TTRPG Ideas - House Rules

At the time of writing, TTRPG's have been apart of my life for 42 years. I have been on both sides of the table; DM/GM/Storyteller and player. As such, I have been exposed to quite a number of different games and there are rules from several that I like to include across my other games when I am in the hot seat of hosting.

Here are a few of my personal house rules that I use in my games:

Character Creation- This is specific to D&D or other games with similar mechanics.

• Max hit points @ 1st level. 
• For attributes, 4d6 throw out the lowest. Re-roll 1's a single time per roll. (i.e. First roll is 4, 6, 1, 1. Player would re-roll the 2 1's a single time and then take the best result.)
• Max starting gold. I know this is a less common thing these days, but in older editions of D&D, you had to roll for your starting gold.
• Random common magical items. I have a growing list of various common magical items that I will give to the party at level 1.
• Merits & Flaws. This helps to add some flavor to every character. This is taken from the classic World of Darkness by White Wolf.

Game rules-

• No computers/tablets/phones at the table unless specifically used for game.
• XP logs. This is something I took from my time in the LARP community. This is to ensure everyone tracks when they earn XP, how much and when they level up or what the XP was spent on.
• Full HP when characters level up instead of rolling for additional HP.
• When rolling against a specific difficulty, the roll must exceed the difficulty and ties go to the defender. (i.e. Attack roll against an AC of 15 must roll at least a 16 to count as a hit. If there is a contested roll against 2 players or a player and an NPC, the attacking player must roll higher than the defending player.)
• Nat 20's - For double damage, the player rolls once and adds the full value of what would have been their first roll. (i.e. Player crits with a long sword [D&D 5.5E]. That player rolls their 1d8 for damage and then adds 8 + their additional damage modifiers.)

There is a great article written by Sly Flourish on House Rules from Various RPG's that I enjoyed reading.

Something else that I prefer... probably because I'm more of an old-school role player... physical dice over digital dice. When travelling (I do quite a bit of roleplaying while on the road), physical dice may not be an option and would be an exception to this rule.

There's a great video by Ginny Di about death of a PC. I really like the idea of incorporating this concept into my next game.

I recently saw a video about improved healing without the need for rolling. I wish I would have saved it to reference here.

Please share your favorite house rules in the comments section below. I'd love to see what other rules are popular in your games.