House rules

Every character has three friends they can call on over the course of a campaign. When you're stuck, or you need help with something you can't do yourself, you can call one in.

Say who you're going to see, how you know them, and one interesting thing about how you left it. Something like: “I'm going to go ask Vex. We ran with the same crew back in the day. Hope she isn't still mad about that poker game.”

Then I play the friend. They might help for free. They might want something in return. Either way, the player just added a person to the world, and I have a new thread to pull.

It brings backstories into the game without a session of homework, and it gives a stuck table a way forward that comes from the characters, not from me.

The original: when a player tries something wild, or the story would be better for it, they roll two d20s and take whichever die is furthest from 10. You almost never get a middling result.

I usually flip a coin instead. The player calls heads or tails. If it lands on their call, it's a critical success. If it doesn't, it's a critical fail.

Either way, it's going to be epic. Epically good or epically bad, we'll see.

On a critical hit, you take the maximum on your weapon's damage dice, then add your normal damage roll and modifiers on top.

A crit should feel like a crit. This way nobody rolls a pair of 1s on the biggest hit of the night.

In Pathfinder, you can spend a Hero Point to reroll a check, and you have to take the second result even if it's worse.

At my table, if the reroll comes up lower than your first roll, you keep your first roll and you keep the Hero Point. Spending a point to try again shouldn't feel like a trap.