More D&D Rules EVERYONE Ignores

Our campaigns use Electrum as a mean joke. "You find five-thousand gold points of coins in the loot purse. They look kind of weird though. . . When you try to spend them, the vendor gets confused. He's never seen these before. . . The banker says they're Electrum. She'll store them, but you won't earn interest and you can't withdraw them like currency. There'll also be a storage fee." Stuff like that. It's all in fun.

Be me a forever DM Starts adding annoying rules like carrying capacity and encumbrance to try not be DM anymore turns out my players loved the realism and now I will never not be the DM

Use electrum as an "ancient currency" Like when your players search ancient ruins they would find electrum. No shop would accept it but some collector or historic would trade it for even more than it's worth in the PHB

"No one has heard of Electrum." I have, way back in 1st edition. It had the exact same problems back then.

I can understand everyone's dislike of electrum but it makes perfect sense if you know a little bit about what it's made of. It's an alloy of gold and silver so it makes perfect sense that it would be a halfway point between the two.

The only time I've seen Electrum actually used was in Curse of Strahd in Barovia and our party decided that Strahd truly was an evil man for forcing his people to use that currency.

As a DM, I mostly dismiss encumbrance rules unless my players try to carry an unreasonable amount of stuff. Taking the bandit captain’s scale mail doesn’t mean a weight check, but trying to walk around hauling 12 sets of half plate, I had a player try to do that, means we pull out the calculator. I’ll make them track their money if they want to carry thousands of coins, but I also provide the option to buy a homebrew Magic Item called the Coinpurse of Holding. For just 1 pound of weight, all your coins and trade bars, I use those too, are tucked away in a convenient pocket plane. They can carry as much money as they want without getting encumbered and thieves are a lot more interesting NPCs to use.

If gold is twice as heavy (by volume) as silver and the coins weigh the same, I assume that gold is twenty times the value of silver by weight, so a gold coin is smaller than a silver.

Our archer goes through 3-6 arrows PER ROUND. The quiver holds 20. The bag of holding takes a FULL ACTION to retrieve another bundle of arrows and put them in the quiver. This makes strategy in even mid-length combats meaningful. (another character trained his monkey to refill the quiver. I allowed it!)

electrum is honestly something they should keep, just because of how it real how there's always one dumb thing breaking the pattern

5:45 I once had a character so poor that he just couldn't eat for days... I kept track at how long it would take him before he started gaining levels of exhaustion, so one day I had him boil and eat his own boots. Good thing he was a Goliath with good Con, so being barefoot was not much of a real hinderance. I then found out that like a single chicken is only a few copper each, instead of 5sp for a ration or something similar for inn food, so he finally could eat daily again and not starve in the middle of Waterdeep!

Darkvision in darkness only gives disadvantage to perception rolls that require sight. Remember, being invisible doesn't give advantage to stealth rolls. Being blind doesn't make you auto fail perception checks to notice enemies either, for the same reason. .

I was in a campaign that used encumberance as well as coin weight. It was miserable. The only person who wasn't constantly struggling with weight limits was the barbarian. Every 50 gold was a pound, which is also the cost per spell level for a wizard to copy a spell into their spellbook. The GM also ruled most places couldn't neatly exchange silver to gold, if at all, because most businesses operate using silver and copper (despite the fact almost everything you can buy in the 5e books costs at least 1 gold). So if you wanted to copy three 3rd level spells into your spellbook, you had to be lugging 90 pounds of silver pieces around with you while you searched for your spells of choice. Along with your 11 pound scholar's pack, 4 pound quarterstaff, 5 pound light crossbow, 4 pound robe, and 3 pound spellbook. Someone literally multiclassed into artificer so they could make a bag of holding to use as a glorified wallet because so much of the campaign became struggling with small change. Imagine carrying all of the dimes with you that it would take to afford a gaming laptop.

This has been the most real video I've seen on ignored rules. Some of them are so used to being ignored that you forget they are rules in the first place.

Fun fact, I actually made it through the entire Tomb of Annihilation hardcover/module as an archer character tracking ammunition as per PHB, including recovery rules, as a sort of self-imposed challenge. I still ended up doing crazy dps the entire time.

I like electrum pieces ever since I learned it's a real thing, it's a natural alloy of Silver and Gold that can be found in the wild. I also always keep track of my own ammunition amount, even if I never enforce my players to do so when I dm.

I've always used electrum as "tokens of favor" that a guild or crime ring might use rather than a currency. Think continental coins from John Wick. They aren't technically money but access to certain perks.

When it comes to lifestyle expenses, numerous spells and abilities make surviving for free absolutely trivial. On the other hand, it's also reasonable that most characters would want some kind of a lifestyle for the same reason you and I spent our money on computers and furniture instead of choosing to live in a cardboard shack.

A rule that dm's forget is that a one is not a atimatic fail this kinda stuff makes a 1 a billion times worse than a 2

Oh my friend, I use 'hardcore' currency, classic British standard rates: 12 coppers (pence) per silver (shillings), 20 silver per gold (pound). I typically don't bother with electrum still there, but I've used the traditional 2 EP per GP and a more flexible intermediate 4 EP per GP - they're just denominations of coins, after all, though I like to keep it simple. Fun fact - the later, more consistent denominations held the shilling coins at 1/20th of a pound (0.8 ounces), meaning that the gold pound coin was literally worth one pound of silver - hence Pound Sterling (Silver). Players usually are resistant to it initially having grown up with decimalized currencies, but usually find it easier to divide up amongst each other after a little bit of familiarization, since 240 (the number of coppers/pennies per gold/pound) is a highly composite number. It's really useful in parties of 3 or 4.