Worst REAL house rules you've used

[Anonymouswizard]

This...on the other hand. I've played in games where going dead-by-the-book for stat generation was used, and I would call not houseruling it the way you did the worst decision. With the high variance of 2d10 and the massive degree that characters depend on their 'prime stat' to do their rules-forced niche protection role, it's practically a way of using RNG to determine what career you are allowed to play this game, and I'm pretty sure 'our DM made us roll randomly to see what class we could play' would definitely earn a spot in a Worse Houserules list.

Part of the problem is that the default method is 'roll in order and reroll one', and it's surprisingly easy to get a character without a good score spread for any class (which I suspect is half the reason for the reroll, but even then you aren't certain to see the stat improve). The alternative method does give you complete freedom to play what you want, but I'd probably bump it up to 105 or 110 points if I ever ran a 40kRPG again (which I might try getting ahold of once more if I don't like Wrath and Glory).

Note that I did run Dark Heresy with default statlines, and it sort of worked because most roles have one or two Careers that cover them and you're supposed to feel underpowered anyway. It also worked a lot better with random Homeworlds than without, as it got players thinking about possible origins they wouldn't have considered otherwise. Still annoying if you had your heart set on an Adept and only rolled 27 Int, but the relatively lack of niche protection (barring the Psyker and Tech-Priest, neither of which were essential( meant that if you rolled the stats to be your party's warrior or scout or whatever there were probably two or three careers you could choose from to fill the role.

[The Glyphstone]

Yeah, in DH I can see it working just because everyone is meant to suck. But Explorers are expected to be competent, otherwise they'd never have gotten to their job in the first place. Inquisitors just grab whoever is available and looks reasonably disposable, and the lucky ones survive to get used a second time.

[Quertus]

I'm pretty sure 'our DM made us roll randomly to see what class we could play' would definitely earn a spot in a Worse Houserules list.

Hmmm... I mean, it's how a lot of games run. And it solves a lot of problems. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's easier to play in any play style with the least invasive house rules / least social pressure when starting from this base.

As one of the simplest example of this, one can play with a balanced party, or an unbalanced party. Both styles are valid, neither style is inherently wrong. If your group wants balance, it is easy enough to empower weak characters, and I've seen GMs aplenty nerf (what they considered) OP characters (like the 3e Monk). And people who agree this mindset will call it "fair". But starting from a balanced system, and trying to enforce imbalance? It's a bit harder to know what will break if a 50-point GURPS character adventures with a 500-point character, and the system is rarely designed with such imbalance mind. It's much less work to make a system designed for imbalance work with balanced characters than the other way around.

So, while I agree that it's probably bad to add to a game not designed for it, I feel the need to point out that it's not only not inherently bad, but probably the best way for games to be designed in the first place. So it should never have to be a house rule in the first place.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I and my players haven't had a problem with the rolled-in-order statblocks for DH.

Mostly because 20+2d10 isn't a whole lot of range on the scale the stats are measured, and if it's really bad and it's important to you you can spend your re-roll on it.

That said, I've been moving away from rolled-for stats anyway, since I don't think it's a particularly valuable exercise.

[GreatWyrmGold]

In general, I see rolled stats as being useful mainly for reducing the number of decisions one needs to make in character creation (which can speed it up) and making characters feel more "organic". This means it has a strong place in games like Paranoia, where random Red-level characters are pulled out of the barracks, given lasrifles, and expected to blow through all six clones in reasonably short order. From what I've heard, WH40k is only slightly less extreme in this regard (both in the quality of individual agents and their mortality rate).

[Stuebi]

This...on the other hand. I've played in games where going dead-by-the-book for stat generation was used, and I would call not houseruling it the way you did the worst decision. With the high variance of 2d10 and the massive degree that characters depend on their 'prime stat' to do their rules-forced niche protection role, it's practically a way of using RNG to determine what career you are allowed to play this game, and I'm pretty sure 'our DM made us roll randomly to see what class we could play' would definitely earn a spot in a Worse Houserules list.

Part of the problem is that the default method is 'roll in order and reroll one', and it's surprisingly easy to get a character without a good score spread for any class (which I suspect is half the reason for the reroll, but even then you aren't certain to see the stat improve). The alternative method does give you complete freedom to play what you want, but I'd probably bump it up to 105 or 110 points if I ever ran a 40kRPG again (which I might try getting ahold of once more if I don't like Wrath and Glory).

I did end up Houseruling it, in a way were people ended up with statlines that made them "competent" at their class, but was still in line with the way RT tries to represent the curve your party follows. We basically did a number crunch the same way WoW at some point did, and it did wonders for general balance and my sanity. In retrospect, I'm actually somewhat glad I fell into this pit, because it gave me context for powerlevels and such, which was helpful for future experiences as a DM.

RT is a weird one in that regard. From what most people tell me, Dark Heresy for example WANTS you to feel underpowered in many ways. But in RT, it seems to me that the party is supposed to be at least baseline competent (And compensate for any failings with the massive amount of ressources RTs have available). If I ever run RT again, I would probably just straight up do a point bank that you spend on your stats, and then go over it with the players to ensure everybody is okay at the thing they want to do, but are still in line with what the setting will throw at you.


As far as the CoC Campaign is concerned, it def. did make for some cinematic moments, and the people I played it with remember it somewhat fondly. But it was a complete subversion of what we expected it to be (And what the game tries to be).

It has that specific problem that many videogames have as well. No matter how horrific the opposition is, if the player is able to meet said opposition with two barrels of molten lead, the amount of suspense and fear tends to be very low. Of course CoC provides plenty of enemies that don't just Lemming their way towards the party and make gurgling noises. But a lot of the pre-designed adventures and such sort of rely on the party being on their backfoot. And that's not happening if their arsenal would embarass Doomguy, and said arsenal also works on whatever cosmic horror is lurking about at the time.

Here again, I am glad for the experience, because I learned a few things from it.

- "Your attacks do nothing" engagements should not be something you rely on constantly, but on the opposite side, not every enemy needs to be kill- or defeatable by regular means. Overreliance on the former makes players feel like they have no agency, on the latter it makes them default to "shoot first, ask after" and robs some of the more horrific encounters of their meaning.

- As "cool" as guns are for interior decoration, do not plaster the environment with free equipment. Yes, technically taking it would be stealing. But if the Goat of the black woods just walked into the foyer with eyes on the applepie, all bets, and considerations for human decency, are off.

- While the thought itself is comical, having to think up a formula for rolling against lead poisoning due to having most of your body replaced with bullets, is generally a bad sign for your "Horror"-Campaign.

[Anonymouswizard]

It depends, I've seen horror computer games work quite well with the shooty bang bangs, but they also involved a sense of being alone, limited ammunition, and/or something that scared me personally. There's also the inherent horror of broken people pursuing something, is the fact that You Did It worthwhile when you had to cross every moral line you've had and descend into madness?

[Stuebi]

It depends, I've seen horror computer games work quite well with the shooty bang bangs, but they also involved a sense of being alone, limited ammunition, and/or something that scared me personally. There's also the inherent horror of broken people pursuing something, is the fact that You Did It worthwhile when you had to cross every moral line you've had and descend into madness?

I don't want to drive too far offtopic, but since this is something I like to discuss:

To me personally, when you play something that is within the horror genre, there is a certain expectation of dread. And these very rarely hold up for me if I am given any sort of means to dispatch whatever monster or enemy is threatening me. It's mostly a case of feeling in control. Even if whatever I'm encountering is terrifying, if I know I can actually kill the thing, a fundamental part of the dread the medium is trying to provide falls away. This holds especially true for anything Lovecraft, which relies on things beyond our understanding, and more importantly, beyond our more mundane means of self-defense to provide it's brand of horror. Eldritch abominations fall apart for me, if they bleed and die. Because it only leaves them as "Looking kinda gross". The CoC Campaign was fun, but we played it in a way that was probably completely unintended and goofy.


To keep some semblance of staying on topic:

One houserule I used to have, but turned out terribly in the end, was one that prevented players from ever aquiring or leveling anything they had not used during play.

It made sense to me back then. People don't just magically learn to be better at haggling from completeing a more combat focused campaign or some such. But it turned bad pretty quickly. I had players trying to shoehorn in checks and the like to make sure they could level what they wanted later, and arguments on "Does it or does it not make sense". And that's not mentioning how weird the leaps got when people wanted to cross-class.

I still have a variant on it today, but I handwave most of the more mundane stuff and only ask for explanations on more specialized skillsets and the like.

[Glorthindel]

Part of the problem is that the default method is 'roll in order and reroll one', and it's surprisingly easy to get a character without a good score spread for any class (which I suspect is half the reason for the reroll, but even then you aren't certain to see the stat improve).

The problem is that these days we are using a stat generation system from an earlier version of the game where starting stats had an entirely different level of importance.

Back when I first played AD&D you could quite easily play a Fighter with a Strength score of 9, or a Rogue with a Dex of 12 and not feel useless. But these days most players will consider themselves screwed if they haven't got at least a 16 in their base stat, because the bonuses from stats occur at much lower level scores, and increase much faster and steadily.

Just compare a character with 16 strength - in 5th ed that gives you +3 to hit and damage, while in AD&D that got you just +1 damage.

How about a 16 Dex - in 5th ed thats +3 AC, +3 Initiative, and if using a finesse weapon, +3 to hit and damage, again while in AD&D it gave you +1 Initiative, -2 AC (equivalent of a +2 now), and +1 to hit with missile weapons only. And there was literally no difference between a Dex 7 and a Dex 14 character, both had straight no modifiers across the board. There is a gulf of difference.

Then when you add in the fact that bonuses from other places have gone down, and you see the problem. Fighters used to get +1 to hit every level, and they are now reduced to the same same scaling proficiency as everyone else (A level 10 Fighter in AD&D got +10 to hit from level alone, and another +1 to hit and +2 damage from weapon specialisation, while a level 10 5th ed Fighter gets just +4 to hit). The game has moved the majority of bonuses out of classes and magic items, and moved it into stats, so of course stats are now more important.

The problem is we are all kind of misled into believing it is fundamentally the same game, when in reality, in some places, the differences are vast. I love rolling for stats, and that is part of the trick - those of us who played the old editions have always done it this way, and because it is still the default option, are misled into believing it still should be. When in reality, what really didn't matter to much (because the effects of stats was so marginal compared to the bonuses from spells and magic items) is now character breaking (because it does make up the majority of your bonuses).

[The Insanity]

You can only play characters with gender matching your IRL gender. Ot was a PBP game, BTW.

[Lapak]

The game has moved the majority of bonuses out of classes and magic items, and moved it into stats, so of course stats are now more important.

Tangential to the thread, but this is why as I fiddle with my own house rule-set on a roughly D&D base I have considered keeping the broader bonuses from attributes but having them overlap (and not stack) with class/level based bonuses. So a strong first-level fighter might get +3 to hit, but he won't see that go up until level 4, at which point he hits as well as any other level 4 fighter because skill has become more relevant than raw strength. It would make high stats relevant to early survival but not make them necessary to keep up at all levels. Haven't settled on it, but I keep tossing it around in my head.

[GreatWyrmGold]

It has that specific problem that many videogames have as well. No matter how horrific the opposition is, if the player is able to meet said opposition with two barrels of molten lead, the amount of suspense and fear tends to be very low.

Which is why Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation are considered horror games while Dead Space and most Resident Evil games aren't.

- While the thought itself is comical, having to think up a formula for rolling against lead poisoning due to having most of your body replaced with bullets, is generally a bad sign for your "Horror"-Campaign.

For the enemies or the PCs? Having a PC who gets shot a hundred times but still lives, suffering from the pain of bullet wounds and lead poisoning, sounds pretty horrific.

To me personally, when you play something that is within the horror genre, there is a certain expectation of dread. And these very rarely hold up for me if I am given any sort of means to dispatch whatever monster or enemy is threatening me. It's mostly a case of feeling in control.

It's a fine balance to tread, but there are absolutely ways to tread it well. The most important part is to make sure the player has limited control over the situation. Say, you're in an underground facility full of zombies, and while you can dispatch any single zombie with ease, you don't have enough ammo to shoot them all or the melee skills to deal with more than one attacking you at once.

[Velaryon]

[*]Sneak attack(or any at will ability) is limited to once/turn.

I've encountered this one, but usually it's because the DM has done a poor job reading the rules and thinks that's how it's supposed to work. Most of the time when I encounter games with fumbles or automatic success/failure on skill checks with a natural 20 or natural 1, it's the same reason - people didn't read the rules carefully enough and think that's the actual rule.

Some other poor houserules I've encountered in 3.X D&D:

1. Characters may only take one prestige class. Once you start a prestige class, you must keep taking levels in it until you've completed it or the game ends (though this never actually happened because that DM never once finished a game in all the years I've known him).
2. You can't put points into skills unless you've used them or described yourself practicing them during downtime (makes sense in theory from a "realism" perspective, but adds more work and less fun to the gaming experience).
3. One DM, in a hamfisted attempt to make a "low-magic" game, would allow a single arcane OR divine caster in the party, not both. And he banned Mystic Theurge because he thought it was OP (though in all fairness, the whole group were noobs and most of us thought the same of MT).
4. Roll your stats and put them on your sheet in order (he wanted to experience how it was done in the old days. None of us enjoyed it and scrapped the game after maybe 2 sessions max).

[Jlerpy]

Re: the shared xp/individual xp thing-
One solution I'm fond of is similar to the system for Fate Points (Fortune Points? Not sure now) from 3rd Ed. WFRP: When someone does x (where x is something that's good and noteworthy), put a token in a container. When there are a number of tokens in the container equal to the number of players, everyone gets one.
This can easily be adjusted to work for xp stuff as well.

What I really like about it is that it keeps the group even, but still recognises individual contributions.

[Quertus]

Re: the shared xp/individual xp thing-
One solution I'm fond of is similar to the system for Fate Points (Fortune Points? Not sure now) from 3rd Ed. WFRP: When someone does x (where x is something that's good and noteworthy), put a token in a container. When there are a number of tokens in the container equal to the number of players, everyone gets one.
This can easily be adjusted to work for xp stuff as well.

What I really like about it is that it keeps the group even, but still recognises individual contributions.

That... doesn't sound like the worst house rule ever.

[Jlerpy]

That... doesn't sound like the worst house rule ever.

Aw dang! ;)

[Silly Name]

You can only play characters with gender matching your IRL gender. Ot was a PBP game, BTW.

This sounds like the GM had bad experiences with people who played characters of the opposing gender in a creepy, fetishizing way. Still a dumb houserule, though.

As for bad houserules I used:

• Early in my GM career, I thought AoOs were caused by entering a square. I corrected that early and apologised.
• Multiple iterations of a system to run a city. I eventually dropped it completely and just let the players roleplay their way through HQ management.
• Everyone gets 2 extra skill points. This made skill point-starved classes a bit happier, but mostly made the skillmonkeys even more skillmonkey-er.

Rules I've been subject to...

• High damage causes wounds. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, we were playing D&D 3.5, which meant that as we levelled up, the GM was regularly mutilating or disfiguring my PCs. Having high HP somehow made me feel more vulnerable than having little HP.
• I'll second crit fumbles as an horrid thing to do in D&D. I'm sure there are systems where they work, but they can't just be injected into any system.
• DM ruled that, on a critical hit, you received double damage and suffered other stuff, such as being stunned or getting grievous wounds. I later learnt he pulled that from another system which had a table for such critical wounds. Coincidentally, a system meant to have an higher mortality rate than D&D. Oh, and only enemies got to use that table.
• DM rolled the dice randomly to see if something happened. I once fell, and he rolls a d20, lands on a 20, declared I broke my hips (at least he let me get away with healing magic to fix it). I have the suspicion this would have happened on a low roll as well, since he never bothered to explain to us what parameters he was using.

[GreatWyrmGold]

• DM ruled that, on a critical hit, you received double damage and suffered other stuff...Oh, and only enemies got to use that table.
• DM rolled the dice randomly to see if something happened. I once fell, and he rolls a d20, lands on a 20, declared I broke my hips (at least he let me get away with healing magic to fix it). I have the suspicion this would have happened on a low roll as well, since he never bothered to explain to us what parameters he was using.

Nothing is worse than a DM who's out to get you, followed closely by a DM whose incompetence or insecurity manifests nearly identically to being out to get you.

[JeenLeen]

One bad houserule-ish thing a DM of mine did was something he was aware of but kept forgetting to correct.

He'd often roll a die to determine something basically caused by luck, like if someone is in a good mood or not, or if a store happens to have something rare but not really rare available in stock. (There were better examples in play, but I can't remember them.) If he rolled low, bad for us; if rolled high, good for us. But he often didn't have an exact cutoff, so a middling roll would sometimes be chosen by whatever he felt was easier or more fun/dramatic (which more often than not was bad for us.)

He did later correct and just rerolled until he got a high or low result, or after realizing he didn't set a cutoff, set one and rerolled.

---

That's not nearly the worse houserule I dealt with, but probably the most common with my usual DM (who's a pretty great DM.)

Most annoying houserule I dealt with that a Pathfinder game where the DM said we couldn't pool money to buy supplies. We wanted to buy a Wand of Cure Light Wounds. It wouldn't have bothered me if his reasoning was he felt such was abusing the magic-item-curve or just said he didn't want us to have such yet so it wasn't in the shop, but the reason was to align with Pathfinder Society rules. And this wasn't a Pathfinder Society module (albeit it was part of one of the campaigns you get credit for completing.)

[Cluedrew]

You can only play characters with gender matching your IRL gender. Ot was a PBP game, BTW.

There are good reasons to have this rule. If they come up you have larger problems and should leave immediately.

On Fumbles: Yup, me too. Critical fumbles. I managed to talk the GM into at least having people role to confirm so the fighter didn't suffer as much.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Most annoying houserule I dealt with that a Pathfinder game where the DM said we couldn't pool money to buy supplies. We wanted to buy a Wand of Cure Light Wounds. It wouldn't have bothered me if his reasoning was he felt such was abusing the magic-item-curve or just said he didn't want us to have such yet so it wasn't in the shop, but the reason was to align with Pathfinder Society rules. And this wasn't a Pathfinder Society module (albeit it was part of one of the campaigns you get credit for completing.)

I had a DM like that. (I think I complained about him previously in this thread?) We were playing 5e, so it was Adventurer's League, but same idea—even though we weren't playing Adventurer's League, and even though we sometimes didn't play by AL rules, he still made rulings based on AL rules.
Like many of his rulings that I loathe, I think he was trying to prevent "abuse". Which essentially came down to solving problems in ways he didn't like/expect/something, which included even basic attempts to set up combat in our favor (whether it's attacking from range, setting up an ambush, or something as cheesy as asking how far away the enemy is when he says said enemy is out of range). Regarding that last point, he also had a nasty habit of having enemies run away and finding ways to ignore all attempts to stop them (sometimes by not giving ranges, sometimes by not allowing reactions or follow-up actions, once by saying that he swam his full movement plus the absurdly-fast speed of the river's current, which we couldn't also do).
There's one incident I vaguely remember where some ice mephits tossed our gear down an icy crevasse, and the DM tried his hardest to make sure any plan more complicated than "climb down the crevasse with our bare hands" wouldn't work. I think I yelled at him that time? It was frustrating, since he was saying he wanted us to come up with creative solutions, and then shooting them down.

[GloatingSwine]

Any fumble rules in a D&D game. It always ends badly.

The reason fumble rules tend to end badly is because people always assign wildly inappropriate consequences to them.

You could do an easy but consequential fumble rule by just saying if you roll a 1 on an attack your next attack is at -1 (or if you're rolling a handful at once for each 1 the lowest other die in the handful also goes down by 1, but only once per die)

It's not a big threat, it might turn a marginal hit into a whiff.

(The other reason is that it only affects sword swingers who tend not to need any more kicks in the teeth in most RPG systems)

[Anonymouswizard]

Everyone gets 2 extra skill points. This made skill point-starved classes a bit happier, but mostly made the skillmonkeys even more skillmonkey-er.

Eh, this works well if you restrict it to a selection of skills. Crafting skills and most profession skills work, as most people wouldn't mind one but need to put their points elsewhere, but opening it up to everything can be problematic. I do remember playing Pathfinder without background skills, my Fighter took the Favoured Class extra skill point because while he extra HP might be useful for his party role, he felt skill-point starved despite being human and having 12 or 14 INT. Really it's much better to increase most 2+int mod classes to 3+int or 4+int.

Rules I've been subject to...

• High damage causes wounds. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, we were playing D&D 3.5, which meant that as we levelled up, the GM was regularly mutilating or disfiguring my PCs. Having high HP somehow made me feel more vulnerable than having little HP.
• I'll second crit fumbles as an horrid thing to do in D&D. I'm sure there are systems where they work, but they can't just be injected into any system.
• DM ruled that, on a critical hit, you received double damage and suffered other stuff, such as being stunned or getting grievous wounds. I later learnt he pulled that from another system which had a table for such critical wounds. Coincidentally, a system meant to have an higher mortality rate than D&D. Oh, and only enemies got to use that table.
• DM rolled the dice randomly to see if something happened. I once fell, and he rolls a d20, lands on a 20, declared I broke my hips (at least he let me get away with healing magic to fix it). I have the suspicion this would have happened on a low roll as well, since he never bothered to explain to us what parameters he was using.

I've used the first, but in systems that didn't scale damage/hp anywhere near as much as D&D. Generally generic wounds though, with mutilation generally being something an enemy has to aim for (from a simple 'scaring strike' to a difficult 'limb removal'). Each individual wound gives minor penalties (normally -1 to all actions), but even with healing magic they'll stick around for a few days to a couple of weeks, and the system does not mix with dungeon crawls (it works best in scenarios where you might be fighting once or twice a day).

Also done the third, but only when the system recommends it and applied equally.

The last is just horrible. I mean, I've used luck dice to determine stuff before, but generally allowed players to back out of their course of action before rolling.

[Silly Name]

I've used the first, but in systems that didn't scale damage/hp anywhere near as much as D&D. Generally generic wounds though, with mutilation generally being something an enemy has to aim for (from a simple 'scaring strike' to a difficult 'limb removal'). Each individual wound gives minor penalties (normally -1 to all actions), but even with healing magic they'll stick around for a few days to a couple of weeks, and the system does not mix with dungeon crawls (it works best in scenarios where you might be fighting once or twice a day).

Also done the third, but only when the system recommends it and applied equally.

I agree that those are rules which can be applied in certain systems, and I'm sure they enhance combat. It's just that they have very little place in a game of D&D, where HP is highly abstracted and damage tends to grow exponentially.

The fact that the GM in question was grinning everytime something "cool", as he put it, was happening certainly didn't help.

[Wardog]

The reason fumble rules tend to end badly is because people always assign wildly inappropriate consequences to them.

Also, by the sounds of it, wildly inappropriate probabilities.

A 1-in-20 chance of botching an attack (balanced by a 1-in-20 chance of getting a really lucky hit) regardless of skill is not neccessarily statistically accurate, but is at least believable.

A 1-in-20 chance of dropping your weapon, breaking your weapon, or hitting the wrong target every time you attack is completely unrealistic unless either the charcter is totally incompetant, or their weapon is horrendously badly designed or maintained.

[Quertus]

Yeah, I've used fumble rules, but I gave Fighters immunity to fumbles (and better chances of scoring criticals, and better criticals) as they leveled.

But, even so, my fumble rules were not as bad as some I've seen.

One of the worst I've seen made the fumbles worse the more you worked to prevent them.

One of the funniest I've seen involved a two-weapon PC losing a weapon every round. He was surrounded by - I kid you not - a long sword, a short sword, several daggers, and some rather confused orcs, and was down to wielding (I think) a rock and a pointy stick. My character just sat in a tree, watching the whole thing*.

*OK, to be fair, my character was evaluating the fight, and the orcs' tactics, and eventually came to the conclusion that this was a diversionary force, and the main force wasn't planning on intervening in this fight. My character rushed back to town, having never actually met the other PCs. Unfortunately, it took me too long to realize what was going on, and he was too late to stop the main force.

[Miz_Liz]

All 5e experiences.

Hardcore critical fumbles. Like, my warlock almost killed the poor rogue with a nat1 eldritch blast fumbles.

Also from the same DM: warlock patron rules. You could legit lose all access to your powers if you pissed off your patron. I was an archfey warlock with a treant patron, burned up some bushes, and lost my powers for three days.

Different DM: having to declare use of bardic or DM inspiration before rolling. Defeated the whole purpose.

[Luccan]

A recent DM let me try to shoot between an ally's legs (My character was a forest gnome who was down on one knee, the other character was Medium and standing). I rolled an 11 and so missed my target, but apparently in those circumstances missing at all was a fumble. Admittedly, I shouldn't have tried it anyway since its not really rules legal, but I figured it looked cool and the DM allowed it. Anyways, that's how I nearly killed the party Ranger in out first combat.

It wasn't really malicious, but I found it annoying since if I allowed in one of my games, I would have treated it as a normal miss.

All 5e experiences.

Hardcore critical fumbles. Like, my warlock almost killed the poor rogue with a nat1 eldritch blast fumbles.

Also from the same DM: warlock patron rules. You could legit lose all access to your powers if you pissed off your patron. I was an archfey warlock with a treant patron, burned up some bushes, and lost my powers for three days.

Different DM: having to declare use of bardic or DM inspiration before rolling. Defeated the whole purpose.

I can see doing that for Inspiration, which doesn't actually say when you can use it as I recall (so technically any ruling on that is a houserule), but Bardic Inspiration specifically calls out being used after the roll before the DM says it succeeds or fails.

[Bohandas]

Me: Alright everyone we're using the Book of Carnal Knowledge for this game.

Af least it wasn't the Book of Erotic Fanatsy

[GreatWyrmGold]

It wasn't really malicious, but I found it annoying since if I allowed in one of my games, I would have treated it as a normal miss.

I'd probably have made the arrow come distressingly close to delicate bits of the ranger, maybe have him roll a Fortitude save against being staggered if the mood was light and the stakes low, but nothing life-threatening.