We play Dungeons & Dragons v. 3.5 published by Wizards of the Coast.
Those are our actual books in the picture. That’s the DM’s actual floor. That’s a lot of pages of rules and details so let us introduce our house rules to avoid anger and killing sprees when listening to our show.
While our podcast is pretty free flowing, we do stick to some rules to make sure the story moves along and the listening experience is enjoyable.
DM Rules
We play DM discretion
If the DM wants to reward creative thinking, for example, they can call it as a success without referring to rules or mechanics. We can’t then hold up the rulebook as a higher authority than the DM during play. See also – you can’t turn back time.
Rulings not rules
After the situation is described, the players do not look down their menu and debate meta-game options, they visualize it and react from their imagination with ideas, as characters – then, if necessary, the DM may employ a rule to help determine the outcome.
You can’t turn back time
If a player looks at the DM and says an action in the present tense – it happens / is set into motion. Another player cannot second guess them, or start a meta-debate about the action.
Battle Board
This is an audio show so the combat rules may be simplified with regards to the battle board. We think the show should have a certain amount of game details in it, but we want to avoid long audio descriptions of the positioning on the battle board. In fact we aren’t using one, just some figures to keep tracks of things numerically.
World Details
Elves
Elves are greatly featured in our campaign. They are different in appearance and culture to the elves of the core rules. Please read the game world section for details.
Monks
The character class Monk does not currently feature in our campaign and nor do some of the concepts inherent in that class, like Ki.