I watched both the longer vid and the shorter vid by that giga-nerd woodwwad and recorded his points. In BOTH videos, he emphasizes, know the rules before you break the rules.
D&D 3.5 The Best House Rules (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpSzVLfXe2Y ):
-If a race gives a bonus to a skill, that skill becomes a class skill.
-Races give + or - depending on appearance.
-Dwarves can't swim...?
-NO XP PENALTIES EVER! Not for multiclassing, not for casting a spell, and not for making a magic item. (When he mentioned this, he gave an example of a king in real life asking a wizard to make a magic sword for him. The wizard, knowing this act would suck him of his life force would pretty much say "eff you" and go to another kingdom)
-When making a magic item, you have to quest for the components and really put effort into the item. You get XP for such a quest.
-All casters can spontaneously cast.
-Wizards, Clerics, and Druids HAVE to find and obtain every spell they get. (as opposed to getting some automatically)
-If your on the phone, outside smoking, etc, you will lose your turn in combat and are treated as flatfooted.
-Cool familiars allowed (such as imps)
-Paladins need to quest for their mount
-Paladin mounts can be whatever. Gave an example of one paladin
who roleplayed through taming a Nightmare.
-Druids don't get scimitars... because why does nature-boy have a middle-eastern weapon?
-Cleric gets extra domain at 7th, 14th, and 20th level
-Sorcerers get d6 instead of d4 for hit points
-Their spells are not spells, but spell-like abilities. (This means you can use
spell-like ability feats)
-Cha counts towards extra spells per day AND extra spells KNOWN
-Gets a feat every even level of the DM's choosing.
-Gets padded armor and can "cast spells" in it.
-Can't cast off a scroll, but gets Use Magic Device for free.
-Bards spells are also spell-like abilities.
-Can use spell-scrolls from any class. (such as a scroll with wizard-only magic)
-gods can't grant spells they don't have domain over
-Some gods might simply NOT allow certain spells
-Rogues get a +1 luck bonus once per game session to any roll except damage rolls. So if they miss by 1...
-Can exchange a weapon from their proficiencies for another of equal or lesser value.
-Specialist Wizards can choose a 3rd banned school to gain other benefits, such as extra feats, extra skill points, extra HP, etc.
-Specialist Wizards get class skills appropriate for their specialization (Such as
and illusionist having sleight of hand, escape artist, etc).
-No confirm critical needed on a natural 20. Weapons that crit on lower than 20 still need to confirm if they roll lower than 20.
-Dodge feat is just a flat +1 bonus (instead of +1 against one chosen enemy. It's a pain to keep track of.)
-Ride and Swim can not be used untrained.
-Any skill you aren't trained in, you get a -1 penalty to it.
-No gender-swapping magic items. (Has no place in a "serious" game)
-No rolling for height, weight, or age if player doesn't want to.
-Small characters don't get a penalty for using larger-sized weapons (such as a halfling finding a medium short sword and using it as a long-sword)
-No duplicate characters, such as if one character is a big, battleaxe-wielding dude, then another player goes "oh! I wanna have a big battleaxe too!" He says no to that. A better example he gives is someone makes a character with a blade-boot, then someone else wants that item too, he says no. Reason: He doesn't want players stealing spotlights from other players.
He pronounces "racist" as "Rassist"
The guy seems *slightly* opinionated, but then who isn't. Everyone has things that break their brain. For him it's swimming dwarves and gender-swapping magic. But he also claims, like Byron, that if you can make sense of something for him, he'll be OK with it. Whatever the case, the things listed here seem pretty straight forward.
D&D 3.5 House Rules How I do Stats (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...mp;feature=endscreen ):
-No dice rolling for stats.
-Point buy with 74 points (presumably he means with stats starting at 0)
-Races have caps. So a human has a cap of 18 on all stats, while a dwarf has a cap of 20 on his Con.
-No BASE stat can go over 15 at first level (You can still have a 17 from race mod)
-Gain a point to add to stats every single level afterword.
-Can not put 2 points in a row into the same stat.
-Whenever you would have NORMALLY gotten a stat increase (4th lvl, 8th lvl, etc), you can race the cap for your race in that given stat.
-10th level and 20th level, +1 to ALL stats. At 20th, raise the cap for 1 stat.
I started getting sucked into his other videos, but decided the day was wasting away. So I'll just very quickly jot down what I watched:
In his "Female Players" vid, he goes over how to deal with female players. He gave an example of the worst kind: "The Girlfriend", who is the girl who is just clingy to her boyfriend, has no interest in being there, etc. Worst example he gave was one who was playing a halfling with the ability to shapeshift into a cat. When the party was in a dungeon, full of traps, the girl, knowing this place was fully trapped, shapeshifted into a cat and ran through the place, setting off all the traps and killing the entire party. She was laughing about it "you guys take this game too seriously", etc, but it was obvious she just want to end the game so she could have more time with her boyfriend and all it did was have him yell at her.
In his "It's a Trap!" vid, he goes over how moronic it is to be a sadistic GM. You kill your players, you don't have a campaign. End of story. "You kill off the annoying player's character, fine. You kill off the guy who wasn't really into the game, fine. But you kill off your star player? You're just screwing yourself." His big advice was for traps to have a REASON. For me, the trapped kobold layer in Pathfinder immediately came to mind. We even had FORE-WARNING those traps were there, but we forgot. THOSE TRAPS MADE SENSE! And I just felt it was justified.
Anyway, hope this is a fon read for ya.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:20, Wed 24 Oct 2012.
