Five Commonly Ignored Rules in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by the sunken isles which is now live on kickstarter sunken isles is now fully funded and it's blowing through some of their stretch goals including new adventure hubs for the campaign and new sub systems for d d this adventure has been headed up by logan uh one of our fellow youtubers his channel runesmith you should definitely check it out as well and the sunken isles adventure really draws on some different and uh unique inspiration from what we typically see in your average seafaring adventure the campaign is live now until march 18th 2022 so be sure to check it out uh well you still can so make sure to follow the links below to jump in on the kickstarter before it ends and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d d including advice for players and guides for dms we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode now we love discussing the rules of dungeons and dragons and talking about how dungeon masters and players by mastering the rules can make the rules work for you in your game rather than having them be a straight jacket to your fun and as part of mastering the rules there's a couple rules that it's totally fair to ignore now we've done videos in the past about common rules mistakes which you can check out right up there but today we're going to talk about rules that are more commonly ignored in most cases these are rules that we know we're getting wrong but we're doing it on purpose so we're going to discuss the top five rules interactions that we think you don't need to pay as much attention to or ones that are getting ignored that maybe you should pay a little more attention to there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling so to kick things off let's avail ourselves of one big burden and that is encumbrance encumbrance is the rule that basically dictates how much your character can carry normally this is a value in pounds equal to 10 times your character's strength score which in most cases actually means you have no problem carrying a lot of stuff is it 10 or 15 or 20. it's on page 176 it is 15 times your strength capacity but a variant changes it to five times your strength score or 10 times for being encumbered or heavily encumbered okay so it is 5 10 or 15. case in point we don't use it and actually in d d fifth edition i will say that for the most part it doesn't really come up that often i'm pretty sure i have encumbrance turned on on dnd beyond but none of my characters ever are carrying enough for it to matter we're all basically linked from the legend of zelda anyway and no matter how many magic items and items we're carrying they somehow are fitting in our bags and pockets and honestly as a dungeon master in order to alleviate myself the pressure of having to deal with whether or not the party can or cannot carry it i usually award a bag of holding at pretty early levels which just kind of allows me to wave away the whole how are you going to fit this barrel into your backpack well i have a bag of holdings so it's going in there i think that encumbrance is an artifact of inventory management which can be fun in some video games and thus it can be s fun in some campaigns where things like tracking ammunition and tracking rations and tracking carrying capacity are something that your group is collectively interested in and something that excites you if the style of inventory management and bookkeeping is something that your group enjoys and finds interesting then by all means use it in your game but for many dungeon masters if you haven't explicitly talked to your group on whether people care about inventory management as part of session zero and it's actually something that's worth talking about in session zero it can be really easy to obsess over it in a way that in fifth edition in particular it's just not necessary part of this comes from the fact that unlike previous editions i played with groups of players where in third edition they would strip the bodies of every single foe they kept get all their masterwork weapons get every piece of armor they can scrap together and walk into a village with a hundred suits of scavenged armor and weapons and drop them in front of a shopkeeper to get their thousands of gold so that they could then go buy magic weapons and armor that kind of third edition style economy doesn't really exist in 5th edition dnd so i find that the impulse that players have to grab everything that isn't bolted down and hoard it is very much lessened and it really means that the necessity to track encumbrance is equally lessened now while we're talking about encumbrance and managing your inventory this kind of extends to other rules that we think you should ignore as well and that is rules like ammunition with ammunition there are some dms who like to count how many arrows or bolts uh your characters have and once they're out of arrows or bolts they gotta go get more what's interesting is i've actually seen this work against me i was trying to run a campaign that was very survival based it would include foraging tracking your inventory tougher encumbrance rules and tracking ammunition when i told my players this well what ended up happening is nobody picked a character that used a ranged weapon just because and i i asked i thought it was a perfect campaign for a ranger with a bow nobody wanted to do it because they had to track ammunition and i realized that that wasn't a good rule to put in front of my players so if you are thinking of tracking ammunition or tracking rations or really tracking any of those fiddly bits make sure that your whole group is on board with buying into that and not just going to try to find loopholes in the system to get around that if you're trying to get your players to track rations and they just have a druid with good berry well then that doesn't matter anyway the the interesting counterpoint to this is that d5e kind of has a built-in system for limiting a character's inventory when it comes to magic items because of magic item attunement and so that very small limitation of three tuned items actually can create some interesting gameplay where players do have to choose carefully which magic items they want to use by a similar token it is generally worth tracking things like consumable magic items like potions and scrolls and you know being careful of showering your player characters with too many consumables because of course they will hoard those and never use them when we look at encumbrance just because we're not tracking it doesn't mean that it isn't a factor in our games and i think as dms we need to use our best judgment if your player characters are stockpiling rations ammunition and you're not really caring about that that's no problem but if your characters want to steal the grandfather clock from a mansion well you got to ask them where are they putting it and how are they getting away with it use your best judgment when it comes to them hoarding a bunch of items if there's a weapon rack with 20 swords and they say i want to grab all these swords realistically you got to ask them how are you going to carry all 20 of these swords out or if your player characters want to disassemble a siege weapon and bring that into the dungeon or the adventure or start hauling with them a bunch of construction equipment or mining gear that's when it's reasonable for you to say well guys how are you actually going to carry that what are the logistics of this going to look like for the day-to-day typical adventuring gear it's fine but if your players do introduce things like bringing in large quantities of equipment the type of things that would require extra help to bring in you know a moving truck that's when you really want to actually step in and say hey you know now we're hitting the the limit here and as long as that communication is open and clear and your players know that as an expectation you'll be fine with it with not having to be a stickler for tracking encumbrance so as we move on to our next rule that we might ignore we're taking a look at item interaction in dungeons and dragons now there's a whole section in the player's handbook that describes various things that you might be able to do on your turn as well as take your movement and action and this list is rather ambiguous and kind of vague in its implications so in addition to being able to take a movement an action and a possible bonus action characters in fifth edition dungeons and dragons can also interact with the environment in some way once per turn as part of their movement or action and the list of things that are possible under this object interaction category is very large it includes things like stuff some food into your mouth or drink all of the ale in a flagon or such basic things as drawing or sheathing a sword opening and closing a door taking a potion out of your backpack taking a bobble from a table removing a ring from a finger putting on a mask throwing a lever a switch many of these things on these lists it's actually hard to determine whether they should be an action or a free object interaction and the rules even acknowledge this that in some circumstances the dungeon master might say no this should be a full-on action so it we do run into interesting situations here though with this particularly when it comes to player characters switching their weapons out in the middle of combat or switching what items they're holding and this is where the rules of fifth edition just turn into a traffic jam because if you are a character that has nothing in your hands and you want to draw both your swords technically that's your object interaction and then an action to draw two swords yeah the the rules state that you can draw or achieve a weapon on your turn as a free action but you can't do both which also means that if you're uh shooting your bow and then the enemy charges you you technically can't put your bow away and pull out your sword without also using your action and this is where i think that we can lean into ignoring certain aspects of these rules now there's elements that you don't want to ignore and there's elements that you do want to ignore i think that players can get a little crafty with this sometimes and they see something on this list like chugging an entire flag and of ale and try to make the argument well why can't i just drink a potion as a free action as well this is where we want the rules to be structured and in place for the benefits of the game but when it comes to being able to readier weapons i think we should be a little bit more open-ended here just to fulfill the fantasy of dungeons and dragons if your character wants to put their bow away and draw their sword out to get ready for their next turn i have zero issue with letting them do that it feels really limiting to say well that's going to be your action and they waste a turn trying to get ready to stab the enemy who is charging them i have seen countless internet discussions talking about how characters should be juggling their items and weapons and whatever they're holding in their hands and worrying about all these things and to me it just sounds like a confusing mess and i ignore it just let your player characters switch out whatever they're holding once per turn i've seen arguments online i'm going to use crossbow expert as an example where the rules as written say that when you're using crossbow expert you still need a free hand and people are saying well i'll just stab with my rapier drop it as a free action and then and that just sounds like it's ruining the fantasy i can't imagine my character stabbing dropping pulling out an ammunition i just let the character get away with it as soon as you get into the stuff where like in order to pull this move off the character needs to drop an item that they pick up you just lose me like i know the rules have all these real weird technicalities in corner cases but whenever it's come down to enforcing it in actual play it just feels wrong if your character's not exploiting the rules but just trying to be a cool player in the battlefield i don't see any problem with letting them now the crux of why all of this what can your character hold in your hand and what you need to be holding and what you need to pick out what you need to be doing with your character's hands often clashes with another commonly ignored rule and that is spell components so in dnd 5e every spell might have any combination of up to three components verbal components which are the magic words that you intonate to set the magic of the spell in motion the somatic components which is your wiggly magic fingers performing mystic gestures to again set the spell in motion and then there's also the material components of the spells which are physical objects or ingredients that you need to have with you in order to cast the spell now with material components there's a few more fiddly rules here with the idea of having an arcane focus but then there's also costly material components that aren't ignored by having a spell casting focus traditionally material components tend to be the biggest thing of spells that are ignored this is also why in 5th edition the arcane foci like a wand or an orb or a staff was introduced as an alternative to having to drag around a pouch filled with pinches of salt iron filings bits of wool and bat guano now one of the problems here is that as a dm it's hard to keep track of what every spell requires in order to cast it so while your players are calling out the spells that they're casting and you're calling out the spells that your villains are casting it can get a little messy and confusing and not everybody has it all memorized and although the spell casting focus allows us to ignore a lot of these material components material components that have a cost should not be ignored and this is the problem is that a lot of times as a dm if my player says i'm casting a spell and they don't read the costly material component and i don't have time to look it up at the table it gets forgotten completely this can be really important because many of the spells that do have costly components are ones with very important effects spells like revivify raised dead greater restoration all have material components and so if a player character has forgotten to go and buy the diamonds they need for this spell and then a player character dies well you could be in an awkward situation when suddenly you realize oh you actually needed 300 gold pieces worth of diamond dust to cast that spell even simple spells like arcane lock have a material component that has a cost to it which i won't lie we've forgotten about a few times in our game but you're gonna have to use your judgment here on whether or not you're purposely forgetting these rules but we find that this is one that's sometimes just forgotten by accident at the table another interesting set of rules regarding spell components that kind of gets forgotten or misused is the way that verbal and somatic components work and i want to actually turn to some of our favorite pop culture references to help inspire what what spell casting should look and feel like a lot of players will try to hide their verbal and somatic components by saying that either the verbal component is part of a spell like suggestion or that the hand waving can be done just by hiding under your cloak and fiddling a few fingers the objective here is that players want to conceal their spell casting without being a sorcerer using subtle spell but then you're stepping on the toes of what subtle spell implies and i think that when we look at spell casting i actually like to use the way that the dresden files a great book series about a wizard detective uses spell casting and sort of talks about it and this is that when he goes into the somatic and verbal components of spell casting there needs to be intent and will behind the power word that is used to cast the spell you can't simply say fuego and have a fireball appear you need to say it with force and emphasis and we see other examples of this such as in lord of the rings whenever gandalf is casting a big powerful spell he has a booming voice that sounds louder than that of a normal human sometimes there's a gust of wind or the room darkens and we we see a lot of these elements even dr strange when he's casting a spell needs to use his hands to create these effects there are certain instances where less effects are needed but i think that the idea of casting a spell is big and easily noticeable i totally agree i also think it's cool that what that the idea that arcane runes hang in the air as the spellcaster's hands perform the somatic gestures and their voice takes on an unearthly cadence in the process of casting a spell and spells are pretty powerful so the ability to hide that you're doing it should be equally powerful as well and so i don't think that verbal and somatic components should be necessarily something that players are so easily able to hand wave away and conceal it makes it very interesting when these are things that make it obvious when someone is casting a spell and in fact this is very important because one of the kind of interesting elements of effects like subtle spell is that because it does conceal the spell casting it means that you can't see someone casting a spell to counterspell them so there's some interesting gameplay implications behind this as well there is one place though where these various components of spells create an awful traffic jam rules interaction situation and that comes into the interaction between material components and somatic components the rules state that in order to perform the somatic components of a spell you need a free hand so that hand can't be holding an object that like a potion bottle or a spell book that hand can't be holding a weapon or a shield it needs to be free and able to move and in my personal opinion a shield does impair the ability even if it's one that's strapped to the hand but we can talk about we can debate that one under the rules for material components it states that if you are holding an arcane focus or the material components needed for a spell that hand that you're holding those in can be the same hand that you use to perform the somatic components what's interesting with the way that this plays is because this text is exclusively written in only the material components section it implies that if there are no material components needed and the spell only requires somatic components well now you need a free hand if the text was instead included in the somatic components section then it would imply that no matter what if you're holding an arcane focus you can have your focus in one hand and a sword in the other this might seem like a corner case because most spells have all three verbal somatic and material but there's plenty of spells like firebolt and eldritch blast that are only verbal and somatic with no material component so this means that if your character is holding objects in their hands even if those objects are spell casting foci they technically can't cast these spells because they don't have a free hand to perform the somatic components in my opinion this is totally ridiculous and can totally and safely be ignored a clear case of this is the eldritch knight in our campaign casting shield when they are wielding two axes or a two-handed axe technically no free hand and shield is a spell that requires somatic components but not material components but in this case why ruin the fun of that it just takes away from i think what again what the character wants to do and the fantasy of that character in a way that doesn't really negatively impact the game this has a whole bunch of implications as well for even characters like clerics paladins eldritch knights as well as hex blades characters that often want to have a sword in one hand and a shield in the other they might have their spell casting focus be a holy symbol that is painted on their shield or tattooed on their hand or a hex blade warlock who can use their packed weapon as a spell casting foci but that doesn't matter because you still need a free hand to cast sacred flames spiritual weapon and eldritch blast because none of those spells have material components the only way around this is to take the warcaster feat but again although the warcaster feat is great i i just think that it's silly to limit these characters in this way i feel like it's one of those things that's kind of counterintuitive in the rules because so much fantasy involves many spells being cast by a sorcerer wizard or a priest or someone whereas where you can see them manipulating an object as part of the act of casting the spell and the fact that there's this weird category of spells in d and d5e that don't have material components but that have verbal and somatic ones it's it's just a landmine the theme of ignoring spell related issues for convenience and gameplay continues when we look at the way that spells target there's a lot of spells in d d that players want to use very creatively by doing something cool and thematic like eldridge blasting a door down but what's interesting is that there are a number of spells like eldageblast and firebolt that specifically state that you need to target a creature i think that even in reading these spells it's not obvious from just reading the spell description that you can't use them in this way because we're so used to the idea that if you can attack with it obviously you can attack the environment even in some of our games we've had characters use eldritch blast to snap a rope or to blow away a chain or to knock out an object from someone else's hand and i think this is all fine and cool and i don't see the reason to rule against it technically the rules don't allow it if you're a new dm and you're experiencing a spell for the first time at your table have the person casting a spell read the spell out loud often times players read the name of the spell and maybe the first sentence and then infer from there what the rest of the spell does the spell dimension door well it only involves the third dimension and the only door involved in the spell is the door you're teleporting past so nothing about the spell itself involves alternate dimensions or actual doors oh you can't cast dimension door while you're holding a bag of holding because it involves teleporting into an extra dimensional space it doesn't the word extra dimensional is nowhere in the spell when you read the spell description and see what it actually does it's helpful to think about that and then once you know you can choose to ignore stuff that is just doesn't make any sense and blow the hinges off that door with your elders blast something that you shouldn't ignore when you're looking at these spells and reading the descriptions is that spells that don't specifically say that they do damage or can damage or harm things probably shouldn't be used to do damage i've seen a lot of people try to argue about using magehand to poke an enemy in the eye or to use create or destroy water to evaporate the water in somebody's body but when you read the description of the spell if it doesn't say that it can hurt somebody and actually in some cases it says specifically this spell cannot be used to hurt somebody then it shouldn't be allowed to do that one of the other elements of spells that is commonly ignored comes in the form of teleportation spells like the aforementioned dimension door because so many of them you get mixed up on which ones require line of sight which ones don't which ones require cover which ones require you to be able to see somebody which ones don't a spell description for example that requires you to see the target means that you can't target an invisible creature because you can't see them even if you know where they're standing if you are in an area of darkness you can't cast a spell that requires you to see someone because you can't see them so there's all sorts of weird interactions here that happen with the specific verbiage around line of sight and targeting that cause a ton of problems and this brings us into our last commonly ignored rule that has a bunch of implications which is cover as a thing that exists oftentimes the only cover rule that any players or dungeon masters pay attention to indeed in games of dnd 5e is total cover which is when you can't see which is you can't target what you can't see but many times the rules for half cover and three quarters cover are often just ignored entirely this is usually during the heat of the game when everybody's paying attention to what they're going to do on their turns and we kind of forget about the obstacles in the way we forget some rules interactions such as that creatures can offer cover to other creatures behind them this includes your player characters this includes the monsters they're fighting also if there is a group of enemies hiding behind some rubble being shot at by your ranger they might be granted partial or half cover with these cover rules you should be granting a plus two or a plus five to their ac one that we constantly forget is that at the rare times that we do remember to use cover we forget that sharpshooter ignores cover and so we'll finally be like yes got it these characters have cover hahaha plus five to their ac and then we just kind of ruined the day of the archer fighter who wanted to use sharpshooter and we upped the ac without really announcing it and forgot the rules interactions where all this really becomes a mess of course is in a bunch of things that the rules just don't talk about imagine that i am standing in a darkened room i am looking out from this darkened room through a glass window at a carriage on the other side of the road can i shoot my eldritch blast through the glass window and hit the wheel of that wagon with it there's a lot of reasons why the answer to that question is no but intuitively the answer should be yes even though you can see through the window you cannot target through a window and i think this is a case where we can ignore these rule interactions if your character wants to eldritch blast from a dark room through a window and hit the carriage wheel that's cool and i'm going to allow it but but of course those become a lot more problematic when we ask questions like can a cleric cast sacred flame on an enemy that's trapped inside a wall of force can that same cleric conjure their spiritual weapon on the other side of a wall of force can a summoner summon a monster inside a wall of force or can they summon it on the other side of a glass window i'm not sure how we should best rule them to be perfectly honest because it seems like as soon as you layer the environment with spell effects you get into this whole situation where the dm's judgment in the stitch in the situation is really required i think in this case and honestly in the case with all of the rules interactions that we're talking about in this episode it comes down to using your logic and your best judgment we've said this many times on our channel but the rules are a tool that should be used to amplify the game at your table at the end of the day the game of dungeons and dragons is about fulfilling our fantasies playing heroic characters doing awesome things destroying evil monsters and villains and i think that as long as we're all having fun playing into that fantasy then ignoring some of the fiddly parts of the rules some of the interactions that get messy or sloppy and instead relying on our judgment as dungeon masters and what is the most fun but still fair at our tables is going to set you on the right path to enjoying the game a little bit better without bogging yourself down with trying to memorize or manage all of the complicated rules so in the spirit of that tell us about all the rules that you love to ignore in your games of dungeons and dragons you can talk about them in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube and want to join our discord community to talk to us about all the rules that you ignore you can follow the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim where we ignore plenty of rules you can get them wrong all the time yes and you can find all of the previous episodes of that show right up over here and if you do want to make sure that you're getting the important rules right be sure to check out our videos about that right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 451,269

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: nbC74sKKfA0

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022