The Most Commonly Changed Rules in D&D

all right look I've been peeping around the ttrpg community lately and it's been just a lot of discourse about rules and you know I guess I just wanted to add some more to that fire because I'm a helpful individual so I went on Twitter to ask the hard-hitting questions really I just wanted to see what everybody had to say because Twitter's the best place for discussion like really it's it's a it's a place to learn and grow and communicate with the people around you no what am I saying it's a it's a place for Pure content look at all this stuff that I could talk about now but yeah I've been writing I'm playing games and really right now rules are just so man they're so interesting to me right now and I just want to talk about them I just I love changing them and using different types of rules and before everybody starts getting on me about like oh if you're just gonna Homebrew DD to the point where it's not even DD anymore why don't you just play another system there there is a difference between home brewing a system me and my friends already know how to play versus learning an entirely new system because yeah I agree you should totally go play third party stuff it's super awesome and it's fun and people have put a lot of work and time into it and you can give money to a company that isn't wizards of the command sometimes we have children and we don't have time for stuff like this and it's just easy to go I'm already playing I'm 30 games into a campaign and sometimes I want to change a little rule this is nothing wrong with that so if I change like 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 maybe write my own system that's effectively the exact same thing would you guys kick start that whatever we'll talk about that later what we are going to talk about today is another Kickstarter that launched right now because today's sponsor is Ghost Fire gaming of course the the the goats themselves they're actually ghosts they're actually I should stop I should stop doing this and I should go get a real job no for real though uh Ghost Fire dropped a new case starter today it's called the Ethereal expanse and it's looking pretty cool it's a setting guide kind of like a campaign setting sort of thing and it explores the wondrous region on the astral plane where sailing ships can sail across a magical sea of ethereal liquid and it is stunningly Illustrated like look at all of this art so not only does this just have like a cool little setting but there's 12 new subclasses that hail from the factions within this world there's backgrounds and spells and uh ghostfrey's Heritage trait system which allows you to build your character from over 50 different traits along with an in-depth and evil combat rules there are those people that played that uh you know that setting that came out a little bit for fifth edition and you were like I don't like the combat for the naval ships it isn't my favorite thing then why don't you go check this one out because uh ghostfire typically writes for the great stuff and uh maybe you'll like it and you'll wanna uh is travel across the astral plane visiting various planets and fighting strange creatures go check it out with the link down below that was a bit much all right so I went on Twitter and I asked what's the one rule that your table always is changing or you just never use I love to see various option folks are playing with and uh Paladin responded with I've been gaslit too many times regarding whether or not you get a pet based on starting equipment I will not elaborate what I totally feel this do you know how many different rules that we just played wrong because someone at the table is just like no that's how it is and then we all just decided to believe that person but I can't believe palleted that it has gone to a point where you you get a pet I don't think anybody gets a pet to start audio mate Ranger maybe he gets a companion I don't think you can get a pet maybe one of the trinkets you can get is like a live mouse Spencer can one of the trinkets you get at the beginning like a trinket that you can start the game with can it be a mouse like a live living Mouse Spencer says she thinks so so that means it's right we're going to continue the cycle initiative depending on who in my group is dming the rule changes to be 10 plus initiative bonus or you can pick between 10 plus and rolled or what I personally do kind of stolen from Colton initiative Israel at the beginning of the session you have I talked about Colton's initiative rule I oh so we've been playing wild Beyond The Witch light over on Arcane arcade and Colton just just I don't know if he made this up or he found it somewhere whatever as DMS were constantly stealing from each other anyways he got this new rule that I just thought it was genius we all love it where he We Roll initiative at the beginning of the game so then when combat happens the person who goes first is the person who acts first so we all roll at the beginning of the game at the about Midway through we get into a combat and whoever strikes first there first and then we go through initiative it is such a Flawless system because the only negative the only downside is like oh if you roll really high you're not going to go first but you roll it at the beginning of the game so you kind of forget and then in the once you get to the combat and somebody goes first you kind of just accept it it's like yeah all right I mean I'm gonna get to go eventually this is the order if I wanted to go first I should have just acted first that is such a great way to do it but me personally responding to that person I don't I am not a big fan of the 10 plus initiative rule I had a whole video where I responded to Logan about it because he had talked about combat and stuff like that and personally I think it's a little boring just because every combat is effectively going to be the same if your Dex is plus one and yes you can all Spencer you can get a petrified Mouse well you can get a pet you can definitely get a pet a pet rock but basically every comment would be the same uh so if you got a wizard Ranger a barbarian Druid and uh everybody's got varying different dexterity bonuses maybe somebody's got the alert feed or something the initiative is going to be the same every time the wizard knows that they will always be later and that to me kind of sucks but I am a fan of jumping right into the combat so I I really like uh Colton's initiative rule in my in my opinion it's like like that episode of Bluey Lucky's dad's rule where like all the kids hate it at first but then they try it and then it becomes super fun that's how it sounded to me at first then we've been playing them like this is the greatest way to Run Initiative ever ever so love it health potions rule bonus action to take one yourself action to force feed to someone else yeah I don't hate that I think that's cool I I know so many tables that run with bonus action potions and to me I'm always just like I don't want healing to be that easy because it's really easy but then after forget health potions are a whole consumable like you use it and it's done so maybe it should be like a bonus action thing that's a good way to get around like if you want to give it to somebody else it's your whole action kind of like that using potions is always a bonus action okay yeah I got it fall damage on my table rule is there is no Max cap 20 D6 for it and instead of rolling damage characters get flat six damage for each 10 feet they fall also minimum distance to which you'll get damages 15 feet that's cool I like that a lot I think the roll damage is still kind of fun um but it is kind of weird for to like do like two damage I I don't know I I I but I like that because it makes falling a little more dangerous but you do give them a buffer like that 15 feet like 15 feet you can still fall and be okay but if you fall 20 feet you're gonna take damage I think that's cool because then you could calculate it too like you could be like I know I'm gonna take six damage I could probably survive this fall kind of thing oh that's awesome you can switch and use weapons during your turn however you want without spending an action to do so yeah I mean I feel like a lot of people play by this way anyways unless like you're playing Pathfinder or something that's a little bit more crunchy or tactical the more I play fifth edition the more I'm like disliking action bonus action move and reactions I I really love the way Pathfinder 2E does it with its three action thing um it's just it's so much easier for like a a GM to make like an improvised thing that you can do uh just a little like one action or a two action thing we do the same thing in our Fallout game where we use action points so you get about like 10 to 15 and um you can even make it smaller within that but I agree an action a whole action to change your weapon not I'm not a big fan not a big fan I'd be okay with bonus action but then it kind of sucks when the player's like okay I'm gonna take out this webinar I'm gonna use this cool thing that I can do when I attack and they can't do it I don't know I just think that the action bonus Action Reaction kind of system it's easy and it works but I think it can um it can set up for disappointment sometimes so it's like can't do that it's like well can I what if I don't move and it's like oh well wait till next turn enlarge reduce has very different rules depending on what what we're casting it on mainly because my table likes to carry around tiny items they've stolen or liberated like they're Ant-Man yeah we okay any time in our games that something gets bigger or smaller somebody the the book has a description of what it's supposed to be it's supposed to it's not even supposed to be that much but every time somebody describes it it's like somebody one player will be like oh this big and then another player will go like this and it'll just progressively shrink until somebody's like isn't this character like an inch tall and it's like no they were never an install the description has just gotten smaller throughout the game that I've been on our icewind Dale game Mia her character immolation had gotten the ability to like get really big like like as a giant like get really large and I describe like should get like 18 20 feet tall there was a point where like okay I'm gonna get an immolations bag and I'm like she's not that big like she's she's not 30 40 feet tall but we just kept accepting it like oh yeah she can't even she's a skyscraper like she just kept getting taller uh so yeah I just think that's funny and I like to play into it as a DM because it's just a good time that would be material components for us sometimes we use them others we forget them most of the times you just burn gold to replace the expensive ones it said because I really like using components and only get to use them when I'm dming yeah I totally fully agree with that like the components I think are so cool and they add like a really cool flavor to spellcasters but the ones you only have to really keep track of are the gold ones but the gold ones a lot of the times the players will take them and then not know and then want to cast revivalify and oh no you need this and it's like I just spend the gold for it but what I normally do is if it's the first time they're gonna cast the spell and they forgot I go okay your character would have known to at least buy uh Diamond so you can have one diamond for free but the next time you cast this spell you are not going to get it you need to go buy that diamond or you need to find a diamond or something like that that and I know that some people may say that that kind of sounds a little uh meticulous like why are you going to make your player go and do that just just to be able to cast this Bell and I think there's some Adventure that you can find in that like imagine the players go do a dungeon somebody dies that situation happens I go okay but you're needing to find a diamond next time and they come back to the city they're like well we need to find a diamond that is a whole Adventure now that the characters get to go on where they get to go through the city they get to interact with the tools that I've created and they get to try and find a diamond and then I get to kind of react to that as the dungeon master and I think that those kinds of Adventures are super super fun where the players just need a little thing and then I can throw in an NPC a little bit of like the plot like what if getting a diamond in the city is really hard because the villain is making the nearby mines uh dangerous with monsters so the players have together to feed a monster and get a couple of diamonds then I could reward them with like three or four and then they feel like they earned something like I don't know I think that there's a lot of Adventure to be had in that and instead of just being like here just have the thing saying like I don't know I think those tools are there to create story and create adventure and I love stuff like that inspiration doesn't give Advantage it's a re-roll healing potions yeah I I like that a lot to be honest inspiration giving Advantage um I I do both actually so we do inspiration coin I have that in my Homebrew videos and basically uh you flip it you get one each game you flip it and when you flip it you can re-roll a D20 or you can get advantage on a D20 and then if you ever roll a natural one or I roll a crit against you and your coin is flipped you get to flip it back over um and Colton actually did a really cool thing with our wild Beyond The Witch light game where if you know anything about that campaign uh your characters have lost something it has been like away to the feywild and he ruled that we don't get to start with our coins um they start flipped until we get the thing that we lost and I think this was a cool way to do it because we could still get them if we rolled a natural one or if we got crit but it was a character sheet thing that made us remember like oh yeah the thing that I lost I'm trying to get that back and just recently me and Spencer got our things back and it's so cool to now have that reward like oh I get to I get to start with an inspiration uh it's so cool healing potions is a bonus action self only we also keep changing how we treat crit hats we mostly track the number of crits we do and receive and at the third time we inflict receive an injury but the exact very oh that's super interesting so if you do like a a every third crate you do you can do like an injury that's super interesting you could make it to where like uh depending on the type of damage it is so if you do like slashing or piercing and that's the crit that they like bleed or if you do like a fire spell then they burn or if it's cold damage on the on the third crit then it's like they get slowed or if it's necrotic damage then maybe like they're they're strength wanes oh there's so many options you could do with that uh I I love that like if it's electricity like instead of there being like a an injury it could be like a status effect instead um oh there's a lot you can play with that that's fun inspiration goes to the standard RP or cool action moment of the night but must be used before they the end the next session to avoid players stacking it and it gets used makes players want to think outside the box and do cool stuff yeah we we rule the same way if you do something cool and your coin is flipped then uh uh sometimes I'll flip the coin back over or sometimes I'll Grant an extra one like it may already be flipped I'm like you can have an extra one for this session because the coins only they're they're per session you don't get to stack them you only get one um but the funny thing is we used to do this rule where you would have a card like a like a like a deck of cards and you got a random card and it would give you a random bonus to a skill but um they were per game so at the end of each game somebody didn't use their card everybody was always using them by the end so we called it like the the end of game backflip so it's just like oh I didn't use my card oh quick I'll do a backflip and add my card to it really quick it's like we were ending the session so I was like our characters at the end of each game were just doing sick back flips flanking giving Advantage is always ignored at our table we feel it makes combat less fun party flinking a single BBG all getting advantage or the party being flanked by many smaller enemies all getting Advantage just isn't fun for us and I agree I you know I've talked about flanking is kind of dumb I I I just think it's there's so many ways to Grant advantage in in fifth edition that like just giving Advantage for flanking just kind of removes your creativity in my opinion so giving flanking like a plus one or a plus two I normally rule with plus two I think works um though I don't allow flaking for monsters that are typically like Mythic or legendary or something like that or if they have blind sense or if they have multiple eyes or if their passive perception is above like 18 then it's not flanking does they're too perceptive they're too aware um but that applies for player characters as well so in our even fall stream that we did Grace's character Phelan his passive perception was so high that uh he whenever enemies would flank him he just couldn't be flanked and I loved that was just a lot of fun um and like a cool way to have that flavor come to the character of being like super aware of stuff so I just like my characters to get advantage and and bonuses and different more creative ways than just linking and stuff and you know what hot take I I think opportunity attacks are silly I I don't like them they you know know why because they force you to stay in one spot fifth edition combat rewards you for going up to a bad guy staying still and whacking them as often as you can without ever moving that that is what you should be doing that's what the game tells you to do and I we've been playing Pathfinder and we've been playing my Fallout system where that isn't a thing and I like it a lot more there's a lot more maneuverability and options in combat I think it's cool for 5e jumping the rules for jumping are just so Jank that sometimes you say screw it and just feel left and just feel it out yeah I mean I I don't think it's that hard I mean high jump is a little weird but I feel like long jump it's just you can you can always clear five feet and then you can go a number of feet extra equal to your uh strength score so if you have a strength of 10 then you can go 15 feet then if you want to go more than that roll an Athletics check and if it's above 10 then okay you do it depending on the interaction we make object interaction a bonus action opening a bag to go reveal a potion of healing or another player can take it out of your bag without spending an action to sift through it yeah I mean doing more in your turn it's just fun um I I tend to do the same thing I think at the in the game like opening a door is an action which is like crazy pretty sure all players are shoulder checking doors in combat and it's not even a bonus action we rarely use spell concentration checks only if I decide the damage is great enough to Warrant very rare or if the players just say they're trying to break my casters concentration it just slows down the game I've never thought about not playing with concentration I feel like we did when we first started 5e because we didn't understand the rules and um spellcasters felt super powerful and then they got like kind of balanced out when the concentration was actually a rule I feel like the biggest thing it does is it's a giant turn off for spellcasters to take certain spells I think the biggest thing actually is that you can't cast two of them at the same time I actually think you could totally rule that you take damage and you're not concentrating anymore because sometimes with haste man that's sucks but I think the big thing that would have to stay would be you can't cast haste and fly at the same time like you you have to only pick one um you can't you can't do both because then man you can get in some really crazy compost climbing should be acrobatics there I said it I mean sure depending on what what you're doing you're making acrobatics for everybody the guy who's really strong you're gonna make him do backflips up the mountain come on what there's a lot about potions in here if a PC is proficient in a skill enrolling a Nat one on its checks not considered critical failure it can feel pointless dedicating proficiency to anything if a Nat one essentially nullifies at all you'll likely not reach the DC with low rolls so why punish the PC more I mean there aren't crit fails for skill checks in fifth edition anyways rolling a one doesn't it's just the lowest he can roll I prefer that rule anyways a crit fail should only be on like attack rolls if you rule with crit fails on scale checks that's a cool way to balance it out I I agree with that I think that's kind of neat no one on my table likes preparing spells they just pick some things and never change that's so funny that's that's awesome props to your players my players are wanting to change their spells on short rests character creation my group added that everyone gets a racial fee at level one for free I did that one time it was fun and very powerful and for stats we rolled standard 46 drop the lowest and re-roll the lowest of the six we are also finding totally flavoring classes have classes multi-classes hell yeah sure can Sean just play that that into that power fantasy just be strong and be cool and fight big monsters that's awesome not particularly the way I like to run uh dungeons Dragon sometimes depending on like what it is um like we're playing strix Haven right now and that's just that's just a slice of Life School anime and they're powerful at level two and I love it typically I'm more for the the gritty realism tactical combat kind of game and uh yeah that's just kind of the way I like to roll but you you guys do you was there any rules in here that you thought was kind of cool I'd love to hear more in the comments I I sure that there's going to be some rules I steal from this and other people are going to steal from this because that's what we do as game Masters we just commit theft and make our games fun for our players so um make sure to talk about your players before you just drop a rule on top of them and um if you want to bring one up to your GM you know be respectful be like hey you don't have to do this but I think this would be kind of fun all right go check out ethereal expanse that's the end of the video

Channel: XP to Level 3

Views: 343,597

Keywords: dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, how to, tutorial, funny, monk, fighter, 5e, player, book, dm, dungeon master, roll, ranger, rogue, paladin, cleric, barbarian, bard, wizard, sorcerer, warlock, artificer, mystic, skits, idea, character, stats, build, new, tips, gm

Id: DidiQM4aXTg

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023