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Shiftkitty wrote:

We had a player (Star Wars) whose force-laden PC went bad. The rest of us decided he had to go. He was "always scanning for plots", so an assassination attempt was a bad idea, so three of us talked to the DM and had our PCs hypnotized. When certain conditions were met, all three would draw their blasters and fire. Being hypnotized, the plot wouldn't even be in their minds until it was triggered. Too late, Darth Moron!

that's a seriously awesome idea.

Wow. I was expecting some much more evil stuff to come rolling out of people's mouths in this thread.

I haven't had much experience with bad house rules, but there is one that annoyed the **** out of me. The DM I played with most often says rolling up your character goes like this: 4d6, drop the lowest, reroll 1 and 2. So, yes, you're reading that correctly, the lowest possible Ability score you could have was 12. You could also reroll the whole batch of six if you didn't like it. Twice. Also, you get a free roll on the treasure tables for a minor magical item to go with your starting equipment. Guess what his games were like.

Dealing with that bull, and my friends 'rolling at home' and showing up to my games with 17/17/17/15/15/15 spreads put me on to point-buy REAL quick.

I don't feel this is a bad house rule, but I'm sure some of my players feel it is: two people who aren't YOU have to confirm what you roll for attack and skill checks. All of my players cheat, apparently -- one of them is notorious for it -- and it's for the dumbest of reasons. They can't stand to look useless, even for a second.

Thank goodness for responsible players!

Seconded! I'm DMing a group of older players right now (except my husband, the youngest of the bunch at 31) who are more interested in having fun and staying out of jail than in seeing what game rules they can break with loopholes.

Every character's attack roll was equal to 20 minus level. You had to roll above this number minus your enemy's THAC0 to hit.

Armor didn't incur penalties; you were restricted by class, instead. If you multiclassed, you gained the proficiencies (if you could call them that) of that class.

Every character gained 1 plus modifier spells at 1st level; each level was +1 spell. That was it.

You couldn't move and attack in the same turn. There was no such thing as opportunity attacks or counterattacks.

You couldn't counter an attack with offensive magic -- unless it was specifically used for that purpose. You could only react with magic as a way to "interfere" with attacks.

You had 3 turns to bandage (save) a character who was dying at 0 hit points; or they died forever. Revive magic was practically impossible to come by.

A spellcaster who got knocked unconscious lost all of his spells when they came back.

Counterspell battles were resolved like Magic: the Gathering; everything went on a stack. You could counter with anything that made sense, though.

Your constitution bonus only applied at first level.

Assassins dealt double damage in melee. They also doubled damage when sneak attacking from hiding. You quadrupled your damage, in this case.

Skill and ability checks required you to roll below your statistic number; 20 was always a fail. Having a higher statistic number helped.

Rolling a 20 automatically hit -- but only provided a +1 to damage. I rolled a second 20, and then an 18, once, and he allowed me to quadruple my damage; to be fair, I was using an epic hero.