House Rules: Choose Em, Don't Use Em, or Abuse Em?

[Mark]

I wonder how much people have changed in their games now that the revision of the third edition is a year and a half old...

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

I wonder how much people have changed in their games now that the revision of the third edition is a year and a half old...

Woah, Mark...two True Ressurection spells in a matter of minutes! And people say high level characters are unrealistic.

 

[Evilhalfling]

hmmm.
How much of what Ive done is HR and how much is setting guidelines?
more than a page, less than a binder -
I am trying to simplify and cut back to core -
oh yeah thats working

 

[Silveras]

It depends on the campaing tone and style I am going for. If I were to run Greyhawk, I'd run the rules as-written. For my homebrew world, various things get tweaked to get the "flavor" right.

 

[Orius]

Um, $400 when passing Go, I guess. I tend to go somewhat by the book, but I also have a pretty loose DMing style. I won't write up a fat binder of house rules, but I like to sort of run the game fast and loose and not pay too much attention to minor nitpicky rulings only munchkiny rules lawyering cheats give a damn about. I don't mind using non-core monsters or magic items, or allowing feats or spells that aren't core, as long as the stuff the players are using aren't over the top. As a DM, i don't care if the monsters raise all kinds of hell. I don't mind using PrCs, but which ones are available are my call.

 

[swrushing]

Some people play the game as purists, some tweek and house rule everything, some fall somewhere in between: Who are YOU?

Before my game starts, before chargen, i go thru and change rules. Most of these are either simplifications (i always try and bring in new players so simpler works well) OR they are changes specific to my upcoming story and setting.

These focus on things players will need to know before chargen.

After i get characters, i usually make a few tweaks here and there. These are made after i see the characters, see their "stories" and are designed to help my campaign (which is at that point being planned with PCs as stars in mind) focus on their particulars.

The way i see it, a published game is a mass market thing, a compromise designed to appeal to as many as possible, but made without:

1. specific knowledge of me and my preferences.
2. Specific knowledge of my campaign's story, its star characters, etc.
3. Specific knowledge of my players' preferences.

Armed with those three bits of knowledge, i can take the "store bought" system and make it a better fit to our tastes.

heck, believe it or not, i often add spices to my "store bought" foods as well.

same basic principle.

Sometimes its a few rules (a little salt and pepper) but sometimes its a majotr overhaul (cook it myself) like eplacing hit points with damage save et al.

 

[The Shaman]

Gotta love that Free Parking windfall...

As someone else noted, it depends on the system.

I've got about three pages of changes to 3.5 for my D&D game, not including things like banning elves, dwarves, and half-orcs from the campaign and adding goblinoids and lizard folk as player character races. However, easily a page of this is stuff from Unearthed Arcana, so that doesn't really qualify under Mark's definition - call it two pages of house rules, mostly related to certain spells and item creation.

I've only made a few changes so far for my Modern games, but I'm starting a game which will include some majorly reworked skills and a dozen new AdCs, if AdCs would be considered house rules.

The longer I play with a system, the more likely I am to start giving it a nudge here or there. There is a feel I like to get for each game, so most of my house rules are used for that purpose, rather than "fixing" something "broken."

 

[Li Shenron]

First of all, there's not enough options in the poll

I like to keep house rules to a minimum, and in fact I have used only a very few of them, and some of them I later withdrew. Almost all of them were done for the purpose of making character creation easier (the only one I will probably always use from now on is no Xp penalty for multiclassed PCs).

I like using some variants or additional rules (still a few at a time), but I don't consider them house rules, because I don't use them to "fix" something, just to make it different for another campaign.

Finally, I am personally not fond of DMs who change a lot before actually having ever tried how the standard rules work, as well as players/DM that instead adhere to the RAW even when it's plain ridiculous to do so.

 

[reanjr]

I redid everything, from ability score generation, to racial modifiers to the the combat and magic systems to the skills and feats to the spells to the magic items. I still consider it D&D, though. It has the same feel.

 

[Gez]

Considering that I changed all classes, and added a few more, that I changed several skills, created several feats, modified all races, added some more, tweaked/added spells...