Dungeons & Dragons 5e players and DMs love making homebrew rules, but some groups just won’t use them, either because they’re too annoying or they break the game’s balance.
D&D 5e chronicles all of its rulesacross different sourcebooks, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a group that follows them to the letter. It’s much more common for D&D groups to change the rules to their liking, which is encouraged by the developers.
There are some rules that DMs or players want to use, but they know they’ll be shot down by the others in the group. These have been discussed in a thread on theDnD Reddit, where the strange and powerful rules are explained.
“For example. I think it would be funny to not let people bring their own notebooks,” the OP wrote, “Notebooks are handed out based on intelligence. 16 gets a small notebook, 13 gets a small legal pad, 10 gets two sheets of paper, Barbarians at 8 get a coloring book and two broken crayons :P”
“I’ve never quite liked how encumbrance and inventory space works in dnd. In my group we’ve been trying to adopt a grid-based inventory space, kinda like Path of Exile or the old Diablo games,” one user wrote, “It comes with a little bag sheet that has a grid of varying sizes depending on the container, and little item cards in different blocky shapes you can try and fit in your inventory.”
“Up to triple advantage and disadvantage,” one fan wrote, while another said, “Base PHB races only. Starting to get sick of everyone wanting to play as bugbears and satyrs etc. But I don’t want to be a fun ruining curmudgeon, so I just let the players have fun lol.”
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“I suggested one for my campaigns but my players refused,” one DM wrote, “It was a change for checks, when someone helped you you would add their modifier as well instead of getting advantage.”
“So if my wizard with +3 in int did a history check and was helped by my +4 int artificer, the check would have been 1d20+3+4 and who helped would have had an impact, I mean, why would a barb with -1 int help? And why would it be as good as an artificer with +4?”
Scott Baird is a Games Writer on Dexerto’s UK team, specializing in Pokemon, Baldur’s Gate, Dungeons & Dragons, Final Fantasy, and Magic The Gathering, and Nintendo games. He also has bylines at Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, Screen Rant, The Gamer, and TopTenz.
