feel. Sure, “it’s what their character would do,” but not every group wants to deal with the antics of a quirky adorable cartoon character archetype. Chaotic Stupid can be fun if done right, but there’s a time and a place for it, same as everything else.
We also appear to have very different ideas of what playing a bard should be like.
“I still don’t get why Kender are considered particularly bad. Isn’t any chaotic character race a potential excuse to be chaotic stupid?”
The difference (at least according to the meme, I’ve never actually played w/ kender or read the rulebooks so I don’t know for certain how accurate this is) is that kender aren’t just a *potential* excuse to be chaotic stupid, they explicitly, by the rules, are a license to be chaotic stupid. As in the book says, almost in these exact words, “Kender are allowed to be as chaotic stupid as they want, and if other players object to this and try to stop them they are Evil”.
In a 5E game, I rolled a nat 1 on a Medicine check to stabilize an ally after combat, and the DM decided that was worth a lingering injury on them – and since he’d pulled up the table anyway, he decided to roll one for the Fighter as well, since he dropped to 0 HP twice during that fight.
I didn’t stay in that game much longer after that
I don’t think I’ve run into anything too weird. Other than WotC putting wild magic of all things into the PHB of all places to make people think that’s somehow a normally reasonable and allowed thing! Way to push your “we think accidentally tpking your entire party is fun therefore everybody must!” agenda.
But I certainly have run into unwarned of crit fails and successes. And stuff like “you can’t level until you take a long rest and what do you mean why haven’t I let you take a long rest in so long you never even got to experience 2nd level that’s perfectly fine”.
The reverse of this stuff is actually using the Inspiration mechanic in 5e. =P
I run Crit fails in my games BUT a few things get added in. 1: It’s Pathfinder 2.0, and my players pretty much always start with 3 hero points (rerolls) each, this means that the odds of a PC getting a crit is almost null, and my wonderful monsters keep getting the failures. (Secretly it puts false fear into players and can nerf some mean encounters.)
I also use a deck for the random effects, and take the situation into effect. At worst something might be damaged, but never lost, and most of the time it just means a character gains a debuff for the fight. Random is fun, but I don’t want it to be more important then actions or character builds!
My Pathfinder group has had its moments where we realize that our home rules aren’t working or our interpretations of the rules are incorrect and aren’t necessarily the best way to play the game, but it’s rarely a significant issue.
My 5e Curse of Strahd game doesn’t use the optional flanking rule due to our party being pretty small (only 3 players) and we’d be worse off with it than not. I won’t dispute that against most enemies that outnumber us, we’d be worse off with it, but we’ve mostly fought wolves which get it automatically through pack tactics, so I’m not sure I agree. We also use something called “glancing blows”, where an attack that hits at exactly AC and no higher only does half damage. Fortunately, none of these were really surprises.
I’ve also been listening to Glass Canon Podcast and hated their home rules in the earlier sessions. Most of them were poorly thought out and in the case of the crit successes and failures, they hadn’t implemented a decent system to make sure that 1) the crit made sense, 2) that the crit wasn’t horribly unbalanced and 3) that it didn’t disproportionately harm the party in the early levels. Fortunately, they seem to have improved their system with the fan criticals and fewer stupid random house rules.
1 and 4 made me shudder. As someone who enjoys a fair amount of verisimilitude, I loathe critical fails and success.
As for today’s question… Well I once had a campaign that culminated into nothing, because the DM had decided we were strong enough to steamroll the BBEG, so he just described it as a cinematic instead of actually letting us play it. Anticlimactic to say the least.
Another one was a variant of critical successes and failures, back in 3.5 days. If you make an attack and roll a 1, roll again. If you roll a second 1, you kill yourself instantly. Similarly, if you roll a 20 and then a second 20, your target is dead. Doesn’t matter who it is. A peasant throws a rock at a god’s avatar? 1 in 400 chance he kills it. That was so dumb.
I have been pretty lucky in my gaming experience to not have this particular scenario pop up. At least I have never been “surprised” by a weird table rule.
The weirdest table/DM rule I ever encountered was an explanation of how this DM handles Wishes (the spell) back in the days when Wish was a bit more complicated and did not have a basic concept of what you could do “safely” with a wish and what might happen if you attempt a wish that is a bit outside the boundaries of good taste… (2nd edition, aka AD&D)
This DM ruling was that you would write your wish on a piece of paper, he would then fold that piece of paper into as many folds as he could, toss it into the air, and where ever it landed, he would unfold it, and read it, and however he interpreted it… that is how he would handle your wish…
His explanation about how he would read it backwards or forwards or from the side was honestly nonsensical and the only thing I could think at the time was “If you don’t like the spell, just don’t use it.” Because obviously, he did not like the Wish spell.
But this was one of my early introductions into the idea of strange table rulings.
I use criticals on fails and on skills, but not as harsh.
With the critical fails on attack rolls, much like confirming a crit, they need to confirm the fail. Roll die again and if it’s a 4 or less, THEN it’s a critical fail and we go from there, if not you just missed hard.
For skills, you just get a +5 bonus (or penalty) for critting and failing. No hyper success or hyper failure but it does allow some people to succeed where they really shouldn’t, and the skill monkey thats hyper specc’d to pass by the skin of their teeth even when rolling a 1.
Honestly, I want to give Kender a shot.
I started gaming with Pathfinder, and I’ve been a DM right from the moment I started (not the easiest way to dive in, but it worked for me), but having passed 10 years at the table now, there’s still so much I’ve not experienced.
I could buy up some older-edition books, but honestly my Hope is to see more settings hit 5e. I want to play with Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, etc. Heck, I don’t think it’ll ever be done, but I would be stoked to see Birthright hit 5th edition.
…And I want to give Kender a try. I want to see what all this fits is about myself, not just hear it from others. Will it be terrible? Maybe, but I want that experience nonetheless.
In one 5E game I played with a lot of homebrew/house rules, the GM nerfed the Identify spell so it no longer revealed items’ properties; it just gave advantage on the (often extremely hard) checks to identify them. I only found out after giving it to my bard, leaving me feeling like I’d wasted a chance to learn better spells. Thankfully, he later agreed to compensate by not counting it against spontaneous casters’ known-spell limits.
Spell components are “optional.” They’re a necessary part of the game, so the DM has the tools required to take them away from you and prevent some of the more powerful spellcasting. However, just as they’re not optional, neither are spell focuses, so people who don’t want to gather otherwise worthless objects don’t have to without it breaking the system (Anyone with average Int can tell what a focus is, and can take one away just as easily as the components).
*aren’t