Failed House Rules

[Rostranor]

So these boards are good for finding things to add to your game, but there isn't really a spot where people talk about what didn't work in their game. I think that sometimes that can be just as valuable. So I'll start this off.

House Rule: Critical Hits do max damage.
Reasoning: We all thought that it was lame that you could do a critical but still roll a 1 on damage for it. So, because of D&D ver. X gaming we decided that critical would do max damage.

Why we ditched it: In one scenario a thief drew two daggers took the die penalty to hit for fighting two handed, added the backstab bonus in to hit on each one and did 20 points of damage in one attack before rolling on the crit table. This was ruled legitimate because of the definition of backstab, "When attacking from behind or when the target is otherwise unaware..." p35. So that was the end automatic max damage for a crit.

[Gansk]

You could just have excluded backstab from the rule (i.e. daggers would do max BASE damage, not the special backstab damage).

I assume the spells did not do max damage on a natural 20, so I'm not sure why you can't make backstab an exception as well.

[boneguard]

You could just have excluded backstab from the rule (i.e. daggers would do max BASE damage, not the special backstab damage).

Depends on the edition

In 1st and 2nd edition (and IIRC Original D&D/BECMI) Backstab give a damage multiplier to your damage eg dagger damage x2. In which case A Dagger max BASE damage would also equal maximum backstab bonus.

3rd ed changed that by adding an extra dice pool of damage as a backstab bonus.

[smathis]

So these boards are good for finding things to add to your game, but there isn't really a spot where people talk about what didn't work in their game. I think that sometimes that can be just as valuable. So I'll start this off.

House Rule: Critical Hits do max damage.
Reasoning: We all thought that it was lame that you could do a critical but still roll a 1 on damage for it. So, because of D&D ver. X gaming we decided that critical would do max damage.

Why we ditched it: In one scenario a thief drew two daggers took the die penalty to hit for fighting two handed, added the backstab bonus in to hit on each one and did 20 points of damage in one attack before rolling on the crit table. This was ruled legitimate because of the definition of backstab, "When attacking from behind or when the target is otherwise unaware..." p35. So that was the end automatic max damage for a crit.

I actually have no problem at all with that. To each their own, however. Things can get kind of crazy in our games. A base of 20 damage for a backstab crit isn't terribly out of the question.

The road to Transylvanian Adventures is littered with the corpses of rules enhancements that failed to make the final cut. Mostly because they weren't as fun as what wound up in the book.

[oncelor]

One of our house rules let wizards swap out spells known for other spells -- it required days of re-learning and spell checks and that sort of thing. In general this worked out alright, but I think it made the "Wizard Staff" spell too much of an easy decision. I would tweak the house rule so that "Wizard Staff" cannot be swapped out.