House Rules Poll

[Taneel BrightBlade]

My house rule: No EP you just level up from time to time.
My house rule2: yes you can be that (half-cat, winged elf, ect) but I'll need to give you penalties.

 

[TroyXavier]

I have a few minor modifications to spells and skills. I pretty much stick with the books though unless it seems wildly broken.

 

[Wombat]

Our group has collectively come up with so many house rules that our game is probably no longer D&D, but some vague OGL D20 fantasy game.

 

[billd91]

I give out XPs based more on how far characters have gone to reach a goal and how much time we've played rather than on monster defeats.

We are also going through spell changes in 3.5 and resetting them back to 3.0 when the spell has been too screwed up to be fun to play. Too much of 3.5's spell changes (and there are many more than there should have been) are based on nothing but pure combat and a misguided idea to make some skills more important to the game at the expense of letting another character, without the skill, fill that role by using magic. Bad idea altogether.

 

[Galethorn]

I used to run my games in a highly modified combination of 3.5, stuff from UA, and pure houserules. But, about a month ago (or maybe less...I can't remember), I switched over to Grim Tales.

So, the only houserules I use now are...

2 extra skill points for Strong, Fast, and Tough,

UA armor-as-damage-reduction,

Customized WP/VP system,

A few homebrew races,

Ad hoc (i.e. 'made up on the fly') XP,

and a few minor modifications on feats and so on.


This works out quite well, since my campaign is Subtle-Magic (not to be confused with Low-Magic), Grim-but-not-Gritty (hence the WP/VP), and doesn't have a lot of dungeons. So far, in the three adventures I've run, only one had a dungeon, and it was a relatively small cave.

 

[Li Shenron]

In the current 3.5 campaign:

- no multiclassing penalties
- same limit to class and cross-class skills
- feats every 2 levels instead of 3

and Xp is basically given in free-form.

 

[dekrass]

Current campaign:
AU item creation feats
no multiclass penalty
alignment is almost nonexistant(except outsiders)

Next campaign will use Elements of Magic system.

 

[MonsterMash]

Main things I've got are:
Still 3.0 creature sizes - not everything is square!

Revised XP chart - doubled the intervals/totals so that it goes 2000/6000/12000/etc.

Restrictions on choice of class/race to fit the setting. Human subraces with some bonus skills, additional class skills and modifiers.

Not all characters are literate without using skill points or a feat.

Some additional skills and feats and some prohibited from other sources.

 

[Davelozzi]

Classes: I use a prestige paladin (homebrew, not the one from Unearthed Arcana), and a variant ranger (Wheel of Time woodsman, more or less).

Skills: I do languages differently - you have to take ranks like others skills, though a few will suffice (1=basics only, 2=slow speaking, heavyily accented, 3=resoanbly fluent, 4+ = increased eloquence & mastery, plus it costs one skill point to become literate in any language that you speak). Each player starts with 3 ranks in his/her mother tongue, and gets free language-only skill points equal to twice their Int bonus, in addition to regular skill points.

Ablilities: We roll 4d6 drop lowest, create two sets of six scores and then choose the better set. I also had a homebrew point-buy option at one point but no one ever used it.

 

[Drifter Bob]

I used to run my games in a highly modified combination of 3.5, stuff from UA, and pure houserules. But, about a month ago (or maybe less...I can't remember), I switched over to Grim Tales.

So, the only houserules I use now are...

2 extra skill points for Strong, Fast, and Tough,

UA armor-as-damage-reduction,

Customized WP/VP system,

A few homebrew races,

Ad hoc (i.e. 'made up on the fly') XP,

and a few minor modifications on feats and so on.


This works out quite well, since my campaign is Subtle-Magic (not to be confused with Low-Magic), Grim-but-not-Gritty (hence the WP/VP), and doesn't have a lot of dungeons. So far, in the three adventures I've run, only one had a dungeon, and it was a relatively small cave.

I'm interested in a few things you mentioned. Can you describe a 'subtle magic' setting? Explain how you implement that. Alos, what is WP/VP? And how do you implement armor as damage reduction. DO you do a defense roll?

DB