D&D: The Weirdest Rules & Tricks That Will Make Your DM Sigh
One of the places where D&D 5th Edition’s rules break down the hardest is with Advantage and Disadvantage. DMs hate these weird tricks.
Seriously though, these are some real technicalities that work if you play the game strictly by the rules. They don’t make sense if you apply real-life logic to them. But this is gaming, real-life logic was never even in the building. It was all just “let the DM figure it out” under a mask the whole time.
So just keep that in mind when trying to pull off this sort of shenanigan. You want to make sure you do it in the fun kind of way, not the annoying pedant way that would get Brian Cox to pistol whip you like he threatened to do in Super Troopers and should have done in Succession.
At Extreme Range? Cast Darkness!
Archery is a powerful option in D&D. You can attack while your enemy is all the way over there. Though you do take a penalty for shooting at someone out at long range.
Unless, of course, you can’t see them and they can’t see you.
That’s right, by the rules of 5th Edition, as they are written, two blindfolded archers at long range are much more accurate when trying to hit each other than if they could see each other clearly. This is because any instance of advantage cancels out any instance of disadvantage.
So the advantage of being an “unseen attacker” cancels out the disadvantage of being at long range. Now, you can’t just convince your target to put on a blindfold to be a good sport. But you can cast a spell like Darkness or Fog Cloud. Nothing like surrounding yourself with impenetrable darkness so you can’t see your target to make you a much better marksman at long range! This same trick can help deal with being poisoned, slowed, or any other condition that grants you disadvantage.
Facing a Gelatinous Cube? Try Grappling
One of the deadliest low-level monsters is the living cube made up entirely of acid known as the Gelatinous Cube. These cubed oozes can completely engulf and dissolve anything they can engulf, which they can do merely by surging forward. It’s a deadly attack that can incapacitate multiple party members at once.
This is why the thing to do against the living cube made of flesh-dissolving acid is to grapple it with your bare hands. Because grappling a creature only takes a free hand. And if you do it, the target gains the “grappled” condition, which means the Gelatinous Cube can’t move, which means that the Gelatinous Cube can’t use its deadliest attack, Engulf. Because Engulfing a target requires the cube to be able to move.
Grapple the acid cube and you shut it down, and Rules as Written, there’s no damage for merely touching the acidic ooze, only for being engulfed (or slammed) by it. Of course, it can still use a slam attack, but that’s much easier to deal with.
Need to Make a Big Jump? Transform Into an Elephant
You can change into anything with a high enough strength. But the elephant feels especially heinous, given how reality works. But if you need to make a jump, it’s entirely dependent on your Strength ability score. As the Rules are Written, an Elephant can make a nine-foot jump, while something more agile but physically weaker, like, say, a cat, can’t jump even a little.
What’s your favorite weird trick that makes absolutely no sense?
