I am curious what house rules people play with when the game. This is mostly aimed at the 5E crowd but I am still curious what changes people think are so necessary there are House rules added for them.
In 5E we always played with Drinking a Potion was a bonus action if you had it ‘on your belt’. Meaning everyone would have one potion they picked to be in a ‘ready’ state.
In 13th Age we allow a Potion to be drunk as a Quick Action if the player makes an Easy Save, on a fail they have to roll the save again on their next Quick Action.
In 5E we basically ignored Encumbrance and just made a judgement call is something was ‘too much’. (13th Age already does this in the rules)
I don’t tend to use a lot of house rules, and what I do are usually additive then changing some rule. In one of my Traveller games I added a Luck Point system, where if somebody rolled double ones on a skill check they got a Luck Point. Then after another skill check they could spend a point to reroll. You can’t spend more than one point on a roll, but more than one person can spend a point on a single skill check to reroll it again. It’s been great for player engagement, and has lead to some really fun moments as everybody scrambles to check if they have any points to spend on an important roll. Another one I use in my Traveller games is I added an Overwatch action. Inspired by the Xcom games, you can spend your action on your turn to keep your gun trained on a specific area, and if anybody moves through that area you get a free shot.
I also recently started playing Pathfinder 2e, and though in keeping it rules as written, especially as I learn the system, I have made it so that the party can only level up if they’re in Downtime mode, to encourage my players to actually make use of Downtime.
We forego all notions of hunting, rations, weight, in the end unless you aim for hyper realistic, common sense is good enough (hunting in a desert might be hard, transporting cargo is heavy.)
We modified a bit the rests mechanics: Short rest is short (like 5-10min) work as usual.
Full rest needs to be done in a safe camp or safe place, it means putting up a big fire and not having 2 persons on guard. Which means more dangers, (doing that near a bad guys place = fight for sure)
So we normally sleep without fires and it does replenish exhaustion, but no spell for the wizard (or all abilities that require full rest)
In the end it forces us to have the more balanced 4-6 encounter between long rest upon which d&d is built.
Works really well!
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undefined> too many set house rules, but I do make rule calls on the fly that don’t necessarily follow the handbooks, as I’m sure many DMs do. I am always aiming for rule of cool, and good for the story calls. In the end, we are here to have fun. If I make a call that gives the party an unintended advantage of a step up in some way, be damn sure I’ll make sure that gets balanced out somehow…
We’ve always played that healing potions can be consumed in a bonus action or an action to use one on an unconscious player.
I adapted the ‘Icon Relationships’ in 13th Age to be more like your Karma rule. It plays a little more FATE like. They get points, they spend points. Lets them get out of a touch scrape while giving them some agency
On a 5-foot grid, you can move two squares diagonally for 15 feet of movement, i.e. sqrt(2) = 1.5.
When there’s an ambush, the ambushee with the highest initiative repeatedly rolls initiative against a DC based on how good the ambush was, while the ambushers just take turns in whatever order they want. When the ambushee beats the roll, we set up a normal initiative order. Also, initiative is decoupled from dexterity – being good at turning cartwheels or picking pockets doesn’t mean you won’t freeze up in combat. Initiative is its own stat.
Most GMs I know will cherry-pick some of the better ideas from the different game systems they’ve run and bring them into new games.
In nearly every system I’ve run, I use the “re-roll initiative every round of combat” from Shadowrun as it doesn’t seem to interact negatively with most games, and it makes combat much less static.
I like that as a concept, it would definitely shake things up each round, but I feel like it would drag down the pace of combat. I try to avoid initiative calls wherever possible because I hate stopping to write down a bunch of numbers and shuffle them into descending order.
I don’t play with too too many set house rules, but I do make rule calls on the fly that don’t necessarily follow the handbooks, as I’m sure many DMs do. I am always aiming for rule of cool, and good for the story calls. In the end, we are here to have fun. If I make a call that gives the party an unintended advantage of a step up in some way, be damn sure I’ll make sure that gets balanced out somehow…
We’ve always played that healing potions can be consumed in a bonus action or an action to use one on an unconscious player.
We ignore rations, encumbrance, unless it really makes sense for it to be a problem. Our games are not gritty.
I play only with 2 PCs. My best friend who absolutely loves DnD and my wife, who has fun but isn’t as big on the game. So, fun is where it’s at for us. It makes for a chaotic game sometimes and i love it.
It depends on how tightly the system is designed. Pathfinder 2e players consider it blasphemy to houserule the way 5e players do, but the system is extremely well balanced so houserules aren’t really needed. In 5e there are so many holes in the system that basically every DM has to fill in the gaps to some extent.
