Some games are great as-is, the rules-as-written, no changes necessary. Other games are horrible, and after one session, you never touch them again. Still other games have a nugget of something great but require tweaking in order to make them more enjoyable. We call those tweaks we make “house rules,” because we use them in our houses for our groups, and they’re not necessarily things another group would (or should) adopt when playing the same game.
House rules run the gamut for all sorts of games, from ways to bet in poker, to buying property in Monopoly, to generating ability scores in D&D. Sometimes house rules become so pervasive they actually become part of the rules in future iterations of the game. Sometimes a house rule is as simple as ignoring a rule, for whatever reason, instead of making up a new one.
We play a lot of games in my household, and we have a lot of house rules because of the range of ages between our children. We don’t like to exclude them if we can avoid it, so we adapt things to accommodate them all, from the 10-year-old to the 21-year-old. Skill level is a factor with us when deciding house rules for a game, as is how complicated the rules are to understand.
For example, we play a game called Michigan Rummy. It’s a commercial game you can buy at Kmart, Walmart, or Target, with fairly simple rules. Deal out all the cards, play the cards in order, if you play a card or cards pictured on the board, you get the chips. Play all your cards, you win the kitty. (There’s more to it, of course, but I don’t want to bore you with ALL the rules.) However, before play begins but after the cards are dealt, everyone bets on the best five cards in their hand as in poker.
My kids don’t comprehend the rules to poker. I’ve tried – even with the oldest – but they just don’t get it. So we always leave that part out. We don’t put chips on the poker space, and we don’t bid on the poker hand. That’s a rule that’s just too complicated for everyone involved, so we leave it out so everyone can enjoy the rest of the game.
We have house rules for Boggle as well. For those of you that don’t know, Boggle is a grid with cubes covered in letters, and you have a set amount of time to make words from the connected letters. The letters must be connected in order, and you cannot reuse a particular cube in the same word. If more than one person has the same word, no one scores any points for that word.
We have a 10-year-old playing, a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, a 21-year-old (when she’s visiting), and myself and my wife (both 42). Needless to say, the size of our respective vocabularies varies widely. It would never be fun for the youngest to play with the rules-as-written, because she would never get the big words that would rack up the points. Conversely, the older ones would always stomp her by loading up on the little words and cancelling all her points. So we have some house rules.
The youngest is the only one allowed to score three-letter words. Everyone else has a four-letter-word minimum. We limit a game to 50 points, but I have to reach 75 points (before anyone else reaches 50 points) in order to win. When they get tired of losing, they impose a five-letter-word minimum on me. I still always win, but everyone from the youngest to the oldest has fun and feels a sense of accomplishment.
Years ago when I was little, my grandparents played Scrabble with me, but we never used the board. They called it Speed Scrabble, and we would make our own respective crossword diagrams using a hand of tiles, forcing everyone to draw another tile whenever you used all of yours, calling out “take one.” When all the tiles were gone, whoever used all their tiles was the winner; then you scored your points, and the winner got points for all the unused tiles from the other players.
That was in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Now there’s a nearly identical game called Bananagrams that uses cute banana-related lingo but is essentially what I grew up calling Speed Scrabble. That’s just one example of house rules that grew into a proper game in its own right.
Pathfinder is another example, essentially “D&D 3.75,” as people called it in the beginning. Problematic rules for D&D 3E/3.5 were house ruled by the employees at Paizo, and it became a fully-fleshed game that is (arguably) more popular now than D&D. And each edition of D&D was really just the evolution of house rules into canon, from rolling an extra d6 and dropping the lowest score when generating ability scores, to allowing elves and dwarves to advance past their class level limits.
My online Darksun game has house rules for lingering wounds that impose a penalty if you drop below 0 hit points. The DM felt the danger and grittiness of Darksun from previous editions wasn’t accurately reflected in the 4E rules, so he added that level of difficulty to achieve the atmosphere he wanted to portray. I don’t remember which game designer it was, but one of them said in his Darksun games, characters only had one healing surge per day. If all the players are in agreement, that’s great.
For my online Planescape game, we have a house rule for critical fumbles. If rolling a 20 on a d20 gets you a critical hit and the potential for extra damage, then rolling a 1 on a d20 is a critical fumble, with the potential for catastrophic failure. Typically it’s a broken weapon, which I’ve found is a great way to alleviate the characters of their treasure hoards, spur roleplaying, and make the Craft and Profession skills more attractive.
As I look at the playtest rules for D&D Next, I see things I know I’ll house rule when the game comes to fruition, assuming they stay as rules. Right off the bat, I’ve thrown out the limits on ability scores – min-maxing is part of the fun, in my opinion, and characters are supposed to be heroic in stature and abilities. As we play, if I find that change skews the DCs for ability checks and saving throws, I’ll likely house rule those as well, bumping them up.
Another thing I’ve house ruled is critical hits. In the latest iteration, you simply roll an extra die of the damage die. The version before that had you deal maximum damage. I’m sticking with that, because of the disappointment my players have had time and again from 3E/3.5E, and would have from those rules-as-written. In 3E/3.5E, when you roll a 20, you have to confirm the critical by rolling to hit again; if you don’t hit, it wasn’t a critical hit, and if you do, you roll damage twice. But the excitement of scoring a critical hit is diminished by rolling piddly damage on both rolls.
In my opinion, simply rolling an extra die sets the player up for the same kind of disappointment – rolling a 1 for extra damage doesn’t make you cheer for the critical hit. In 4E the damage is maximized, and that always seems to bring a smile to my players’ faces, and that’s what I like to see. I read in an email from Kobold Press some advice that Teos Abadia (Alphastream) gave that really resonated with me: “…we should watch the players and from them pick up cues on what will work best.”
Words to house rule by.
House rules run the gamut for all sorts of games, from ways to bet in poker, to buying property in Monopoly, to generating ability scores in D&D. Sometimes house rules become so pervasive they actually become part of the rules in future iterations of the game. Sometimes a house rule is as simple as ignoring a rule, for whatever reason, instead of making up a new one.
We play a lot of games in my household, and we have a lot of house rules because of the range of ages between our children. We don’t like to exclude them if we can avoid it, so we adapt things to accommodate them all, from the 10-year-old to the 21-year-old. Skill level is a factor with us when deciding house rules for a game, as is how complicated the rules are to understand.
For example, we play a game called Michigan Rummy. It’s a commercial game you can buy at Kmart, Walmart, or Target, with fairly simple rules. Deal out all the cards, play the cards in order, if you play a card or cards pictured on the board, you get the chips. Play all your cards, you win the kitty. (There’s more to it, of course, but I don’t want to bore you with ALL the rules.) However, before play begins but after the cards are dealt, everyone bets on the best five cards in their hand as in poker.
My kids don’t comprehend the rules to poker. I’ve tried – even with the oldest – but they just don’t get it. So we always leave that part out. We don’t put chips on the poker space, and we don’t bid on the poker hand. That’s a rule that’s just too complicated for everyone involved, so we leave it out so everyone can enjoy the rest of the game.
We have house rules for Boggle as well. For those of you that don’t know, Boggle is a grid with cubes covered in letters, and you have a set amount of time to make words from the connected letters. The letters must be connected in order, and you cannot reuse a particular cube in the same word. If more than one person has the same word, no one scores any points for that word.
We have a 10-year-old playing, a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, a 21-year-old (when she’s visiting), and myself and my wife (both 42). Needless to say, the size of our respective vocabularies varies widely. It would never be fun for the youngest to play with the rules-as-written, because she would never get the big words that would rack up the points. Conversely, the older ones would always stomp her by loading up on the little words and cancelling all her points. So we have some house rules.
The youngest is the only one allowed to score three-letter words. Everyone else has a four-letter-word minimum. We limit a game to 50 points, but I have to reach 75 points (before anyone else reaches 50 points) in order to win. When they get tired of losing, they impose a five-letter-word minimum on me. I still always win, but everyone from the youngest to the oldest has fun and feels a sense of accomplishment.
Years ago when I was little, my grandparents played Scrabble with me, but we never used the board. They called it Speed Scrabble, and we would make our own respective crossword diagrams using a hand of tiles, forcing everyone to draw another tile whenever you used all of yours, calling out “take one.” When all the tiles were gone, whoever used all their tiles was the winner; then you scored your points, and the winner got points for all the unused tiles from the other players.
That was in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Now there’s a nearly identical game called Bananagrams that uses cute banana-related lingo but is essentially what I grew up calling Speed Scrabble. That’s just one example of house rules that grew into a proper game in its own right.
Pathfinder is another example, essentially “D&D 3.75,” as people called it in the beginning. Problematic rules for D&D 3E/3.5 were house ruled by the employees at Paizo, and it became a fully-fleshed game that is (arguably) more popular now than D&D. And each edition of D&D was really just the evolution of house rules into canon, from rolling an extra d6 and dropping the lowest score when generating ability scores, to allowing elves and dwarves to advance past their class level limits.
My online Darksun game has house rules for lingering wounds that impose a penalty if you drop below 0 hit points. The DM felt the danger and grittiness of Darksun from previous editions wasn’t accurately reflected in the 4E rules, so he added that level of difficulty to achieve the atmosphere he wanted to portray. I don’t remember which game designer it was, but one of them said in his Darksun games, characters only had one healing surge per day. If all the players are in agreement, that’s great.
For my online Planescape game, we have a house rule for critical fumbles. If rolling a 20 on a d20 gets you a critical hit and the potential for extra damage, then rolling a 1 on a d20 is a critical fumble, with the potential for catastrophic failure. Typically it’s a broken weapon, which I’ve found is a great way to alleviate the characters of their treasure hoards, spur roleplaying, and make the Craft and Profession skills more attractive.
As I look at the playtest rules for D&D Next, I see things I know I’ll house rule when the game comes to fruition, assuming they stay as rules. Right off the bat, I’ve thrown out the limits on ability scores – min-maxing is part of the fun, in my opinion, and characters are supposed to be heroic in stature and abilities. As we play, if I find that change skews the DCs for ability checks and saving throws, I’ll likely house rule those as well, bumping them up.
Another thing I’ve house ruled is critical hits. In the latest iteration, you simply roll an extra die of the damage die. The version before that had you deal maximum damage. I’m sticking with that, because of the disappointment my players have had time and again from 3E/3.5E, and would have from those rules-as-written. In 3E/3.5E, when you roll a 20, you have to confirm the critical by rolling to hit again; if you don’t hit, it wasn’t a critical hit, and if you do, you roll damage twice. But the excitement of scoring a critical hit is diminished by rolling piddly damage on both rolls.
In my opinion, simply rolling an extra die sets the player up for the same kind of disappointment – rolling a 1 for extra damage doesn’t make you cheer for the critical hit. In 4E the damage is maximized, and that always seems to bring a smile to my players’ faces, and that’s what I like to see. I read in an email from Kobold Press some advice that Teos Abadia (Alphastream) gave that really resonated with me: “…we should watch the players and from them pick up cues on what will work best.”
Words to house rule by.
