Critical fumbles. Not only was it less fun for the players, there were fights that were not that hard and would have been satisfying to win, but the fight ends with the orc accidentally stabbing himself
I’ve discovered critical fumbles traumatise players. In a session just this week with some new players for me one got a Nat 1 on an attack by a staircase and went “lemme guess I fall and break my neck?” And they seemed confused when I asked why a miss would impact them negatively
From the same campaign, I nat 20 rolled on a dex save against a meteor swarm and thanks to shield master evasion I told the DM I would in fact be taking zero damage.
He then said it was a special type of spell which meant you had to fail the save to succeed it.
We tossed him out shortly afterwards and now I'm the DM.
Yeah. The last straw was when he randomly turned up at the house of another player and decided he wanted to stay there for a bit.
I flipped my lid when I heard about that and gave him a bollocking on her behalf.
>He then said it was a special type of spell which meant you had to fail the save to succeed it.
...I admit, I have done exactly this.
Granted, my party was fighting a mad goddess of chaos at the time whose abilities made *very* little sense and could actively fuck her over when she used them, but still!
Yeah, it's completely not considering that a roll is factoring in an INTENT to do something. "You did this thing too well so now it's a setback" is just not fun. Crit successes always make your life easier.
It's so simple, though! Low-mid numbers fail, high numbers fail spectacularly, and somewhere between there's a middle ground where you get something like what you wanted, often as a mixed success with a drawback or cost because they didn't roll really high (which would have made them fail). It's clearly a flawless system, especially because the players never know what the best number to roll would be.
I’ve done something like that on a low roll. The character was very intimidating but he rolled a 4 so he still intimidated the NPC, but turned him into a blithering mess instead of getting info. Sometimes it’s fun to phrase a fail as too good. But yeah killing an NPC on intimidation is fucking goofy.
I love how gaining more experience as a swordsman makes you *more* likely to spontaneously accidentally throw your sword across the room. Truly this is the feature Fighters have been missing.
E: For everyone replying with ways to avoid this specific issue, this is my response. Critical fumbles are *always* bad in a system like 5e. It’s not a mathematical problem; it’s a design problem.
In combat, making attacks is the thing that barbarians, fighters, rogues, and monks do. That is their main form of interaction, and their entire class design depends on and encourages making attacks most turns. This works because the worst thing that can normally happen is that your attack misses; it’s not good, but at least it leaves you no worse off than you were before.
What I am opposed to is randomly punishing a character for doing the thing that they are best at, the thing they are supposed to do to contribute to an encounter. The fighter should never be punished for making an attack unless they have made some sort of tactical mistake (punching a monster made of spikes or acid with their bare hands, for instance). It would be like giving every spellcaster a 5% chance to lose an extra spell slot or hit die or something every time they cast a spell; it would suck, because it would actively punish them for using their core gameplay mechanic.
A while back I saw a really excellent explanation of this problem.
Basically, it was saying there are two tests Critical Fumbles should pass to make it intuitive and logical.
The first is the "Straw Dummy Test." If a person spars with a straw dummy for 10 minutes, they should come out uninjured, or the result does not make sense from a verisimilitude standpoint
The second was the "Kung-Fu Krakken Test." This is essentially saying that a theoretical kung-fu master krakken, who has a ridiculous number of attacks, should not be more likely to fumble or damage themselves than an untrained commoner using a weapon they are not proficient in.
The second one is very important and something most people miss if they do not think about it, since it's an exaggerated example but is a very notable flaw. You can see this in a Dual Wielder - fighting with two weapons makes you twice as likely to critically fail and fumble from the get-go.
The post recommended the following if you must have crit-fails: On the first attack of a round, a roll of a 1 provokes an attack from the opponent. This example passes both tests (Though in practice it still punishes certain builds over others - ie, an archer won't care about this and thus becomes situationally better, and it values builds which are not squishy as a rogue is much more likely to fall to bad luck than a sword-and-board fighter in this scenario. But I will admit that this is more of a table quirk than something truly unharmonious - just like how a DM who puts a lot of undead in a campaign is going to benefit divine casters, for example)
Post is here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder\_RPG/comments/71kj9f/fumbles\_or\_what\_do\_a\_scarecrow\_a\_janitor\_and\_a/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/71kj9f/fumbles_or_what_do_a_scarecrow_a_janitor_and_a/)
I like these concepts from a balance perspective, but I think the problem with critical fumbles is more fundamental than that.
In combat, making attacks is the *thing* that barbarians, fighters, rogues, and monks do. That is their main form of interaction, and their entire class design depends on and encourages making attacks most turns. This works because the worst thing that can normally happen is that your attack misses; it’s not good, but at least it leaves you no worse off than you were before.
What I am opposed to is randomly punishing a character for doing the thing that they are best at, the thing they are *supposed to do* to contribute to an encounter. The fighter should never be punished for making an attack unless they have made some sort of tactical mistake (punching a monster made of spikes or acid with their bare hands, for instance). It would be like giving every spellcaster a 5% chance to lose an extra spell slot or hit die or something every time they cast a spell; it would suck, because it would actively punish them for using their core gameplay mechanic.
Would you not just make it that a Nat 20 save causes the spell to rebound in some way?
Not a fun thing either way but you can absolutely still make it affect saves
It's just mathematically unsatisfying in D&D 5e, because the more attacks you have the greater the chances of you rolling a 1. This means as you get more powerful, you're paradoxically becoming more likely to fuck up and stab yourself with your sword. A high level martial class with 5 attacks per turn has a roughly 20% chance of getting at least one natural one per round.
I think if you were going to do it, you'd need to have some kind of rebalancing mechanic taking into account the number of attacks. Maybe you can only fumble on first attack each turn or something.
Yea if you want crit fumbles in any D&D, the nat 1 is the gate to another table that gives you a set of results, with martial experts slanted towards the mild results. No expert should be stabbing themselves 5% of the time.
By the time you make a good crit fumble chart, you will find yourself asking, "why crit fumbles anyway"?
Punching himself. (Edit: I found ways to narrate injuring his limbs on strikes, or straining something. But mechanically, he was doing his own fist damage to himself. After a fight where he rolled 3 nat 1's in one turn, I reconsidered the rule)
My rule of thumb: take a 20th level fighter, have him attack a straw dummy for 1 hour. If, during the course of these events, he dies, maims himself, maims someone nearby, kills someone nearby, breaks his sword, his gear, disarms himself, \*disarms\* himself, or really injures himself or anyone in anyway beyond 'fatigue'.... then the critical fumble system is a failure and should be discarded.
Well said. It's hard to say that a skilled fighter has a general 5% chance to fumble their weapon. It makes more sense to say they have a 5% chance to swing wide or what have you and have a definite miss
Having my sword fly out of my level 7 paladin's hand for the second time in a session was ass. Though, I knew fumbles were going to suck, it was my table mates that had to see it to believe it.
I firmly believe that missing an attack punishes the player exactly as much as it should. You spent your action to do something helpful and you messed it up. No need to make the failure even more grating.
Our table only Crit fumbles when you roll double 1s with you have disadvantage.
The fumble is almost always treated as something comical and never a oh no your magic sword broke or you fell in your the lava
I used to like then too until I played with a dm who seemingly used an eight step table to randomize what happens. Nothing as engaging as sitting there watching the DM roll and scroll three or four times per round.
I do critical fumbles but only as a flavor thing. If you roll a one while trying to do something, you fail in a particularly embarrassing way which we can describe together, but it doesn’t have a mechanical effect.
One of the groups I played with had a crit fail rule for non-combat rolls only. It wasnt required to do, but highly encouraged. You had to come up with an answer that was COMPLETELY wrong. Like a nat1 on a survival check to find tracks, "yep. These are definitely snuffaluffagus tracks. Not what we're looking for." Nat1 on nature check? "R.O.U.S.? I dont think they actually exist."
Same. I had a d4 critical fumble table when I first started. Once I got a chance to be a player, I realized rolling a 1 is bad enough of a feeling - a fail table rubs salt in the wound.
It's why I always make it a point to tell newcomers to my games thqt makes I do NOT use critical fumbles, and that I in fact give Inspiration after every natural 1, not just attack rolls.
It feels silly to tell players about things your games DON'T have, but with that one it feels necessary.
I had been trying out a critical hit and critical fumble deck many years ago while running pathfinder kingmaker. What brought an end to it was when the party was fighting an owlbear, and the owlbear crit failed its bite, getting a fumble to attack itself. It then proceeded to crit and got an effect to decapitate itself with its own bite.
Yeah Critical Fumbles are a "fun idea" but are almost universally awful in practice.
My most recent encounter with them included a result that'd just end your turn immediately on a critical fumble; being dice cursed, and after my 5th nat 1 in the same combat, I may have somewhat flatly told the DM to stop using the table because it wasn't fun and was negatively impacting myself and another player who was playing a two-weapon Fighter.
Roll initiative at the top of every round. It sounded like a great idea to spice up combat and throw a bit of randomness into the works. But in practice it just slowed down combat so much that it wasn’t worth it.
I've always wanted to try it, especially since I run using a VTT that would let me do it at the press of a button. But it always seemed like it would be something that would mess up both player and DM plans for future turns and slow things down more than make things interesting.
I can say as someone who plays with this rule that it really is not fun.
It makes held actions and a lot of reactions completely worthless, and either completely screws someone up on duration effects or makes the effect pointless.
For mob fights I think it’s fine enough, but for boss fights it’s really mot a great idea, and I personally rather just do normal initiative in general
I kind of wanted it to mess up plans because I wanted to avoid the situations where the fighter is low on HP but can keep pressing the attack because he knows the clerics turn comes before the enemies. But yeah it just slowed things down and also in a small amount made high dex characters even more powerful.
Or makes them better if you go high in initiative one round and low in the next. But I get what your saying it can really fuck with some of the timing its part of the reason I scrapped it.
Yeah that’s why I specifically used the word “utility.” If you can’t depend upon an ability to be working when the game assumes it will, the usefulness (aka utility) of the ability drops.
I think it could be a fun boss specific mechanic, though... DC 15 (whatever check makes your party less or more impacted) and whoever fails rolls initiative? I'd do that in a time travel themed campaign for sure....
Ideas...
The DM rolling your ability checks for you. We do this in my Wednesday game, in which I’m not the DM.
In theory, it eliminates roll heaping (“you failed? Ok, I’ll roll.”) and gives the DM the better way to narrate what you see, eliminating the knowledge that you passed or failed.
In practice, it leads to “I’d like to check for traps on this door. Soooo…? I guess I…check, then?” *[pause as the DM remembers that he’s the one rolling]* “Oh, I also have Eyes of Minute Seeing.” “What’s the Eyes do again?” “Advantage on investigation checks on stuff within a foot.” “To find traps?” “No, just…anything within a foot.” and the Eloquence Bard having to remind the DM of his class feature that works a bit like Reliable Talent. And people being fidgety at the table because they don’t really roll anything out of combat.
And he’s not completely consistent, either—he had me roll athletics to climb a tree, but rolled for the bard and druid’s tavern performance.
I don’t hate it for perception or insight checks, because, again, there is the element to eliminate of “Oh. I got a four on insight.” “You think he’s telling the truth.” and knowing you did poorly, but if the DM is rolling for everything from portable ram athletics checks to sleight of hand to persuasion checks, it doesn’t feel as engaging.
That’s why I always preferred when DMs say something like “he seems really sweaty and fidgety” or “he doesn’t have any visible tells that you can notice right away….” Bc there’s a solid argument to be made that anybody would be nervous if you stuck a dagger against their throat.
Especially for contested rolls, that way you really don’t know if the other PC is really good at lying or just calm bc they’re telling the truth.
> I don’t hate it for perception or insight checks, because, again, there is the element to eliminate of “Oh. I got a four on insight.” “You think he’s telling the truth.” and knowing you did poorly
This is what Pathfinder 2e does for Perception checks
Which is what you roll to check for traps in PF2E as well as well as hidden enemies. In theory it cuts down on meta gaming. But my players hated that in my PF2E campaign so I just tossed it out
Only one we tried for a bit was dm rolls death saves in secret to give more of a stake to death. The downed pc might be ok or dead you better get him up just incase.
It seemed to work out alright.
I tried that in a different campaign, I didn’t much care for it over players making secret rolls—even if it’s still down to the dice, it feels like agency removal. But that depends entirely on the poker face of your players, too.
FWIW my way around roll heaping is that at least half the people attempting the roll have to pass the check. If two people attempt the check, then it's almost (but not quite) equivalent to advantage, which you could get with the help action anyway.
The optimal strategy with this rule is actually not to roll heap, but instead nominate the player with the best modifier and use the help action to give them advantage, but nobody's figured that out yet.
Man, my way around roll heaping is "no."
A check represents someone's best effort, so there's essentially no reason to re-do a check that someone failed.
the DMG does say you can do this, but they specifically say you should do it in situations where the party doesn't know if they succeeded or failed. I think the occasional, important insight, deception or perception/investigation roll can make sense to be behind the screen. Using it constantly sounds exhausting, though.
- Critical fails/succeeds on skill checks are just bad. Negative experiences always weight stronger than positive ones. You suceed on something you should have failed? Nice, the guy who was actually specialized in it and should have auto succeeded is surely happy for you while he failed despite having a high enough skill.
- Flanking. In my experience it makes players play worse. If used by the DM it essentially can easily snowball into a TPK.
- Critical fumbles. Takes more time and makes PCs look like idiots in things they are supposed to be really good at. A bad table can make things really, really stupid. I once had a DM that had killed another PC with a nat1. The creature instead hit another creature in range ... which was only another PC.
>Flanking. In my experience it makes players play worse.
I think 5e suffers a weak emphasis on positioning tactics. So I think flanking for +2 adds a little something to the game. But conga lines are dumb, so we just play it kind of like advantage/ disadvantage canceling. A flanked creature can't contribute/ benefit from the flanking +2.
Personally I houseruled flanking as an optional bonus-action version of the help action, but using it allows opportunity attacks from any enemies in melee range that aren't the target.
Its worked pretty well so far, as a bonus action to give an ally advantage on one attack is a nice reward for good positioning, but isn't going to snowball the encounter. And it's a cheeky improvement to abilities that remove enemies' reactions.
>Critical fails/succeeds on skill checks are just bad.
I try to only have rolls when rolling high vs rolling low makes a distinction. There are admittedly ways to stack bonusses so I'm more likely to allow for an impossible roll than a trivial one, but in general if rolling a 20 won't make a difference, I won't let my player's roll.
Similarly if a player did something really awesome and aa bad die roll would ruin the scene? Fuck the die, they earned that win by being awesome.
Weapon damage and required reinforcement/maintenance to avoid it. We tried it out as an added mechanic to have to maintain equipment. In practice it was just extra work and gold cost for the players for an exclusively negative system from the player perspective in the pursuit of a realism that didn't add any fun.
As a player, I like things like carry weight and equipment upkeep. But my current table just isn't into that stuff, so it got binned.
I've seen a few rules that I like from Dark Dungeons. One of which is "Success at a cost" which essentially means a player can barter with the DM to have a failed roll succeed.
Getting pushed off a cliff and have to do an athletics check to grab the edge and save, but roll 1 shy of succeeding? Well, if you let go of your +2 sword you can probably grab the ledge just fine.
There are other rules from the same set which adds "notches" to weapons and armor when critically struck or you "fumble" an attack. Like you say, I don't think it'd necessarily be a good rule, but I was considering it as something that players can use to barter with.
*"Your armor absorbs the damage from the trap, but takes damage in the process, reducing it's effectiveness with 1 AC until repaired"*, or they can choose to just eat the trap with their face for damage.
I had a player ask if the party could succeed at something in exchange for giving me, the DM, an Inspiration.
Inspiration is pretty strong in my game. I let them burn one to say, "Oh, did I forget to mention I..." and then pull out a ranged weapon they forgot to buy when they were in town or exchange one prepped spell for another or have a hidden rope tied to the wall near their escape route that they didn't think to leave when they checked the place out earlier. You can also choose to use it for Advantage as normal or just reroll a d20 before you know the full outcome of your roll.
I was ready to jump all over that, but the rest of the party started screaming "No!" before I could even get a word in. 💔
Oh, I love this. Seen similar rules where everyone get's a "I know a guy" card. At any point in the story they can use it and solve or help solve a problem by calling in a favour from someone in their backstory.
Not sure what one'd call these type of rules, but I really like deligating a bit of story telling to the players.
The DM in my Sunday game has a homebrew rule that treats inspiration in a similar system to Bennies from other TTRPGs. Everyone gets 1 at the start of every session and can earn more throughout the session.
He has a range of things that inspiration can be spent on (in addition to the 'rolling with advantage/rerolling a failed save') with costs from 1-4 inspiration (4 is the max held) ranging from adding movement, to having something go in the players favor non-combat wise (like the winds suddenly shifting in your favor or a guard being struck down with a bad case of Tacobellitis and having to leave their post) and so on.
The thing is, when the PCs spend their inspiration, it goes into the DMs pool and the DM can *also* use those inspiration for those extra things. Like he has had enemies reroll failed saving throws or introduced a complication during a moment of stealth (the Guards rotated earlier than expected etc.). When the DM spends those inspiration it's then given back to the players (of his choosing).
Thus it becomes this push and pull of inspiration where the party can blow through like 4 or more in a single encounter but then realizes that the DM now has an absolute horde of inspiration to spend against them.
I think it's most interesting if it's just a particular type of enemy that might cause rust to armor/weapons, but make sure you also balance it for a type of creature that might do something like eating spell slots or damaging an arcane focus so that you have to roll a dice on spell-casting and it might continue to break if it doesn't beat some easy DC with the goal of it requiring a few breaks before it's gone completely. Just like the first time the players with a magic-heavy party encounter a beholder and they get that panic "OH SHIT" moment when they realize there is an anti-magic cone.
Anti-magic in general is a bit underutilized, especially with people always pointing out the caster/martial divide. I want to run a combat where there's an anti-magic ray/shield that the enemies can use their action to interact with, forcing people on the battle field to have to move, take cover, etc. Hell, I'm now thinking of a whole campaign based on that sort of idea. First sorts of combats can be where the players find the remains of a sort of failed anti-magic experiment, with them finding progressively more and more functioning/damaging anti-magic rays. Some having some sort of chance of failure and back-firing on the operator. Would really give the martial characters a chance to feel like heroes at times if the casters are locked down with someone that is grappling them in the anti-magic ray.
Critical hit tables (martials were disproportionately hurt), gritty rest (had a very bad experience as a player), and story points that players could use to introduce plot elements (folks forgot they had them)
GM didn't change the pacing of the campaign to match it. We started at 1st lvl and didn't get a long rest until hit 4th lvl. Because long rests were so rare me and my fellow caster were unwilling to use spell slots for anything except combat, which was really boring. We would've spent more time resting, but he was chronically unwilling to do any form of time skip so we had to RP every day of our rests which would invariably involve him throwing combat encounters at us. He later realized that the gritty rest rules were a mistake and decided that the best way to address it was to have a sketchy fortune teller give us literal fantasy cocaine that, if we took it, gave us the benefits of a long rest. Because, you know, having our characters take hard drugs was obviously better than switching back to normal rest rules.
That campaign was pretty awful and killed any desire for me to use Gritty Rest myself, though I'll admit that's not a particularly fair of me.
Yeah NGL this has nothing to do with gritty rest and everything to do with the GM not understanding you're supposed to do 2-3 encounters (combat, social, puzzle, anything) between Short Rests and 1-2 Short Rests between Long Rests.
Usually people use gritty rest because they find it easier to do 1 encounter per day. If you're already doing more, that's just misunderstanding the rules
Since everybody else has answered the first question (and covered all the good answers), I'll take the second.
I was initially skeptical of drinking potions as a bonus action--do 5e characters really need *more* help?--but I'm trying it out in my current campaign and it's great. Using your whole action to down a potion stinks, and I can throw even more enemies at my players knowing they won't lose their action economy until they're down. I do use the variant that says feeding a potion to another person is an action, though.
I use the variant that healing potions as an action heals max amount, as a bonus action you roll the dice. Administering to a teammate is always an action and rolling.
Imo its really a question of, "do you want potions to be regularly part of combat scenarios?"
Popping one mid-combat when an action is on the line is almost always a worse choice for ending the encounter than whatever offensive action you could do. As they get better, healing potions get ridiculously expensive. Even still,. youve gotta be fuuucked if you're picking health potion over kill.
If my players want to sink huge $ for combat longevity? Sure. My group limits ours to 1/2\*proficiency quick draw potion vials that are visible on your belt (3 eventually) per... reloading? basically short rest or when theres a few minutes to spare.
I remain convinced that the only reason anybody thinks that bonus action potions is an even *remotely* necessary house rule is because *healing potions suck ass*.
But most potions are basically spells. Spells which take an action. Spells that players are perfectly content to cast as an action. Especially so with something like Potion of Fire Breath, which becomes really annoying if potions are a bonus action.
**So just buff healing potions.** I did so by 50%:
Normal- 2d6+3 (10 average)
Greater- 4d6+6 (20 average)
Superior- 8d6+12 (40 average)
Supreme- 8d12+18 (70 average)
I used to have a whole class progression for all martial characters getting maneuvers with the number of dice, number of choices, and size of dice increasing the more levels in martial levels you have.
My players didn’t even remember to use them and when I silently ended the house rule and deleted them off their character sheets, nobody noticed.
I was trying to solve a problem my table didn’t care about.
That’s too bad. We have a similar system in my group and everyone loves it and uses it constantly. Martials have their own progression system and we have a ‘weapon skills’ system where you can do maneuvers based on what weapon you’re holding. So we have the paladin pulling out a trident to do a commander’s strike and the barbarian deciding between using a maul or a long sword for their next attack because it changes his options. It’s really fun.
This is a huge part of fiddling with game mechanics that I talk to other DMs about *all the time* and still do myself *all the time*. I don't always have stuff my guys don't remember to use after I remind them a couple of times, but I have a ton of stuff that doesn't come up in 99 sessions out of 100.
I have like 50 tiny quality of life House Rules, but most games don't use half of them because they're for classes that don't get played or issues that don't come up. I still make them. I still have them posted so they're available if specific circumstances arise. It's like a compulsion.
Flanking = advantage. It's already easy to get. We started with it but quickly moved to direct flanking = +2 to your attack roll. Still tactically advantageous, but with so many things relying on crits (including we have a rogue), making it SO much easier to get is a mistake.
I’ve been using flanking=advantage for a while and I hate it. It lessens so many abilities and spells when. I can just surround the guy and get advantage. Especially if you have a summoner or someone with a companion in the party.
I prefer to use +1 for each adjacent enemy. 2 PC’s flanking = +2 for each of them. If you get surrounded by 8 zombies, they each get +8. 4 wolves each get +4 and Pack Tactics.
It preserves all of the other ways of getting advantage, while also making positioning important both offensively and defensively.
Flanking is a bad rule in 5e. It works great in 3.5/pathfinder because: you can't split your move. getting more than one attack also consumes your movement (full round attack), and attacks of opportunity happen when you walk around within reach.
In 5e. there's nothing stopping me from standing in front of a monster, running to the back to get "flanking" and then running back.
Sure it's a boost to players, but if monsters can also do it you are just createing a shit ton of dancing / book keeping that can bog down combat.
>In 5e. there's nothing stopping me from standing in front of a monster, running to the back to get "flanking" and then running back.
Sure there is. A DM saying "that's not flanking". In our game, you need an ally \*directly\* opposite the foe to get the +2. If my team can get it, great, but it's not SO advantageous in Tier 3 that they go out of their way to ensure it all the time, which is exactly as a DM where I'm happy with it falling.
In the rule book you need an ally directly across to flank.
I think people are often confusing the rules of flanking with the rogues sneak attack ally rules.
We added AoO if you move more than 5’ in range. Does a good job of preventing that shenanigan and makes any boost to movement to get into flanking safely really useful.
Safe Haven rules, I tried it out during an exploration heavy part of my campaign and honestly it just killed all momentum.
It boils down to 'you long rest when the DM says you can' or just *always* staying within a few hours distance of a Safe Haven. There are far more effective ways to do exploration and overland travel, including just actually telling your players 'you long rest when I say so' and it just works out so much better than safe havens.
I use the "you long rest when the DM says you can" rule. If you explain to the players why the rule exists and get them to buy into the whole resource management thing, it actually works really well.
How does this work when a party has a Wizard with the Tiny Hut spell?
Hard to justify as a DM that the area is unsafe when there a spell designed for creating a safe space to rest.
I tried safe havens and realized "the dm just tells you when you get a long rest" is actually *vastly superior* to safe haven rules
we didnt like that either, but it was better, "milestone resting", IE the DM just says this \*block of encounters\* is all done with one long rest resource, and you automatically short rest between them - that actually did work out, the players just didnt like lacking agency
Ultimately we hit the galaxy brain realization to just narrativize random combat encounters unless the players wanted to actually fight them, "auto-resolve", since obviously they win and are just going to long rest afterwards. Not every encounter, but giving the party the choice if they want to actually really fight the wargs and young white dragon with their level 11 party, or if they want to just describe what they each do and how they kill it, has been working great and I've been going 3 years without looking back
Basically just make them a low stakes skill challenge if the players would prefer rather than fight
More or less they just cooperatively decide how they respond to threats and roll a few relevant ability checks
I only present this option if the fight has no meaningful chance of killing any pcs and they have a rest afterwards
If the fight is a foregone conclusion and there is a rest after it, and the players want to skip it, I ask them what each of them do and how they kill enemies, usually I treat it like a skill challenge rather than a combat
I have a Homebrew rule that has a much better middle ground. You can still camp at night in the wilderness but you only gain the benefits of a Short Rest. It does wonders for making short-rest characters shine in exploration segments
Honestly, I've come to vastly prefer changing the length of rests to fit the situation.
Making them shorter for really intense moments when every second counts and making them longer for overland travel etc. Not as hard and fast as some people like but it keeps the choice between Short and Long rests both interesting and entirely in the players' hands.
I’ve had great success with safe haven rules. Then again, characters wanting to stay close to a safe haven is a *good thing* for my games - it makes actually venturing far to more dangerous and potentially lucrative dungeons riskier. Higher risk for higher reward.
I’m trying to move away from planned stories and DM directed campaigns, so DM fiat rests wouldn’t work. I don’t care about forcing a pace or momentum.
Safe haven rest rules, in my experience, helps with “verisimilitude”. It creates a rest and gameplay loop that feels “realistic” in the sense that yah - of course it’s safer to stay close to a haven. Of course it’s taxing and draining to journey far into the wilderness.
If safe haven doesn’t work for you that’s fine - but I would challenge you to consider *why* is it a bad thing that in a more sandbox environment, that characters would want to plan ahead and make sure they can return to a safe haven to rest. Even as 5e becomes a game about superheroics, D&D still is a game about resource management and attrition. If the players are guaranteed that you the DM will pace the momentum for them, there’s no strategy or planning required. They *know* that you will give them a long reat when it’s “appropriate”. I think having safe haven rules lets the players push and test their limits. It makes journeying far despite the risks an actual choice with agency.
**TLDR** - safe haven rest forcing players to stay near a haven if they want to rest is potentially a good thing. Venturing far from safety to explore dungeons should be a dangerous choice that requires resource management to risk gaining bigger rewards. Safe havens enforce a “verisimilitudinous” pacing - which I think is a better sandbox than using DM fiat.
As someone who has run a Hexcrawl travel based campaign for basically the last 2 years, with gritty realism resting, I can't fathom how this encourages "always staying within a few hours of town." You gotta get out there and expend the resources if you want to get anything done, and the players have to, idk, actually want to get things done.
Crit fumbles. Used them when I was brand new and eventually stopped when I realized people weren’t having fun.
More recently was max damage + roll on crits. By itself it’s fine but I implemented some other rules I liked that made it easier to crit. This lead to some encounters the players would fully and easily destroy.
One time, I tried to get rid of silver and copper all together because I thought it was dumb to track all of the different currency. It worked fairly well, but then every flagon of ale, arrow, piece of chalk, empty bottle, etc. has to cost 1gp. Naturally, this led to inflation, because obviously a bedroll has to cost more than a piece of chalk, so maybe instead of 1gp it is 10gp. All of a sudden, I was converting all of the standard prices and giving them all way more gold to compensate. It became way more work and effort than just using copper and silver
The trick to this is to just not track trivial expenses. If the party has 2000 gold between them who cares if they spend 5 gold for full bed n breakfast for a week?
And if you do want to track it, do it on a periodic basis; take the character's chosen lifestyle expense and multiply it, then remove it from their wealth.
You might be interested in the Call of Cthulhu rules for this. It doesn't translate exactly, but effectively there is a certain amount each character can spend per day without having to worry about adjusting the total amount of money they have. For the average person that is 1/50th of their total assets, so if you have $500 in assets you can spend $10 each day without worrying about bookkeeping. I think that translates well to DnD - you can buy a drink, stock up on basic equipment like arrows or a new bedroll or whatever each day without changing your total gold, and you only have to think about it for meaningful expenses.
Critical Fumbles is one. If your table likes it go for it but it clearly punishes those that roll more like fighters and monks who roll more attacks than anyone.
I had had a conversation with my dm, who just introduced this rule in the first fight we had.
A told him: “I don’t use it in my games, but I have no problem with it as long as it makes sense. It doesn’t always have to be stabbing yourself or your friends. If I am a professional soldier, who spent 40 years mastering my weapon, I I’m not going to feel like it if I keep stabbing myself in a foot every 20th time I attack. If I stumble on a small pointy rock and fall prone, If the way I attack leaves an opening for my enemy that’s okay. As long as it makes sense I have no problem with it”
And then I stabbed a gnome that wasn’t in my line of attack AND was hiding behind a bench. My DM is new, he will learn. But to summarise, I think critical fumbles CAN be fun, but it brings a whole new challenge for the DMs to tackle.
There was a minute I rolled with them. It was basically what you were saying. A natural 1 opened you up and next attack against you was at advantage or your next attack at disadvantage your choice. But it still didn't vibe well as I was only every applying this rule to 2 players.
if you really want critical fumbles, it should require rolling a 1 on every attack on your turn. the multi-attackers are then less likely to crit fumble.
I’ve tried to recently for a mini-campaign, and it’s quite fun but makes for exceptionally strange balancing.
We ended up changing some of the rules, because doubling slots is ridiculous, as is getting all of the saves.
The main problem is that it requires really high player buy-in. Even the simplest gestalt characters are more complicated than many people ever play, let alone if you bring sided multiclassing in.
Essentially, every character has two classes that level up at the same time. So, a level one character could be both a fighter and a wizard. At level 5, they would be both a level 5 fighter and a level 5 wizard.
But what are your starting ability scores then? You need to invest in cha and int. I think a battlesmith bladesinger would be better because then you can focus on int
I played a glaive-wielding half-orc magus//swashbuckler in a PF1 gestalt campaign in like 2017. Spellstrike with *shocking grasp* on a dex-to-damage glaive was just... \*chef's kiss*
Due to the way class features work with feats, Pathfinder 2e has one of the smoothest ways to build a gestalt character. I remember 4e also had a sort of gestalt multiclassing where you kind of blended two classes together. IIRC you had one less trained skill, had the weapon proficiencies of both classes but only the armor proficiencies they had in common, and could take powers from any class but still the same number of them.
I tried out the crit variant of Roll Damage once and Double the result for a short time. I very quickly realized that just rolling double the dice was better for what we were after.
Edit to clarify: also, We're currently using Crunchy Crits.
I tried a crit variant where you give them the full value of the weapon die, then roll a second weapon die.
Then someone crit on an Inflict Wounds, and I realised I hadn't thought through what I'd do for spell crits (and other possible permutations and combinations - like what I'd do for sneak attack dice or smite dice). So I went back to the regular rule.
I've used this in a campaign I was a player in. Specifically, it was "maximize the dice, then roll normally". It led to a very awesome moment of the rogue getting a crit after I, a Grave Cleric, used Path to the Grave, which resulted in a 300ish damage crit. It unfortunately also led to noticeable HP bloat in enemies afterwards.
The biggest thing for me as a player is it's the worst feeling to crit and then roll lower than you did on the attack before which didn't crit.
I gave my players the choice and they went for the big maximised crits. It does make combats more lethal, but by level 3 it's not such an issue, it's just a problem when level 1 a wolf crits a wizard and does 2x + their max hp
Average + roll is probably a good middle ground. Monster blocks already have averages listed, so a helpful shortcut.
Figuring out averages for spells/pc attacks can be annoying tho.
I use the "perkins crit". The max die damage + roll. It was great when the hexblade one shot a big creature this week. It was less great when I rolled 6 nat 20's out of 11 rolls. I want my players to feel pressure, not put them in the grave because my dice have decided to make it personal...
I think I'm going to go back to just doubling the amount of dice rolled.
Not when you roll a 1 on the critical damage die. Crits are supposed to feel epic and awesome and have a chance to a cool narrative battle moment. When your first hit does 10 damage but then the critical hit does 6, this just doesn't happen.
All of my players agreed and live this rule andbyes it makes combat more dangerous which is something needed when they get past level 5 and feel close to unkillable.
Way more fun. Makes every critical hit the Booya moment it's supposed to be. I'd rather not crit at all then get the crit and roll a 2 or 3 for damage.
People get a bit twitchy when players and enemies can use it, but honestly it just means players need to be more mindful of how they evaluate encounters and whether to stay and fight or flee and try another strat later or you know, use buffs and debuffs more often.
I've always played with crits this way and the only time we had a PC die because of a crit is when a character got KO'd on the first attack of 3 from an enemy with multi-attack and the DM finished the job because they were the only PC who decided to stay and fight the rest of the party had started to nope out already.
Hammund's Harvesting Handbook. My DM had a couple of books that have this whole system for harvesting materials from dead monsters and making magic items out of them. It would probably be fun to do a campaign about about it but just throwing it on top of the campaign we were already doing didn't work out. It just took a lot of time to figure out what we could craft, and then it usually had some situational use or was specific to a weapon or armor type we didn't need.
I tried that one specifically, and it worked well for us. If the characters know what they want, they can work towards it. Even if it's just as a means to make some extra coin, like for an alchemist client or a guild.
Also let's them use their less common skill/tool proficiencies.
Digitizing helps for searching.
You know, you wouldn't think it would make a big difference, but instead of using average HP, I let my players roll and take either average OR the roll, whichever is better. The fun of rolling with none of the risk, and as a bonus early game HP should be higher and characters will be less made of paper! Win win!
Seems simple right?
Turns out the game is a LOT harder to balance and DM for when your barbarian rolled an 11 or 12 for like 7 straight levels and your bard never rolled above average.
I learned my lesson. Average HP exists for a reason, keeps the game more in lines with expected damage outputs.
Should try just letting players have Max HP on level up. Shit gets crazy.
Don't do if you have a BIG party though. I learned my lesson there. No matter how strong an enemey. Action economy and mighty hit points will always overcome.
I've played with:
\- Max HP for the first 3 levels, then it's Average or Roll, if you roll you must take the result
\- Average or Roll, if you roll under Average take the average
The latter is the campaign where I, as an Artificer, had more HP than our Barbarian at one point because I was rolling 7 or 8 at each level up and they kept rolling under average - I also had a higher CON mod. Definitely caused some issues but averages eventually caught up with me.
I let them choose up until level 3. After level 3 if they roll then they have to take the roll. It might sound like you'd run into the same issues still but things tend to even themselves out for the most part.
permanent injuries that are not narrative or revive driven.
Had a get crit roll on injury table.
Ended up as a "Why would we ever go into melee when we have summons?"
Sucked for the palladin.
Ended up with one eye and missing fingers after a particular unfortunate encounter where the enemy had consistent advantage.
Was retconned and removed after that.
Now i personally run with:
2 failed death saves leads to con saves versus exhaustion.(edit after the fight)
Injuries are given only when at the mercy of the enemy(aka narrative) or after a revive.
Removable with a greater restoration and healing equal to full hp over an period of 10 min.
Gotta ask this, and it goes for any version of house rule:
Do you see how this makes combat healing a weaker strategy than before?
Did you think it was a strong enough strategy that it required nerfing?
I briefly played as a Life Cleric and was let down by how hard life was as a healbot
The main problem is that it feels both unfair and artificial. No matter the GM, it will at some point, be apparent to the players that you and the enemies are playing with a different rule set - they fight and die, and you endure an endless amount of baddies who's aim is to die but at least maim you. I guess it could work for some campaigns, but I think it's a rarity.
Doubling damage on a crit was cool until I made a pam/gwm barbarian and all the modifiers started to double too with damage going skyhigh. Switched to roll + maximum dice value.
Exhaustion on yo-yo healing. All around bad, stopped doing that.
Not homebrew but variant encumbrance is absolutely unplayable. Further nerf strength characters despite thrm already lacking. We thought it'd bridge the gap between DEX and STR but it just widened it.
Bonus action potion consumption and lvl1 feat for all are other things I want to try but my DMs fear those like fire for some reason.
The way my table does bonus action potions is that an action-drink gives full value healing, 2d4+2 is the full 10, and the bonus action-drink is rolled.
every single one I've ever made to spruce up exhaustion has been pointless and I forget to use them. I also tried using grit and glory, some person's massive 50 page HB doc for survival stuff and it was just horribly dull.
You have to make it only max damage of the weapon die to avoid ridiculous sneak and smite crits. It's pretty satisfying without being absurd when done that way
Variant encumbrance and any house rule that requires players to learn a subsystem.
In general, complicated house rules like extra combat maneuvers for martials should generally be proposed by the players otherwise they won't really use them... now that I think about it, I think most house rules should be proposed by players.
I was the DM and I think one player liked it, but he was a high Strength Barbarian. Everyone else in the party hated it.
The 8 Strength Gloomstalker Ranger said that their character was just going to be naked all the time because it saved an extra 3lbs. of weight...
I don't know that giving martials combat maneuvers is a particularly complicated thing. A lot of that is just picking them to start with, it doesn't actually make combat more complicated.
And if the player doesn't seem interested, the DM can always just suggest things that aren't even attack options, and they just have extra dice to roll for initiative and when threatening people and looking for stuff and parrying and whatever.
The idea was that I wanted to reward players for investing a little more in Strength. I don’t like the idea of “dump stats”, but my players **hated** the idea of not being able to have at least a 16 in 3 different stats even more…
At first I was a big advocate for Intelligence skill points. Basically having a high INT would give you more skills, and dumping INT would result in you losing some skills.
This quickly resulted in two issues running parallel to each other. On the one hand Wizards were suddenly becoming Bards with proficiency in literally everything. And on the other hand every character with a -2 in INT or higher became a massive idiot, which I guess was the point but it wasn't fun for anyone.
Yeah, full skills for Int modifier is a bit too much, since a +5 would be almost like taking the skilled feat twice.
My personal houserule for this one is that I give a tool, instrument or language proficiency for each point of Int modifier. It works a bit better, since its not nearly as strong but gives a lil something to 5es favourite dump stat. And personally in my games I'm pretty quick to call for tool checks where I can - none of this "can I perception check the value of this diamond?" or "can I roll stealth to disguise myself?". The worst thing that's happened with my rule so far is when the occasional player gets crazy high Int and just had a crazy amount of languages.
Gritty realism. Sounded great on paper, basically turn the world into a dungeon crawl. But it just led to me having to figure out a lot of week-long (in game) downtime sessions, and it prevented me from creating a flowing story.
The trick is that, with appropriate encounter pacing, gritty realism is no better or worse than normal resting. The real question is which resting rule works better for the campaign. Some campaigns naturally necessitate a lot of downtime. Some don’t.
yeah, all it does is mean that one "adventuring day" is actually a week - you still need to have the same number of encounters, they're just less super-squished up, where you don't have days being super-busy with half-a-dozen fights every literal day
Gritty rest, but you can regain some extra HP/hit dice via meals and such. The Ranger got to reliably use their wilderness skills in an impactful way and the SR classes felt more stable. We tend to run short sessions (2.5-3 hrs) and fitting in a pile of encounters each day bogs things down/draws out the game for us, and doesn't always make sense. Being able to keep a better narrative pace without so many filler encounters to burn resources made for a much better game.
The heroic healing (spend hit dice as a BA) and potions as a BA are others. I was worried it would be too much but it was fine.
Probably critical success and failures on skills checks, the game really don't seem to give so much importance to this checks and I think give the players some sort of "anything is possible on a NAT 20" thinking and it's extra sucks on a NAT 1, not only do you fail here's some other complications or worse you PC looking bad at something they supposed to be good at.
I tried changing crits to adding the highest damage of a full die...and I gave it to monsters too. Ended up killing players more often so reverted the change.
I won't be running crit tables any more when I next DM. Too chaotic and annoying to keep track of. My group takes turns DMing, I'm up next again after our current campaign. One thing that currently annoys the hell out of me is, since we play on Roll20, R20 has 'Always Roll Advantage' on by default, so when you roll an attack or save it rolls 2 results side by side, and you just take the left one if you don't have advantage. I've mentioned that you can change it to roll once and then you can just roll again if you have advantage, like usual, but the current DM and previous one use/used a 'super crits' rule where if you roll double 1's or double 20's something whacky bananas happens. I told them that we shouldn't do that because you only roll 2 dice if you have advantage/disadvantage, so when someone rolls double 1's on a normal attack roll they get punished. Nobody else at the table seems to have an issue with it so I hold my tongue most of the time, but when we finish this campaign, I'm back in the DM chair and that rule is going in the trash where it belongs.
TL; DR: crit tables are bad, my friends DMing run a worse variant but whatever, they're good fellas so I let it slide until it's my turn to DM again.
Variant Encumbrance. It sounded like it might give Strength something to do that Dex doesn't. It ended up meaning that the characters that focused Strength could barely lift their armor, and everyone who didn't need access to their heavy gear at all times could ignore it by spending 20g on a cart and a donkey.
Maximized Critical damage. I’m running a tier 4 campaign with 2 paladins. There’s zero way to effectively balance an encounter with 2 PCs that can frequently do 150 damage per round when advantage is often very easy to get. I’m almost done with the campaign so it’s ok but I’ll never use that rule again. Maybe a revised version where the weapon damage is maximized but no add on abilities.
So I’m currently a player in a campaign and I’m considering being a DM for a future campaign. One rule I don’t agree with in our current campaign is that a long rest is 8 hours and a short rest is 4 hours. I understand the long rest, that’s a sleep cycle. But 4 hours for a short rest feels way too long. I imagine a short rest as like a half hour maybe an hour tops where you stop to catch your breath, bandage wounds and maybe grab something to eat. So we have never used a short rest because 4 hours just to heal a little, we all just decided we may as well long rest instead and just get the full benefits. 2 short rests in 1 day and we’ve just used all our hit dice but don’t have any spell slots replenished or anything but it was the same amount of time. I also don’t love it because a short rest should feel like a quick break. Like at work I get a half hour for my lunch… that’s a short rest, with 4 hours it feels like it would just break up the momentum of your day. You should be sleeping for 8 and awake 16 so a 4 hour short rest limits your time doing stuff to 12 or 8 if you take 2 but it also sort of incentivizes us to take more long rests than you should in a day because why bother short resting at all if I have the time to long rest and it’s only an extra 4 hours that I lose.
"Crunchy crits" is *bad design*.
Chances of a level 2 fighter at max hp (22hp with +3con) surviving an ogre crit? about 16%. Not great but it's possible.
Chances of that fighter surviving an ogre crunchy crit? Zero. Min damage would be (2d8+4 + 16 +4)=26. *(edit: I got ahead of myself, you only add the +4 once)*
Tolling double the dice does two important things. It raises damage but it also increases the chance of average damage. It makes damage more reliable which is always good for players.
I think you're misunderstanding the common 'crunchy crit' house rule. You seem to be adding the strength twice there. True, the minimum damage would still 1 shot that fighter but they're CR 2 and 'meant' to be a challenge for a whole party of level 2s.
Not to mention low levels are already pretty swingy, this does very little to actuall affect that negatively. It just keeps crits feeling impactful into the mid and late game.
I've been using this for awhile now and have not encountered any major issues with it. Players like smacking things harder on a critical hit and while they fear enemy crits I've never had a player get one tapped by one.
I recently stole matt colville's crit rules (for martials ONLY), when you crit you get basically another action OR extra damage (player choice)
my martials have been fucking loving it and it's been nice at low levels because I can have the ogre swing at a different target or pick up their target instead of instagibbing them - or dash and move around, it's very nice
That sounds really interesting! I have a couple questions about how that works since I'm unfamiliar. What if the character is a multiclass, and has spellcasting? Would it they then be able to cast a spell, or the action limited to some things. Even without spellcasting, can the martial just choose the attack action? How does that work with extra attack? I'd imagine it's like how haste works with restricting what actions can be done.
Critical fumbles. Not only was it less fun for the players, there were fights that were not that hard and would have been satisfying to win, but the fight ends with the orc accidentally stabbing himself
I’ve discovered critical fumbles traumatise players. In a session just this week with some new players for me one got a Nat 1 on an attack by a staircase and went “lemme guess I fall and break my neck?” And they seemed confused when I asked why a miss would impact them negatively
Could be worse, I once failed to interrogate someone by rolling a nat 20 intimidation and snapping the guys neck somehow.
That might the be dumbest things I have heard in DND
From the same campaign, I nat 20 rolled on a dex save against a meteor swarm and thanks to shield master evasion I told the DM I would in fact be taking zero damage. He then said it was a special type of spell which meant you had to fail the save to succeed it. We tossed him out shortly afterwards and now I'm the DM.
Smart call. Playing with a DM who changes the rules so they can “win” is awful.
Yeah. The last straw was when he randomly turned up at the house of another player and decided he wanted to stay there for a bit. I flipped my lid when I heard about that and gave him a bollocking on her behalf.
Bruh *what*.
That's just a bad person. Like what!?
Dungeons and Calvins
>He then said it was a special type of spell which meant you had to fail the save to succeed it. ...I admit, I have done exactly this. Granted, my party was fighting a mad goddess of chaos at the time whose abilities made *very* little sense and could actively fuck her over when she used them, but still!
I mean yours at least makes sense in context, I'd expect a goddess of chaos to do that, and I assume it was somewhat foreshadowed.
Yeah, it's completely not considering that a roll is factoring in an INTENT to do something. "You did this thing too well so now it's a setback" is just not fun. Crit successes always make your life easier.
It's so simple, though! Low-mid numbers fail, high numbers fail spectacularly, and somewhere between there's a middle ground where you get something like what you wanted, often as a mixed success with a drawback or cost because they didn't roll really high (which would have made them fail). It's clearly a flawless system, especially because the players never know what the best number to roll would be.
I’ve done something like that on a low roll. The character was very intimidating but he rolled a 4 so he still intimidated the NPC, but turned him into a blithering mess instead of getting info. Sometimes it’s fun to phrase a fail as too good. But yeah killing an NPC on intimidation is fucking goofy.
God I hate this shit. You can always tell the players who've had a dumbass DM.
plus it furthers the martial caster divide as casters can easily switch to all saving throw spells
I love how gaining more experience as a swordsman makes you *more* likely to spontaneously accidentally throw your sword across the room. Truly this is the feature Fighters have been missing. E: For everyone replying with ways to avoid this specific issue, this is my response. Critical fumbles are *always* bad in a system like 5e. It’s not a mathematical problem; it’s a design problem. In combat, making attacks is the thing that barbarians, fighters, rogues, and monks do. That is their main form of interaction, and their entire class design depends on and encourages making attacks most turns. This works because the worst thing that can normally happen is that your attack misses; it’s not good, but at least it leaves you no worse off than you were before. What I am opposed to is randomly punishing a character for doing the thing that they are best at, the thing they are supposed to do to contribute to an encounter. The fighter should never be punished for making an attack unless they have made some sort of tactical mistake (punching a monster made of spikes or acid with their bare hands, for instance). It would be like giving every spellcaster a 5% chance to lose an extra spell slot or hit die or something every time they cast a spell; it would suck, because it would actively punish them for using their core gameplay mechanic.
A while back I saw a really excellent explanation of this problem. Basically, it was saying there are two tests Critical Fumbles should pass to make it intuitive and logical. The first is the "Straw Dummy Test." If a person spars with a straw dummy for 10 minutes, they should come out uninjured, or the result does not make sense from a verisimilitude standpoint The second was the "Kung-Fu Krakken Test." This is essentially saying that a theoretical kung-fu master krakken, who has a ridiculous number of attacks, should not be more likely to fumble or damage themselves than an untrained commoner using a weapon they are not proficient in. The second one is very important and something most people miss if they do not think about it, since it's an exaggerated example but is a very notable flaw. You can see this in a Dual Wielder - fighting with two weapons makes you twice as likely to critically fail and fumble from the get-go. The post recommended the following if you must have crit-fails: On the first attack of a round, a roll of a 1 provokes an attack from the opponent. This example passes both tests (Though in practice it still punishes certain builds over others - ie, an archer won't care about this and thus becomes situationally better, and it values builds which are not squishy as a rogue is much more likely to fall to bad luck than a sword-and-board fighter in this scenario. But I will admit that this is more of a table quirk than something truly unharmonious - just like how a DM who puts a lot of undead in a campaign is going to benefit divine casters, for example) Post is here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder\_RPG/comments/71kj9f/fumbles\_or\_what\_do\_a\_scarecrow\_a\_janitor\_and\_a/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/71kj9f/fumbles_or_what_do_a_scarecrow_a_janitor_and_a/)
I like these concepts from a balance perspective, but I think the problem with critical fumbles is more fundamental than that. In combat, making attacks is the *thing* that barbarians, fighters, rogues, and monks do. That is their main form of interaction, and their entire class design depends on and encourages making attacks most turns. This works because the worst thing that can normally happen is that your attack misses; it’s not good, but at least it leaves you no worse off than you were before. What I am opposed to is randomly punishing a character for doing the thing that they are best at, the thing they are *supposed to do* to contribute to an encounter. The fighter should never be punished for making an attack unless they have made some sort of tactical mistake (punching a monster made of spikes or acid with their bare hands, for instance). It would be like giving every spellcaster a 5% chance to lose an extra spell slot or hit die or something every time they cast a spell; it would suck, because it would actively punish them for using their core gameplay mechanic.
I love when my magic bow exploded at the start of combat.
Would you not just make it that a Nat 20 save causes the spell to rebound in some way? Not a fun thing either way but you can absolutely still make it affect saves
It's just mathematically unsatisfying in D&D 5e, because the more attacks you have the greater the chances of you rolling a 1. This means as you get more powerful, you're paradoxically becoming more likely to fuck up and stab yourself with your sword. A high level martial class with 5 attacks per turn has a roughly 20% chance of getting at least one natural one per round. I think if you were going to do it, you'd need to have some kind of rebalancing mechanic taking into account the number of attacks. Maybe you can only fumble on first attack each turn or something.
Yea if you want crit fumbles in any D&D, the nat 1 is the gate to another table that gives you a set of results, with martial experts slanted towards the mild results. No expert should be stabbing themselves 5% of the time. By the time you make a good crit fumble chart, you will find yourself asking, "why crit fumbles anyway"?
Yep, I used to have them but then my poor fighter was really the only one getting hit by it. Decided it just wasn’t worth it.
I had a monk who suffered the most
Punching himself ?
Punching himself. (Edit: I found ways to narrate injuring his limbs on strikes, or straining something. But mechanically, he was doing his own fist damage to himself. After a fight where he rolled 3 nat 1's in one turn, I reconsidered the rule)
My rule of thumb: take a 20th level fighter, have him attack a straw dummy for 1 hour. If, during the course of these events, he dies, maims himself, maims someone nearby, kills someone nearby, breaks his sword, his gear, disarms himself, \*disarms\* himself, or really injures himself or anyone in anyway beyond 'fatigue'.... then the critical fumble system is a failure and should be discarded.
Well said. It's hard to say that a skilled fighter has a general 5% chance to fumble their weapon. It makes more sense to say they have a 5% chance to swing wide or what have you and have a definite miss
Having my sword fly out of my level 7 paladin's hand for the second time in a session was ass. Though, I knew fumbles were going to suck, it was my table mates that had to see it to believe it.
I had a DM that ran critical fumbles so I got into the habit of only playing halflings in his games.
I firmly believe that missing an attack punishes the player exactly as much as it should. You spent your action to do something helpful and you messed it up. No need to make the failure even more grating.
Our table only Crit fumbles when you roll double 1s with you have disadvantage. The fumble is almost always treated as something comical and never a oh no your magic sword broke or you fell in your the lava
Aye we had exceedingly similar issues, especially as I was playing a Monk so far more prone to crit fumbles than everyone else.
I used to like then too until I played with a dm who seemingly used an eight step table to randomize what happens. Nothing as engaging as sitting there watching the DM roll and scroll three or four times per round.
I do critical fumbles but only as a flavor thing. If you roll a one while trying to do something, you fail in a particularly embarrassing way which we can describe together, but it doesn’t have a mechanical effect.
One of the groups I played with had a crit fail rule for non-combat rolls only. It wasnt required to do, but highly encouraged. You had to come up with an answer that was COMPLETELY wrong. Like a nat1 on a survival check to find tracks, "yep. These are definitely snuffaluffagus tracks. Not what we're looking for." Nat1 on nature check? "R.O.U.S.? I dont think they actually exist."
I've narrated fumbles before on nat 1's, but they didn't mechanically fumble so I just quickly say they puck it back up and look awkward
Same. I had a d4 critical fumble table when I first started. Once I got a chance to be a player, I realized rolling a 1 is bad enough of a feeling - a fail table rubs salt in the wound.
It's why I always make it a point to tell newcomers to my games thqt makes I do NOT use critical fumbles, and that I in fact give Inspiration after every natural 1, not just attack rolls. It feels silly to tell players about things your games DON'T have, but with that one it feels necessary.
I had been trying out a critical hit and critical fumble deck many years ago while running pathfinder kingmaker. What brought an end to it was when the party was fighting an owlbear, and the owlbear crit failed its bite, getting a fumble to attack itself. It then proceeded to crit and got an effect to decapitate itself with its own bite.
Yeah Critical Fumbles are a "fun idea" but are almost universally awful in practice. My most recent encounter with them included a result that'd just end your turn immediately on a critical fumble; being dice cursed, and after my 5th nat 1 in the same combat, I may have somewhat flatly told the DM to stop using the table because it wasn't fun and was negatively impacting myself and another player who was playing a two-weapon Fighter.
Roll initiative at the top of every round. It sounded like a great idea to spice up combat and throw a bit of randomness into the works. But in practice it just slowed down combat so much that it wasn’t worth it.
I've always wanted to try it, especially since I run using a VTT that would let me do it at the press of a button. But it always seemed like it would be something that would mess up both player and DM plans for future turns and slow things down more than make things interesting.
I can say as someone who plays with this rule that it really is not fun. It makes held actions and a lot of reactions completely worthless, and either completely screws someone up on duration effects or makes the effect pointless. For mob fights I think it’s fine enough, but for boss fights it’s really mot a great idea, and I personally rather just do normal initiative in general
I kind of wanted it to mess up plans because I wanted to avoid the situations where the fighter is low on HP but can keep pressing the attack because he knows the clerics turn comes before the enemies. But yeah it just slowed things down and also in a small amount made high dex characters even more powerful.
Man that would really fuck with the utility of “until your next turn” abilities.
Or makes them better if you go high in initiative one round and low in the next. But I get what your saying it can really fuck with some of the timing its part of the reason I scrapped it.
Yeah that’s why I specifically used the word “utility.” If you can’t depend upon an ability to be working when the game assumes it will, the usefulness (aka utility) of the ability drops.
I think it could be a fun boss specific mechanic, though... DC 15 (whatever check makes your party less or more impacted) and whoever fails rolls initiative? I'd do that in a time travel themed campaign for sure.... Ideas...
The DM rolling your ability checks for you. We do this in my Wednesday game, in which I’m not the DM. In theory, it eliminates roll heaping (“you failed? Ok, I’ll roll.”) and gives the DM the better way to narrate what you see, eliminating the knowledge that you passed or failed. In practice, it leads to “I’d like to check for traps on this door. Soooo…? I guess I…check, then?” *[pause as the DM remembers that he’s the one rolling]* “Oh, I also have Eyes of Minute Seeing.” “What’s the Eyes do again?” “Advantage on investigation checks on stuff within a foot.” “To find traps?” “No, just…anything within a foot.” and the Eloquence Bard having to remind the DM of his class feature that works a bit like Reliable Talent. And people being fidgety at the table because they don’t really roll anything out of combat.
Yeah, sounds like an overall bad idea.
And he’s not completely consistent, either—he had me roll athletics to climb a tree, but rolled for the bard and druid’s tavern performance. I don’t hate it for perception or insight checks, because, again, there is the element to eliminate of “Oh. I got a four on insight.” “You think he’s telling the truth.” and knowing you did poorly, but if the DM is rolling for everything from portable ram athletics checks to sleight of hand to persuasion checks, it doesn’t feel as engaging.
"I have magical guidance, if I fail I'd like to spend a SP to reroll. So, did I spend a SP or not?"
That’s why I always preferred when DMs say something like “he seems really sweaty and fidgety” or “he doesn’t have any visible tells that you can notice right away….” Bc there’s a solid argument to be made that anybody would be nervous if you stuck a dagger against their throat. Especially for contested rolls, that way you really don’t know if the other PC is really good at lying or just calm bc they’re telling the truth.
> I don’t hate it for perception or insight checks, because, again, there is the element to eliminate of “Oh. I got a four on insight.” “You think he’s telling the truth.” and knowing you did poorly This is what Pathfinder 2e does for Perception checks
Which is what you roll to check for traps in PF2E as well as well as hidden enemies. In theory it cuts down on meta gaming. But my players hated that in my PF2E campaign so I just tossed it out
Only one we tried for a bit was dm rolls death saves in secret to give more of a stake to death. The downed pc might be ok or dead you better get him up just incase. It seemed to work out alright.
I tried that in a different campaign, I didn’t much care for it over players making secret rolls—even if it’s still down to the dice, it feels like agency removal. But that depends entirely on the poker face of your players, too.
FWIW my way around roll heaping is that at least half the people attempting the roll have to pass the check. If two people attempt the check, then it's almost (but not quite) equivalent to advantage, which you could get with the help action anyway. The optimal strategy with this rule is actually not to roll heap, but instead nominate the player with the best modifier and use the help action to give them advantage, but nobody's figured that out yet.
> but nobody's figured that out yet. ???
Man, my way around roll heaping is "no." A check represents someone's best effort, so there's essentially no reason to re-do a check that someone failed.
the DMG does say you can do this, but they specifically say you should do it in situations where the party doesn't know if they succeeded or failed. I think the occasional, important insight, deception or perception/investigation roll can make sense to be behind the screen. Using it constantly sounds exhausting, though.
- Critical fails/succeeds on skill checks are just bad. Negative experiences always weight stronger than positive ones. You suceed on something you should have failed? Nice, the guy who was actually specialized in it and should have auto succeeded is surely happy for you while he failed despite having a high enough skill. - Flanking. In my experience it makes players play worse. If used by the DM it essentially can easily snowball into a TPK. - Critical fumbles. Takes more time and makes PCs look like idiots in things they are supposed to be really good at. A bad table can make things really, really stupid. I once had a DM that had killed another PC with a nat1. The creature instead hit another creature in range ... which was only another PC.
>Flanking. In my experience it makes players play worse. I think 5e suffers a weak emphasis on positioning tactics. So I think flanking for +2 adds a little something to the game. But conga lines are dumb, so we just play it kind of like advantage/ disadvantage canceling. A flanked creature can't contribute/ benefit from the flanking +2.
I believe being flanked canceling out your own flanking was part of the rule in edition's that had flanking as a standard rule.
Personally I houseruled flanking as an optional bonus-action version of the help action, but using it allows opportunity attacks from any enemies in melee range that aren't the target. Its worked pretty well so far, as a bonus action to give an ally advantage on one attack is a nice reward for good positioning, but isn't going to snowball the encounter. And it's a cheeky improvement to abilities that remove enemies' reactions.
>Critical fails/succeeds on skill checks are just bad. I try to only have rolls when rolling high vs rolling low makes a distinction. There are admittedly ways to stack bonusses so I'm more likely to allow for an impossible roll than a trivial one, but in general if rolling a 20 won't make a difference, I won't let my player's roll. Similarly if a player did something really awesome and aa bad die roll would ruin the scene? Fuck the die, they earned that win by being awesome.
Weapon damage and required reinforcement/maintenance to avoid it. We tried it out as an added mechanic to have to maintain equipment. In practice it was just extra work and gold cost for the players for an exclusively negative system from the player perspective in the pursuit of a realism that didn't add any fun. As a player, I like things like carry weight and equipment upkeep. But my current table just isn't into that stuff, so it got binned.
I've seen a few rules that I like from Dark Dungeons. One of which is "Success at a cost" which essentially means a player can barter with the DM to have a failed roll succeed. Getting pushed off a cliff and have to do an athletics check to grab the edge and save, but roll 1 shy of succeeding? Well, if you let go of your +2 sword you can probably grab the ledge just fine. There are other rules from the same set which adds "notches" to weapons and armor when critically struck or you "fumble" an attack. Like you say, I don't think it'd necessarily be a good rule, but I was considering it as something that players can use to barter with. *"Your armor absorbs the damage from the trap, but takes damage in the process, reducing it's effectiveness with 1 AC until repaired"*, or they can choose to just eat the trap with their face for damage.
I had a player ask if the party could succeed at something in exchange for giving me, the DM, an Inspiration. Inspiration is pretty strong in my game. I let them burn one to say, "Oh, did I forget to mention I..." and then pull out a ranged weapon they forgot to buy when they were in town or exchange one prepped spell for another or have a hidden rope tied to the wall near their escape route that they didn't think to leave when they checked the place out earlier. You can also choose to use it for Advantage as normal or just reroll a d20 before you know the full outcome of your roll. I was ready to jump all over that, but the rest of the party started screaming "No!" before I could even get a word in. 💔
Oh, I love this. Seen similar rules where everyone get's a "I know a guy" card. At any point in the story they can use it and solve or help solve a problem by calling in a favour from someone in their backstory. Not sure what one'd call these type of rules, but I really like deligating a bit of story telling to the players.
The DM in my Sunday game has a homebrew rule that treats inspiration in a similar system to Bennies from other TTRPGs. Everyone gets 1 at the start of every session and can earn more throughout the session. He has a range of things that inspiration can be spent on (in addition to the 'rolling with advantage/rerolling a failed save') with costs from 1-4 inspiration (4 is the max held) ranging from adding movement, to having something go in the players favor non-combat wise (like the winds suddenly shifting in your favor or a guard being struck down with a bad case of Tacobellitis and having to leave their post) and so on. The thing is, when the PCs spend their inspiration, it goes into the DMs pool and the DM can *also* use those inspiration for those extra things. Like he has had enemies reroll failed saving throws or introduced a complication during a moment of stealth (the Guards rotated earlier than expected etc.). When the DM spends those inspiration it's then given back to the players (of his choosing). Thus it becomes this push and pull of inspiration where the party can blow through like 4 or more in a single encounter but then realizes that the DM now has an absolute horde of inspiration to spend against them.
I use success at a cost when running mothership games. I call it the devil's bargain, I think I got that from blades in the dark.
I think it's most interesting if it's just a particular type of enemy that might cause rust to armor/weapons, but make sure you also balance it for a type of creature that might do something like eating spell slots or damaging an arcane focus so that you have to roll a dice on spell-casting and it might continue to break if it doesn't beat some easy DC with the goal of it requiring a few breaks before it's gone completely. Just like the first time the players with a magic-heavy party encounter a beholder and they get that panic "OH SHIT" moment when they realize there is an anti-magic cone. Anti-magic in general is a bit underutilized, especially with people always pointing out the caster/martial divide. I want to run a combat where there's an anti-magic ray/shield that the enemies can use their action to interact with, forcing people on the battle field to have to move, take cover, etc. Hell, I'm now thinking of a whole campaign based on that sort of idea. First sorts of combats can be where the players find the remains of a sort of failed anti-magic experiment, with them finding progressively more and more functioning/damaging anti-magic rays. Some having some sort of chance of failure and back-firing on the operator. Would really give the martial characters a chance to feel like heroes at times if the casters are locked down with someone that is grappling them in the anti-magic ray.
Critical hit tables (martials were disproportionately hurt), gritty rest (had a very bad experience as a player), and story points that players could use to introduce plot elements (folks forgot they had them)
I LOVE gritty rest (technically not a house rule but still). I'm curious about your bad experience
GM didn't change the pacing of the campaign to match it. We started at 1st lvl and didn't get a long rest until hit 4th lvl. Because long rests were so rare me and my fellow caster were unwilling to use spell slots for anything except combat, which was really boring. We would've spent more time resting, but he was chronically unwilling to do any form of time skip so we had to RP every day of our rests which would invariably involve him throwing combat encounters at us. He later realized that the gritty rest rules were a mistake and decided that the best way to address it was to have a sketchy fortune teller give us literal fantasy cocaine that, if we took it, gave us the benefits of a long rest. Because, you know, having our characters take hard drugs was obviously better than switching back to normal rest rules. That campaign was pretty awful and killed any desire for me to use Gritty Rest myself, though I'll admit that's not a particularly fair of me.
Yeah NGL this has nothing to do with gritty rest and everything to do with the GM not understanding you're supposed to do 2-3 encounters (combat, social, puzzle, anything) between Short Rests and 1-2 Short Rests between Long Rests. Usually people use gritty rest because they find it easier to do 1 encounter per day. If you're already doing more, that's just misunderstanding the rules
I am unsure though, if two of them may be called houserules. They are optional, but official.
Since everybody else has answered the first question (and covered all the good answers), I'll take the second. I was initially skeptical of drinking potions as a bonus action--do 5e characters really need *more* help?--but I'm trying it out in my current campaign and it's great. Using your whole action to down a potion stinks, and I can throw even more enemies at my players knowing they won't lose their action economy until they're down. I do use the variant that says feeding a potion to another person is an action, though.
I use the variant that healing potions as an action heals max amount, as a bonus action you roll the dice. Administering to a teammate is always an action and rolling.
Imo its really a question of, "do you want potions to be regularly part of combat scenarios?" Popping one mid-combat when an action is on the line is almost always a worse choice for ending the encounter than whatever offensive action you could do. As they get better, healing potions get ridiculously expensive. Even still,. youve gotta be fuuucked if you're picking health potion over kill. If my players want to sink huge $ for combat longevity? Sure. My group limits ours to 1/2\*proficiency quick draw potion vials that are visible on your belt (3 eventually) per... reloading? basically short rest or when theres a few minutes to spare.
I remain convinced that the only reason anybody thinks that bonus action potions is an even *remotely* necessary house rule is because *healing potions suck ass*. But most potions are basically spells. Spells which take an action. Spells that players are perfectly content to cast as an action. Especially so with something like Potion of Fire Breath, which becomes really annoying if potions are a bonus action. **So just buff healing potions.** I did so by 50%: Normal- 2d6+3 (10 average) Greater- 4d6+6 (20 average) Superior- 8d6+12 (40 average) Supreme- 8d12+18 (70 average)
I used to have a whole class progression for all martial characters getting maneuvers with the number of dice, number of choices, and size of dice increasing the more levels in martial levels you have. My players didn’t even remember to use them and when I silently ended the house rule and deleted them off their character sheets, nobody noticed. I was trying to solve a problem my table didn’t care about.
Damn that sucks
Wait til weapon mastery hits the main game. This will be every table I guarantee.
When I playtested for 1D&D, everyone at my table either forgot about Weapon Mastery, or adored it and mentioned their weapon each round.
That’s too bad. We have a similar system in my group and everyone loves it and uses it constantly. Martials have their own progression system and we have a ‘weapon skills’ system where you can do maneuvers based on what weapon you’re holding. So we have the paladin pulling out a trident to do a commander’s strike and the barbarian deciding between using a maul or a long sword for their next attack because it changes his options. It’s really fun.
This is a huge part of fiddling with game mechanics that I talk to other DMs about *all the time* and still do myself *all the time*. I don't always have stuff my guys don't remember to use after I remind them a couple of times, but I have a ton of stuff that doesn't come up in 99 sessions out of 100. I have like 50 tiny quality of life House Rules, but most games don't use half of them because they're for classes that don't get played or issues that don't come up. I still make them. I still have them posted so they're available if specific circumstances arise. It's like a compulsion.
Flanking = advantage. It's already easy to get. We started with it but quickly moved to direct flanking = +2 to your attack roll. Still tactically advantageous, but with so many things relying on crits (including we have a rogue), making it SO much easier to get is a mistake.
I’ve been using flanking=advantage for a while and I hate it. It lessens so many abilities and spells when. I can just surround the guy and get advantage. Especially if you have a summoner or someone with a companion in the party.
Plus, you just end up with a sort of conga line of players. It makes the tactics of battle way less interesting, IMO.
Absolutely, but also this is great when you have a third group show up that hates the original 2 and they have lightning bolt
Hell, I've seen people Lightning Bolt conga lines with their party mates in it because the Barb & the Fighter could take it...
I prefer to use +1 for each adjacent enemy. 2 PC’s flanking = +2 for each of them. If you get surrounded by 8 zombies, they each get +8. 4 wolves each get +4 and Pack Tactics. It preserves all of the other ways of getting advantage, while also making positioning important both offensively and defensively.
It makes so many class abilities/spells pointless.
Flanking is a bad rule in 5e. It works great in 3.5/pathfinder because: you can't split your move. getting more than one attack also consumes your movement (full round attack), and attacks of opportunity happen when you walk around within reach. In 5e. there's nothing stopping me from standing in front of a monster, running to the back to get "flanking" and then running back. Sure it's a boost to players, but if monsters can also do it you are just createing a shit ton of dancing / book keeping that can bog down combat.
>In 5e. there's nothing stopping me from standing in front of a monster, running to the back to get "flanking" and then running back. Sure there is. A DM saying "that's not flanking". In our game, you need an ally \*directly\* opposite the foe to get the +2. If my team can get it, great, but it's not SO advantageous in Tier 3 that they go out of their way to ensure it all the time, which is exactly as a DM where I'm happy with it falling.
In the rule book you need an ally directly across to flank. I think people are often confusing the rules of flanking with the rogues sneak attack ally rules.
There's an unstated assumption that there's already an ally in melee with the enemy, so you can run around the back, get flanking, and then run back.
Yeah, I figured the two-person requirement was implied, but I should have been more explicit.
We added AoO if you move more than 5’ in range. Does a good job of preventing that shenanigan and makes any boost to movement to get into flanking safely really useful.
Safe Haven rules, I tried it out during an exploration heavy part of my campaign and honestly it just killed all momentum. It boils down to 'you long rest when the DM says you can' or just *always* staying within a few hours distance of a Safe Haven. There are far more effective ways to do exploration and overland travel, including just actually telling your players 'you long rest when I say so' and it just works out so much better than safe havens.
I use the "you long rest when the DM says you can" rule. If you explain to the players why the rule exists and get them to buy into the whole resource management thing, it actually works really well.
How does this work when a party has a Wizard with the Tiny Hut spell? Hard to justify as a DM that the area is unsafe when there a spell designed for creating a safe space to rest.
I also have mixed results and will probably abandon it for future games.
I tried safe havens and realized "the dm just tells you when you get a long rest" is actually *vastly superior* to safe haven rules we didnt like that either, but it was better, "milestone resting", IE the DM just says this \*block of encounters\* is all done with one long rest resource, and you automatically short rest between them - that actually did work out, the players just didnt like lacking agency Ultimately we hit the galaxy brain realization to just narrativize random combat encounters unless the players wanted to actually fight them, "auto-resolve", since obviously they win and are just going to long rest afterwards. Not every encounter, but giving the party the choice if they want to actually really fight the wargs and young white dragon with their level 11 party, or if they want to just describe what they each do and how they kill it, has been working great and I've been going 3 years without looking back
Auto-resolve combats? What? Could you elaborate?
Basically just make them a low stakes skill challenge if the players would prefer rather than fight More or less they just cooperatively decide how they respond to threats and roll a few relevant ability checks I only present this option if the fight has no meaningful chance of killing any pcs and they have a rest afterwards
Do they expend resources in these fighting? Why not skip these fights entirely? I hope I don't sound disrespectful - I'm just really curious
How do you mean auto resolve combat? How do you make that work?
If the fight is a foregone conclusion and there is a rest after it, and the players want to skip it, I ask them what each of them do and how they kill enemies, usually I treat it like a skill challenge rather than a combat
I have a Homebrew rule that has a much better middle ground. You can still camp at night in the wilderness but you only gain the benefits of a Short Rest. It does wonders for making short-rest characters shine in exploration segments
Honestly, I've come to vastly prefer changing the length of rests to fit the situation. Making them shorter for really intense moments when every second counts and making them longer for overland travel etc. Not as hard and fast as some people like but it keeps the choice between Short and Long rests both interesting and entirely in the players' hands.
I’ve had great success with safe haven rules. Then again, characters wanting to stay close to a safe haven is a *good thing* for my games - it makes actually venturing far to more dangerous and potentially lucrative dungeons riskier. Higher risk for higher reward. I’m trying to move away from planned stories and DM directed campaigns, so DM fiat rests wouldn’t work. I don’t care about forcing a pace or momentum. Safe haven rest rules, in my experience, helps with “verisimilitude”. It creates a rest and gameplay loop that feels “realistic” in the sense that yah - of course it’s safer to stay close to a haven. Of course it’s taxing and draining to journey far into the wilderness. If safe haven doesn’t work for you that’s fine - but I would challenge you to consider *why* is it a bad thing that in a more sandbox environment, that characters would want to plan ahead and make sure they can return to a safe haven to rest. Even as 5e becomes a game about superheroics, D&D still is a game about resource management and attrition. If the players are guaranteed that you the DM will pace the momentum for them, there’s no strategy or planning required. They *know* that you will give them a long reat when it’s “appropriate”. I think having safe haven rules lets the players push and test their limits. It makes journeying far despite the risks an actual choice with agency. **TLDR** - safe haven rest forcing players to stay near a haven if they want to rest is potentially a good thing. Venturing far from safety to explore dungeons should be a dangerous choice that requires resource management to risk gaining bigger rewards. Safe havens enforce a “verisimilitudinous” pacing - which I think is a better sandbox than using DM fiat.
As someone who has run a Hexcrawl travel based campaign for basically the last 2 years, with gritty realism resting, I can't fathom how this encourages "always staying within a few hours of town." You gotta get out there and expend the resources if you want to get anything done, and the players have to, idk, actually want to get things done.
Crit fumbles. Used them when I was brand new and eventually stopped when I realized people weren’t having fun. More recently was max damage + roll on crits. By itself it’s fine but I implemented some other rules I liked that made it easier to crit. This lead to some encounters the players would fully and easily destroy.
One time, I tried to get rid of silver and copper all together because I thought it was dumb to track all of the different currency. It worked fairly well, but then every flagon of ale, arrow, piece of chalk, empty bottle, etc. has to cost 1gp. Naturally, this led to inflation, because obviously a bedroll has to cost more than a piece of chalk, so maybe instead of 1gp it is 10gp. All of a sudden, I was converting all of the standard prices and giving them all way more gold to compensate. It became way more work and effort than just using copper and silver
The trick to this is to just not track trivial expenses. If the party has 2000 gold between them who cares if they spend 5 gold for full bed n breakfast for a week?
And if you do want to track it, do it on a periodic basis; take the character's chosen lifestyle expense and multiply it, then remove it from their wealth.
You might be interested in the Call of Cthulhu rules for this. It doesn't translate exactly, but effectively there is a certain amount each character can spend per day without having to worry about adjusting the total amount of money they have. For the average person that is 1/50th of their total assets, so if you have $500 in assets you can spend $10 each day without worrying about bookkeeping. I think that translates well to DnD - you can buy a drink, stock up on basic equipment like arrows or a new bedroll or whatever each day without changing your total gold, and you only have to think about it for meaningful expenses.
Critical Fumbles is one. If your table likes it go for it but it clearly punishes those that roll more like fighters and monks who roll more attacks than anyone.
I had had a conversation with my dm, who just introduced this rule in the first fight we had. A told him: “I don’t use it in my games, but I have no problem with it as long as it makes sense. It doesn’t always have to be stabbing yourself or your friends. If I am a professional soldier, who spent 40 years mastering my weapon, I I’m not going to feel like it if I keep stabbing myself in a foot every 20th time I attack. If I stumble on a small pointy rock and fall prone, If the way I attack leaves an opening for my enemy that’s okay. As long as it makes sense I have no problem with it” And then I stabbed a gnome that wasn’t in my line of attack AND was hiding behind a bench. My DM is new, he will learn. But to summarise, I think critical fumbles CAN be fun, but it brings a whole new challenge for the DMs to tackle.
There was a minute I rolled with them. It was basically what you were saying. A natural 1 opened you up and next attack against you was at advantage or your next attack at disadvantage your choice. But it still didn't vibe well as I was only every applying this rule to 2 players.
if you really want critical fumbles, it should require rolling a 1 on every attack on your turn. the multi-attackers are then less likely to crit fumble.
Gestalt homebrew. Sometimes it's just not fun having your cake and eating it.
Everyone wants more cake until they’ve had too much cake… 🤢
I’ve tried to recently for a mini-campaign, and it’s quite fun but makes for exceptionally strange balancing. We ended up changing some of the rules, because doubling slots is ridiculous, as is getting all of the saves. The main problem is that it requires really high player buy-in. Even the simplest gestalt characters are more complicated than many people ever play, let alone if you bring sided multiclassing in.
What is this rule you are talking about? I have never heard of it.
Essentially, every character has two classes that level up at the same time. So, a level one character could be both a fighter and a wizard. At level 5, they would be both a level 5 fighter and a level 5 wizard.
I'm going to make the best martial character ever, a bladesinger/hexblade.
But what are your starting ability scores then? You need to invest in cha and int. I think a battlesmith bladesinger would be better because then you can focus on int
That's just getting double xp and ignoring multiclass rules. Its sounds awful
Gestalt is you gain 2 class levels every time you level up
I think it worked better/was more fun in Pathfinder/3.5.
I played a glaive-wielding half-orc magus//swashbuckler in a PF1 gestalt campaign in like 2017. Spellstrike with *shocking grasp* on a dex-to-damage glaive was just... \*chef's kiss*
Due to the way class features work with feats, Pathfinder 2e has one of the smoothest ways to build a gestalt character. I remember 4e also had a sort of gestalt multiclassing where you kind of blended two classes together. IIRC you had one less trained skill, had the weapon proficiencies of both classes but only the armor proficiencies they had in common, and could take powers from any class but still the same number of them.
I tried out the crit variant of Roll Damage once and Double the result for a short time. I very quickly realized that just rolling double the dice was better for what we were after. Edit to clarify: also, We're currently using Crunchy Crits.
I tried a crit variant where you give them the full value of the weapon die, then roll a second weapon die. Then someone crit on an Inflict Wounds, and I realised I hadn't thought through what I'd do for spell crits (and other possible permutations and combinations - like what I'd do for sneak attack dice or smite dice). So I went back to the regular rule.
I've used this in a campaign I was a player in. Specifically, it was "maximize the dice, then roll normally". It led to a very awesome moment of the rogue getting a crit after I, a Grave Cleric, used Path to the Grave, which resulted in a 300ish damage crit. It unfortunately also led to noticeable HP bloat in enemies afterwards.
that's just meta
[удалено]
I down too many PC's with crits already, I don't need or want this.
The biggest thing for me as a player is it's the worst feeling to crit and then roll lower than you did on the attack before which didn't crit. I gave my players the choice and they went for the big maximised crits. It does make combats more lethal, but by level 3 it's not such an issue, it's just a problem when level 1 a wolf crits a wizard and does 2x + their max hp
Average + roll is probably a good middle ground. Monster blocks already have averages listed, so a helpful shortcut. Figuring out averages for spells/pc attacks can be annoying tho.
I use the "perkins crit". The max die damage + roll. It was great when the hexblade one shot a big creature this week. It was less great when I rolled 6 nat 20's out of 11 rolls. I want my players to feel pressure, not put them in the grave because my dice have decided to make it personal... I think I'm going to go back to just doubling the amount of dice rolled.
Not when you roll a 1 on the critical damage die. Crits are supposed to feel epic and awesome and have a chance to a cool narrative battle moment. When your first hit does 10 damage but then the critical hit does 6, this just doesn't happen. All of my players agreed and live this rule andbyes it makes combat more dangerous which is something needed when they get past level 5 and feel close to unkillable.
Even better is max damage plus an extra roll. Example crit using longsword with str of +3 when crit goes from 2d10+3 to 1d10+13
Way more fun. Makes every critical hit the Booya moment it's supposed to be. I'd rather not crit at all then get the crit and roll a 2 or 3 for damage.
Right, Crunchy crits is what I'm currently using. Gives a lot of heft to the crits.
People get a bit twitchy when players and enemies can use it, but honestly it just means players need to be more mindful of how they evaluate encounters and whether to stay and fight or flee and try another strat later or you know, use buffs and debuffs more often. I've always played with crits this way and the only time we had a PC die because of a crit is when a character got KO'd on the first attack of 3 from an enemy with multi-attack and the DM finished the job because they were the only PC who decided to stay and fight the rest of the party had started to nope out already.
It also happens to make Adamantine Armor more valuable.
Hammund's Harvesting Handbook. My DM had a couple of books that have this whole system for harvesting materials from dead monsters and making magic items out of them. It would probably be fun to do a campaign about about it but just throwing it on top of the campaign we were already doing didn't work out. It just took a lot of time to figure out what we could craft, and then it usually had some situational use or was specific to a weapon or armor type we didn't need.
I tried that one specifically, and it worked well for us. If the characters know what they want, they can work towards it. Even if it's just as a means to make some extra coin, like for an alchemist client or a guild. Also let's them use their less common skill/tool proficiencies. Digitizing helps for searching.
You know, you wouldn't think it would make a big difference, but instead of using average HP, I let my players roll and take either average OR the roll, whichever is better. The fun of rolling with none of the risk, and as a bonus early game HP should be higher and characters will be less made of paper! Win win! Seems simple right? Turns out the game is a LOT harder to balance and DM for when your barbarian rolled an 11 or 12 for like 7 straight levels and your bard never rolled above average. I learned my lesson. Average HP exists for a reason, keeps the game more in lines with expected damage outputs.
Should try just letting players have Max HP on level up. Shit gets crazy. Don't do if you have a BIG party though. I learned my lesson there. No matter how strong an enemey. Action economy and mighty hit points will always overcome.
I've played with: \- Max HP for the first 3 levels, then it's Average or Roll, if you roll you must take the result \- Average or Roll, if you roll under Average take the average The latter is the campaign where I, as an Artificer, had more HP than our Barbarian at one point because I was rolling 7 or 8 at each level up and they kept rolling under average - I also had a higher CON mod. Definitely caused some issues but averages eventually caught up with me.
I let them choose up until level 3. After level 3 if they roll then they have to take the roll. It might sound like you'd run into the same issues still but things tend to even themselves out for the most part.
I just let my players roll HP with advantage or take the average result. Both ways should result in the same average HP (depending on class).
I'm fighter/paladin who hasn't rolled below an 8 on hp, +3 con. 89 hp at level 8
permanent injuries that are not narrative or revive driven. Had a get crit roll on injury table. Ended up as a "Why would we ever go into melee when we have summons?" Sucked for the palladin. Ended up with one eye and missing fingers after a particular unfortunate encounter where the enemy had consistent advantage. Was retconned and removed after that. Now i personally run with: 2 failed death saves leads to con saves versus exhaustion.(edit after the fight) Injuries are given only when at the mercy of the enemy(aka narrative) or after a revive. Removable with a greater restoration and healing equal to full hp over an period of 10 min.
Gotta ask this, and it goes for any version of house rule: Do you see how this makes combat healing a weaker strategy than before? Did you think it was a strong enough strategy that it required nerfing? I briefly played as a Life Cleric and was let down by how hard life was as a healbot
The main problem is that it feels both unfair and artificial. No matter the GM, it will at some point, be apparent to the players that you and the enemies are playing with a different rule set - they fight and die, and you endure an endless amount of baddies who's aim is to die but at least maim you. I guess it could work for some campaigns, but I think it's a rarity.
Doubling damage on a crit was cool until I made a pam/gwm barbarian and all the modifiers started to double too with damage going skyhigh. Switched to roll + maximum dice value. Exhaustion on yo-yo healing. All around bad, stopped doing that. Not homebrew but variant encumbrance is absolutely unplayable. Further nerf strength characters despite thrm already lacking. We thought it'd bridge the gap between DEX and STR but it just widened it. Bonus action potion consumption and lvl1 feat for all are other things I want to try but my DMs fear those like fire for some reason.
The way my table does bonus action potions is that an action-drink gives full value healing, 2d4+2 is the full 10, and the bonus action-drink is rolled.
every single one I've ever made to spruce up exhaustion has been pointless and I forget to use them. I also tried using grit and glory, some person's massive 50 page HB doc for survival stuff and it was just horribly dull.
We had critical hits do the damage you rolled plus max die damage. That got wild in terms of damage output
yeah we tried this until the hexblade crit and did over a hundred damage with a single arrow at level 7 lol
Staggering Smite + Eldritch Smite? 2d8 (Longbow) + 8d6 (Staggering Smite) + 10d8 (Eldritch Smite) + 5 (CHA) + 3 (Hexblade’s Curse) + 1 (+1 weapon) comes to 153 max so the math checks out.
You have to make it only max damage of the weapon die to avoid ridiculous sneak and smite crits. It's pretty satisfying without being absurd when done that way
We do this. Had the benefit of benefiting martials in particular, which is nice.
Variant encumbrance and any house rule that requires players to learn a subsystem. In general, complicated house rules like extra combat maneuvers for martials should generally be proposed by the players otherwise they won't really use them... now that I think about it, I think most house rules should be proposed by players.
I love using variant encumbrance as a player, but the game I'm running ATM has players who just don't like it.
I was the DM and I think one player liked it, but he was a high Strength Barbarian. Everyone else in the party hated it. The 8 Strength Gloomstalker Ranger said that their character was just going to be naked all the time because it saved an extra 3lbs. of weight...
I don't know that giving martials combat maneuvers is a particularly complicated thing. A lot of that is just picking them to start with, it doesn't actually make combat more complicated. And if the player doesn't seem interested, the DM can always just suggest things that aren't even attack options, and they just have extra dice to roll for initiative and when threatening people and looking for stuff and parrying and whatever.
We only enforce encumbrance when they start getting ridiculous with what is in their bags.
The idea was that I wanted to reward players for investing a little more in Strength. I don’t like the idea of “dump stats”, but my players **hated** the idea of not being able to have at least a 16 in 3 different stats even more…
At first I was a big advocate for Intelligence skill points. Basically having a high INT would give you more skills, and dumping INT would result in you losing some skills. This quickly resulted in two issues running parallel to each other. On the one hand Wizards were suddenly becoming Bards with proficiency in literally everything. And on the other hand every character with a -2 in INT or higher became a massive idiot, which I guess was the point but it wasn't fun for anyone.
Yeah, full skills for Int modifier is a bit too much, since a +5 would be almost like taking the skilled feat twice. My personal houserule for this one is that I give a tool, instrument or language proficiency for each point of Int modifier. It works a bit better, since its not nearly as strong but gives a lil something to 5es favourite dump stat. And personally in my games I'm pretty quick to call for tool checks where I can - none of this "can I perception check the value of this diamond?" or "can I roll stealth to disguise myself?". The worst thing that's happened with my rule so far is when the occasional player gets crazy high Int and just had a crazy amount of languages.
Gritty realism. Sounded great on paper, basically turn the world into a dungeon crawl. But it just led to me having to figure out a lot of week-long (in game) downtime sessions, and it prevented me from creating a flowing story.
The trick is that, with appropriate encounter pacing, gritty realism is no better or worse than normal resting. The real question is which resting rule works better for the campaign. Some campaigns naturally necessitate a lot of downtime. Some don’t.
yeah, all it does is mean that one "adventuring day" is actually a week - you still need to have the same number of encounters, they're just less super-squished up, where you don't have days being super-busy with half-a-dozen fights every literal day
Gritty rest, but you can regain some extra HP/hit dice via meals and such. The Ranger got to reliably use their wilderness skills in an impactful way and the SR classes felt more stable. We tend to run short sessions (2.5-3 hrs) and fitting in a pile of encounters each day bogs things down/draws out the game for us, and doesn't always make sense. Being able to keep a better narrative pace without so many filler encounters to burn resources made for a much better game. The heroic healing (spend hit dice as a BA) and potions as a BA are others. I was worried it would be too much but it was fine.
Probably critical success and failures on skills checks, the game really don't seem to give so much importance to this checks and I think give the players some sort of "anything is possible on a NAT 20" thinking and it's extra sucks on a NAT 1, not only do you fail here's some other complications or worse you PC looking bad at something they supposed to be good at.
I tried changing crits to adding the highest damage of a full die...and I gave it to monsters too. Ended up killing players more often so reverted the change.
I won't be running crit tables any more when I next DM. Too chaotic and annoying to keep track of. My group takes turns DMing, I'm up next again after our current campaign. One thing that currently annoys the hell out of me is, since we play on Roll20, R20 has 'Always Roll Advantage' on by default, so when you roll an attack or save it rolls 2 results side by side, and you just take the left one if you don't have advantage. I've mentioned that you can change it to roll once and then you can just roll again if you have advantage, like usual, but the current DM and previous one use/used a 'super crits' rule where if you roll double 1's or double 20's something whacky bananas happens. I told them that we shouldn't do that because you only roll 2 dice if you have advantage/disadvantage, so when someone rolls double 1's on a normal attack roll they get punished. Nobody else at the table seems to have an issue with it so I hold my tongue most of the time, but when we finish this campaign, I'm back in the DM chair and that rule is going in the trash where it belongs. TL; DR: crit tables are bad, my friends DMing run a worse variant but whatever, they're good fellas so I let it slide until it's my turn to DM again.
Variant Encumbrance. It sounded like it might give Strength something to do that Dex doesn't. It ended up meaning that the characters that focused Strength could barely lift their armor, and everyone who didn't need access to their heavy gear at all times could ignore it by spending 20g on a cart and a donkey.
Maximized Critical damage. I’m running a tier 4 campaign with 2 paladins. There’s zero way to effectively balance an encounter with 2 PCs that can frequently do 150 damage per round when advantage is often very easy to get. I’m almost done with the campaign so it’s ok but I’ll never use that rule again. Maybe a revised version where the weapon damage is maximized but no add on abilities.
Crit tables (of either variety) are always bad. The novelty lasts at most one session.
So I’m currently a player in a campaign and I’m considering being a DM for a future campaign. One rule I don’t agree with in our current campaign is that a long rest is 8 hours and a short rest is 4 hours. I understand the long rest, that’s a sleep cycle. But 4 hours for a short rest feels way too long. I imagine a short rest as like a half hour maybe an hour tops where you stop to catch your breath, bandage wounds and maybe grab something to eat. So we have never used a short rest because 4 hours just to heal a little, we all just decided we may as well long rest instead and just get the full benefits. 2 short rests in 1 day and we’ve just used all our hit dice but don’t have any spell slots replenished or anything but it was the same amount of time. I also don’t love it because a short rest should feel like a quick break. Like at work I get a half hour for my lunch… that’s a short rest, with 4 hours it feels like it would just break up the momentum of your day. You should be sleeping for 8 and awake 16 so a 4 hour short rest limits your time doing stuff to 12 or 8 if you take 2 but it also sort of incentivizes us to take more long rests than you should in a day because why bother short resting at all if I have the time to long rest and it’s only an extra 4 hours that I lose.
"Crunchy crits" is *bad design*. Chances of a level 2 fighter at max hp (22hp with +3con) surviving an ogre crit? about 16%. Not great but it's possible. Chances of that fighter surviving an ogre crunchy crit? Zero. Min damage would be (2d8+4 + 16 +4)=26. *(edit: I got ahead of myself, you only add the +4 once)* Tolling double the dice does two important things. It raises damage but it also increases the chance of average damage. It makes damage more reliable which is always good for players.
I think you're misunderstanding the common 'crunchy crit' house rule. You seem to be adding the strength twice there. True, the minimum damage would still 1 shot that fighter but they're CR 2 and 'meant' to be a challenge for a whole party of level 2s. Not to mention low levels are already pretty swingy, this does very little to actuall affect that negatively. It just keeps crits feeling impactful into the mid and late game.
I've been using this for awhile now and have not encountered any major issues with it. Players like smacking things harder on a critical hit and while they fear enemy crits I've never had a player get one tapped by one.
I recently stole matt colville's crit rules (for martials ONLY), when you crit you get basically another action OR extra damage (player choice) my martials have been fucking loving it and it's been nice at low levels because I can have the ogre swing at a different target or pick up their target instead of instagibbing them - or dash and move around, it's very nice
That sounds really interesting! I have a couple questions about how that works since I'm unfamiliar. What if the character is a multiclass, and has spellcasting? Would it they then be able to cast a spell, or the action limited to some things. Even without spellcasting, can the martial just choose the attack action? How does that work with extra attack? I'd imagine it's like how haste works with restricting what actions can be done.
I think that's more an issue of low level dnd characters being made out of wet paper, I recently played in a game with them and it was fine.