House Ruling 4E? How common

[Glyfair]

I think there is a lot less houseruling D&D these days, but I think it started with 3.5. Part of it has to do with what we consider houseruling. For example, I don't consider playing with the skill challenge mechanic to be "house ruling" since it seems to have been intended as something flexible.

Dykstrav has hit on some other reasons.

In the 1E days, house rules were often used to make the game playable, according to the tastes and preferences of a particular group.

AD&D had a lot of what most considered "unplayable" rules. I know there are groups that played with all the rules as written, but I never met them. Many parts of the game were just too bulky to be used. Most used simpler methods, adjudicated them on the fly, or had various house rulings for them.

In 2E, many DMs house ruled in order to tweak the game to fit their setting. In many ways, 2E was one of the most interesting times to play D&D because many DMs spoke of their games in terms of creating an ongoing narrative or at least a shared setting. Many DMs house ruled simply because they wanted to change a basic premise of the game in their own setting ("elves can be paladins"), or because they wanted to adhere more closely to a preferred milieux ("clerics of the war god can use swords.")

I don't think this was tied to 2E. I certainly remember it happening before that. In fact, most gamers I know hated the restrictions on non-humans from a flavor standpoint. They were commonly houseruled.

When 3E rolled around, there was a major shift in attitudes towards house rules. Most players and DMs were willing to accept additional options (new feats, deities, magic items, spells, et cetera), but seemed resistant to fundamental changes in the rules themselves (methods for determining initiative, hit points, weapon damage and the like).

I think that house ruling did change with 3E. However, much of that was because the above mentioned types of houseruling were made obsolete or greatly reduced.

You didn't see people houseruling things like whether a gnome could be a paladin. The assumption was that all races could be anything, and weren't limited in their advancement. Much more common houserules were that certain races couldn't be certain classes, and that was mostly in the early days.

There also weren't too many "unplayable" parts of the rules set. Some people would dislike a certain part of the 3E and make a houserule, but you didn't really see "unplayable" parts of the rules set. Some had problems with Attacks of Opportunities, but that was nothing compared to the AD&D initiative system (with the weapon speed, spell casting, weapon length, etc. all worked into).

I think we also have the fact that a lot of those who love to houserule also have tended to stick with 3.5. 4E was designed to be a lot more inherently balanced. Whether it succeeded is a long discussion, but that fact is changing a part of the system tends to have lots of ripple effects among that inherent balance, and that makes it less attractive to the house-ruler who likes to have 10 pages of houserules.

 

[Nymrohd]

I house rule a lot. In AD&D I had a large set of house rules, then with Player's Options my house rules became extremely complicated (and never really got played much . . .). On 3rd edition I simply used a lot of UA options and a list of banned features from books outside the core.
My 4th Edition houserules are I guess a lot more streamlined. Expertise and Epic Will/Fort/Ref, Paragon Defense and Robust Defense are banned, every character gets +1 to attack and saves at 11th and 21st level. All races give ability score bonuses like the changeling (one static plus +2 at one of two others). Armor is the most heavily modded (Chain shirts are light chain armor for instance), it scales by level (if you wear heavy armor you gain +1 at levels 5,11,15,21,25 and if you wear light armor you gain +1 at level 21) and I have more classic armor types (mithril gives +1 armor, +1 Ref and requires level 11+ items, adamantine requires level 16+ items and gives +1 armor, resist 2 physical damage and several others). This is pretty much it along a lot of new crunch that fits my homebrew and are being playtested by my group.

 

[Kzach]

I latched onto D&D during the transition from 1e to 2e era. Everybody house-ruled and so I've become used to analysing the system and trying new things to fix perceived errors. I'm always on the lookout for tweaks to the system.

4e though, I have to say, is one of the few systems where I'm happy to play using the unaltered core rules. I have a huge list of houserules for 4e which I'm convinced improve upon the system, and I do prefer to play using those rules, however I'm OK with using the base system.

That's something I can't say about previous editions.

 

[TerraDave]

You know, attitudes toward house ruling is something that I've observed changing over time. Me and my current group discuss this since we've noticed several trends in house ruling over the years and I'm starting to house rule my 4E game.

In the 1E days, house rules were often used to make the game playable, according to the tastes and preferences of a particular group. Most commonly, you used alternate ability score generation methods. Other little touches were usually put in to make the game less lethal (like re-rolling hit points or something like that). But the truth of the matter is that in 1E, no one really knew the rules as written all that well. We just read the books, made characters, and played. If we didn't know something, we made it up and kept the game going.

In 2E, many DMs house ruled in order to tweak the game to fit their setting. In many ways, 2E was one of the most interesting times to play D&D because many DMs spoke of their games in terms of creating an ongoing narrative or at least a shared setting. Many DMs house ruled simply because they wanted to change a basic premise of the game in their own setting ("elves can be paladins"), or because they wanted to adhere more closely to a preferred milieux ("clerics of the war god can use swords.")

When 3E rolled around, there was a major shift in attitudes towards house rules. Most players and DMs were willing to accept additional options (new feats, deities, magic items, spells, et cetera), but seemed resistant to fundamental changes in the rules themselves (methods for determining initiative, hit points, weapon damage and the like). Many espoused a viewpoint that the rules were now carefully balanced by a large and diverse body of professional game designers, and with this perception of quality, were loathe to make changes. Even when dissatisfied with certain rules (grappling, attacks of opportunity), they generally played by the rules as written and ignored what they didn't like rather than trying to house rule it.

Thats a pretty good summary

 

[Blastin]

• "Astral Damage" - except in a relatively short list of exceptions, ivine powers with damage keywords replace those keywords with "Astral". Astral damage is of a type determined by your deity or religion (for example, the raven queen is cold or necrotic - when you make your character, you choose one of those damage types)

consider this one "borrowed"