Trash common houserules

Consider the following:
>If you roll nat 1 but still succeed after adding the modifier, it's a success
>If you roll nat 1 and your modifier isn't enough it's critical failure

Re-rolling Initiative after every round.

I mean, sure, we play on a VTT and it only takes a click of a button to re-roll and re-sort Initiative, but it makes actually planning your turn a huge pain in the ass and enables silliness like "I went last on this turn and am going first on the next one so I'm just going to obliterate this guy I'm standing next to before he acts."

When I have my players roll, I let them choose between a "normal" challenge and a "heroic" challenge. On a "heroic" challenge, they roll d20+modifiers, nat 1 is a crit fail, nat 20 is a crit success, and the crit fail and crit success are divinely influenced - essentially, relying on favor of the gods. On a "normal" challenge, they roll 4d6-4+modifiers, nat 0 is a fumble, nat 20 is a guaranteed success, regardless of difficulty.

A nat 1 isn't going to be a success after modifiers, especially in 5e where bonuses are pathetically small.

I don't think that's because they want to comically fuck up on 5% of the things they do, I think it's because this shitty houserule is so common that a lot of people assume it's official.

What the fuck

automatic crit/miss is only built in to the system for attack rolls, not any other roll

this

>roll for gender during character generation
>it's 6 options

I know.

>5%
What are you playing? D&D or some shit? just go for a good bellcurve system like 3d6.

i'll take stuff that doesn't happen for 5$

I totally forgot about this, critical fumbles are the worst of all. Including all the ones I posted.

I was sure I was forgetting one or two.

>Mercer's resurrection rules
What now?

It's when you get infected by a disease, and then come back as that disease but with superpowers

I'll post something that's irritating that is sort of a house rule:

No free mulligans when everyone is friends and just trying to get lands

>GM says we can't improve Intelligence after character creation because IQ is mostly genetic in real life

>I'm going to pretend you're not just starting a bait thread
Bad idea.

What are the resurrection rules?

Resurrection requres a roll with dynamic DC that depends on how many times you've been resurrected before and what your party does to convince your soul to come back

That doesn't sound plausible at all - it would be either two or well over twenty.

It could also be one, either playing a weeb system that forces all female or playing with /r9k/

Tell your GM they're retarded and should feel bad.

>ouedeobjiwrj 4 werf 4

>Haibane Renmai, except all the characters are catastrophically maladjusted NEET Incels.

I'd run it as a one-shot.

>This is something no player wants
I want it.

If you succeed even on a nat 1, maybe you shouldn’t roll in the first place

>Have fun breaking a bow string on 5% of your shots or dropping your sword on 5% of your swings while the neckbeard GM chortles at your comedy of errors.
t. moron who has never watched an Indiana Jones movie in his life and doesn't understand how you can comically fail (repeatedly) and still be heroic

Christ, this. I'm in a game and the GM has a rule where if you roll a 1, you either suffer a negative consequence or have to take a shot. I can drink these lightweight amateurs under the table so the drinking part isn't a big deal to me, it's the mere existence of the rule that bugs me.

Eh, I houserule a Natural 1 more as you just not doing any damage whatsoever. It's just treated like a standard miss, but I usually throw in something like "You stumbled a little or you didn't swing as hard as you'd hoped and did nothing." No penalty associated with.

>roll 6 sided dice
>evens for boys, odds for girls

if they want to go even deeper into what they are rp it out, but other than that its simple

Fumbles are fine for almost every game that isn't D&D. The issue is that in most iterations of D&D a good portion of the classes - the one's that are usually more mechanically capable to begin with - don't actually roll that often. So it's yet another hoser for melee- and skill-based characters.

I honestly get kind of mad about when I come to a table and people are hooting and hollering about this incredibly dank Free Parking meme of a houserule. Meanwhile I'm looking at my base attack progression and just relishing the thought of just completely eating shit 20% of the time I make a full attack because "a natty one on an intimidate check means you get gay married XD".

Comical failures I can roll with. When the DM rules you murder your adjacent party member and changes your alignment to chaotic evil, not so much. Not saying you're advocating that, but that has been my experience with some DMs. If we're rolling with critical failures, I'd like to at least have know how critical we're talking.

That's literally how the rule official rule works.

Storytime:
Rogue had Stealth proficiency, ~18 DEX, for +7 to the roll.
Druid has +2 to Stealth.
Druid casts Pass Without Trace - a flat +10 to all stealth checks for the party.

Rogue Nat 1s. 18 total.
Druid rolls a 3 or something. ~15 total.
Yet the Rogue is the one that gets ruined by a Cone of Cold.
I was already against any sort of crit on a skill check, but that session cemented my hate. And the campaign itself just got worse as time went on.

One of my GMs has a simple 'roll a 20, add another 10 to the result' and the opposite for a nat 1. Works alright. I'm thinking about making it 1d10 in my game, instead of a flat 10. Won't change much anyway, since very few things require 20+ to begin with.

>shorter short rests
Fuck you. A short rest should be five minutes. Extending a short rest to an hour is literally one of the most boneheaded moves WoTC ever did in the development of 5e.

God forbid we actually let people HAVE FUN playing the game. We have to choke people with limited resources and make it so that the party must be taking hour long breaks between encounters in order for people to actually use their characters.

how is this a houserule?
if you want to switch up two-handing and casting then use a versatile weapon, thats what they are there for.
otherwise go the typical paladin route with your shield being a spellcasting focus or like druids with your polearm being you focus.

>We have to choke people with limited resources
That's what D&D's supposed to be. A race against your resources to get as much shit as possible and back to civilisation with minimal casualties.

That's what it was originally, but most of their design philosophy and adventure design is pretty far away from that these days. The resource management aspect largely just feels like an artefact they haven't got the heart/balls to throw out

Always roll 2 dice. If both would fail and one is a 1, you fumble.

Hear that lads? Thats the sound of wizard tears dripping into the orc blood left by a martial

Group im in confirms crits, both 20s and 1s. If the second roll doesnt pass the AC when confirming the 20, it becomes a regular hit.
If it does pass the AC when confirming the 1, its a regular miss. Makes crit successes and fails much less frequent and more hilarious. That said, a crit failure in combat never does anything worse than you fall prone or take a couple points of damage in our group, nothing as extreme as "lol, you kill the pc behind you. Your evil now and lose all your paladin abilities!" Thats just retarded.

What is the purpose of War caster if you can use somatic components while holding a zweihander?

The purpose is to sword&board while also casting. nothing stops a greataxe user from putting one hand into the component pouch for their turn. they need both hands to ATTACK with it, not to hold it. meanwhile, the sword'n'board can't half-ass either of the things they're already holding without dropping them.

>the DM rules you murder your adjacent party member and changes your alignment to chaotic evil
Stab your DM and claim that it's what your character would do under the new alignment.

>Wizard tears

Why? Ironically enough, I've almost never had a party have to stop because the Wizard ran out of spells even in 5e. 90% of the time we're resting it's because a martial is almost dead and we need to stop so he can take a nap for a bit.

Fumbles are fucking retarded if they're more common than 1 in 400.

Seriously, 5% of the time to do something you're proficient at is ridiculous. This is why dicepools are better, the less you have the more likely you are to fuck up.

5% is too much.
i don't enjoy losing a bone every combat and spending one week to recover, on top of the normal combat difficulty of "monsters can just fucking kill you".

He's not wrong.
Though your character's life experiences would increase their Wis not their Int.

this is a very nice way of handling the " 20 makes anything possible" rule D&D had.
a 20 counts as a 30, a 1 as a -5.Enough to make you fail and succeed at a real challenge, but not enough for " i roll diplomacy to convince the king to gift me his reign" kind of bullshits.

kys you autist

Shut up it is not.

>short rest is a day
>long rest is a week

the DM was forced to do this to adapt an exploration campaign to 5e.
its makes sense because the party has 5 encounters/week rather than 5 encounters/day in a dungeon;
Yet it still reminds me of how bullshit and outdated vancian casting and daily powers are.

Are you practicing for a competitive format? Or are you slamming casual stacks of 60-80 against one another because you lack the discipline to adhere to any particular format?

House rules in card games are always stupid. Fight me.

>GM asks you he spend a lot of time improving his IQ so your statement proves his point

iirc Blades in the Dark has a d6

1-2 Man
3-4 Woman
5 Concealed/Ambiguous
6 reroll

My group is fine with it since the enemy fumbles as well. It's even led to a dragon literally hitting itself in the face in an attempt to get our monk off of it's head. Other times thought the critical failure on an attack is typically "You swing with a mighty blow that misses and your sword gets stuck in the dirt, floor, ect."

The issue is mainly that PCs are going to get fucked harder than enemies by critical fumbles because Team Monster is rarely going to lats beyond a single fight.

Any crippling effects PCs get from critical fumbles stick around longer because they aren't disposable cannon fodder, and they tend to get them more because, lasting much longer they make more dice rolls than any monster.

Critical fumbles are just shit ideas in general, unless you're playing a silly comedy game where an expert swordsman who's spent 20 years practicing with the art of the blade stabbing himself 5% of the time he attempts to do anything is normal.

>either playing a weeb system that forces all female
I can't imagine one where there wouldn't be option to play a trap.

He is wrong, as you are. Rducate yourself and stop listening to pop science.

that's downright okay.

pretty close to what i do for my game

The way I do it is you reroll the 1. If you would have hit with the second it is just a normal miss. This way, if you are playing a super skilled character, you need to be very unlucky to fumble.

IQ is one measure of intellect but not the only. Your capacity to learn is greatly dependant on your genetics.

Sorry. Your half-orc will always be less intelligent than a human, and less so than an elf. Outliers aside.

A friend of mine tried this, and it isn't so bad in practice.
DC is fairly low the first few times so long as there are people to vouch for you (if you have 3, the DC the first time is 2, the second time you die, the DC is 3). I wager the actual bitching is because DURR CRITICAL ROLL. My actual complaint about it is how you still lose the diamond you had if it goes south.

How about GMs that refuse to houserule even when we encounter a part of the system that's inherently broken.
>PF
>GM throws a guy with a clay helmet on his head
>okay, standard formation, proceed to kill
>absolutely impossible to kill him with damage while he swings a hammer at us with fuckhueg STR, figure out that the clay helmet basically makes him immortal
>Rogue says "I'll just shoot him in the head."
>Actually called shots are an optional rule in a splatbook and I'm not using it
>"Okay, then I'll try to sund-"
>You can't sunder with a ranged weapon
>Sphere Wizard tries to use Telekinesis to smash a rock into the fucker's helmet
>Uh, no, I'd count that as a ranged attack
>we end up eating like 3 AoOs trying to sunder this guy's helmet when the PoW Warlord finally gets it.
>encounter ends, everyone calls it a night shortly afterword

That's not even "houserule", that is covered in the rules under "Improvised Actions".

>non-lethal attacks incur a penalty to hit

My group has these decks for both critical hits and critical failures. It's pretty fun since the hit deck includes cards that can remove limbs or cause other permanent maiming so abilities that regrow limbs or allow you to reattach them are actually useful without the DM having to specifically chop you up.

The fail deck isn't that punishing either, a lot of the cards do very small things (i.e. drop your ammunition/weapon, poke yourself for 1 damage, get a -1 on your next attack, you MUST attack the same target again) but then it has a few cards that do larger things like attacking the nearest ally instead or pulling a muscle and taking strength damage.

I use Mercer's resurrection rules

Ultimate Combat is not a "splat book".

The GM was using PoW but not using ultimate combat? It's like he isn't even trying.

>Not rolling to confirm
This problem goes away except like .1% percent of the time

Intelligence is elastic reeeeeeeeeeeee

Iirc some component is genetic but anyone can become smarter than they are today with education and practice

It's the other way around. Think of muscles, yes some people are built stronger but across the board the most important thing for how strong you are is how much you train. Even a tiny manlet can outlift a 6'6 mclarge dude if the large dude never trains. And consider in most people aren't manlets or huge but average, you start to see how genetics plays a part, but the biggest factor is training ie eduction.

God, tell me about it.
>Try to make sense of a blueprint in an alchemist's lab, roll a fumble
>lol you didn't see that fuming potion boiling below, your vision is shit for 1d4 days
>Try to pick a lock, as the thief class, roll a fumble
>lol your lockpick break and half of it is stuck in the lock
>Use a pair of pliers to retrieve broken lockpick, roll a fumble again
>lol now your lockpick is irreparably stuck deep in the lock

I told my GM that maybe he should tone down the crit fails when they don't make sense and he just... didn't understand.
>But then what am I supposed to do when you roll a 1 on lockpicking???

His homebrew is also full of shitty design decisions. 360 points to distribute across 9 stats, d100 roll under... Yes, that's a 40% success chance on average. The only way I've managed to make a competent character is by completely ignoring Willpower, a stat which I eventually deduced never comes up unless you're a mage. But the fumbles are what fucking kills me.

>I'm only going to give XP for "quest progression"
>go into dungeon looking for a jade figurine to return to guy who paid is to get it, fight 5 bugbears? Get XP
>go into forest to blow off some steam and kill 5 bugbears and steal their jade figurine? 0 XP.
>he is of course completely impervious to the fact that they're logically equivalent, and always brings up irrelevant shit about "coherency" and "dissuading the impetus to turn this into a hexcrawl".

I once had a DM who had ur roll for initiative every round.
Always seemed like a waste of time to me, I mean dynamic initiative sounds like a good interesting idea but man that way sucked.

I do this for duels or arena fights. This way it's not just whoever goes first wins

What system do you play where INT is your IQ? Do you only roll INT to solve logic puzzles and memorize digits?

Let's be real, INT in most games is your education. When you're rolling to study a magic artifact, you're not adding a bonus proportional to the speed at which your neurons treat information. You're adding a bonus proportional to how much shit you know about the world in general (and magic specifically).

If a barbarian has 8 INT because he can't read and the dude spends his whole life learning how to read and study, he should gain at least a little bit of INT. Human brains are really fucking good at adapting.

This. I firmly subscribe to the school of "assume the PCs are competent unless noted otherwise". In a normal campaign, they're not clumsy or forgetful.
One thing is certain, you don't need to make PCs slip and land face first into the mud, or have them starve their pets because the players didn't mention feeding them. Your players are going to find perfectly normal ways to fuck up, all by themselves.

We have this but you have to roll a d6 as well and on a 5 or 6 you roll on a table. It's usually a small modifier that wears off after a round or two. Same with critical successes as well, but the effects for those range from advantage on your next roll up to decapitation. We all thought it was shit in theory but were enjoying it quite a bit two years into the campaign. After over a dozen levels the amount of wear and battlescars on the party really reflects on the party's journey. We also can save up to three inspirations so were never in much danger of immediately dying due to bad luck, but it gets pretty intense when you just barely dodge a blow that would have removed your head during a difficult encounter.

That's just 3.5 / pathfinder core rule
>You can use a weapon that deals nonlethal damage, including an unarmed strike, to deal lethal damage instead, but you take a –4 penalty on your attack roll.

Wrong quote, fuck
>You can use a melee weapon that deals lethal damage to deal nonlethal damage instead, but you take a –4 penalty on your attack roll.

Consider the following:
>If you roll any number and succeed after adding the modifier, it's a success
>If you roll any number and your modifier isn't enough it's a failure
>1 isn't different

1 man
2 woman
3 woman(man)
4 man(woman)
5 eunuch
6 mutant/reroll

>Wizard
More likely warlock or monk, to be honest. Wizards don't get all that much off of a short rest, compared to some other classes.

Proof?

God forbid we let warlocks be not shit

It works well in games that arnt D&D that can provide a reward for opting-in to a critical fumble when it happens.

Why do people have such a hate on for 4d6-4? I personally prefer it to d20, for dem curves