Do I use to many house rules.

[Talysian]

I was reading a thread on the wizards site and it made me wonder if i had to many house rules...

here is my listing of them.

My world has firearms so I have 3 pages of weapons/bonus feats.
I tend to give non character Builder rewards (boons/items)

And give all players a flat +1 to Dmg every 5 levels. Don't allow the armbands of powerish items.

I give an action point every encounter, and allow characters to burn healing surges to get additional magic item uses... and use weem's fate point system


I pre roll monsters Init, and average out the damage, and have the players roll defense instead of me rolling attacks. I also take monster hp down by 25% and up there dmg by +1 every 3 levels, and give them bonus dice to crits based off of level. Subtract -1 from there defenses per teir.

That about sums up mine..
The result has made my encounters more cinematicish, and more intense, included some extra roleplaying and shortend encounter times..

alot is behind the scenes.. I dunno too much?

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Other than the fate points, I'd say definitely no. Nothing confusing or arbitrary. If you're lowering monster defenses, I'm assuming you're also banning Expertise which is awesome. (Death to feat taxes!) And any house rules to shorten combat just sweeten the deal!

I won't comment on the fate points, as I don't know anything about them, and have no interest. Unless they're overly involved, and required my attention as a player though, I probably wouldn't mind them.

 

[Stalker0]

As a frequent houseruler myself, here are my thoughts.

1) Do your players "get" your houserules? Sometimes i've made what I thought were good rules, but my players just never understood them and so never used them.

2) Are the houserules adding to your experience? This is the 90/10 approach. You can accomplish 90% of the additions you want with just a 10% adjustment...a lot of times the rest of your houserules are just extraneous.

 

[Talysian]

1) Oh yea, they only have to worry about a couple of things once, and as far as the changes I did to combat, it makes it much faster, and keeps them way more involved. There isn't much work on their end, the only downside is a lot of the stuff I do isn't tracked in the Builder.

 

[malcolm_n]

If it works for the people with which you play, good for you. My only real concern would be trying to add another player to the mix; especially one grounded in the basic rules already.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

I don't know if there's really such a thing as too many. I'd think as long as you have them written down so that your players can see what you're doing differently, it's all good.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The only place where it seems like you might have too many rules is in that 3 pages of firearms rules.

I don't see why they require so much space, and doubly so because I have no idea what they comprise of.

 

[Talysian]

Basically it's mainly weapons/pics/Descriptions. With about 4-6 Feats. If I took out the pic's and flavor text It would be probably 3/4th of a page.

 

[Belaugured DM]

No,

I use a 7 page pdf that relies on 3 other pdfs as referenced documents as my houserules source. A lot of that stuff is culled from ideas kicked around here at EN world.

 

[BobTheNob]

I dont think there is such as thing as "too many house rules". You do have a responsibility as DM to ensure transparency of your house rules and that your players understand the rational for having them and the impact in terms of character design, and that means documentation given to the players in official form! Maybe its the "business person" in me speaking, but you have to make sure there is a certain amount of due-diligence involved.

That said, my own house-ruling is strictly restricted to correction of game abnormalities (i.e. breakages) as Im of the position that there is just SO much material now, it just doesnt need to be expanded upon (except maybe "Psionic Power", so when is that source book coming out?).

But thats up to you how much your game needs. Remember, key is communication with players!