House Rules

[DonTadow]

I have some rules concerning injury.

I am retro with the spells.

I have an action point variant which is too generous and I will tone down next game.

Lots of my house rule document is an index to which supplements (or parts thereof) to use and which not to use.

There are a couple of questions and changes I will make to the injury system. First I hate punishing player's for a natural 20 so I will reverse the chart. Second I noticed you use half damage instead of 50hpts. Do you see any problems with using both?

 

[JimAde]

I don't have many house rules, but:

Character death occurs at negative Con score or -10, whichever is better and...
Save or Die effects reduce the victim to negative 1d6 HP. This is in place because...
Resurrection magic does not exist for the most part.

I'm also tinkering with an alternative spell point system for sorcerers inspired by S. John Ross's "unlimited mana" rules for GURPS. So far only the bad guys have gotten to use it and none of them have exploded yet. I'm kind of disappointed.

 

[Tzarevitch]

I mainly house-rule select spells and magic items.

Teleport: I use the rules from Monte Cooke's Arcana Unearthed and I shortened the range.
Greater Teleport: Same as Teleport but with greater range and carrying capacity (no unlimited range and 0 chance of error nonsense).
Dimension Door: (Renamed Teleport, Lesser) As teleport but max range is 400" + 40'/lvl.
False Vision: When cast with another spell or on a creature, object or location, it blocks the effects of True Seeing.

All save-or-die spells have been converted to damage with a saving throw for partial damage.

Vorpal has been changed. It breaches all DR and allows crit hits and sneak attacks even on creatures that are not normally vulnerable to them. Vorpal also breaches object hardness.

I have others but those are the main ones.

Tzarevitch

 

[Captain NeMo]

Nothing here, but I've got a boat load I'm considering. The most major of which is a simple 4 (or so) class system...no definition between NPC and PC....the features are "adapatable"-not bland!-and would be a nerfed a bit. I imagine the emphasis would be on feats and skill choices. I'd probably keep prestige classes.

 

[billd91]

We use a few house rules, but don't introduce them until after playing with the RAW first. While gut reaction may say that a house rule would be nice, you think you really should experience the rules as written before tinkering with them.

The ones I use when I run:

Shield bonus adds to touch AC (I want touches to be a bodily touch, besides, it's a nice effect to see rays blocked by a shield)

Many spells over-nerfed in 3.5 have durations brought back up to 3.0 levels (or a compromise between the two)

Half-orcs get a racial bonus at Intimidate and Climb

Negative levels that don't get resolved by the next-day save are permanent penalties until removed by restoration-type spells. Negative levels never translate into loss of character levels.

Magic item creation and spell XP costs build in an account that must be paid off out of incoming XP rather than come out of a PCs current XP total. Prevents the odd cases of recently-leveled PCs being unable to cast spells that cost XPs when they could have simply cast them the day before. I do not allow PCs to defer gaining levels.

Spell Focus adds +2 to the DC of the spells. Greater Spell Focus (and all prestige class or other feats that add to spell DCs) add +1. Spell focus was only a problem because prestige classes and additional feats got stupid with increasing bonuses. The fix should have applied to the cases where things were getting stupid and not to the original feat.

Characters can get hero points for doing really heroic stuff that they can then use to save their butts when a bad die roll goes against them.

 

[Psion]

I like the three rules you set and I am going to use them in the next rules update of my campaign. Can I list what you have verbatim in my manual (only for player use)?

I don't see wht not.

There are a couple of questions and changes I will make to the injury system. First I hate punishing player's for a natural 20 so I will reverse the chart.

You do that, you are punishing them for having good saves, and will get some strange results.

Here's the thing you need to understand about the way I arranged the chart: it is based on the character's roll on the dice on the same roll as the saving throw, without modifiers. This means that the character will only get a 20 result if they FAIL THE SAVE rolling a 20; this will happen only if they have poor fortitude saves with respect to how much damage they took.

If you invert the chart, all of the sudden you make it possible to hack off limbs by nicking an already weak character with a dagger.

For example, lets say you trigger the save with 10 points of damage and only have +5 fort save. The save is DC 15. You will never have an injury table result of over 9 in this circumstance; on any roll of 10 or higher, you will have made the save and thus never be referred to the table. On the other hand, if your character takes 20 points of damage, the save is 20 and you could potentially get a result on the chart of 14, but no higher. You see, arranging it this way makes it so that:

- You need large amounts of damage to inflict grevious injuries, and
- you need MORE damage to inflict the worst results on big creatures like Great Wyrm Dragons with high fort saves.

If you invert the table, all of a sudden you can lop off limbs of huge creatures with miniscule amounts of damage just because they fail a save.

Second I noticed you use half damage instead of 50hpts. Do you see any problems with using both?

It's not instead of. The half-damage trigger is not intended as a replacement for massive damage, but you could use it that way if you want. I was presuming that both rolls apply. If you take 50 points of damage in one blow and have less than 100 hp, you would have to make two fortitude saves, the way I was running it.

 

[sniffles]

The group I play with has only one house rule across the board: if you roll a 1 for HP, you always get to reroll. We often reroll for 2s also, but not in every game.

Several of the GMs also rule that all skills are class skills.

 

[werk]

here's my list of housies

Players may not roll dice against other players.

Limit two (2) free actions per round per creature (excepting feats and spells that add actions).

Quick-Draw is draw or sheath/stow.

Tower shields can not be used while mounted.

Dodge is not always-on, it must be declared or is not effective, same with search/spot/listen/etc. Casting defensively must be declared.

Critical damage may be calculated by doubling (x2) the rolled damage after bonuses, does not include non-weapon damage like flaming.

Massive damage is defined as over 50 points and 50% of target's HP worth of damage from one damage dealing instance. Save or die.

Wizards and known spells:
Wizards may learn a spell by one means, research.
*Pure reasearch for a spell results in the spontaneous 'memorization' of the spell, which can then be cast or scribed to a spellbook.
*Spells from a scroll can be learned after appropriate research, at which time the spell becomes 'memorized' and the scroll is consumed. The wizard may cast or scribe the spell to a spellbook.
*Spells found in others' spell books may be used (for learning) the same way as a scroll, but the spell in not removed from the originating spellbook.

Wizards may cast spells that they 'know' from their spellbook. They cannot cast from others' spellbooks. Spells cast from a spellbook are consumed, and the spell is no longer considered 'known' by the wizard.

Wish spells work as intended by the caster d100 % of the time. DM rolls d100 for chance, player rolls d100 for success/perversion of intent.

These are not complete as we just started 3.5 a few months ago and I threw out my 3.0 housies. I don't think any of these really change the way the game works except the limit on free actions (which I find 'fixes' some 'broken' attributes of the game).

 

[JimAde]

Actually that reminds me of another one of mine (just the opposite of werk's). Dodge always adds to your AC as long as you are not denied your Dex bonus for some reason. You don't have to declare you're using it and you don't have to declare a Dodge target. If you have some other feat that only works on your declared Dodge target then you have to declare one, but you still get the +1 AC against everybody.

 

[DonTadow]

I don't see wht not.



You do that, you are punishing them for having good saves, and will get some strange results.

Here's the thing you need to understand about the way I arranged the chart: it is based on the character's roll on the dice on the same roll as the saving throw, without modifiers. This means that the character will only get a 20 result if they FAIL THE SAVE rolling a 20; this will happen only if they have poor fortitude saves with respect to how much damage they took.

If you invert the chart, all of the sudden you make it possible to hack off limbs by nicking an already weak character with a dagger.

For example, lets say you trigger the save with 10 points of damage and only have +5 fort save. The save is DC 15. You will never have an injury table result of over 9 in this circumstance; on any roll of 10 or higher, you will have made the save and thus never be referred to the table. On the other hand, if your character takes 20 points of damage, the save is 20 and you could potentially get a result on the chart of 14, but no higher. You see, arranging it this way makes it so that:

- You need large amounts of damage to inflict grevious injuries, and
- you need MORE damage to inflict the worst results on big creatures like Great Wyrm Dragons with high fort saves.

If you invert the table, all of a sudden you can lop off limbs of huge creatures with miniscule amounts of damage just because they fail a save.

I'm still a bit confused at this point. What I want to do is replace 1 with 20.

Say I have a fortitude of 15. I have 120 hit points and take 60 points of damage. I roll a 20 which gives me a total of 35. 5 below the 40 I need for the save. I almost made it, but because i rolled a nat 20 i am only clobbered.

Now same situation. Say I roll a 1 which gives me 16, obviously i fail, but because i rolled a natural 1 i lose a limb. I failed it by 26 points.

I still can't see how I'm punishing people with high fortitude. I figure I'm punishing the roll of 1 and rewarding the roll of 20 (if you can consider being clobbered instead of losing a limb rewarding).
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