Stuff Worth Stealing 2 || D&D with Dael Kingsmill

i broke my nail oh hello humans my name is dale kingsmill and a while back i did a video uh that was focused on house rule ideas that i had stolen from around the internet in various places to use in my own game a collection of ideas that predominantly were not my own and or weren't long enough to make a whole video about but what was really hecking cool about that video was that i asked for people to um leave their own house rules or um you know homebrew bits and pieces that they'd stolen from around the internet in the comment section and it became this incredible repository for just ideas creative ideas to use in your tabletop rpg game rpg game oh no the tautologies they got me and there were so many cool ideas from within those comments that i liked and wanted to steal but i finally thought why not do a part two so here's some more stuff that's worth stealing the omg james left a comment with an idea that i actually have stolen and used within my game james calls it rumors and says that they stole it from will wheaton i've certainly seen other variations of this house rule sort of thrown about on reddit but basically each player comes up with rumors to do with their characters backstories and they have to come up with a number of them equal to the number of players including the dm and themselves so if you have a party of five each player is going to come up with six but because they are rumors uh you know somewhere around one third or one quarter of those rumors that they come up with are going to be false the rest of them are going to be true things based on their backstories but these are things that might sound true but aren't then all of those rumors get shuffled up and handed out to each of the other players which keep in mind means that there is a possibility that none of the other characters will get a lie but they all know that the thing they receive might be a lie so they don't know whether they're reading something true or not but it the idea is that it has this interesting sort of subliminal influence on how they interact with each other you really want these rumors to be things that encourage you know opportunities for poking and prodding into each other's backstories one of my players uh her character is like the edgy rogue architect and one of her rumors that was false is that um she's on the run because she like assassinated some important political person and i read that and i was like this is perfect because based on what they know of her character everyone would believe that lachlan left a couple of house rules one of those was doubling strength modifiers on two-handed weapon damage they say it makes melee fighters scary so they don't get us left in the dust uh by magic users as the levels go up and they say that it also applies to monsters making giants even more scary they also leave a side note that for them they make sure that melee attacks from huge or larger creatures have area of effect effects oh no the tautologies because how is the dragon only hitting one person they say and that to me just sounds like fun i kind of like this idea because um to me it seemingly having not tried it seemingly um reduces the supremacy of dexterity or it doesn't reduce the actual supremacy of dexterity as a stat but it might reduce the deficit a little bit giving you a reason uh within the physical stats to choose strength over dex i would be interested to see to me it seems like there might be a little bit of a danger zone um with regard to paladins just because they are likely to be using two-handed weapons but they also are spell casters so i don't know whether that's gonna lead to paladins just being all powerful but i do think that the idea is very interesting and bears more thought more thinking in the think tank stevens that's really hard to say steven stielberg which is a very appropriate name uh for the subject matter steven stielberg dropped in um shields shelby splintered is what they call it this is another one that i've seen out and about in different places but they say that a pc wielding a shield can choose to sacrifice that shield to avoid damage so the shield is destroyed but you avoid the damage and i've seen variations on it where you sacrifice the shield in order to negate a critical hit so it just becomes a normal hit or i've seen versions where it means that you take half damage things like that but i do like the the cinematic nature of it this one someone somewhere suggested this but i don't think it was on my stuff i've stolen video i think it was on either a more recent video or maybe they mentioned it on twitter if it's you please let me know please let me know in the comments because it's it's in there it's wormed its way into my brain and you deserve the credit but they basically said if i'm remembering correctly they basically said that um for characters who are below either third level or fifth level all characters below that level get bonus hit points some something like 10 bonus hit points just to give them a little bit more meat in those very deadly very dangerous early stages and then once they pass that level threshold whether it be third or fifth level they start paying it back in installments so uh when they roll for health at every level up they can go oh well i rolled well this time i'm gonna put you know three of those health points towards paying back my debt instead of increasing by that amount you're giving them a hit point loan a little startup capital that's all to me that sounds very friendly um particularly if you've got a bunch of new players and they all want to play spell casters and so none of them have any hit points this just seems like a friendly way of handling that spoon dragon ahaha now this is one i loved reading spoondragon's linguistics concept basically they were pointing out that 5e and you know tabletop that gds tabletop rpgs in general you basically you either know a language or you don't know a language it's all or nothing which isn't how language really works in the real world and as a result it becomes uh fairly uninteresting because it's either well does anyone speak infernal yes okay great well he said this does anyone know primordial no oh well you can't actually read the riddle sorry so spoon dragon sort of transformed it into a percentile system which is is fun any any chance to work in less common types of roles like percentile roles for me i love those and i actually i loved it so much i took this concept and i tweaked it and i made my own little version of this uh house rule i have not gotten to use it yet i have yet to find a group of players who are really eager to make languages harder particularly because i guess it does come across as one of those like quite bureaucratic house rules but someday someday i'll find people who who want to play with just that that teensy little bit more uh gritty realism sons the gritty because to me it sounds fun basically how my version of this works is that at gamestart you can have up to two languages where you are fluent at 100 you grew up speaking these languages it is not race locked it has always bugged me that that language proficiency is uh so closely tied to your race because what if you want a character like what if what if your character is carrot from discworld and like sure you are human you have the stats of a human but you were raised by dwarves so really you should speak dwarvish so i haven't got them race locked i would just you know make it make sense with your character background but yeah maximum two languages at 100 at gamestar you can have more language proficiencies from the get-go but any after these first two start stepping down at like ranked intervals so 100 100 80 70 60. so on and so forth until you get to 30 and then every language after that that you start the game with is at 30 so 30 30 30. i had to build that in because it is possible to build a character that starts the game with like 11 language proficiencies something crazy like that that is not the actual number but it is whatever it is it's a very high number any time within the game that you uh encounter a language that you are less than 100 fluent with you have to roll d percentile and roll under your fluency level so if you are 60 fluent in draconic and this dragon's talking at you you want to roll like a 49 not an 82. if you roll under your fluency level then you can accurately translate what's being said if you pick up a new language during play at later levels those languages that you pick up start at 20 fluency and you have to build it up from there every time your character levels up you can choose a language that increases influency by five percent so you just get a little bit better over time it's really i i don't want people to make the mistake that it's about um the game being realistic that's not what i'm trying to do at any point i'm i'm not aiming for simulation i'm aiming for truthiness it's like colville always uses the word verismilitude and i think some people misinterpret that to mean oh the game has to be realistic that's not what that means various military isn't simulated reality varisimilitude is something that it feels true i have many thoughts about this they're based on aristotle quotes we won't get into it right now but yeah i like living in that zone of truthiness which is why i like the idea of something that uh that takes a real challenge and keeps the challenge real while also abstracting it and adding some level of simplicity and then finally uh this is actually this is one of my own that i made up on the fly on twitter that i actually really like and so i'm throwing it at you now for the people who didn't see it coming at you it does not really have a name but at the moment i've given it the working title team instinct partly because it's the most accurate name of the the ones that have been devised thus far and partly because i just think it's funny because it's the name of one of the teams from pokemon go we we see people often talking about how do we encourage players to sort out what they're going to do on their turn before their turn arrives you know you get to the wizards turn and they're like oh wait what's happening who's what's going on what's this guy doing and they haven't sorted out their spells and all those things and a lot of people find that frustrating and that's fair but then i was thinking about it i thought maybe the best way to make sure that players know what they're doing on their turn would be to let players figure out what they're gonna do on their turn i honestly think a big part of this problem that uh doesn't get touched on as often is the fact that um the game stops right before combat right you're playing playing playing role play role play role play roll for initiative and then suddenly everyone has to stop they do this role that only happens at this particular time so it's this weird little transitional phase it takes a while they're all reacting to their roles they're chattering amongst each other you're asking for the numbers you're making your list you're prepping the combat there's this pause this lull that gives your players room to fall out of the headspace of the game and then they have to build back into it which is tricky as well when you've gone from one sort of style of play in in the role play zone into combat so it's it's a really tricky um it's a hard switch i was thinking about that and i was thinking about you can't see it right now but i'm doing a yoga pose that i think is called the mountain or something i'm so zen oh i got too cocky you know in video games when you get bullet time or in the robert downey um sherlock holmes movies when he he like he's about to fight someone and he like thinks it through and he's like oh and then i'll hit him here and then oh and then he's i'll do the thing to his eardrum or whatever and then and then it plays out the fight in like real time why not do something like that in your rpg the idea being that your players that this party of adventurers have been spending so much time together they fight together so often that they don't really need to talk about what they're going to do to know how to divvy up the fight ahead of them that little heroic quality of like oh well i'm gonna handle this guy you handle that guy give your players a couple minutes three minutes tops to just look at the battlefield take it in take in the the combatants the opponents and let them strategize amongst themselves let them talk about what each of them is going to do giving these few minutes of strategic discussion to your players gives you a gives you time to prep your combat and b keeps your players thinking within the zone of the game with the added benefit of course of having an idea of what they want to do when their turn comes around really broad strokes of like you know you target this person i'll target this person and even three minutes i think you'll find will pass very very quickly if you're worried about it you can limit it to one minute even just because then the players are more likely to be aware of what everyone is doing and probably more likely to focus on what everyone is doing as well they'll be paying attention to what opponents are doing you know they'll they'll each want to keep tabs of the person they're meant to be going after another couple of interesting side effects i think you might find happening would be that when you drop a dramatic change in the middle of combat you know a bullet rips up out of the ground this twist that you had planned it'll have a bigger effect because suddenly they have to account for this thing that wasn't accounted for in their original strategy or for example you might um if if you do this at the start of every ordinary combat maybe when you hit a surprise round in combat if there's an ambush you don't give your players time to strategize and suddenly that plays into the feeling of chaos in amongst this surprise combat because where they're usually acting as a well-oiled machine suddenly they're all kind of getting in each other's way some enemies don't have anyone marking them things like that i personally really like the idea not to my own horn just saying so those are some ideas i think that they're worth stealing i hope you found one or two of them worth stealing yourself please please do leave your own house rules or house rules that you've stolen in the comments below it was so fun reading through them last time we got so many great comments and there are so many new peeps here now there's so many more of you so we're gonna have a whole new brain sharing party you know this is the you you give a little you take a little all that good stuff um apart from that i do believe that's it i'm done email this to your grandma and i'll see you some other time i bet i've forgotten something better have it's halloween it's the halloween month ooh

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 61,950

Rating: 4.9836326 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek and Sundry, Geek, nerd, australian, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeons, dragons, pathfinder, 5e, rpg, ttrpg, fairytales, grimm, dungeon master, dm

Id: 64qTAdCnAH4

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Dalzay]

I was excited about the languages part because I've been working on my own variable language proficiency system. In my system:

• Reading and listening are easier than speaking and writing
• Even when you fail a language check you get some information appropriate to your language level.
• Language checks are made a skill checks, so proficiency can help you communicate in areas you know a lot about.
• Speaking to someone in their native language can give you advantage.

[u/spsseano]

I've been using Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e which has been a lot of fun creating like an Halfling raised as a Dwarf, or a Teifling raised in a Gnomeish Culture.

[u/Generalitary]

This reminds me of a couple of things:

The "Rumours" idea reminds me of a thing I've used called "Gossip". When PCs are schmoozing around town, especially with an aim to gather information, they can gather Gossip points. These are a meta-resource sort of like inspiration (though you keep them in your inventory), but they can be cashed in to get advantage on a history, arcana, religion or general Intelligence check to remember some piece of information, as long as it's plausible that some random person you talked to in the past might have mentioned it.

Also, there's this: Customized Proficiencies. I haven't used this, but I'm pretty sure the math checks out. It lets you use Skill Points to get a more granular control of where your proficiencies are applied to skills and whatnot.

[u/JhonnyB694]

One that I use on my 5e campaign:

• Your INT bonus changees the proficiencies that you have, being able to get extra Prof with a possitive mod or losing some if a negative one.

[u/caberlitz]

I mean, it isn't stealing as more of pirating :X

But great tips, loved the language one. Very good mix of trying to improve the suspension of disbelief, while not being too crunchy