When playing a game such asDungeons & Dragons, there are many rules to consider, based on all sorts of things that could happen in such a game. We get a lot of them by heart by simply playing the game over and over, and that’s even how most people even learn the rules to begin with. In fact, most rules people read about only concern character creation; everything else, you just get from experience.
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With that said, there are times when the group can get stuck on how to proceed in a certain situation. Though the DMs can and probably will improvise a solution, there are niche rules on how to deal with quite a lot of these moments.
10Harvesting Poison
In case your players want to make themselves deadlier, they can extract poison from creatures, and there are rules for how it works in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Essentially, it gives you the amount of time they’ll spend, the difficulty, what skills to roll, and so on.
It even gives the consequence of ending up poisoned if the players rolls a very low number. Xanathar expands this concept a bit, adding extra rules to it.
9Custom Background
A crucial part of character creation is the background; it gives you extra proficiencies, items, and your initial money, as well as helps you out with roleplaying suggestions in case you still don’t know how you want your character to behave. However, despite all the many background options across the books, you may find yourself stuck for not finding any background that fits your character.
Well, you and your DM can always create one. And that’s not even a stretch on the rules or homebrewing. The Player’s Handbook has a section of Custom Backgrounds, where you can choose skill proficiencies, tool proficiencies, languages, and others.
8Identifying Cursed Items
Identify is a powerful spell available for Bards and Wizards. It allows you to get all sorts of information about a magic item that you touch, such as its properties, how to use them, and if it’s currently under the effect of third-party spells (such as Magic Weapon, for instance), among other things.
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It’s only natural that people use this spell to identify curses as well, to ensure the item in question isn’t dangerous. However, the spell doesn’t identify curses in general, rules as written, although it may give you hints that there’s something more. The only cursed items that are caught by Identify say so in their item descriptions. Otherwise, it will fail. All that said, it falls to the DM on whether they want the spell to work in this regard.
7Climbing Enemies
The Dungeon Master’s Guide offers some interesting rules when it comes to a medium or small creature (such as most player characters) attempting to grapple a huge creature (or bigger).
Since you won’t be able to hold such a big creature down, you can instead climb it, which creates a whole section of extra rules and dynamics, where you can treat the monster as difficult terrain, go wherever they go, and attack with an advantage against the said creature. Just be careful not to fall. Or get tossed.
6The Same Proficiency From Multiple Sources
When creating a character, you can choose some proficiencies from a list of skills, with each class having its own list to choose from. You also gain two more proficiencies from backgrounds, and that’s not even mentioning certain species that also gain certain proficiencies. So what happens when you obtain the same proficiency from different sources?
Well, you just pick another one, simple as that. The rules allow you to simply get another. The only restriction you have is that the proficiency has to be of the same type. For instance, if you get proficiency with a disguise kit from multiple sources, you can get another tool proficiency, and it has to be another tool. It can’t be a skill proficiency, for example.
5Objects Have Health And Armor Class
Lots of common materials have a predetermined armor class. Not that they will dodge you (unless they’re mimics), but they have a resistance based on the material they’re made of.
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That can be useful in case you want to change the materials of a locked door. Something made of wood has a 15 AC, for example, and something made of Adamantine has an AC of 23. Some objects such as siege weapons also have AC, along with health, attack bonus, and damage already there in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
4Initiative Ties
What happens when you start an encounter, and two characters have the same initiative roll? Most cases use Dexterity to make this decision — the character with the highest Dexterity score will go first. This is such a popular way to decide that most people think that’s the official ruling. But it isn’t.
If two players tie in their initiative rolls, the book simply says to let the players decide who goes first, and if the initiative is tied between a player and an NPC, then it falls to the DM to decide who goes first. Still, the Dexterity rule is so famous that even online tools such as Roll20 use it as a tiebreaker.
3Suffocation
If you want to make an intense kill using water or something that suffocates your enemy… Don’t. Not because we’re judging your methods or anything. It’s just that running out of air, especially during combat, takes a lot of time, at least by the rules. By the rules, a character can stay one minute plus their Constitution modifier holding their breath.
That means a character with 20 in theirConstitutioncan stay six minutes underwater, for example. A round of combat is six seconds, meaning this character can stay without air for 60 rounds of combat! And once the character starts choking, you have a number of rounds equal to your Constitution modifier to get yourself some air, so this character would still have five extra rounds to save themself. This rule is still useful in case your group needs to travel somewhere without air for a while though, like going underwater to retrieve something rather than fighting.
2Waking Someone Up
Most people know you can wake someone else with your action, something that is useful during combat if an ally was put to sleep through magic. However, there are rules for other situations, such as making noises near a sleeping person, and it all revolves around yourpassive perception.
If people are talking next to a sleeping character, without background noises, they’ll wake up if they have a passive perception of 15. If people are whispering rather than talking, then the passive perception must be 20 instead. In the case of whispering, the maximum distance between the characters is ten feet (three meters).
1Ability Checks
One of the most used features of the game is the ability checks. It is what we use for our skills, after all. What makes this rule appear here is that most players may be unaware of all the things it implies.
Skills are not the only thing that counts as ability checks. Anything that uses an ability score counts — except for attacks and saving throws. That also applies to initiative roll, or spells like Counterspell and Dispel Magic. This means that anything that improves an ability check, such as Jack of All Trades and Guidance, can be used in these moments.
