For Players: How do you feel about House Rules?

[Crothian]

We have very few house rules, but as a player I don't mind them. Any DM I'm going to play for is going to have my trsut to make House Rules he feels need to be made.

 

[Wombat]

I've never had problems with people's house rules, mainly because I have always felt that such rules give the flavour of the campaign. In fact, I doubt I have played in a single game where there were absolutely no house rules, because of nothing else there are going to be interpretations of cryptic passages, views on specific spells, and the like.

As a GM I am careful to spell them out. As a player I ask about them. As a gamer, I expect and appreciate them. When there are no house rules at all, I feel the GM has not really thought about his game world too much.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

THere's a lot of extremism here, so I may as well throw my very blue hat in.

As I see it, these are rules:

Rule 0.
STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA.
Roll D20, higher than a target number.

Everything else... Everything... including all the other rules in the Phb and DMG.. Are optional, and which ones you use, replace, or ignore are house rules.

That's not exactly true. They may be optional, but they are the default, and if you play by the book you use no house rules whatsoever. Every option you replace or ignore is a house rule. And the d20 higher than a target number isn't irreplacable: UA has bellcurve rolls, where 1d20 is replaced with 3d6, which gives more average results.

 

[Joachim Pieper]

I'm not a huge fan of Rule 0 fascists. What's the point of giving us the rulebook if you're just going to over-rule it. To me, the DM must at least base his decisions on the rules, and must be able to justify his position beyond 'I say so'. It's very frustrating otherwise. Referees don't make rules up.

It's interesting, in our epic game, I've run it and another DM has run it. My style was to refer more and more to the rules, his appears to be to refer less and less. Admittedly, he has much more experience, and his way works very well - but the difference in style is quite interesting...



Cheers.

 

[S'mon]

I don't mind house rules, if I can see the reason behind them.

For example, S'mons game has several house rules, mostly to do with making Raise Dead, Resurrection and so on a little harder - the rules mostly increase the gp cost of casting those spells and reduce the duration during which the body can be raised. Sounds fine to me, that's his choice as a DM and I can see and understand the reasons behind it.

However, if an ability was destroyed simply because using it was effective, then I'd be annoyed.

I don't increase the gp cost for raise dead etc beyond the very high figures already in 3.5; but I retain some pre-3e-derived rules re max time for raise dead (30 days) and Fort saves to survive resurection, depending on condition of the body.

Generally speaking, 3.5 removed the need for most of my 3.0 spell-nerfing house rules since 3.5 accords a lot better with the flavour of my setting, which is lower-magic and less Cleric-dominated than the world the default 3.0 rules create. Probably my biggest house rule is that I use Spontaneous casting for all Divine casters, which seems to work fine and makes much more sense to me than unlimited spell lists do. I would also allow Arcane casters to use healing spells if they wanted, although these might need to be researched from scratch.

As a player, I don't generally object to house rules if I know the reason for them and I think the DM has an understanding of how they will affect the balance of the game. Eg I had a DM who only had the PHB, no DMG, so PCs never got any magic items. We never really got treasure, either. Otherwise it was unmodified 3.0. This had a huge impact beyond 1st level, eg it made Clerics much better fighters than Fighters, Fighters became essentially useless.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not a huge fan of Rule 0 fascists. What's the point of giving us the rulebook if you're just going to over-rule it. To me, the DM must at least base his decisions on the rules, and must be able to justify his position beyond 'I say so'. It's very frustrating otherwise. Referees don't make rules up.

That's not really a good analogy, though. DMs aren't much like referees.

 

[Gargoyle]

As a DM, I've swung between having absolutely no house rules, and having a huge list of them. My players are generally happy with my house rules, because I publish them before the campaign, only make changes after discussing it with them between sessions, and continue to document the rules for them so that they are aware of all deviations.

However, as a player, I generally don't like the house rules of other DMs, even when the rules favor the players. Perhaps I'm a controlling sort of person who likes things done my way, which is why I usually DM, or maybe the DM's I've experienced had truly bad house rules. I think perhaps it is mostly because I've never seen another DM take the time to document their house rules and print them out for me. They seem to keep track of their house rules in their head and expect me to do the same.

 

[Li Shenron]

As a player, I think they are in general a little annoying, and NEVER really necessary. Not that I had many DMs, but every single one (including myself... although just recently) wanted to use they own pet rules and fixes. I think it's our (DM's) attitude of making the game really ours in some way, and perhaps even to feel like we are better rulers than the designers themselves sometimes...

But as a player, as I was saying, it's often annoying. First of all because you know the game, and maybe you even have a strategy sometimes, and as soon as you start playing with the new group you may find out that what you knew was suddenly "wrong". Luckily my DMs used only a few HR, not pages and pages of them... in any case, having tried the core rules as well, I didn't find any improvement to the game.

I'll also put a cross-link to the poll I opened last week, about the perspective from the DM's side. http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=78658

In the discussion in my other thread, I point out that all this opinion of mine (including my opinion as a player) doesn't regard the DM's changes for a setting reason, which instead don't bother me at all as a player!

 

[Li Shenron]

*edit: to clarify this... my current 3 first & only HRs don't "fix" things but only lessen some restriction to character creation (one in multiclassing, the other in skills) or make it simpler for players to upgrade to 3.5 rules (using weapon equivalencies)


sorry... clicked "reply" instead of "edit"!

 

[Altalazar]

I don't mind a few minor tweaks, as long as they make sense.

I think Houserules are fine as additional options - like an optional Ranger class you could take, or things like that.

I really dislike houserules that change basic game mechanics or are otherwise obtrusive.

I much prefer to stick to the core rules as much as possible.