Do you go in RAW 100%?

[MacDhomnuill]

My approach is always been to run through a couple of situations 100% rules is written to get a feel for the system maybe play a session or two and then start thinking about what I like and don’t like and making small changes as we go. A good example is hit points, I hate hit points I don’t care what the game is I don’t care what particular system is hit points suck and I hate them thus I almost always remove them and replace them with some kind of wound system. But I always play the game with hit points first to get a feel and be there’s some games I’ve kept Hit points Call of Cthulhu being a good example.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Never. No point. I know how to run the basic tenet of every RPG (ask the players what they want to do, tell them what happens when they respond, roll a die if there's a question), so all the other junk in the rules are just there to make the dice rolling different for each game. But I don't care about that stuff enough to make sure I use every different rule as written. It's not worth my time to worry about it.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It depends on the system, I suppose. When I go back to AD&D 1e, in order for me to make sense of it, I've always done lots of house-ruling (albeit frequently by omission rather than addition). That's part of the beauty of the game. But that's also a special exception. For the vast majority of games, I am probably about 95-99% RAW.

 

[stonehead]

There is a difference, but deliberately excluding or choosing not to use certain rules is itself a house rule. Similarly, if the system provides a large number of optional rules, specifying the list of which optional rules are in force is also a house rule.

By that logic, is it possible to play a game with several books worth of optional rules without house ruling it? GURPS has several dozen books worth of optional rules. Is it impossible to run a GURPS campaign RAW?

As an aside, part of the reason I would never claim to run a complete RAW game is, to put it bluntly, I never learn every single rule case for every game. Even the first time out. I tackle central mechanics and terms and learn how to build characters and adjudicate basic conflicts but yeah, they rest I will either look it up when it comes up or just make a spot rolling, regardless of there being a rule that covers it.

Never. No point. I know how to run the basic tenet of every RPG (ask the players what they want to do, tell them what happens when they respond, roll a die if there's a question), so all the other junk in the rules are just there to make the dice rolling different for each game. But I don't care about that stuff enough to make sure I use every different rule as written. It's not worth my time to worry about it.

Again, I would emphasize that in a lot of systems outside the DnD-adjacent space, that's all there is. There's no such thing as looking up a rule for this specific scenario, because there aren't rules that handle special case scenarios. There's just character creation, basic resolution, and probably some damage tracking and progression.

If you don't like these systems, or you still want to house rule, that's fine. It just isn't the herculean effort to run RAW the way some in this thread are making it out to be.

 

[djotaku]

Yes at the start. I usually like to do one session (or adventure as the case may be) with RAW to get a feel for the system. After that I tend to look around at "best practices" so as not to break the game. I know no TTRPG is perfectly balanced, but I don't want to add some rule that ends up making things trivial or otherwise gamebreaking.

 

[Marc17]

If that is the easiest, then we'll try, but typically my group has no trouble changing things to something we think will be more fun. I think with every new version of VtM there were some changes we thought were great and adopted along with some we didn't.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Who here would claim that they play ANY TTRPG 100% rules as written with no alterations or omissions?

True for a fair number of Indie games like DitV, My Life With Master, Agon, Hillfolk

For more complex systems, I'll be honest -- I probably make more mistakes that alter or omit rules than I do deliberate choices. I just found out yesterday that my belief that cultural maximums in Pendragon limit Prestige Award advancement is not actually correct. I've been running it that way for 3 years now. So it was an error, and now, because I really do prefer it that way, I guess it's a house-rule!

13th Age is the only game I've run for a long time where I've felt no need to make a houserule. Given its complexity, I haven't made many changes to the way I've run D&D4E either -- really just banning a list of things I find makes the game less fun. No houserules for Call of Cthulhu, Fate, or Numenera, even after running multiple yea-long campaigns in each.

The only reason I'll houserule anything is because it makes the game noticeably less fun. I'm not tempted to houserule for realism purposes or to fit some feeling of what I think the genre is meant to be. And it's a burden on people to remember that something has been houseruled, so it really has to be quite annoying to get fixed.

I think The One Ring is the only game I've deliberately houseruled, and that was just to add more options to events in the Journey subsystem to give players a bit more choice in what skills to use. Oh, and I also added a rule that your Lore skill let you know how many languages you are able to work with, because what sort of insanity is it to design an otherwise really nice system for Tolkien that completely ignores the one thing Tolkien cared most about?

 

[SableWyvern]

By that logic, is it possible to play a game with several books worth of optional rules without house ruling it? GURPS has several dozen books worth of optional rules. Is it impossible to run a GURPS campaign RAW?

I'd say it's impossible to come up with a meaningful definition of what GURPS RAW means, that a substantial number of people will actually agree on. That being the case, saying you run GURPS RAW is, to me, a pretty meaningless statement.

At most, you could pick up a specific campaign, that lists a set of default choices, and run that campaign RAW. So, perhaps, you might be able to run GURPS Autoduel RAW.

There are people who sometimes show up in the Mythras discord who really, really want to know how to run a specific spell RAW. Often, the only correct answer is, "It's not intended to be run RAW, the intention is that you adapt to fit the context of the game you're planning to run."