Houserules - Yay or Nay?

[dungeon blaster]

I'm wondering to what extent DMs here use houserules.

 

[Grymar]

Some slight adjustments to help the game along, but not much at all.

 

[Crothian]

On the poll they are major, but I don't feel they are. A few altered races and classes to fit into the world is small potatoes in my garden. House rules are the way the DM gets the game to fit what they are doing. Games like D&D try to do too much.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Yes, my game has so many HRs it could hardly be called D&D!

Though sometimes (rarely) it'll just be D&D, RAW. At other times, a non-d20 system. Yeah, my HRs are fantastically amazing, but I can suffer without them for short periods of time.

 

[Crimhthan_The_Great]

On the poll they are major, but I don't feel they are. A few altered races and classes to fit into the world is small potatoes in my garden. House rules are the way the DM gets the game to fit what they are doing. Games like D&D try to do too much.

I agree with you that these type of house rules are not major. House rules are what make the game yours. I, for one, can not imagine playing in a campaign where the DM had no house rules at all. That would seem to me to be terribly bland and lacking personality.

 

[Lanefan]

My game is essentially a set of houserules that started 25+ years ago as 1e and just kept slowly evolving...

It's still vaguely recognizable as 1e, but only just.

Lanefan

 

[Nonlethal Force]

I have a few homebrew races and my own homebrew world ... but I personally wouldn't call those houserules. I suppose they are.

Other than that, I typically do the rules as written. What I do change is minor. For example, the BoED claims that clerics can spontanteous cast any exalted spell. I say hogwash on that and discount it!

But that's about how major they are.

 

[Dykstrav]

House rules are what make the game yours. I, for one, can not imagine playing in a campaign where the DM had no house rules at all. That would seem to me to be terribly bland and lacking personality.

I basically agree with this. Seems to me that if there aren't any rules that you want to change, you probably haven't read them very closely. Myself, I mostly change the things that bog the game down in discussion during play.

 

[Arkhandus]

I'm a House-Ruling machine.

......

Anyway, I only rarely run campaigns using my House Rules though, as I'm generally gaming in settings that are published or just someone else's baby. I mostly HR stuff for homebrew settings that I'm not really likely to ever have a chance to use, much as I may want to. I prefer to use only minimal House Rules in a game with someone else's setting (like Greyhawk, Rokugan, or The 13 Kingdoms [see sig if that one isn't familiar to you]).

For my homebrews, I HR a lot of races, classes, feats, and spells, maybe a little bit of other stuff, so I voted that "I HR major changes" on the poll.

And I have several d20 or D&D variants partially thought-out and partially worked-on that will likely never see the light of day, because I go back and forth between different sets of ideas at a whim, and I really have to get more homebrew-setting work done if I'm gonna actually use them, so I can't focus much on that other stuff. Some of those would qualify as "so many houserules it's hardly even recognizable as D&D!" (others aren't even close...)

If I had a regular face-to-face gaming group, I'd probably do more GMing/DMing and playing, rather than so much houseruling, homebrewing, and brainstorming.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

On the poll they are major, but I don't feel they are. A few altered races and classes to fit into the world is small potatoes in my garden. House rules are the way the DM gets the game to fit what they are doing. Games like D&D try to do too much.

I agree. I changed some of the class features a bit, along with a few other rules, but I wouldn't call them major. And all my house rules still fit on a single A4 page. Once you get beyond that the players tend not to read them.

Olaf the Stout