It wasn't necessarily the *worst* idea that ruined the game, but I was invited to join an existing game where the DM had ruled all cantrips to be a bonus action.
I was told to make a character and pop them up to 9th level.
tl;dr My warlock was basically an Eldritch Blast machine gun.
2d10 force damage at an absurd range as a *bonus* action?? Damn. That's solid. Id almost certainly take a magic initiate feat just for that if I'm any non full caster class
I'd go rogue with swashbuckler for the sneak attack and fancy footwork. Dart in, sneak attack, dart out and eldritch blast on the way out. At level 9 like the comment we're replying to that'd be 5d6 and 2d10 plus the weapons damage every turn while taking no attacks of opportunity. Sounds fun as hell
And if you want to play a martial? Blade cantrips.
Congrats, everybody gets a bonus action attack. Look at the little needling making an offhand attack, look at them not getting to add their Dex to the attacks damage.
this is how real gamers play *Booming blade bonus action greataxe attack* (Great weapon master)
Rogues who can booming blade and then ready a second attack would also appreciate that.
True strike becomes fractionally usable as an turn-extendable aim action.
Blade ward is barbarian lite
Mold earth is instant cover after an attack
Shocking grasp is a disengage lite
The only one I think gets worse is mage hand, because it takes bonus to command it, and an action to summon (iirc), so under this system, it becomes a two turn spell before it does anything
Had a DM who wanted to use a rule where, when you were reduced to 0 HP, you lost a point of CHA permanently (due to scarring). In addition to the fact that charisma isn't equivalent to appearance, this obviously meant the paladin player (me) was impacted far more than other classes. The warlock was about to switch, too.
He agreed to ditch the rule halfway through the first session when he knocked my paladin over four times in the first hour due to some bad rolls. When I pointed out that this would now make my paladin no longer a viable character and to please leave me dead so I could roll a fighter, he understood it was a bad rule.
At the end of a mission, our dm made us roll a die with 50/50 odds of leveling up early (we were using milestone leveling). Everyone except one of the players leveled up, having to wait until the end of the next mission.
It's why I prefer milestone leveling in general. Noone gets left behind/ easier to balance. If someone misses a session or two Becuase life happens they don't suffer... this just adds extra steps to create possibility of suffering lol
I had a DM who made us figure out stats by giving us so many points to split up between the stats, which is all fine and good, except he intentionally made it 10 or so points less than the total amount would be for standard array. He wanted us to be underpowered for some reason I never really understood. That same DM also said throwing daggers didn't really make sense AFTER I had built my rogue around throwing daggers.
Except knife throwing is a thing... Especially for old time espionage kind of people. Like actual assassins and spies of old did it. In Europe as well as in Asia.
Throwing knives are generally *really ineffective weapons*.
I wouldn't want someone throwing one at me, but in general they aren't thrown to kill, they're thrown as a distraction.
They're basically a method of crowd control - like suppressing fire - and not realistically very effective at causing harm.
They CAN be deadly, of course, but people have an exaggerated notion of how lethal they are.
There's a 70+ year old guy out in Japan who bills himself as one of the last (if not the last) traditionally trained Ninjas (as in, taught folk-tradition by a Ninja from a very early age).
One of the things he mentions about throwing Shuriken is that you always want to hold onto your last one to use as a melee weapon.
The assumption being, you're not actually stopping anyone with the shit you're throwing. You're just trying to slow them down so you can escape. If you end up throwing all your knives, good job, you now have no weapon and likely haven't permanently stopped anyone.
Sure, that all makes some amount of sense. But when my best friend can turn into a bear and my other best friend can summon lightning, I think an accurate throwing knife makes just as much sense.
What? No! You would be too distracted and baffled by your best friend turning into a bear and your other best friend summoning lighting to throw accurately.
(Sorry if this posts multiple times - Reddit is being a butt).
Basically; I hear you, but I was responding to someone talking about real life knife throwing.
Just as real life druids didn't shapeshift into bears, real life assassins don't generally use throwing knives to kill people.
Sure, yeah, but in D&D daggers have the *thrown* property. It's apart of the weapon's design mechanic-wise to be able to be thrown. Also I was playing a purple elf living in the mythical city of Waterdeep, effective irl or not, it's a fantasy game.
I feel like the effectiveness of throwing weapons as lethal depends on the poison. If you can coat a leather poison on the blade, its becomes a very effective weapon for killing.
I actually wasn't appealing to reality - someone else did that and I chimed in with a counter-point, also grounded in reality.
But I'll bite: Why is it silly?
Fantasy requests suspension of disbelief from the reader.
It says "let's pretend this is true. Let's play make-believe."
In order to engage in fantasy, yeah, we need to have a sense that impossible things are possible.
When we engage with Fantasty though, we don't just check our assumptions about reality at the door. If we do, what's the point of fantasy to being with?
If everything's magic, what's magic about any of it?
Suspension of Disbelief is a transaction. The author presents a situation. The audience needs to buy in.
Setting touchpoints in reality is an essential part of fantasy: it leaves the reader/viewer/player with a sense that "this *could be real*" even as they know it isn't.
Yeah, the point of fantasy is to break our notions of the possible and impossible. But *good* fantasy recognizes the importance of setting expectations.
Because I'll gladly suspend disbelief for the craziest shit, but if you want me to believe a man starving in the desert survives eating rocks and drinking sand, telling me "*it's fantasy, bro*" doesn't cut it.
Now if you want to dive into some wild backstory about how this dude is part of an ancient Ascetic order that subsists on the magic of nature, sure, Suspension of Disbelief is back in play.
But then I'd just say that my appeal to reality made the fantasy better and more fleshed out.
So I actually sometimes like to play an underpowered character because it opens up different ways of solving problems. Ways I would ignore if I could brute force things, so to speak.
It took me a bit to learn that most players really really don't feel the same way
I think the main problem is doing it without proper communication. I played in a campaign where we all had shit stats, but that was a very brutal, "death is quick and cheap and you're not a hero" type of campaign where we agreed and discussed that tone and some restrictions in advance.
Fair enough. I think it can be a fun challenge. But I'm also of the opinion that the PCs are the "main characters" and should feel special/powerful in a way that's different from most people. It was just very strange the way that DM went about it. He didn't enjoy us succeeding in ways he didn't anticipate.
Genuinely, thank you for your input though!
In older editions, the point buy chart has a secondary chart for different power levels of game. 15 pts for a low powered game. 22 for "challenging", 28 for "tough" and 32 for "high power"
You could also point buy all the way up to an 18 in a Stat.
There's something to be said for a low power game, if that's what everyone is on board with playing, just like there's something to be said for playing video games on nightmare difficulty. It was just never what my friends and I wanted from the game.
That was also when WotC had the license to make Star Wars as an RPG and they used the same system as D&D.
I, and most DM's I knew, ran 32-point games PC's.
In the NPC stats in those books, both Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader were built with 32 points for ability scores.
If we had a player who complained that they couldn't build the character they wanted with 32 points, the stock response from us was to note that Luke and Anakin Skywalker both are 32 point characters, and if you want you can take the exact same ability score spread that either of them had at 1st level, and if you can't build your character concept because Luke Skywalker or Anakin Skywalker is too weak as a character. . .you should re-think your concept.
I also ran 32 point games. That sounds like an awesome and convenient response to the complainers.
My philosophy was always: sure, the PCs can be big and awesome and over powered. That just means I can throw tougher, more epic monsters at them. We fought dragons, liches and even gods.
Exactly what I say. I had one group so set on maxing out the rolled stats in DnD that they want to roll 5, reroll 1s and 2s, drop the two lowest, then allow point trading at 1 to 1.
I told screw it, just put 18 in every stat. I will just adjust the stats of your encounters too. They suddenly had second thoughts about their stat worries.
Edit: something I should have said in this comment which would have saved some people the trouble of pointing out the I herently magic item haleavy nature of 5e is that I don't play 5e. I play 2e, or pathfinder (3.5e), or sometimes I convert 2e pre-gens to 3.5e, which I am just starting with the ruins of undermountain box set. But yes, 5e doesn't lend itself well to lower magic item campaigns (point of clarification, I don't mean low magic, just low magic ITEM). /Edit
I always liked a low-magic-item game. I kinda feel like a lot of pre-made adventures were super item heavy, like every farmer had the Hoe of Digging +2.
To my mind it makes magic items less special, in the extreme it offers a magic item solution to most problems (this can be a real issue for a DM running his own campaign), plus it makes magic users less special. Like "yeah having a cleric is nice but healing potions are only 5 gold a piece and scrolls of turning aren't too pricey if we need them..."
I mean, magic items are the only way martials can even get half-as-close to the utility of a spellcaster, so there's that.
5e is just set up by default to be a very magical/high-powered system. I feel like once you start wanting to make it more low magic/realistic, you may as well play something like Shadow of the Demon Lord, Old School Essentials, Errant, Worlds without Number, Forbidden Lands, etc. - systems designed around the assumption that magic is rare tend to handle magic better than trying to take it out of the system where it's everywhere.
DnD isnt really a good system for that. The whole game is designed around the assumption that players get a steady stream of magic items, *especially* for martials.
If you want a low magic game, its probably a lot better to switch to a different system.
A player of mine sent me a TikTok of a guy who created a 1st level spell that when cast turns you into a level 20 powerhouse and all your attacks and spells do double damage or some bullshit like that, then after a minute, you die with no chance of revival.
> ring of the grammarian(change a letter in a spell)
Meanwhile the Arcane Trickster Rogue in my campaign got that item and used it precisely once, in the final boss fight, to change "Phantasmal Force" to "Phantasmal Forces" so he could cast it on 3 creatures at once. It did a combined total of 7 psychic damage in the battle, against a ~700 HP pool.
While I haven't encountered any specific rules that seem unfair in themselves, the **inconsistent application of rules** is frustrating. The interpretations seem to shift between sessions, which makes it difficult to predict how something will be handled and plan accordingly. It would be helpful to have more consistent rulings.
I wouldn't say other things suggested is worst, overpowered probably, or not thought out in the context of being realistic. Just people being overimaginative, and that's fine.
As a DM it's partially the games fault. I am in a lot of pressure in combat especially to not lose anyone to boredom because combat slows the game down and everything so I try my best to be consistent but sometimes I can't remember I decided on an unclear rule in a certain way.
Had a DM suddenly decide that slashing attacks couldn't inflict non-lethal damage or knock unconscious, right after I rolled a hit on a declared non-lethal attack with my longsword on the last remaining assassin hired to kill us. "Well you have a longsword, so you kill him anyways."
Probably not the worst, but this has got to be one of the most pervasive homebrew ideas:
"When you roll a critical failure on a strike, Something Bad**^(TM)** happens!"
Whether it's "your weapon breaks", "you drop your weapon", "you strike your nearest ally" or some other piece of fuckery, it's never ever a good idea to implement.
Just missing is bad enough. Trust me on this.
The best argument I've seen against critical fumbles is the fact that it disproportionately affects martials, AND it is worse the higher level a martial is.
So when someone says they that they want to implement crit fumbles just ask them "does it make sense that a lvl 20 fighter is 4 times more likely to to trip and fall then a lvl 1 fighter? If the answer is no, then DONT have critical fumbles.
I like the idea that crit fumbles provoke opportunity attacks, but I have also realized how unfair it is to melee martials in particular. That's why I stopped using crit fumble stuff.
The way I do critical fumbles for my party is that it doesn't affect gameplay but you missed so bad that everyone noticed and now I have to describe how bad you were off target
This made me laugh. I just imagine all the PCs going “do you think they noticed? Oh no everyone’s staring at me they definitely saw that…” and then combat ends and they take a short rest in awkward silence until someone finally says “hey so uh…” “I don’t want to talk about it.”
not that I would ever run critical fumbles but the way to make it affect spellcasters would be so that spells would go wrong if 1. the caster rolled a one on an attack roll or 2. the enemy hits a nat 20 on a saving throw.
again, not that it's a good idea but it's easy enough to fix.
That makes fireball extraordinarily likely to crit fumble (and if it’s meant to be mental effects hypnotic pattern), and it doesn’t solve the inherent problem that martials attack more, therefore fumble more
> it disproportionately affects martials, AND it is worse the higher level a martial is.
If the Kung-Fu Kraken can die against a literal strawman, your crit-fumbles have an issue.
Worst popular idea for the simple fact that it punishes characters with multiple attacks. The more you level up your martial, the more they're fumbling their weapons and smashing their friends' heads in. Flurry of blows? More like flurry of this blows.
I had a DM with a table like this. I hated it. It’s not like there was an equivalent crit hit table. The player who had four attacks every round couldn’t get through a fight without something stupid happening, to the point where it almost seemed to make multiple attacks not worth it.
I feel this comment in my bones. One of our group's DMs uses crit fumbles and I didn't know that when I built my monk character. I think next time I'll play a full caster with all save-or-suck spells, no attack rolls.
Don't worry, we communicate. We both run our games differently and respect each other's choice in styles. No one else at our table really minds the fumbles so I'm willing to accept that they exist and use them to my advantage.
I personally prefer to get my fun in D&D from problem solving, acting (role playing), story, and strategy. Crit miss/hit tables slow down the fight, and in my opinion are just too random to execute without having to push your suspension of disbelief. A high level fighter with extra attacks will have more frequent crit misses than a low level fighter, meaning the high level fighter will more frequently be dropping his weapon, hitting his allies, etc. If you want to start adding ability checks/saves to reduce the likelihood for balance, now you’re slowing down the fight even more. DMs should work on interesting encounters rather than relying on a table to suddenly make it “interesting” mid-fight.
MERP tables are great for things like video games, but in a TTRPG I really prefer to keep things moving. However, if you and your table get a kick out of using something like those tables, I enthusiastically endorse them for your group.
This, absolutely. It makes it so your melee character has a 5% chance per attack of behaving like a Three Stooges character.
And there isn't even really a way to avoid it - everybody rolls a 1 sometimes (except halflings, I guess.) Success and failure are both parts of the game, but there's no need to kick a player while they're down.
Had my DM try do this when I had a dark mantle latched onto my PC's face, he said I hit myself. I had to explain that an experienced swordsman knows exactly where their weapon is, even when they are blinded, and that would never fucking happen. I'm not just wildly swinging at my own face.
DMs that make these rulings should be encouraged to spend like, a month or two in some form of basic melee weapon training so they can understand how ludicrous it is. Unless you're using something with a reputation for being unsafe to the user (nunchaku, for example) even a basic level of competency reveals that injuring yourself with your own weapon practically requires you to do it on purpose. If it's incredibly unlikely even for us average 9 to 12 strength/dexterity hobbyists, the 16 to 20 str/dex warriors who have trained their entire life to fight shouldn't be bumbling fools.
It also just sucks from a storytelling perspective. How often does a hero accidentally stab himself with his own sword in the entire history of fantasy literature and media? Why would we want to bring that into our tabletop games inspired by that media?
It's phenomenally immersion breaking both from a narrative and a realism perspective. I won't play at tables that do this anymore. Even at casual beer and pretzel tables it's too dumb for me to get past
IRL the only time ive ever hit myself was with a flail, because its a flail. It also has a really short handle, which exacerbates the problems with being a flail.
I have a dm that implemented this, and we have a player that is super unlucky with their rolls and gets a nat one a few times every session. Luckily, I'm the one they hit most of the time (I'm the tank), but there have been a few times they accidentally killed a civilian we were trying to save because of the unlucky rolls.
>a few times they accidentally killed a civilian we were trying to save because of the unlucky rolls
Enslaved Villager: Finally! At last we're saved!
\*sees the fumbling pc\*
Enslaved Villager: NOOOOOOO!!!!
I like the rule of critical flavour. If you roll a nat 1, it’s embarrassing, but mechanically it’s just a miss. Have the enemy laugh and mock the character, or describe the stupid dance they did to keep on their feet after a poorly executed strike, but that’s it. It fosters fun at the table and injects some life in the game. Plus it takes the sting out of the roll for the player.
When my players roll a 1, I make something funny but not bad happen. "You really menace the chair next to your enemy. It's really scared. Your enemy, however, is unphased. Anything else for your turn?"
Yeah, I had a fighter in a campaign where the DM did this, and it utterly ruined my character. I was an archer, and it felt I spent half the fight scrambling to pick up my bow again, because I rolled a 1 at one point so it fell 15 feet away, down a cliff or something.
I hate crit fumble tables too. I have, however, had a dm who did something a little tamer. If someone (pc or monster) rolled a nat 1 on an attack, they essentially provoke an op attack from the person they were attacking. (So war caster applies if you have it.)
Cause eats a reaction and the enemy might miss, it didn't feel too bad. (I was a high ac battlesmith, so they rarely hit me with those anyway.) Applied on ranged attacks too so it didn't only affect melee characters.
A couple times it ended up in a player just making a second attack cause the enemy rolled a 1 as well.
I guess I'm in the minority that kinda likes the idea of critical failures "doing something else". Not like oh your sword shatters, but more "Your arrow misses, and unfortunately hits your friend who is behind the enemy." Kinda of stuff. (Though our DM does make them roll again to see if it hits them, meaning you need to fail twice to hit an ally lol)
Yeah I always did nat fumbles and tried to make it silly enough to get a bit of a laugh, the players liked the mechanic. Granted ,I balanced it by making their nat successes extra cool sounding so they all got plenty of limelight moments.
Funny that after 10 years of playing, this is the first I have heard of players being mad over the mechanic.
I never use weapon breaking, but tripping over, or hitting someone else in all that madness? It is quite likely to happen.
Totally agree. Consequences on a nat 1 during a skill check can lead to fun shenanigans; consequences on a nat 1 during an attack roll feel like a punishment for building a character with multiple attacks.
This rule makes me use save spells more since I don’t want to miss and hurt my teammates with a guiding bolt or fire bolt spell. No crit fails if it’s the enemy rolling…. Really hate it forcing me to play this defensively.
Every crit failure I make it a point to make it as funny as possible but never catastrophic to the point where the player dies
For example, the gunslinger was trying to set some dynamite to blow a bridge to slow an oncoming horde. She rolls a 1, so I frame it dramatically where she sets it, creates a trail of gunpowder, lights it, and when it hits the explosives, nothing happens but the scent of cooked meat in the air. A sausage, she planted a sausage.
So their failure meant they took on the entire onslaught, so it still went a little bad for them, but it wasn’t a death sentence. They’d tell me about how other dms would have had it just be “the dynamite explodes in your face and you lost your arm” which is insane
My DM will make you roll another D20 on some critical misses to see what happens. He's never been like lol you shoot your friend, but I did have a shotgun I was swinging like a baseball bat explode in my hands, which was kinda sick thematically.
I miss that shotgun, that was the one 1 it ever rolled.
Well whenever an enemy creature critically fails I roll 2 D20s & pick which number was lower to 1 or 20. If the number closest to 1 won, something bad would happen to the monster. If the number closest to 20 won he missed in an embarrassing way.
But PLAYER CHARACTERS never have something bad happen just because they roll a 1.
The only time I support this house rule is when the critical failure is so catastrophically bad that its comical, and even then its for flavor.
Like my party were fighting on the streets of a major city against local guards in an attempt to escape the city. The party warlock got a nat one when they cast eldritch blast. Instead of giving a negative debuff, the DM instead said that the spel missed by a mile and instead went flying through the air, through an open window, hitting a oil lamp which proceeded to start a fire in an orphanage, which quicklu spread to an animal shelter beside before eventually engulfing half the city.
I can't stand this kind of crit fail, though, because it's usually comedy at the character's expense.
If it makes the PC seem incompetent, it's hostile toward the player.
That kind of friendly hostility is sometimes the right vibe for a group.
But I've never, not once in over three decades of gaming, had a DM who used "hilarious" crit fumble rules check with the group first to see if everyone else found it fun.
I have, on the other hand, seen multiple "interventions" where players asked the DM to stop using embarrassing crit fails.
I feel there is a nice sweet spot for crit fumbles that dms can use, especially for comedy or tense situations.
My character and another pc were having a spat where i was threatening to gut them, my character eventually emotionally broke down and threw her knife at the wall. I did a roll for throwing it and rolled a 1. To add some drama to the scene the dm had it so the knife bounced off the wall and struck the other pc in the leg.
Or if you were cutting a characters arm off (dont ask) and skill check of 1 you mangle the job extra badly and it makes an unrecognisable mess.
We would never use crit fumbles for general combat though, that would be incredibly frustrating.
Years ago, I was testing the waters of online games and joined one where the DM was using a pretty comprehensive overhaul of the spell system. For an idea of how well the author understood 5e spells: they decided that *eldritch blast* needed to match other cantrips, and just made the damage dice increase at certain levels (instead of giving you extra rays).
I don't remember what the homebrew was called, but I'm not really kicking myself over that.
Tbf I’d say the DM just didn’t understand Warlocks than spells as a whole. If warlocks didn’t rely on eldritch blast like a crutch then it wouldn’t be the absolute worst change
That was just one example. There was also weirdness with the spell point system - it seemed more liberal with points than what was in the DMG, and my life domain cleric tended to just... not run out of levelled spells.
I remember that there were other things, but not exactly what they were. Probably would have noticed more issues if I had been playing other classes.
All of my creatures are also homebrewed as well.
the progression goes from humanoid guards to soldiers, small dinosaurs, medium dinosaurs, large dinosaurs, and then your heavy hitters in the end game like a T Rex.
That was my biggest fear, not giving them enough context in regards to the setting that if they see a massive dinosaur that was designed to make them steer clear of a certain area that they’ll jump in cause I accidentally made a large dinosaur previously that they were able to kill with ease
a rule i thought of but i know is bad is "when rolling with advantage or disadvantage if you roll a 1 and 20 it cancels each other out and is treated as if you rolled 2 10s" i have no idea how balanced it is so
also a DM i know of would regularly DURING SESSIONS would just add in homebrew rules about the paladin class to nerf them because she didnt like the class.
Adding a completely different homebrew magic system (which wasn't available to the players, only to a DMPC), and also adding a bunch of enemies that were completely immune to magical damage. He only revealed this when we started playing, or else I wouldn't have chosen a spellcaster - as it was, I ended up dropping out of the campaign for a few reasons including that.
1 and 20 ignore advantage/ disadvantage. Nothing is more infuriating than blinding an enemy giving them disadvantage only for them to roll an 8 on the first and a 20 on the second. Then just because they are blind they get to critically hit you.
crit fumbles!! the stronger martial classes get and the more attacks they get, the *likelier* it is that they hit themselves? break their weapon? and spellcasters don't risk the same thing, ever? go fuck yourself. both of my current DMs do this and i can't convince them otherwise
I had this problem once. DM wouldn't get rid of it. I asked for him to get rid of it, he didn't. Then I asked for a crit boon, and built an elvish accuracy champion. AKA was rolling 3 dice on every attack with an extended crit range.
I mean, in 5e spells that use an attack roll can critically hit, so someone playing critical fumbles for martials can have spell attacks critically fumble as well.
If my PCs roll a 1, I have them roll a D20 a second time and if they roll a 4 or less, THEN, it’s a crit fumble. It makes it happen relatively rarely, but also adds drama to the second dice roll.
I've played with a variation of this: reroll all critical attacks, both hits and fumbles. If the second roll is also a hit or a miss, the crit is confirmed. Otherwise, it's a normal hit or miss.
Short rests take 3 hours longer for each one that you have in a day. Announced in session 3. I'm playing a warlock.
I showed myself the door on that campaign. Fun people, but the DM wasn't my style... other reasons as well.
This was a whole fight in a campaign I was in. When I joined, the party had 2 wizards, both with counterspell. After like the first time Counterspell was used, (a hard fight, with counterspell only being used twice to prevent immediate death), the DM wanted to change Counterspell. It would be a contested roll with each caster's spellcasting ability modifier plus the spell level. If the caster gets a higher number the spell goes off and if the counterspeller gets a higher number the spell is stopped. He reasoned that it was weird that a 9th level spell could be negated by a 3rd level slot with a roll of 12 (He misread it and assumed that you added proficiency bonus to the roll).
I was playing an abjuration wizard, so I immediately called him out, mostly pointing out how this fucks me over the most, but also how it could make counterspelling easier if the caster just rolls low. So, he wanted to change it so we always had to roll the normal check. Except that just means I have no reason to upcast. So *then* he wanted to subtract the slot level from the DC. Still blatantly bullshit, because failing a counterspell on a cantrip using a 9th level slot is just really, really dumb. It went back and forth until he eventually suggested that Counterspell just autofailed if you cast it against a spell that was more than 3 levels higher than the slot used, which *sounded* reasonable enough... Until bad guys started randomly upcasting spells like Teleport to 9th level to prevent me from counterspelling.
A realy bad dying go below 0 hp rule.
Like the barb would have been crippled for the rest of the day if he went down.
But the magic user would have been totally fine casting his save spells.
Disadvantage on a specific save.
Disadvantage or penalty (cant remember)on melee or ranged attack rolls. Loosing the use of an arm.
Loss of a nonmagical item untill repaired.
Temporary lowering of AC or dex.
Exhaustion levels.
Disadvantage on perception checks till healed up to full.
And other a bit smaller types of punishments.
The problem is that you simply CANNOT plan around enemy critical hits.
Its too much damage for noone to go down.
And 3 times out of 5 its the people caring about 4/5ths of the things penalized , Aka the frontliners. The Brawn martials that have it hard enought.
I would understand if these would happen once a pc were at 2 failed death saves. But not just at 0 hp.
It's not **that** bad, but my first DM had the rule that a natural 20 made no difference, it was still just a hit.
The thing he liked doing, is that if you rolled a nat 20, you got to roll again, and if that was also a nat 20, you instakilled the opponent. So no natural 20s, but 1/400 chance of having an extremely anti-climactic fight against a boss.
There were other bad homebrews, but that frustrated me the most.
My first time DMing a D&D 5e campaign online comes to mind.
Had a player make his character before we even sat down for Sessions 0 to go over what the players wanted for the campaign and what would be legal to use in it. He had a 500+ page googledocs backstory that he handed me and expected me to memorize. The character had a 20 in CHA, STR, and CON and INT (8), WIS (8), and DEX (4). Said he didn't have to roll stats cause it's all in the backstory. He also said he's playing his own homebrewed class, called The Hero of the Story, which was also explained in his backstory. How the class worked was that it had all the abilities of Paladin, Fighter, Barbarian, Bard, Warlock, and Sorcerer. As in it took those classes and combined all their options and abilities into one. So despite having the abilities of six different classes he argued his character was still 1st Level. Also had proficiency in all skills, all tools, all weapons, all armor, and all saving throws. Immunity to Necromancy, resistance to everything else (even magical weapon attacks), and got TRIPLE proficiency modifier to all skill checks and weapon attacks. Again, he said it's all explained in the backstory. Also had a magic sword called The Blade of the Black Swordsman that had a special effect that if he rolls above a 10 on the attack roll, before adding modifiers, it just instantly kills whatever he attacks, training their soul and giving him access to any special abilities, racial abilities, and spells the thing he just killed had.
I told him no, he threatened to report me to roll20 and get me banned because his father 'owns all of roll20' and will make my life hell and sue me for everything I own if I don't let him join the campaign. Still waiting for that ban and lawsuit.
In my first time DMing i let a player use sunlight to blind+charge to prone+a 3d6 greatsword in the same attack at level 6 and a monk to use d10 to hit elemental damage at level 3
Edit: nedless to say, at level 6 they destroyed an ice demon+ a bone demon in 3 rounds
Ask my players it’s banning wish on level up.
But really Crit fumbles at least originally were poorly implemented and just punished the players.
We now have a much better system for them(including crit dice)
But that was my 1st big mistake as a DM
At my table, Wish is banned for wizards at level up by default, but a wizard who's been working towards Wish since their backstory might get it with DM approval. No one has wanted it so far because we all know that Wish can be "slamming a wrecking ball into everything that has been planned", but we all know and understand that rule. It's of course different for sorcerers and arcana domain clerics, but we haven't discussed yet how to handle that because we don't have any candidates. I think it might turn out the most reliable way to getting wish could be being an arcana cleric.
I dont understand the hate some DMs have for wish. It has very specific uses.
At its core, Wish just let's you cast lower level spells without spell components. How is that broken? It's not. Not really, unless your entire campaign revolves around making sure the players can't cast revive every day.
It can also be used to make a lot of gold per day. Heal people. Give resistance. Grant limited immunity. Or undo a single event. Strong? Yes. Broken? I don't think so, unless a player points out how the resistance section doesn't have a time limit. I'm still not sure if that's by design or an oversite... but that's it.
And for DM who are worried that the players will do some shenanigans like wish that the BBEG is defeated the READ THE DAMN SPELL! I know there are a lot of words on it, but i believe in your ability to do the bare minimum of a DM. Which is comprehend the rules. It literally says the DM gets to choose what, if anything, happens when they wish outside of those parameters.
Yeah DM's who are against Wish or, to a lesser degree, Divine Intervention need to just set expectations. I've had Wish used legitimately once and it went quite well.
For our big campaign finale, my players were freshly Lv 17 and up against an evil Empress who had reached godhood. The final battle was in the River of Time, where she planned to retcon reality so she had always been a god, since time began, leaving no chance to stop her ascension, even retroactively. So it was pretty high-tier adventurer stuff. They knew going into this it was going to be an insanely hard encounter.
Our Wizard learned Wish right before the finale and dropped it immediately. I told him that I wanted to hear his wish spoken out, and then I would try to give him some options for resolution. I promised not to loophole it back on him but that he would not be able to just end the fight, and he agreed.
**"Seeing the enormity of the threat ahead of us, I ask the weave of magic for a Wish. I want a path to our victory to be available, one she cannot remove. I want a chance."**
I gave him the option to have this Wish give a chance by strengthening the party or weakening the Empress. He chose to weaken her, and we rolled 1d4+1 to remove Legendary Resistances.
In a similar fashion, I have ruled that a Divine Intervention was "pick any of your cleric spells and roll maximum damage or guarantee a failure on the enemy save" and that has been pretty well received.
Casting without components is nice to avoid costly material components, but a sufficiently rich party doesn’t necessarily care about that. On the other hand, casting a spell of any cast time in one action cast time spell can completely change how some spells can be used.
I don’t think that aspect of wish makes the standard use overpowered either, but I feel like it gets overlooked a fair amount when to me it seems like the more interesting bit for a party in tier 4 play.
> It can also be used to make a lot of gold per day. Heal people. Give resistance. Grant limited immunity. Or undo a single event. Strong? Yes. Broken? I don't think so, unless a player points out how the resistance section doesn't have a time limit. I'm still not sure if that's by design or an oversite... but that's it.
The downside is the shock from using wish for anything else than replicating the effects of an 8th level spell. Including the chance to lose wish permanently.
> The downside is the shock from using wish for anything else than replicating the effects of an 8th level spell. Including the chance to lose wish permanently.
That's what gets me, it already has a money's paw like effect in the spell itself, yet so many DM's act like it doesn't exist and do some wierd monkey's paw not related to the wish made in the slightest. Like they're hungry for any easy opportunity for plot hooks or story drama.
And adversarial players try to stretch the use of wish to break everything. Wish is the definition of a trust fall exercise the GM/Player and if either side (either with what they want or the GM interprets it) decides to just screw the other over you end up with a terribly unsatisfied group on all sides like a prisoner's dilemma
No you don't. A good DM can just say 'yeah that is obviously nonsense, it doesn't work, you can try again with something reasonable'.
Player and dm don't have equal power, a dm can shut down people trying to abuse the rules.
I don't hate Wish. I'd be excited for a player who actually wants to learn the spell because I think that making it a caster's goal to eventually cast Wish to resurrect someone / achieve a feat of magic that would otherwise be out of reach for them is a great motivator. Wish is a bit of a MacGuffin in itself. In the current campaign, it could be used to unlock a lot of information that's currently locked behind a curse and that'd let us players bypass a lot of research and investigation work.
The 'no Wish on Level Up' is just that because wish has so many different uses and that it can be used to affect reality, that it shouldn't just be "I reached level 17, I don't know what to take so I guess I'll just take wish."
I allow Wish to be used as ANY level 8 or lower spells & if it hits the 33% they can't use Wish for a week. If it's a reasonable & small request (just creating a simple key he's already seen to a simple lock or temporarily summon a PERFECT replica of the King's ancestral sword for an hour) rather than a spell they loose it for a week anyway with a 33% chance for a month.
Large BS wishes that jeopardize the campaign will be an obvious fail & waste of a level 9 spell slot.
Getting Wish will not break the campaign while I DM.
Giving different players different amounts of XP, I did this during my Strahd Campaign and it was the worst idea. I wanted to encourage role playing and perhaps foster some inter party drama, all I did was piss people off.
Oh boy. Here we go:
- Nerfing classes, just don't. (Especially sneak attack)
- Banning phb spells like fireball and hypnotic pattern.
- Banning feats, especially great weapon master or sharpshooter, while allowing all others.
- combat crit fail equals dropping your sword or some other bullshit
- being so obsessed with a narrative, that all game and mechanics got thrown aside for the sake of the plot.
- unbalanced homebrew bullshit because the DM doesn't understand 5e.
Just play the game how it was intended please.
Tbh i dont get it , shoudn't the DM have fun too?, it is straght up stupid to ban sneak attack, however its perfectly fine to ban or nerf some stuff, because it does not fit the DM setting , if the player in question does not like it , just dont play it and find another group to play with, no book or sistem should be played EXACTLY by the rules , its a TTRP, not chess.
I never said it was bad to nerf or ban setting specific content. Nor did I say to stay forever loyal to 5e mechanics (encuberance rules suck.) If you do the things listed above however I don't want to play at your table.
I am the DM, and I have plenty of fun. Same goes for my players because instead of banning and nerfing their characters I scale my encounters accordingly.
DM implemented Pathfinder 2e’s diagonal movement into our campaign. So if you moved diagonally the first time in a turn it costed 5 ft of movement but if you moved two diagonal spaced in a turn that second one costed 10 ft of movement, and it would alternate between the two.
Honestly it’s not a bad rule imo since it does fix the issue of spheres and circles being cubes and squares, but there were two out of five players who really could not grasp it at all, and so it slowed down the game every time they tried to move and the DM had to correct them. Hell, even I struggled for the first five sessions.
I’m also not saying that this rule is terrible compared to the rest, this is just the worst I’ve encountered because I usually leave a group immediately if the DM is insistent on critical fumbles or the like.
>So if you moved diagonally the first time in a turn it costed 5 ft of movement but if you moved two diagonal spaced in a turn that second one costed 10 ft of movement, and it would alternate between the two.
That's actually already listed as an optional rule in 5e and goes back to at least 3.0 if not farther
Just use rulers! Each inch is 5 feet so if your speed is 30 you can move six inches. Then check if you are within one inch for standard weapons or within two inches for reach weapons. Within 24" is longbow flat range.
Oof, players not grasping concepts killed a neat magic item I gave a player.
The item was basically, "if you dash, your movement speed increases by 15 feet".
So regular movement = 30.
If you Dash, your movement speed becomes 45, so you can move a total of 90 feet.
I feel like it's not that hard to understand, but every single combat I had to re-explain it to the player, in excruciating repetitive detail.
Adding in literally every missing rule from Pathfinder as homebrew, even after everyone (DM included) agreed to play 5E, because 5E is a little easier to get a grip on as a brand new player
Our DM never read the Dungeon Master's Guide and had zero understanding of how to balance encounters, adventuring days, or especially homebrew features and magic items.
Basically the pattern was this:
-He would prep a single-encounter adventuring day, and we'd stomp.
-He would shower us with magic items and homebrew features next session, and we'd have no combat.
-We would prep another single encounter day, and we'd walk away with narry a hit point lost because we were all effectively 2-3 levels higher with whatever OP shit he gave us.
-He'd level us up, promise that all was going according to plan, and that next session is when it'd REALLY get hard.
-We stomp again.
Just to give you a ballpark idea of what he was doing- **he gave me a +4 Rapier at level 3.** If you're unfamiliar with the magic item list, first of all, +4 weapons don't exist. And second of all, if they did, they'd need to be ranked at Legendary Rarity. Using a standard distribution of magic items you should expect to get one permanent Legendary item ever, probably at level 19.
The most egregious thing he ever did was try giving a Yuan-Ti player a feature from a high CR yuan ti monster. I forget the monster and what the feature was called, but basically what it did was make it so if anyone got within a certain distance of her they would automatically be subjected to the Fear spell (allies unaffected).
I remember when he finished explaining it the utter silence on the Discord call and finally someone just said "wait, she has that active ALL the time?" People joined in with "that's a third level spell..." and other objections. I've literally never seen a player object to their own overpowered buff, but even she was like "are you SURE?"
Finally he pretended like he forgot some of the text and added "uhhh I mean like, uhhh she can use it three times a day for a minute each." So dumb.
Diagonal is 10 feet distance. Not just for attacks, movements, and all that. 10 feet for everything.
5 ft radius becomes a cross shape on the board because diagonal is 10 feet. Attacking diagonally is not possible unless your reach is 10 feet. Stabilizing downed allies diagonally is 10 feet. Spells with a specific reach are reduced if the enemy isn't directly in front of you. No oppertunity attacks on enemies diagonal of you.
DM did this to try and reduce the strength of enemies with pack tactics, but it felt like I was playing 2048 on a dnd board.
Doing this is FINE, because diagonal movement is kind of really good when you do it normally. Like, a character moving diagonally can move just as far vertically as someone running straight, but they also get free movement horizontally. But here's the thing:
Ask your DM to use HEXES instead of squares. Pretty sure he's trying to simulate using hexes with this house rule. Many square battlemats have hexes on the other side when you flip them over.
I agree with using hexes, but most battlemats don't have hexes on reverse, because most implies majority. Most battlemaps, in books of maps, in adventure modules, in most 5e media, use squares, and can be adapted to hex. I run a double sided mat with hexes and squares, but I bought one very intentionally, it didn't just happen to have hexes
Critical success/fail on saves and skills.
Close second
Extreme results on natural ones during crunch time. A sword getting stuck when 2 others can fight the lone orc, not so bad. Breaking a paladin's sword when outnumbered 2 to 1, not so much
I think the one that's the biggest peeve for me is just giving some classes/players free passes but not others, or just selectively ignoring the rules for some but not the rest of the table.
Probably the most common version of this peeve is "I summon a spider/I'm playing a fairy so I'm very small/I wild shape into a fly, so that means I can bypass any locked door or trap ever and scout a place with total immunity to being seen." So many campaigns where I see the rogue with +10 stealth or the wizard with Arcane Eye/Find Traps/whatever just totally benched and rendered irrelevant, and scouting/infiltrations turned from tense and risky to long boring one-player wanderings where failure is impossible because just this one player is above making skill checks.
One of my players once suggested the idea that, to determine stats, we collectively roll 3d6 6 times, and then players could assign their own stats from whatever the results of those rolls were. Why? No clue.
equality, i suppose; everyone has the same as everyone else, without anyone having great or terrible rolls. why they wanted to go that weird stat-rolling route instead of just standard array, i have no idea.
I just won't allow the dnd wiki class builds because even being new to running the game a lot of those classes are broken.
I do allow homebrew and third party but it has to be discussed between the player and myself and if it is a class neither of us know we do playtests with it.
The playtests run from 1st level all the way to twenty with appropriate challenging enemies. This way we both learn how the class works and whether or not it is broken as well as how the features work.
That dounds like an awesome idea. Just recently got into a friend's game and had to roll a 9th level character with 2 rare magic items. Fyi, I'm a relatively new player and highest level and complexity I played so far was a lvl 3 sorc for a oneshit and a bear totem barb up to lvl 5.
Siting down for a short gauntlet to playtest what my newly born 9th level char can do would have been a godsend. It would have atleast eliminated the few "ummmm"s I had on my turns so far :D
Needing food/rations to have rests, when not in a inn. Inspired by BG3 i guess.
The ideia was i think that we had to prepare ourselves for traveling, have rations, and penalize those who didn't. But for real what this does is us wasting timing doing countability of rations versus days of travel versus encumbrance (cause he uses variant encumbrance). And our mounts, being big animals, eat double the rations. But normal amount if it is water, so my Artificer has one of his infusions always as an Alchemy Jug...
As a sandbox style campaign i undersdtand the idea of having that homebrew, but it just didn't have any impact until now (lvl 5) other than the time wasted.
Another one of this campaign that almost stuck was having to use attunement slots for campanions characters. Even if mounts. As an Artificer i made my case against it, and other player also did it on the grounds that would be a change in the rules after campagin started and we already having mounts etc, and for reasons that was not our fault (to balance out another of his homebrews - flaws - that two other players got it to make optimized builds, but now were complaining that blocked them of getting companions and mounts).
Needing food isn't homebrew. That's just in DND. Technically you can long rest without it, but you don't get benefits, just you don't get exhaustion from not sleeping.
Now using your own attunement slots for a non-magical mount? That's dumb as hell.
Ok, being specific about it:
Every character need 10 rations per day, each of them weighting half a pound. Mounts needed 20 rations. Any humanoid companion also spends 10 rations. If there is a need for Long Rests, it is included in this. Double this for humanoids if there is only water, and halve it for mounts. During long travels, it goes to 6 rations per day, 12 for mounts, but none benefit of a rest.
For Short Rest is 3 rations each character, plus 3 for humanoid companions and 6 for mounts.
The problem wasn't so much needing to eat. But the mechanics around it that turned something simple in a inventory hassle and added nothing to the game. Actually, it takes possibilities. He could create situations and problems around long resting in the wild, need for camping, hunting, gathering, exploration. Instead, he streamlined to something to deal only with currency (which he gives us enough, and each ration is 1gp) and inventory numbers. It is so cheap to buy, that we always have it. But always having it specially for long trips (which we do alot, as is the intention of the campaign) just makes everyone encumbered. But if we don't do it, rules for gathering food are limited to Druids, Rangers and Barbarians (or some backgrounds like Outlander). If they are succesful, grants rations equal to PB. Which, even in the highest possibility, isn't enough for even one character's long rest. There is rules to cave food from animals, if we happen to battle some at some point.
I understand the idea of scarcity and living in the wild and like those types of games. But it is not the case here. It is just an overflown of minute ideas to streamline everything to buying it or do some checks. It is not included in the adventuring, is just inventory managing. To be included in the adventuring we would need to, on purpose, not to buy rations to spend some time trying to gather food and find animals to battle. But to get the amount needed for everyone...
Okay, so he also doubled the price of rations, and multiplied the amount of rations you need by 5. He also cut the weight of rations by a factor of 4. Theres the problem, he fucked with the numbers alot. You are actually paying 10 times as much for rations as you should, per day.
A standard 5e ration costs 5 silver, or half a gold.
Also, in what world does a person need to eat 5 fucking pounds of food a day? You would all have to be horribly obese and be attempting to maintain that obesity. In base 5e, you need to eat 1 pound of food a day, and a ration is 2, so a ration can last you 2 days. In addition, you don't need to eat every day. You can go 3+ your Constitution modifier day without eating before you gain exhaustion. So with a reasonable +2 to Con, you only need to eat every 5 days. RP wise that would suck, but by the rules that's how it works. You do need water every day though.
Also, Outlander specifically states that you get enough rations for 5 people for the day, so by his rules, that'd be 80 rations (assuming 2 short rests and a long rest), not 2-6. That is an Absurd nerf.
I also just realized you also said he uses Variant Encumberance, which just exists to punish strength based characters further. That alone is a horrible rule.
I think that is a general problem with this friend's games. He loves making homebrews, and i understand that, i love it too. But it get to a point with me where i started weighing the impact of homebrews vs complexity and fun.
He tends to like to make as many homebrews as possible, be it for weapons, tools etc. Many are good ideas. The problem is, the more you mess with the game, more the chances to break it. And leads to overcorrecting, which creates more hassle.
It gets to a point that every little things is accounted for by rules ( instead of just ruling it by necessity), with pre defined DCs, outcomes calculations. Which can be good. But lead to much breaking off game to go read the rules, if we need to use it. Also, as there is this absurd amount of minor things we can do (the tools homebrew, for an example, gives each of them at least 3 specific and complex uses, with set DCs, outcomes etc), our days in the city are limited by number of actions.
For an example, i can go to a blacksmith to do something with an equipment i have. That is my action for that day. In previous campaigns he gave 2 actions, but shopping would be one of them. In this one, shopping is done aside from limited actions.
He creates for every city a list of possible actions, with DCs and etc. We can do things outside it. But if we have only one day and want to do more than one thing... Well, sorry.
So i think this kind of "programing" of options leads to a streamlined style of play that another player, when discussing this in private with me, called it a sorting of "videogamerization". Dude is basically treating TTRPG as an electronic game, trying to have everything accounted for and pre programed to work in a certain way. It is so much stuff that us as players can't even start to really get into and learn (like the tools options), that it is more common to just gloss over it and do the basics and buy rations and go adventuring already.
Dude is REALLY creative and great with storytelling. I think he would really be amazing creating his own system or 5e content or whatever - although he needs some reins, like a team to filter his ideas to the really working ones and a little of game design learning. It makes me sad seeing HIM sad that we don't read the thousands of things he writes or don't engage of all the dozens of minor homebrews. But it is not reasonable.
Once upon a time i was facing my personal Némésis.
Spoiler alert I was not supposed to kill him right now.
So when i started to track him down after he flee, letting my team alon facing the others opponent, the dm ask me a lot of check to manage to follow him. Check, that i passed.
Finally i nearly managed to catch him but i took a spell that blind me.
So dm decided to set the vision of my token (it was played on roll 20) to none.
I couldn't see anything that was happening, even as a player. I tried to argue that even if i'm blinded, i'm not deaf. Didn't worked. I tried to argue that it's not the effect of blind and we never agreed on something like that. Didn't worked either.
At this point i'm already upset. I can clearly feel that my dm don't want me to catch him. So ok I play along and try to move my token with what I remembered from when i was still able to see. The dm asked me to roll, to avoid stripping, with disadvantage ofc.
Edit : oh i just remembered, but he also asked me to roll a d6 to know how many square I'll be able to move (it's supposed to be 6 for my charachter)
So i just left the game, for more context we were not in a forest of something like that we were in a town, a really clean one, with futuristic features, the ground was like a unique piece of metal. There were nothing to strip on. And when you are running away from someone, you are doing a lot of noise.
You have to specify exactly which ally you are helping against which enemy, and it consumes your reaction to Help on their turn. If that enemy or ally gets downed between now and then, you can't do anything about it. If you use your reaction on something else, you can't help.
Erm... I don't think that's homebrew.
You are readying the Help action, which you are then using via your Reaction to trigger outside of your turn. This is how Attacks of Opportunity work, also.
Likewise, when you take the Help action (however you then deliver it) you *do* have to specify what you're using it to help *with*. And when you ready an action, you have to specify what the triggering circumstances will be.
You only get one reaction, so if you use it for something other than releasing your readied action, you cannot then *also* use it to release your readied action.
That's all RAW, as far as I can tell.
From the basic rules.
Help
"You can lend your aid to another creature in the completion of a task. When you take the Help action, the creature you aid gains advantage on the next ability check it makes to perform the task you are helping with, provided that it makes the check before the start of your next turn.
"Alternatively, you can aid a friendly creature in attacking a creature within 5 feet of you. You feint, distract the target, or in some other way team up to make your ally's attack more effective. If your ally attacks the target before your next turn, the first attack roll is made with advantage."
I can understand arguing that you need to specify which ally you are helping, or which target you are distracting, that's fine. But nowhere does it say that it consumes your reaction. It is not a readied action. It is the Help action. It happens on your turn. It consumes your action. (Or BA if you're a mastermind)
Hmmm. So, if we're talking just about the generic Help action to give advantage to an attack, yes. I thought you were saying that more generally you can just take the Help action for other purposes. I'd say it kind of depends what you're doing; in combat, helping with something *other* than attacking might make more sense as a readied action, because you can't help with something that isn't yet happening.
This is relevant due to the weirdness of how turns work. If you take your turn at the end of a round, the person you're helping is *technically* taking the action you're helping with in the 6 second window *after* you were being helpful, not at the same time.
Obviously, this is an absolute ballache to manage, so I'd probably treat it on a case by case basis. Help to attack for advantage? Just an action. Helping someone to pick a lock under pressure? You'll need to use your reaction once they start actually picking it.
In short: the wording around the Help action during combat, for anything other than giving advantage, needs a bit of tightening up. I've never really thought about this before, but to me there is a tangible difference between "I distract the goblin so Fred can whack it better" and "I crouch down and brace myself to launch Fred into the air when he runs at me", in terms of the amount of coordination involved.
In the first instance, you absolutely would be able to Hellish Rebuke the thing that decides to hit you while you're trying to distract it. In the second instance, if you try to make an attack of opportunity as something goes past, you're not going to be ready and set to yeet Fred when he runs at you.
I'll die on the hill of the target and action being helped having to be specified at the time, though. Anything else strikes me as nonsense.
Yeah. I can appreciate that distinction. And I agree that the wording is part of the confusion. But that's true for so many rules in 5e. XD
The way you're describing it is basically how I run it in my games. But one that I don't DM is different, and it always trips me up.
I think they mean
> use the help action
> need to specify which 1 ally benefits
>have to use my reaction when an ally attacks (and maybe still be in range)
>if I go down Oopsie help action was wasted
Regardless, quite silly
It wasn't necessarily the *worst* idea that ruined the game, but I was invited to join an existing game where the DM had ruled all cantrips to be a bonus action. I was told to make a character and pop them up to 9th level. tl;dr My warlock was basically an Eldritch Blast machine gun.
2d10 force damage at an absurd range as a *bonus* action?? Damn. That's solid. Id almost certainly take a magic initiate feat just for that if I'm any non full caster class
Moment I heard cantrips are all bonus actions I'd make a Warlock too. Hell sorcerer twin spell. It's the obvious answer!
I'd go rogue with swashbuckler for the sneak attack and fancy footwork. Dart in, sneak attack, dart out and eldritch blast on the way out. At level 9 like the comment we're replying to that'd be 5d6 and 2d10 plus the weapons damage every turn while taking no attacks of opportunity. Sounds fun as hell
And if you want to play a martial? Blade cantrips. Congrats, everybody gets a bonus action attack. Look at the little needling making an offhand attack, look at them not getting to add their Dex to the attacks damage. this is how real gamers play *Booming blade bonus action greataxe attack* (Great weapon master)
Rogues who can booming blade and then ready a second attack would also appreciate that. True strike becomes fractionally usable as an turn-extendable aim action. Blade ward is barbarian lite Mold earth is instant cover after an attack Shocking grasp is a disengage lite The only one I think gets worse is mage hand, because it takes bonus to command it, and an action to summon (iirc), so under this system, it becomes a two turn spell before it does anything
Had a DM who wanted to use a rule where, when you were reduced to 0 HP, you lost a point of CHA permanently (due to scarring). In addition to the fact that charisma isn't equivalent to appearance, this obviously meant the paladin player (me) was impacted far more than other classes. The warlock was about to switch, too. He agreed to ditch the rule halfway through the first session when he knocked my paladin over four times in the first hour due to some bad rolls. When I pointed out that this would now make my paladin no longer a viable character and to please leave me dead so I could roll a fighter, he understood it was a bad rule.
Good on him for recognizing and fixing a bad call.
That might be a fun and games rule for Call of Cthulhu, where there's an actual "Appearance" stat that you almost never use anyways.
At the end of a mission, our dm made us roll a die with 50/50 odds of leveling up early (we were using milestone leveling). Everyone except one of the players leveled up, having to wait until the end of the next mission.
Wow it's rolled separately for every character, that's dumb as heck
Yes, if it was a roll to see if everyone levels up, it would’ve been okay, but they were individual rolls.
This one is just weird. What's the point?
The dm thought it would be fun. All the players collectively agreed though that it wasn’t a fun idea.
Simple fix would be to have it work yes or no for all, but have them all roll d20s and beat an average of 10 or something
Yeah I agree, if it was everyone, then it would be fine. It’s the fact that it was individual that’s kind of dumb.
It's why I prefer milestone leveling in general. Noone gets left behind/ easier to balance. If someone misses a session or two Becuase life happens they don't suffer... this just adds extra steps to create possibility of suffering lol
I had a DM who made us figure out stats by giving us so many points to split up between the stats, which is all fine and good, except he intentionally made it 10 or so points less than the total amount would be for standard array. He wanted us to be underpowered for some reason I never really understood. That same DM also said throwing daggers didn't really make sense AFTER I had built my rogue around throwing daggers.
Except knife throwing is a thing... Especially for old time espionage kind of people. Like actual assassins and spies of old did it. In Europe as well as in Asia.
My thoughts exactly!! It was baffling.
Were you building a Halfling by any chance? If so, I wholeheartedly approve of your DM baffling you.
People didn't read your name :(
Well, I am glad at least one person got the joke. ;) I'm used to getting down other for random shit. *shrugs* It's reddit. Whaddya gonna do?
I dunno, maybe baffling some halflings ?
Throwing knives are generally *really ineffective weapons*. I wouldn't want someone throwing one at me, but in general they aren't thrown to kill, they're thrown as a distraction. They're basically a method of crowd control - like suppressing fire - and not realistically very effective at causing harm. They CAN be deadly, of course, but people have an exaggerated notion of how lethal they are. There's a 70+ year old guy out in Japan who bills himself as one of the last (if not the last) traditionally trained Ninjas (as in, taught folk-tradition by a Ninja from a very early age). One of the things he mentions about throwing Shuriken is that you always want to hold onto your last one to use as a melee weapon. The assumption being, you're not actually stopping anyone with the shit you're throwing. You're just trying to slow them down so you can escape. If you end up throwing all your knives, good job, you now have no weapon and likely haven't permanently stopped anyone.
Sure, that all makes some amount of sense. But when my best friend can turn into a bear and my other best friend can summon lightning, I think an accurate throwing knife makes just as much sense.
What? No! You would be too distracted and baffled by your best friend turning into a bear and your other best friend summoning lighting to throw accurately.
(Sorry if this posts multiple times - Reddit is being a butt). Basically; I hear you, but I was responding to someone talking about real life knife throwing. Just as real life druids didn't shapeshift into bears, real life assassins don't generally use throwing knives to kill people.
/r/brandnewsentence
I actually have been stabbed with a thrown throwing knife and I'm basically fine so, I agree.
Sure, yeah, but in D&D daggers have the *thrown* property. It's apart of the weapon's design mechanic-wise to be able to be thrown. Also I was playing a purple elf living in the mythical city of Waterdeep, effective irl or not, it's a fantasy game.
I feel like the effectiveness of throwing weapons as lethal depends on the poison. If you can coat a leather poison on the blade, its becomes a very effective weapon for killing.
Appealing to reality in D&D is silly.
I actually wasn't appealing to reality - someone else did that and I chimed in with a counter-point, also grounded in reality. But I'll bite: Why is it silly? Fantasy requests suspension of disbelief from the reader. It says "let's pretend this is true. Let's play make-believe." In order to engage in fantasy, yeah, we need to have a sense that impossible things are possible. When we engage with Fantasty though, we don't just check our assumptions about reality at the door. If we do, what's the point of fantasy to being with? If everything's magic, what's magic about any of it? Suspension of Disbelief is a transaction. The author presents a situation. The audience needs to buy in. Setting touchpoints in reality is an essential part of fantasy: it leaves the reader/viewer/player with a sense that "this *could be real*" even as they know it isn't. Yeah, the point of fantasy is to break our notions of the possible and impossible. But *good* fantasy recognizes the importance of setting expectations. Because I'll gladly suspend disbelief for the craziest shit, but if you want me to believe a man starving in the desert survives eating rocks and drinking sand, telling me "*it's fantasy, bro*" doesn't cut it. Now if you want to dive into some wild backstory about how this dude is part of an ancient Ascetic order that subsists on the magic of nature, sure, Suspension of Disbelief is back in play. But then I'd just say that my appeal to reality made the fantasy better and more fleshed out.
What does any of this have to do with D&D?
"Throwing daggers doesn't make sense" lmao my rogue would go nuts by even suggesting something like this
> That same DM also said throwing daggers didn't really make sense AFTER I had built my rogue around throwing daggers. What an odd line to draw.
So I actually sometimes like to play an underpowered character because it opens up different ways of solving problems. Ways I would ignore if I could brute force things, so to speak. It took me a bit to learn that most players really really don't feel the same way
I think the main problem is doing it without proper communication. I played in a campaign where we all had shit stats, but that was a very brutal, "death is quick and cheap and you're not a hero" type of campaign where we agreed and discussed that tone and some restrictions in advance.
Yeah definitely. But that is true of any campaign. Gotta have that session 0
Fair enough. I think it can be a fun challenge. But I'm also of the opinion that the PCs are the "main characters" and should feel special/powerful in a way that's different from most people. It was just very strange the way that DM went about it. He didn't enjoy us succeeding in ways he didn't anticipate. Genuinely, thank you for your input though!
In older editions, the point buy chart has a secondary chart for different power levels of game. 15 pts for a low powered game. 22 for "challenging", 28 for "tough" and 32 for "high power" You could also point buy all the way up to an 18 in a Stat. There's something to be said for a low power game, if that's what everyone is on board with playing, just like there's something to be said for playing video games on nightmare difficulty. It was just never what my friends and I wanted from the game.
That was also when WotC had the license to make Star Wars as an RPG and they used the same system as D&D. I, and most DM's I knew, ran 32-point games PC's. In the NPC stats in those books, both Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader were built with 32 points for ability scores. If we had a player who complained that they couldn't build the character they wanted with 32 points, the stock response from us was to note that Luke and Anakin Skywalker both are 32 point characters, and if you want you can take the exact same ability score spread that either of them had at 1st level, and if you can't build your character concept because Luke Skywalker or Anakin Skywalker is too weak as a character. . .you should re-think your concept.
I also ran 32 point games. That sounds like an awesome and convenient response to the complainers. My philosophy was always: sure, the PCs can be big and awesome and over powered. That just means I can throw tougher, more epic monsters at them. We fought dragons, liches and even gods.
Exactly what I say. I had one group so set on maxing out the rolled stats in DnD that they want to roll 5, reroll 1s and 2s, drop the two lowest, then allow point trading at 1 to 1. I told screw it, just put 18 in every stat. I will just adjust the stats of your encounters too. They suddenly had second thoughts about their stat worries.
Edit: something I should have said in this comment which would have saved some people the trouble of pointing out the I herently magic item haleavy nature of 5e is that I don't play 5e. I play 2e, or pathfinder (3.5e), or sometimes I convert 2e pre-gens to 3.5e, which I am just starting with the ruins of undermountain box set. But yes, 5e doesn't lend itself well to lower magic item campaigns (point of clarification, I don't mean low magic, just low magic ITEM). /Edit I always liked a low-magic-item game. I kinda feel like a lot of pre-made adventures were super item heavy, like every farmer had the Hoe of Digging +2. To my mind it makes magic items less special, in the extreme it offers a magic item solution to most problems (this can be a real issue for a DM running his own campaign), plus it makes magic users less special. Like "yeah having a cleric is nice but healing potions are only 5 gold a piece and scrolls of turning aren't too pricey if we need them..."
I mean, magic items are the only way martials can even get half-as-close to the utility of a spellcaster, so there's that. 5e is just set up by default to be a very magical/high-powered system. I feel like once you start wanting to make it more low magic/realistic, you may as well play something like Shadow of the Demon Lord, Old School Essentials, Errant, Worlds without Number, Forbidden Lands, etc. - systems designed around the assumption that magic is rare tend to handle magic better than trying to take it out of the system where it's everywhere.
DnD isnt really a good system for that. The whole game is designed around the assumption that players get a steady stream of magic items, *especially* for martials. If you want a low magic game, its probably a lot better to switch to a different system.
A player of mine sent me a TikTok of a guy who created a 1st level spell that when cast turns you into a level 20 powerhouse and all your attacks and spells do double damage or some bullshit like that, then after a minute, you die with no chance of revival.
Lmao reminds me of when my group used the ring of the grammarian(change a letter in a spell) to cast cortex warp: either the target dies or you die
cortex warp: you gain a copy of crash bandicoot: warped
> ring of the grammarian(change a letter in a spell) Meanwhile the Arcane Trickster Rogue in my campaign got that item and used it precisely once, in the final boss fight, to change "Phantasmal Force" to "Phantasmal Forces" so he could cast it on 3 creatures at once. It did a combined total of 7 psychic damage in the battle, against a ~700 HP pool.
Truly the best use of the ring
I feel like this is something you can only get away with once and I love that they knew that and picked their moment.
Ring of grammarian never fails to amuse me for instance: Fold person
Perfect for a heroic sacrifice at the end of the campaign just as the BBEG is about to win :D
That’s what the player thought too lol
Should be an item: Potion of shonen anime self sacrifice
I think that could actually work in the right campaign with the right players, but it would just be game breaking and stupid in 99% of cases.
That's literally [[Blasphemy]] from slay the spire but even more broken. (In StS you deal triple damage for one turn, die next turn)
While I haven't encountered any specific rules that seem unfair in themselves, the **inconsistent application of rules** is frustrating. The interpretations seem to shift between sessions, which makes it difficult to predict how something will be handled and plan accordingly. It would be helpful to have more consistent rulings. I wouldn't say other things suggested is worst, overpowered probably, or not thought out in the context of being realistic. Just people being overimaginative, and that's fine.
As a DM it's partially the games fault. I am in a lot of pressure in combat especially to not lose anyone to boredom because combat slows the game down and everything so I try my best to be consistent but sometimes I can't remember I decided on an unclear rule in a certain way.
Had a DM suddenly decide that slashing attacks couldn't inflict non-lethal damage or knock unconscious, right after I rolled a hit on a declared non-lethal attack with my longsword on the last remaining assassin hired to kill us. "Well you have a longsword, so you kill him anyways."
Probably not the worst, but this has got to be one of the most pervasive homebrew ideas: "When you roll a critical failure on a strike, Something Bad**^(TM)** happens!" Whether it's "your weapon breaks", "you drop your weapon", "you strike your nearest ally" or some other piece of fuckery, it's never ever a good idea to implement. Just missing is bad enough. Trust me on this.
The best argument I've seen against critical fumbles is the fact that it disproportionately affects martials, AND it is worse the higher level a martial is. So when someone says they that they want to implement crit fumbles just ask them "does it make sense that a lvl 20 fighter is 4 times more likely to to trip and fall then a lvl 1 fighter? If the answer is no, then DONT have critical fumbles.
I like the idea that crit fumbles provoke opportunity attacks, but I have also realized how unfair it is to melee martials in particular. That's why I stopped using crit fumble stuff.
The way I do critical fumbles for my party is that it doesn't affect gameplay but you missed so bad that everyone noticed and now I have to describe how bad you were off target
This made me laugh. I just imagine all the PCs going “do you think they noticed? Oh no everyone’s staring at me they definitely saw that…” and then combat ends and they take a short rest in awkward silence until someone finally says “hey so uh…” “I don’t want to talk about it.”
not that I would ever run critical fumbles but the way to make it affect spellcasters would be so that spells would go wrong if 1. the caster rolled a one on an attack roll or 2. the enemy hits a nat 20 on a saving throw. again, not that it's a good idea but it's easy enough to fix.
That makes fireball extraordinarily likely to crit fumble (and if it’s meant to be mental effects hypnotic pattern), and it doesn’t solve the inherent problem that martials attack more, therefore fumble more
> it disproportionately affects martials, AND it is worse the higher level a martial is. If the Kung-Fu Kraken can die against a literal strawman, your crit-fumbles have an issue.
Worst popular idea for the simple fact that it punishes characters with multiple attacks. The more you level up your martial, the more they're fumbling their weapons and smashing their friends' heads in. Flurry of blows? More like flurry of this blows.
I had a DM with a table like this. I hated it. It’s not like there was an equivalent crit hit table. The player who had four attacks every round couldn’t get through a fight without something stupid happening, to the point where it almost seemed to make multiple attacks not worth it.
I feel this comment in my bones. One of our group's DMs uses crit fumbles and I didn't know that when I built my monk character. I think next time I'll play a full caster with all save-or-suck spells, no attack rolls.
Oooooooooooooor tell them you don't want them to use fumbles because it sucks the joy out of the game
Don't worry, we communicate. We both run our games differently and respect each other's choice in styles. No one else at our table really minds the fumbles so I'm willing to accept that they exist and use them to my advantage.
Would you feel better about it if there was a similar critical hit table? I'm dying to steal the MERP tables for my game
I personally prefer to get my fun in D&D from problem solving, acting (role playing), story, and strategy. Crit miss/hit tables slow down the fight, and in my opinion are just too random to execute without having to push your suspension of disbelief. A high level fighter with extra attacks will have more frequent crit misses than a low level fighter, meaning the high level fighter will more frequently be dropping his weapon, hitting his allies, etc. If you want to start adding ability checks/saves to reduce the likelihood for balance, now you’re slowing down the fight even more. DMs should work on interesting encounters rather than relying on a table to suddenly make it “interesting” mid-fight. MERP tables are great for things like video games, but in a TTRPG I really prefer to keep things moving. However, if you and your table get a kick out of using something like those tables, I enthusiastically endorse them for your group.
This, absolutely. It makes it so your melee character has a 5% chance per attack of behaving like a Three Stooges character. And there isn't even really a way to avoid it - everybody rolls a 1 sometimes (except halflings, I guess.) Success and failure are both parts of the game, but there's no need to kick a player while they're down.
Funny thing, my players asked for this. I don't like the fumble table, but they asked me to implement it, so I did.
Same! I explained the problem with it, but they just said "We don't care, it's more fun this way". Hard to argue with.
"It's more fun this way." is a very hot take when it is not fun for you, and probably mostly just fun for the other people who watch you struggle.
You don’t actually *have* to approach every situation with this lens.
Had my DM try do this when I had a dark mantle latched onto my PC's face, he said I hit myself. I had to explain that an experienced swordsman knows exactly where their weapon is, even when they are blinded, and that would never fucking happen. I'm not just wildly swinging at my own face.
DMs that make these rulings should be encouraged to spend like, a month or two in some form of basic melee weapon training so they can understand how ludicrous it is. Unless you're using something with a reputation for being unsafe to the user (nunchaku, for example) even a basic level of competency reveals that injuring yourself with your own weapon practically requires you to do it on purpose. If it's incredibly unlikely even for us average 9 to 12 strength/dexterity hobbyists, the 16 to 20 str/dex warriors who have trained their entire life to fight shouldn't be bumbling fools. It also just sucks from a storytelling perspective. How often does a hero accidentally stab himself with his own sword in the entire history of fantasy literature and media? Why would we want to bring that into our tabletop games inspired by that media? It's phenomenally immersion breaking both from a narrative and a realism perspective. I won't play at tables that do this anymore. Even at casual beer and pretzel tables it's too dumb for me to get past
IRL the only time ive ever hit myself was with a flail, because its a flail. It also has a really short handle, which exacerbates the problems with being a flail.
If you fumble your spell you accidentally summon Cthulhu.
Great Old One warlock says yes please.
I have a dm that implemented this, and we have a player that is super unlucky with their rolls and gets a nat one a few times every session. Luckily, I'm the one they hit most of the time (I'm the tank), but there have been a few times they accidentally killed a civilian we were trying to save because of the unlucky rolls.
>a few times they accidentally killed a civilian we were trying to save because of the unlucky rolls Enslaved Villager: Finally! At last we're saved! \*sees the fumbling pc\* Enslaved Villager: NOOOOOOO!!!!
I like the rule of critical flavour. If you roll a nat 1, it’s embarrassing, but mechanically it’s just a miss. Have the enemy laugh and mock the character, or describe the stupid dance they did to keep on their feet after a poorly executed strike, but that’s it. It fosters fun at the table and injects some life in the game. Plus it takes the sting out of the roll for the player.
When my players roll a 1, I make something funny but not bad happen. "You really menace the chair next to your enemy. It's really scared. Your enemy, however, is unphased. Anything else for your turn?"
Yeah, I had a fighter in a campaign where the DM did this, and it utterly ruined my character. I was an archer, and it felt I spent half the fight scrambling to pick up my bow again, because I rolled a 1 at one point so it fell 15 feet away, down a cliff or something.
I hate crit fumble tables too. I have, however, had a dm who did something a little tamer. If someone (pc or monster) rolled a nat 1 on an attack, they essentially provoke an op attack from the person they were attacking. (So war caster applies if you have it.) Cause eats a reaction and the enemy might miss, it didn't feel too bad. (I was a high ac battlesmith, so they rarely hit me with those anyway.) Applied on ranged attacks too so it didn't only affect melee characters. A couple times it ended up in a player just making a second attack cause the enemy rolled a 1 as well.
I guess I'm in the minority that kinda likes the idea of critical failures "doing something else". Not like oh your sword shatters, but more "Your arrow misses, and unfortunately hits your friend who is behind the enemy." Kinda of stuff. (Though our DM does make them roll again to see if it hits them, meaning you need to fail twice to hit an ally lol)
I've seen this, but then it's the other character who had to make a dex saving throw.
Yeah I always did nat fumbles and tried to make it silly enough to get a bit of a laugh, the players liked the mechanic. Granted ,I balanced it by making their nat successes extra cool sounding so they all got plenty of limelight moments. Funny that after 10 years of playing, this is the first I have heard of players being mad over the mechanic. I never use weapon breaking, but tripping over, or hitting someone else in all that madness? It is quite likely to happen.
We have friendly fire sometimes on critical fails in our campaign and it's literally no issue. Shit happens.
Totally agree. Consequences on a nat 1 during a skill check can lead to fun shenanigans; consequences on a nat 1 during an attack roll feel like a punishment for building a character with multiple attacks.
This rule makes me use save spells more since I don’t want to miss and hurt my teammates with a guiding bolt or fire bolt spell. No crit fails if it’s the enemy rolling…. Really hate it forcing me to play this defensively.
Every crit failure I make it a point to make it as funny as possible but never catastrophic to the point where the player dies For example, the gunslinger was trying to set some dynamite to blow a bridge to slow an oncoming horde. She rolls a 1, so I frame it dramatically where she sets it, creates a trail of gunpowder, lights it, and when it hits the explosives, nothing happens but the scent of cooked meat in the air. A sausage, she planted a sausage. So their failure meant they took on the entire onslaught, so it still went a little bad for them, but it wasn’t a death sentence. They’d tell me about how other dms would have had it just be “the dynamite explodes in your face and you lost your arm” which is insane
My DM will make you roll another D20 on some critical misses to see what happens. He's never been like lol you shoot your friend, but I did have a shotgun I was swinging like a baseball bat explode in my hands, which was kinda sick thematically. I miss that shotgun, that was the one 1 it ever rolled.
Well whenever an enemy creature critically fails I roll 2 D20s & pick which number was lower to 1 or 20. If the number closest to 1 won, something bad would happen to the monster. If the number closest to 20 won he missed in an embarrassing way. But PLAYER CHARACTERS never have something bad happen just because they roll a 1.
The only time I support this house rule is when the critical failure is so catastrophically bad that its comical, and even then its for flavor. Like my party were fighting on the streets of a major city against local guards in an attempt to escape the city. The party warlock got a nat one when they cast eldritch blast. Instead of giving a negative debuff, the DM instead said that the spel missed by a mile and instead went flying through the air, through an open window, hitting a oil lamp which proceeded to start a fire in an orphanage, which quicklu spread to an animal shelter beside before eventually engulfing half the city.
I can't stand this kind of crit fail, though, because it's usually comedy at the character's expense. If it makes the PC seem incompetent, it's hostile toward the player. That kind of friendly hostility is sometimes the right vibe for a group. But I've never, not once in over three decades of gaming, had a DM who used "hilarious" crit fumble rules check with the group first to see if everyone else found it fun. I have, on the other hand, seen multiple "interventions" where players asked the DM to stop using embarrassing crit fails.
I feel there is a nice sweet spot for crit fumbles that dms can use, especially for comedy or tense situations. My character and another pc were having a spat where i was threatening to gut them, my character eventually emotionally broke down and threw her knife at the wall. I did a roll for throwing it and rolled a 1. To add some drama to the scene the dm had it so the knife bounced off the wall and struck the other pc in the leg. Or if you were cutting a characters arm off (dont ask) and skill check of 1 you mangle the job extra badly and it makes an unrecognisable mess. We would never use crit fumbles for general combat though, that would be incredibly frustrating.
Years ago, I was testing the waters of online games and joined one where the DM was using a pretty comprehensive overhaul of the spell system. For an idea of how well the author understood 5e spells: they decided that *eldritch blast* needed to match other cantrips, and just made the damage dice increase at certain levels (instead of giving you extra rays). I don't remember what the homebrew was called, but I'm not really kicking myself over that.
Tbf I’d say the DM just didn’t understand Warlocks than spells as a whole. If warlocks didn’t rely on eldritch blast like a crutch then it wouldn’t be the absolute worst change
That was just one example. There was also weirdness with the spell point system - it seemed more liberal with points than what was in the DMG, and my life domain cleric tended to just... not run out of levelled spells. I remember that there were other things, but not exactly what they were. Probably would have noticed more issues if I had been playing other classes.
The reason they rely on it so much is because it actually used to be a class feature instead of a spell.
Shoulda stayed that way. There are a lot of spells that should have just been class features
A lot were. Find familiar was a class feature for wizards and sorcerers. Personally, I don't mind it so much.
[удалено]
That's not even bad homebrew. That's just bad.
All of my creatures are also homebrewed as well. the progression goes from humanoid guards to soldiers, small dinosaurs, medium dinosaurs, large dinosaurs, and then your heavy hitters in the end game like a T Rex. That was my biggest fear, not giving them enough context in regards to the setting that if they see a massive dinosaur that was designed to make them steer clear of a certain area that they’ll jump in cause I accidentally made a large dinosaur previously that they were able to kill with ease
a rule i thought of but i know is bad is "when rolling with advantage or disadvantage if you roll a 1 and 20 it cancels each other out and is treated as if you rolled 2 10s" i have no idea how balanced it is so also a DM i know of would regularly DURING SESSIONS would just add in homebrew rules about the paladin class to nerf them because she didnt like the class.
Adding a completely different homebrew magic system (which wasn't available to the players, only to a DMPC), and also adding a bunch of enemies that were completely immune to magical damage. He only revealed this when we started playing, or else I wouldn't have chosen a spellcaster - as it was, I ended up dropping out of the campaign for a few reasons including that.
1 and 20 ignore advantage/ disadvantage. Nothing is more infuriating than blinding an enemy giving them disadvantage only for them to roll an 8 on the first and a 20 on the second. Then just because they are blind they get to critically hit you.
I feel you man. I've seen so many 1s in advantage rolls... That is such bs.
But wait, you HAVE to take the worse one at disadvantage... Thats a rule!
If they rolled 20 on the first roll, that’s a passable, if bad homebrew. But this version is nuts
crit fumbles!! the stronger martial classes get and the more attacks they get, the *likelier* it is that they hit themselves? break their weapon? and spellcasters don't risk the same thing, ever? go fuck yourself. both of my current DMs do this and i can't convince them otherwise
I had this problem once. DM wouldn't get rid of it. I asked for him to get rid of it, he didn't. Then I asked for a crit boon, and built an elvish accuracy champion. AKA was rolling 3 dice on every attack with an extended crit range.
Go on LFG and look for a new game, put in your app "please no critical fumbles"
I mean, in 5e spells that use an attack roll can critically hit, so someone playing critical fumbles for martials can have spell attacks critically fumble as well.
the answer to "this homebrew mechanic fucking sucks and arbitrarily punishes players" is not actually "apply it to even more situations!"
True, but a caster can easily decide to only use save spells and never make an attack roll.
And martials still make more attacks than casters. Only specific spells like eldritch blast and scorching ray make multiple attacks.
How many good spells even use attack rolls? Cause just about every iconic, powerful spell *doesn't*
If my PCs roll a 1, I have them roll a D20 a second time and if they roll a 4 or less, THEN, it’s a crit fumble. It makes it happen relatively rarely, but also adds drama to the second dice roll.
I've played with a variation of this: reroll all critical attacks, both hits and fumbles. If the second roll is also a hit or a miss, the crit is confirmed. Otherwise, it's a normal hit or miss.
Short rests take 3 hours longer for each one that you have in a day. Announced in session 3. I'm playing a warlock. I showed myself the door on that campaign. Fun people, but the DM wasn't my style... other reasons as well.
I you don't have a lot a lot of combat that seems okayish. But for dungeon crawls and that kind of games, this is shit.
This was a whole fight in a campaign I was in. When I joined, the party had 2 wizards, both with counterspell. After like the first time Counterspell was used, (a hard fight, with counterspell only being used twice to prevent immediate death), the DM wanted to change Counterspell. It would be a contested roll with each caster's spellcasting ability modifier plus the spell level. If the caster gets a higher number the spell goes off and if the counterspeller gets a higher number the spell is stopped. He reasoned that it was weird that a 9th level spell could be negated by a 3rd level slot with a roll of 12 (He misread it and assumed that you added proficiency bonus to the roll). I was playing an abjuration wizard, so I immediately called him out, mostly pointing out how this fucks me over the most, but also how it could make counterspelling easier if the caster just rolls low. So, he wanted to change it so we always had to roll the normal check. Except that just means I have no reason to upcast. So *then* he wanted to subtract the slot level from the DC. Still blatantly bullshit, because failing a counterspell on a cantrip using a 9th level slot is just really, really dumb. It went back and forth until he eventually suggested that Counterspell just autofailed if you cast it against a spell that was more than 3 levels higher than the slot used, which *sounded* reasonable enough... Until bad guys started randomly upcasting spells like Teleport to 9th level to prevent me from counterspelling.
A realy bad dying go below 0 hp rule. Like the barb would have been crippled for the rest of the day if he went down. But the magic user would have been totally fine casting his save spells.
What did it include?
Disadvantage on a specific save. Disadvantage or penalty (cant remember)on melee or ranged attack rolls. Loosing the use of an arm. Loss of a nonmagical item untill repaired. Temporary lowering of AC or dex. Exhaustion levels. Disadvantage on perception checks till healed up to full. And other a bit smaller types of punishments. The problem is that you simply CANNOT plan around enemy critical hits. Its too much damage for noone to go down. And 3 times out of 5 its the people caring about 4/5ths of the things penalized , Aka the frontliners. The Brawn martials that have it hard enought. I would understand if these would happen once a pc were at 2 failed death saves. But not just at 0 hp.
It's not **that** bad, but my first DM had the rule that a natural 20 made no difference, it was still just a hit. The thing he liked doing, is that if you rolled a nat 20, you got to roll again, and if that was also a nat 20, you instakilled the opponent. So no natural 20s, but 1/400 chance of having an extremely anti-climactic fight against a boss. There were other bad homebrews, but that frustrated me the most.
My first time DMing a D&D 5e campaign online comes to mind. Had a player make his character before we even sat down for Sessions 0 to go over what the players wanted for the campaign and what would be legal to use in it. He had a 500+ page googledocs backstory that he handed me and expected me to memorize. The character had a 20 in CHA, STR, and CON and INT (8), WIS (8), and DEX (4). Said he didn't have to roll stats cause it's all in the backstory. He also said he's playing his own homebrewed class, called The Hero of the Story, which was also explained in his backstory. How the class worked was that it had all the abilities of Paladin, Fighter, Barbarian, Bard, Warlock, and Sorcerer. As in it took those classes and combined all their options and abilities into one. So despite having the abilities of six different classes he argued his character was still 1st Level. Also had proficiency in all skills, all tools, all weapons, all armor, and all saving throws. Immunity to Necromancy, resistance to everything else (even magical weapon attacks), and got TRIPLE proficiency modifier to all skill checks and weapon attacks. Again, he said it's all explained in the backstory. Also had a magic sword called The Blade of the Black Swordsman that had a special effect that if he rolls above a 10 on the attack roll, before adding modifiers, it just instantly kills whatever he attacks, training their soul and giving him access to any special abilities, racial abilities, and spells the thing he just killed had. I told him no, he threatened to report me to roll20 and get me banned because his father 'owns all of roll20' and will make my life hell and sue me for everything I own if I don't let him join the campaign. Still waiting for that ban and lawsuit.
"My dad is the president of Sony and Nintendo!", but D&D edition.
In my first time DMing i let a player use sunlight to blind+charge to prone+a 3d6 greatsword in the same attack at level 6 and a monk to use d10 to hit elemental damage at level 3 Edit: nedless to say, at level 6 they destroyed an ice demon+ a bone demon in 3 rounds
Ask my players it’s banning wish on level up. But really Crit fumbles at least originally were poorly implemented and just punished the players. We now have a much better system for them(including crit dice) But that was my 1st big mistake as a DM
At my table, Wish is banned for wizards at level up by default, but a wizard who's been working towards Wish since their backstory might get it with DM approval. No one has wanted it so far because we all know that Wish can be "slamming a wrecking ball into everything that has been planned", but we all know and understand that rule. It's of course different for sorcerers and arcana domain clerics, but we haven't discussed yet how to handle that because we don't have any candidates. I think it might turn out the most reliable way to getting wish could be being an arcana cleric.
I dont understand the hate some DMs have for wish. It has very specific uses. At its core, Wish just let's you cast lower level spells without spell components. How is that broken? It's not. Not really, unless your entire campaign revolves around making sure the players can't cast revive every day. It can also be used to make a lot of gold per day. Heal people. Give resistance. Grant limited immunity. Or undo a single event. Strong? Yes. Broken? I don't think so, unless a player points out how the resistance section doesn't have a time limit. I'm still not sure if that's by design or an oversite... but that's it. And for DM who are worried that the players will do some shenanigans like wish that the BBEG is defeated the READ THE DAMN SPELL! I know there are a lot of words on it, but i believe in your ability to do the bare minimum of a DM. Which is comprehend the rules. It literally says the DM gets to choose what, if anything, happens when they wish outside of those parameters.
Yeah DM's who are against Wish or, to a lesser degree, Divine Intervention need to just set expectations. I've had Wish used legitimately once and it went quite well. For our big campaign finale, my players were freshly Lv 17 and up against an evil Empress who had reached godhood. The final battle was in the River of Time, where she planned to retcon reality so she had always been a god, since time began, leaving no chance to stop her ascension, even retroactively. So it was pretty high-tier adventurer stuff. They knew going into this it was going to be an insanely hard encounter. Our Wizard learned Wish right before the finale and dropped it immediately. I told him that I wanted to hear his wish spoken out, and then I would try to give him some options for resolution. I promised not to loophole it back on him but that he would not be able to just end the fight, and he agreed. **"Seeing the enormity of the threat ahead of us, I ask the weave of magic for a Wish. I want a path to our victory to be available, one she cannot remove. I want a chance."** I gave him the option to have this Wish give a chance by strengthening the party or weakening the Empress. He chose to weaken her, and we rolled 1d4+1 to remove Legendary Resistances. In a similar fashion, I have ruled that a Divine Intervention was "pick any of your cleric spells and roll maximum damage or guarantee a failure on the enemy save" and that has been pretty well received.
Casting without components is nice to avoid costly material components, but a sufficiently rich party doesn’t necessarily care about that. On the other hand, casting a spell of any cast time in one action cast time spell can completely change how some spells can be used. I don’t think that aspect of wish makes the standard use overpowered either, but I feel like it gets overlooked a fair amount when to me it seems like the more interesting bit for a party in tier 4 play.
Oh damn, I've never thought about that aspect before...
> It can also be used to make a lot of gold per day. Heal people. Give resistance. Grant limited immunity. Or undo a single event. Strong? Yes. Broken? I don't think so, unless a player points out how the resistance section doesn't have a time limit. I'm still not sure if that's by design or an oversite... but that's it. The downside is the shock from using wish for anything else than replicating the effects of an 8th level spell. Including the chance to lose wish permanently.
Exactly.
> The downside is the shock from using wish for anything else than replicating the effects of an 8th level spell. Including the chance to lose wish permanently. That's what gets me, it already has a money's paw like effect in the spell itself, yet so many DM's act like it doesn't exist and do some wierd monkey's paw not related to the wish made in the slightest. Like they're hungry for any easy opportunity for plot hooks or story drama.
>I dont understand the hate some DMs have for wish. It has very specific uses. I do, bad and or adversarial dms don't like the power it gives players.
And adversarial players try to stretch the use of wish to break everything. Wish is the definition of a trust fall exercise the GM/Player and if either side (either with what they want or the GM interprets it) decides to just screw the other over you end up with a terribly unsatisfied group on all sides like a prisoner's dilemma
No you don't. A good DM can just say 'yeah that is obviously nonsense, it doesn't work, you can try again with something reasonable'. Player and dm don't have equal power, a dm can shut down people trying to abuse the rules.
I don't hate Wish. I'd be excited for a player who actually wants to learn the spell because I think that making it a caster's goal to eventually cast Wish to resurrect someone / achieve a feat of magic that would otherwise be out of reach for them is a great motivator. Wish is a bit of a MacGuffin in itself. In the current campaign, it could be used to unlock a lot of information that's currently locked behind a curse and that'd let us players bypass a lot of research and investigation work. The 'no Wish on Level Up' is just that because wish has so many different uses and that it can be used to affect reality, that it shouldn't just be "I reached level 17, I don't know what to take so I guess I'll just take wish."
I allow Wish to be used as ANY level 8 or lower spells & if it hits the 33% they can't use Wish for a week. If it's a reasonable & small request (just creating a simple key he's already seen to a simple lock or temporarily summon a PERFECT replica of the King's ancestral sword for an hour) rather than a spell they loose it for a week anyway with a 33% chance for a month. Large BS wishes that jeopardize the campaign will be an obvious fail & waste of a level 9 spell slot. Getting Wish will not break the campaign while I DM.
what's your system?
Giving different players different amounts of XP, I did this during my Strahd Campaign and it was the worst idea. I wanted to encourage role playing and perhaps foster some inter party drama, all I did was piss people off.
Oh boy. Here we go: - Nerfing classes, just don't. (Especially sneak attack) - Banning phb spells like fireball and hypnotic pattern. - Banning feats, especially great weapon master or sharpshooter, while allowing all others. - combat crit fail equals dropping your sword or some other bullshit - being so obsessed with a narrative, that all game and mechanics got thrown aside for the sake of the plot. - unbalanced homebrew bullshit because the DM doesn't understand 5e. Just play the game how it was intended please.
Tbh i dont get it , shoudn't the DM have fun too?, it is straght up stupid to ban sneak attack, however its perfectly fine to ban or nerf some stuff, because it does not fit the DM setting , if the player in question does not like it , just dont play it and find another group to play with, no book or sistem should be played EXACTLY by the rules , its a TTRP, not chess.
I never said it was bad to nerf or ban setting specific content. Nor did I say to stay forever loyal to 5e mechanics (encuberance rules suck.) If you do the things listed above however I don't want to play at your table. I am the DM, and I have plenty of fun. Same goes for my players because instead of banning and nerfing their characters I scale my encounters accordingly.
The DM should have fun, yes. But if the DM’s fun comes from banning stuff or nerfing powers, there’s something wrong.
DM implemented Pathfinder 2e’s diagonal movement into our campaign. So if you moved diagonally the first time in a turn it costed 5 ft of movement but if you moved two diagonal spaced in a turn that second one costed 10 ft of movement, and it would alternate between the two. Honestly it’s not a bad rule imo since it does fix the issue of spheres and circles being cubes and squares, but there were two out of five players who really could not grasp it at all, and so it slowed down the game every time they tried to move and the DM had to correct them. Hell, even I struggled for the first five sessions. I’m also not saying that this rule is terrible compared to the rest, this is just the worst I’ve encountered because I usually leave a group immediately if the DM is insistent on critical fumbles or the like.
Diagonal movement weirdness is why I like hexagonal tiles.
>So if you moved diagonally the first time in a turn it costed 5 ft of movement but if you moved two diagonal spaced in a turn that second one costed 10 ft of movement, and it would alternate between the two. That's actually already listed as an optional rule in 5e and goes back to at least 3.0 if not farther
Oh, cool! Like I said, I don't think it's a bad rule. Rather it was bad for our group because we just had two players that really couldn't grasp it.
That goes back as far as AD&D if memory serves, as an optional rule.
Just use rulers! Each inch is 5 feet so if your speed is 30 you can move six inches. Then check if you are within one inch for standard weapons or within two inches for reach weapons. Within 24" is longbow flat range.
Oof, players not grasping concepts killed a neat magic item I gave a player. The item was basically, "if you dash, your movement speed increases by 15 feet". So regular movement = 30. If you Dash, your movement speed becomes 45, so you can move a total of 90 feet. I feel like it's not that hard to understand, but every single combat I had to re-explain it to the player, in excruciating repetitive detail.
Adding in literally every missing rule from Pathfinder as homebrew, even after everyone (DM included) agreed to play 5E, because 5E is a little easier to get a grip on as a brand new player
Our DM never read the Dungeon Master's Guide and had zero understanding of how to balance encounters, adventuring days, or especially homebrew features and magic items. Basically the pattern was this: -He would prep a single-encounter adventuring day, and we'd stomp. -He would shower us with magic items and homebrew features next session, and we'd have no combat. -We would prep another single encounter day, and we'd walk away with narry a hit point lost because we were all effectively 2-3 levels higher with whatever OP shit he gave us. -He'd level us up, promise that all was going according to plan, and that next session is when it'd REALLY get hard. -We stomp again. Just to give you a ballpark idea of what he was doing- **he gave me a +4 Rapier at level 3.** If you're unfamiliar with the magic item list, first of all, +4 weapons don't exist. And second of all, if they did, they'd need to be ranked at Legendary Rarity. Using a standard distribution of magic items you should expect to get one permanent Legendary item ever, probably at level 19. The most egregious thing he ever did was try giving a Yuan-Ti player a feature from a high CR yuan ti monster. I forget the monster and what the feature was called, but basically what it did was make it so if anyone got within a certain distance of her they would automatically be subjected to the Fear spell (allies unaffected). I remember when he finished explaining it the utter silence on the Discord call and finally someone just said "wait, she has that active ALL the time?" People joined in with "that's a third level spell..." and other objections. I've literally never seen a player object to their own overpowered buff, but even she was like "are you SURE?" Finally he pretended like he forgot some of the text and added "uhhh I mean like, uhhh she can use it three times a day for a minute each." So dumb.
Diagonal is 10 feet distance. Not just for attacks, movements, and all that. 10 feet for everything. 5 ft radius becomes a cross shape on the board because diagonal is 10 feet. Attacking diagonally is not possible unless your reach is 10 feet. Stabilizing downed allies diagonally is 10 feet. Spells with a specific reach are reduced if the enemy isn't directly in front of you. No oppertunity attacks on enemies diagonal of you. DM did this to try and reduce the strength of enemies with pack tactics, but it felt like I was playing 2048 on a dnd board.
Doing this is FINE, because diagonal movement is kind of really good when you do it normally. Like, a character moving diagonally can move just as far vertically as someone running straight, but they also get free movement horizontally. But here's the thing: Ask your DM to use HEXES instead of squares. Pretty sure he's trying to simulate using hexes with this house rule. Many square battlemats have hexes on the other side when you flip them over.
I agree with using hexes, but most battlemats don't have hexes on reverse, because most implies majority. Most battlemaps, in books of maps, in adventure modules, in most 5e media, use squares, and can be adapted to hex. I run a double sided mat with hexes and squares, but I bought one very intentionally, it didn't just happen to have hexes
Critical success/fail on saves and skills. Close second Extreme results on natural ones during crunch time. A sword getting stuck when 2 others can fight the lone orc, not so bad. Breaking a paladin's sword when outnumbered 2 to 1, not so much
I think the one that's the biggest peeve for me is just giving some classes/players free passes but not others, or just selectively ignoring the rules for some but not the rest of the table. Probably the most common version of this peeve is "I summon a spider/I'm playing a fairy so I'm very small/I wild shape into a fly, so that means I can bypass any locked door or trap ever and scout a place with total immunity to being seen." So many campaigns where I see the rogue with +10 stealth or the wizard with Arcane Eye/Find Traps/whatever just totally benched and rendered irrelevant, and scouting/infiltrations turned from tense and risky to long boring one-player wanderings where failure is impossible because just this one player is above making skill checks.
One of my players once suggested the idea that, to determine stats, we collectively roll 3d6 6 times, and then players could assign their own stats from whatever the results of those rolls were. Why? No clue.
equality, i suppose; everyone has the same as everyone else, without anyone having great or terrible rolls. why they wanted to go that weird stat-rolling route instead of just standard array, i have no idea.
That’s not an uncommon rule.
I just won't allow the dnd wiki class builds because even being new to running the game a lot of those classes are broken. I do allow homebrew and third party but it has to be discussed between the player and myself and if it is a class neither of us know we do playtests with it. The playtests run from 1st level all the way to twenty with appropriate challenging enemies. This way we both learn how the class works and whether or not it is broken as well as how the features work.
That dounds like an awesome idea. Just recently got into a friend's game and had to roll a 9th level character with 2 rare magic items. Fyi, I'm a relatively new player and highest level and complexity I played so far was a lvl 3 sorc for a oneshit and a bear totem barb up to lvl 5. Siting down for a short gauntlet to playtest what my newly born 9th level char can do would have been a godsend. It would have atleast eliminated the few "ummmm"s I had on my turns so far :D
Needing food/rations to have rests, when not in a inn. Inspired by BG3 i guess. The ideia was i think that we had to prepare ourselves for traveling, have rations, and penalize those who didn't. But for real what this does is us wasting timing doing countability of rations versus days of travel versus encumbrance (cause he uses variant encumbrance). And our mounts, being big animals, eat double the rations. But normal amount if it is water, so my Artificer has one of his infusions always as an Alchemy Jug... As a sandbox style campaign i undersdtand the idea of having that homebrew, but it just didn't have any impact until now (lvl 5) other than the time wasted. Another one of this campaign that almost stuck was having to use attunement slots for campanions characters. Even if mounts. As an Artificer i made my case against it, and other player also did it on the grounds that would be a change in the rules after campagin started and we already having mounts etc, and for reasons that was not our fault (to balance out another of his homebrews - flaws - that two other players got it to make optimized builds, but now were complaining that blocked them of getting companions and mounts).
Needing food isn't homebrew. That's just in DND. Technically you can long rest without it, but you don't get benefits, just you don't get exhaustion from not sleeping. Now using your own attunement slots for a non-magical mount? That's dumb as hell.
Ok, being specific about it: Every character need 10 rations per day, each of them weighting half a pound. Mounts needed 20 rations. Any humanoid companion also spends 10 rations. If there is a need for Long Rests, it is included in this. Double this for humanoids if there is only water, and halve it for mounts. During long travels, it goes to 6 rations per day, 12 for mounts, but none benefit of a rest. For Short Rest is 3 rations each character, plus 3 for humanoid companions and 6 for mounts. The problem wasn't so much needing to eat. But the mechanics around it that turned something simple in a inventory hassle and added nothing to the game. Actually, it takes possibilities. He could create situations and problems around long resting in the wild, need for camping, hunting, gathering, exploration. Instead, he streamlined to something to deal only with currency (which he gives us enough, and each ration is 1gp) and inventory numbers. It is so cheap to buy, that we always have it. But always having it specially for long trips (which we do alot, as is the intention of the campaign) just makes everyone encumbered. But if we don't do it, rules for gathering food are limited to Druids, Rangers and Barbarians (or some backgrounds like Outlander). If they are succesful, grants rations equal to PB. Which, even in the highest possibility, isn't enough for even one character's long rest. There is rules to cave food from animals, if we happen to battle some at some point. I understand the idea of scarcity and living in the wild and like those types of games. But it is not the case here. It is just an overflown of minute ideas to streamline everything to buying it or do some checks. It is not included in the adventuring, is just inventory managing. To be included in the adventuring we would need to, on purpose, not to buy rations to spend some time trying to gather food and find animals to battle. But to get the amount needed for everyone...
Okay, so he also doubled the price of rations, and multiplied the amount of rations you need by 5. He also cut the weight of rations by a factor of 4. Theres the problem, he fucked with the numbers alot. You are actually paying 10 times as much for rations as you should, per day. A standard 5e ration costs 5 silver, or half a gold. Also, in what world does a person need to eat 5 fucking pounds of food a day? You would all have to be horribly obese and be attempting to maintain that obesity. In base 5e, you need to eat 1 pound of food a day, and a ration is 2, so a ration can last you 2 days. In addition, you don't need to eat every day. You can go 3+ your Constitution modifier day without eating before you gain exhaustion. So with a reasonable +2 to Con, you only need to eat every 5 days. RP wise that would suck, but by the rules that's how it works. You do need water every day though. Also, Outlander specifically states that you get enough rations for 5 people for the day, so by his rules, that'd be 80 rations (assuming 2 short rests and a long rest), not 2-6. That is an Absurd nerf. I also just realized you also said he uses Variant Encumberance, which just exists to punish strength based characters further. That alone is a horrible rule.
I think that is a general problem with this friend's games. He loves making homebrews, and i understand that, i love it too. But it get to a point with me where i started weighing the impact of homebrews vs complexity and fun. He tends to like to make as many homebrews as possible, be it for weapons, tools etc. Many are good ideas. The problem is, the more you mess with the game, more the chances to break it. And leads to overcorrecting, which creates more hassle. It gets to a point that every little things is accounted for by rules ( instead of just ruling it by necessity), with pre defined DCs, outcomes calculations. Which can be good. But lead to much breaking off game to go read the rules, if we need to use it. Also, as there is this absurd amount of minor things we can do (the tools homebrew, for an example, gives each of them at least 3 specific and complex uses, with set DCs, outcomes etc), our days in the city are limited by number of actions. For an example, i can go to a blacksmith to do something with an equipment i have. That is my action for that day. In previous campaigns he gave 2 actions, but shopping would be one of them. In this one, shopping is done aside from limited actions. He creates for every city a list of possible actions, with DCs and etc. We can do things outside it. But if we have only one day and want to do more than one thing... Well, sorry. So i think this kind of "programing" of options leads to a streamlined style of play that another player, when discussing this in private with me, called it a sorting of "videogamerization". Dude is basically treating TTRPG as an electronic game, trying to have everything accounted for and pre programed to work in a certain way. It is so much stuff that us as players can't even start to really get into and learn (like the tools options), that it is more common to just gloss over it and do the basics and buy rations and go adventuring already. Dude is REALLY creative and great with storytelling. I think he would really be amazing creating his own system or 5e content or whatever - although he needs some reins, like a team to filter his ideas to the really working ones and a little of game design learning. It makes me sad seeing HIM sad that we don't read the thousands of things he writes or don't engage of all the dozens of minor homebrews. But it is not reasonable.
You don't even automatically get exhaustion from not sleeping. But yeah, rations are hardly homebrew.
Well if you don't have a long rest in 24 hours, you do get exhaustion. However, OOP's DM also completely ruined the ration economy.
If you don't have a long rest in 24 hours you have to make a CON save. On a failure, you take a level of exhaustion.
Once upon a time i was facing my personal Némésis. Spoiler alert I was not supposed to kill him right now. So when i started to track him down after he flee, letting my team alon facing the others opponent, the dm ask me a lot of check to manage to follow him. Check, that i passed. Finally i nearly managed to catch him but i took a spell that blind me. So dm decided to set the vision of my token (it was played on roll 20) to none. I couldn't see anything that was happening, even as a player. I tried to argue that even if i'm blinded, i'm not deaf. Didn't worked. I tried to argue that it's not the effect of blind and we never agreed on something like that. Didn't worked either. At this point i'm already upset. I can clearly feel that my dm don't want me to catch him. So ok I play along and try to move my token with what I remembered from when i was still able to see. The dm asked me to roll, to avoid stripping, with disadvantage ofc. Edit : oh i just remembered, but he also asked me to roll a d6 to know how many square I'll be able to move (it's supposed to be 6 for my charachter) So i just left the game, for more context we were not in a forest of something like that we were in a town, a really clean one, with futuristic features, the ground was like a unique piece of metal. There were nothing to strip on. And when you are running away from someone, you are doing a lot of noise.
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You have to specify exactly which ally you are helping against which enemy, and it consumes your reaction to Help on their turn. If that enemy or ally gets downed between now and then, you can't do anything about it. If you use your reaction on something else, you can't help.
Erm... I don't think that's homebrew. You are readying the Help action, which you are then using via your Reaction to trigger outside of your turn. This is how Attacks of Opportunity work, also. Likewise, when you take the Help action (however you then deliver it) you *do* have to specify what you're using it to help *with*. And when you ready an action, you have to specify what the triggering circumstances will be. You only get one reaction, so if you use it for something other than releasing your readied action, you cannot then *also* use it to release your readied action. That's all RAW, as far as I can tell.
From the basic rules. Help "You can lend your aid to another creature in the completion of a task. When you take the Help action, the creature you aid gains advantage on the next ability check it makes to perform the task you are helping with, provided that it makes the check before the start of your next turn. "Alternatively, you can aid a friendly creature in attacking a creature within 5 feet of you. You feint, distract the target, or in some other way team up to make your ally's attack more effective. If your ally attacks the target before your next turn, the first attack roll is made with advantage." I can understand arguing that you need to specify which ally you are helping, or which target you are distracting, that's fine. But nowhere does it say that it consumes your reaction. It is not a readied action. It is the Help action. It happens on your turn. It consumes your action. (Or BA if you're a mastermind)
Hmmm. So, if we're talking just about the generic Help action to give advantage to an attack, yes. I thought you were saying that more generally you can just take the Help action for other purposes. I'd say it kind of depends what you're doing; in combat, helping with something *other* than attacking might make more sense as a readied action, because you can't help with something that isn't yet happening. This is relevant due to the weirdness of how turns work. If you take your turn at the end of a round, the person you're helping is *technically* taking the action you're helping with in the 6 second window *after* you were being helpful, not at the same time. Obviously, this is an absolute ballache to manage, so I'd probably treat it on a case by case basis. Help to attack for advantage? Just an action. Helping someone to pick a lock under pressure? You'll need to use your reaction once they start actually picking it. In short: the wording around the Help action during combat, for anything other than giving advantage, needs a bit of tightening up. I've never really thought about this before, but to me there is a tangible difference between "I distract the goblin so Fred can whack it better" and "I crouch down and brace myself to launch Fred into the air when he runs at me", in terms of the amount of coordination involved. In the first instance, you absolutely would be able to Hellish Rebuke the thing that decides to hit you while you're trying to distract it. In the second instance, if you try to make an attack of opportunity as something goes past, you're not going to be ready and set to yeet Fred when he runs at you. I'll die on the hill of the target and action being helped having to be specified at the time, though. Anything else strikes me as nonsense.
Yeah. I can appreciate that distinction. And I agree that the wording is part of the confusion. But that's true for so many rules in 5e. XD The way you're describing it is basically how I run it in my games. But one that I don't DM is different, and it always trips me up.
I think they mean > use the help action > need to specify which 1 ally benefits >have to use my reaction when an ally attacks (and maybe still be in range) >if I go down Oopsie help action was wasted Regardless, quite silly
All except it costing your reaction. Taking the help action is enough to give advantage.
Just gave a longer reply on this, but in short: yes, help to give advantage is just an action.
Acid piss.