[Ari Marmell's blog] To House Rule or Not to House Rule

[Dausuul]

I have become much more sparing with my house rules in recent years, not because I don't want to fix the system or because I'm scared of breaking game balance, but because I have come to appreciate the cost of house-ruling. Every house rule requires players to learn it and remember it in play. That's brain-power that isn't being used for role-playing, tactics, or simply appreciating how awesome my adventure is.

Therefore, I now make a point of weighing the benefit of each house rule (in terms of improved gameplay, atmosphere, verisimilitude, or whatever) against the cost.

I have little hesitation in ruling that such-and-such doesn't exist in my world, since such exclusions don't come up much in play; the players just have to remember not to write "warforged artificer" on their sheets during chargen. On the other hand, I am very reluctant to alter (for instance) the combat rules. Since combat comes up more or less every session and requires a lot of brain-power to begin with, I don't want to make the players remember any more tweaks than absolutely necessary. If I do change the combat rules, it's usually with the aim of simplifying or clarifying the system.

More and more, my solution to mechanical issues in the rules is to take advantage of 4E's exception-based design to make the problem moot. For instance, I hate the magic item daily power system; I think it's clunky and way too complicated. My first impulse was to work out a house rule that simplifies the way those powers work. For my next campaign, though, I'm going to address the problem simply by throwing out the existing magic item list, using inherent bonuses, and handing out only homebrewed items which don't have daily powers.

 

[Greg K]

I found it very hard to eliminate prestige classes in 3.0/3.5 even if I wanted to. Player's focused on them and it seemed to annoy people all out of proportion when you removed a beloved prestige class. . .

I haven't had this problem. I am very upfront. I am running the game in a setting. Here are the races and their culture(s). In the description of each culture is a list of known prcs. If a prc is not listed, it either does not exist or it is a secret organization that must be discovered in play. Furthermore,
just because a player knows that a prc exists does not mean that character does. The character need have knowledge of the Prc's existance, find a trainer, convince them to train you and have time to train. Knowledge may come from being part of the culture, having knowledge of a given culture (each culture is its own skilll) or from in play experience.

The one exceptions to gaining access to a trainer, if appropriate, is to start as a member of the culture and/or organization. However, this may require the character to take a class variant, use a tailored spell list, and /or may place other rp responsabilities and restrictions on the character as appropriate.

 

[tyrlaan]

The GSL has much more to do with this that the rules, I suspect.

I disagree with this, based on personal experience. (Wait for it, this is also on topic)

I've built out 5 full blown character classes. Probably a dozen paragon paths as well. And 8 brand new races. Oh, and a bevy of feats to go with all of that. I bring this up because:

(a) I can never, as a sole human being, pump out the volume of material WotC does, nor can I provide a CB for my meager amount of material. Therefore, how can I plausibly expect my nifty class with only 4 power options per level to compete with a rogue, which has eleventy billion power options per level? Oh, and a bucket full of class specific AND race/class combo specific feats.

Publishing 3PP like this is not being squelched by the GSL. It's being squelched by inability to compete at any appreciable level.

(Discussion on whether this is a good or bad thing, and for who might be an interesting side topic - as well as if people think I'm full of garbage)

(b) Clearly I've created houserules. More than is healthy, one might argue

Now, if we delineate precisely which subset of the houserule universe folks are talking about, I may or may not agree with the stance of the OP/original blog post.

However, I think all that's changed is what is easier to houserule and what is tougher to houserule. Making a brand new base class in 3e I considered easy, but a new PrC difficult. In 4e, I'd flip that - PPs are easy and base classes are difficult. I can probably draft up other examples, but hopefully I've communicated my point. I suppose we'll see

 

[ExploderWizard]

Publishing 3PP like this is not being squelched by the GSL. It's being squelched by inability to compete at any appreciable level.

3PP material is being squelched by it's inability to be integrated into the monopolized software tools owned by WOTC. The inability to compete is purely legal.

If 3PP could write material that would work as snap-in data files for the CB(and WOTC permitted it) I think we would be seeing quite a bit stuff being published.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I don't see the edition wars in the house rule question. I think Ari or anyone else could've had this problem from OD&D on up.

The problem (and, yes, it is a problem) isn't necessarily the system.

It lies in how the individual approaches the system.

If they approach it trying to seek a sort of intellectual perfection and elegance, they will be paralyzed. D&D isn't chess, and all possible variations can't be held in even the cleverest mind, though you could probably pay a team to keep tabs on it.

If they approach it willy-nilly, it might be unbalanced. D&D carries a lot of moving parts, even in the early versions, and it's impossible to see how those might interact.

When adding to a system, I find it more productive to err on the side of chaos than of balance, especially for my home games. The result might not achieve mechanical perfection, but, to me, mechanical perfection is utterly pointless. I want to provide my audience (my players) with something engaging and fun. For that to happen, things need to be different, novel, and unique. There needs to be intellectual stimulation.

 

[Lanefan]

I used to only assess XP at the end of an adventure and freeze the XP at that total (so players would be really encouraged to train before taking on a new quest). That way nobody would end up multiple levels behind.

I just accept as a fact of life that once one character reaches 2nd the party will never again be all the same level.

I also used it to make it impossible for daul class humans to gain several levels in an adventure so that they could reactivate the original class very quickly. Otherwise dual classing all mages as fighters seemed too be too obvious a route to go (even if it was fun in Baldur's Gate).

Forgot to mention, we ditched the human-only dual-class rules ages ago. All the races work the same now.

Lanefan

 

[catsclaw227]

If they approach it trying to seek a sort of intellectual perfection and elegance, they will be paralyzed. D&D isn't chess, and all possible variations can't be held in even the cleverest mind, though you could probably pay a team to keep tabs on it.

If they approach it willy-nilly, it might be unbalanced. D&D carries a lot of moving parts, even in the early versions, and it's impossible to see how those might interact.

Please, let us all reflect on this for a moment. It is wisdom born from experience.

KM, as far as I am concerned, you couldn't be farther from the truth. Why are we all getting stuck on levels of balance that we have (obviously) let slide up and down the scale a t different times of out RPG lives.

One thing we all need to remember, is that our individual ideas of what makes a complete (or balanced, if you will) system has changed over the years based upon all the game edition and systems we have tried out.

I have fluctuated between loosey-goosey almost rules-less gaming in the 1e-2e eras to strict adherence to RAW in 3e to a hybrid for 4e.

Others have had their gaming life/RPG experience go in different directions.

Here's the kicker..... We are all right. YES!!!

If it works for our group, and our game, then we are all right! How awesome is that???? How many game systems or entertainment experiences can say that despite the ecology of the environment, that multiple experiences of the the same event (a D&D game, T1-Tomb of Horrors, Savage Tide, homebrew games, Gygaxian sandobx) would result in a multitude of RIGHT and CORRECT and VALID experiences?

Not many, I presume.

God (or the Gods, if you will) loves D&D and its many forms.

Yeeeee Haaaawwww to that!

 

[Scribble]

3PP material is being squelched by it's inability to be integrated into the monopolized software tools owned by WOTC. The inability to compete is purely legal.

The fact that WoTC has cooler toys doesn't make it a monopoly. The CB is not needed to play the game- It's just "too cool" to pass up for most of us.

If 3PP could write material that would work as snap-in data files for the CB(and WOTC permitted it) I think we would be seeing quite a bit stuff being published.

I do agree with this part though. I wish WoTC would make it easier to input Houserules that actually made use of the Cbs functions.

 

[pemerton]

That's a houserule? IF that's the case, I'm a super houseruler.

Well, part of the issue here is that "houserule" hasn't been very clearly defined. It's complicated by the fact that a lot of really important rules for any RPG, like reward guidelines and guidelines for building encounters/conflicts, aren't classified by most D&D players as rules at all!

If by "houseruling" we mean changing the basic character building rules (say in the way that psionic classes do) or changing the basic action resolution rules (say in the way that Stalker0's Obsidian skill challenge rules do) then my guess is a lot of 4e players don't do a lot of houseruling of the first, don't do a lot of houseruling of the combat mechanics, but do do quite a bit of skill challenge houseruling. (But maybe I'm just projecting from my own experience.)

 

[pemerton]

Really? Some situations are handled regularly without rolling dice at all in my(4E) campaign. The fact that the rules call for a dice fest when anything of substance happens doesn't stop us from ignoring that and just playing it out.

Fair enough - I'd say that the game isn't entirely dice-based, then, but the label is neither here nor there.

My issue stems from the fact that setting up such a challenge pre-supposes what the PC's need to do in the first place.

<snip>

I could only see the value in skill challenges if I were running a game wherein I dictated to the players what encounters they were going to have and the nature of those encounters.

I think this is a very good point. I want to respond to it in two ways.

First, I think in general that 4e is a game that rewards pre-prep of encounters. At least for me, it's easier to map out combat locations with interesting terrain in advance rather than on the spot. Similarly, it's easier for me to prepare an interesting skill challenge in advance rather than on the spot.

I don't dictate to my players what encounters they will have and what their nature will be - rather, I rely on my intuition as to these things. Sometimes I'm wrong, and have to work stuff out on the fly.

I think the DMG2 discussion of secondary skills for skill challenges has helped me a bit with this, because it gives a better range of ideas about what secondary skills can do, and so has helped me make on-the-fly judgements about how I should mechanically interpret a player's description of their PC's actions in a non-combat encounter (eg are they trying to undo a previous PC's mistake? if so, then it's a secondary check to try and negate a failure).

I don't think that 4e is any worse in this respect than any fairly crunchy RPG, but I could be wrong. Anyway, this is the first time I've really seen someone point to an aspect of 4e that has the potential to push in a railroady direction.

Second, I think it is possible to place pre-prepped encounters in such a way that the prep makes it easier to run the encounter, but the prep is useful regardless of the goal at which the players aim. So a list of likely avenues of social interaction with an NPC, together with DCs, can be useful prep even if it's not clear whether the players will want to treat that enemy as an ally or an enemy. I admit that if they decide to start a fight then all that work is wasted (this is a consequence of 4e having two such different resolution systems), but maybe some of it can be recycled the same way you might recycle a location if the PCs end up having a picnic with the orcs rather than fighting them.