DND - House Rules...
 

... for when the books just aren't enough.

You guys got any interesting house rules you play with?

My current DM has some crazy-broken house rules. First: You can put Keen on a weapon multiple times. It stacks. He also gives us humongous amounts of money(i.e. 20,000 at creation for 5th level characters, and we've each earned at least that much since. We're at 6th level now, btw). Of course, it's an insane PvP madness campaign, so that makes it a bit better. He also does crazy shit with crit fails. Everything from swords sticking into the ceiling to knocking hot stone chips into an ally's eyes to stabbing your grappled ally down to -9 hp so he can have his face clawed off by a dinosaur animal companion next turn. Fun, but undeniably crazy.

We remove 1= automatic miss, 20=automatic hit. Basically if you roll a 1 you roll a d20 and subtract that from your attack (20's cause you to minus 20 and roll again) and 20= roll again and add that+20 (allowing multiple 20's).
Such a roll allowed our pacifist unarmed human cleric to disarm a collosal demon from his scythe, despite the demon having a +78 advantage over the cleric. Ridiculous.
Also we have an unofficial rule- play a gnome wizard and I, as the demon, will make your life miserable. We play quite political campaigns but gnome wizards will conveniently find themselves in anti-magic dungeon after anti-magic dungeon fighting huge creatures by themselves.

We came up with a rule that if you got at least a 30 on a spot check with a non-epic character (without taking 10 or 20), you would always discover something, whether or not it was supposed to be there in the first place. So, spot checks could actually make doors and chests appear. (Suffice it to say, we never took the game too seriously).

We also used the bizarre system of step dice which dictated that whenever you rolled a natural 20 you got to roll the d20 again and add whatever you rolled to your total (and if you rolled a 20 again, you get to roll again, until you stopped rolling 20's). This resulted in bizarre things like me ending up getting a 50 on a skill check for baking, resulting in the greatest loaf of bread to ever exist, or a friend of mine getting a 70 on a bluff check effectively convincing someone that he was "The Queen of France".

All 0 level spells are free. Yes, including Cure Minor and Ray of Frost variant. In fact, all the 0 level Ray spells are a d6 instead. He has said - numerous times - that he isn't going to throw encounters at us that don't challenge us anymore, and this is going to reflect that fact. There is now no reason for us not to be at full hit points every encounter.

He's also got a whole book full of feats you can pick up, even ones that turn your wizard into a shitty cleric variant.

Nevermind the d6, for rogues with even a single caster level that's Sneak Attack heaven if your DM allows that with spells.

It will take all day to heal though. 10 hit points a minute is pretty slow, and any decent dungeon will use the time to adapt and prepare better for you.

He does, but you might as well just take a level of Warlock for the d6 Eldrich Blast. 'Sides, it may not bother with armor, but weapon enchantments (Especially the Burst type enchantments) cause way more damage with rogues than a flat d6 plus sneak attack. Sure, you could go ahead and take a level of wizard for the ranged ray attack of Sneak, but than again there's so much worse you can do, IE, the level 1 rogue with Martial Weapon Prof: Greatsword, for example.

Besides, I doubt most DMs would allow you to project a ray of frost, a splash of acid, a jolt of lightning, etc, that does 5D6 damage at higher levels. It wouldn't even make any sense.

Yup. That's one of the other reasons.

My group and I have used a couple of the variant rules in Unearthed Arcana depending on the campaigns. We've added cloistered clerics, recharge-magic, and mana variants added to different campaigns.

One of the big houserules that always seems to stick though is that no matter what DM I play under they almost always give the Sorceror class Eschew Materials for free at 1st level.

We don't have many house rules per say, except for when the DM errors in favor of players, its not an error but fact that suddenly comes into existence (making it to our advantage to be honest). For example:

"You have 30 arrows left."
"I have 26, I broke 4 before remember."
"4 arrows magically appear in your quiver, denoted by blue fletching"
"I shoot one at the (monster)"
"It explodes"

Also weapons that get a 20 have a chance to be a special (non magical) weapon.

For example I got a 20 on a throwing dagger, one-shotting the fleeing enemy. We deduced that the dagger was 'perfectly balanced' and therefore got a +1 on to hit.