Is house ruling fair to the game or gamers when first introducing it?

[nedjer]

That's all well and good RC and Umbran, but, getting my ass handed to me over and over again does not do well for my ego.

Chill dude! Your ass is ninja

 

[Hussar]

Chill dude! Your ass is ninja

Dude, my ass is three ninjas. sigh. Gotta start exercising again.

 

[nedjer]

Dude, my ass is three ninjas. sigh. Gotta start exercising again.

Ninja theory Non-ninja sport = non-ninja ass Ninja not motivated Laserquest-parkour-kickboxing-snowcross-tai chi ninja butt of iron

 

[Doug McCrae]

Down my way, houseruling has always been very rare. The few times I have seen it done, the results were almost always worse than the original rules.

I don't particularly like to do it myself, I'm not enough of a gearhead. I prefer making fluff to making crunch. In fact all the GMs I know are much better at fluff than crunch. With superhero systems I feel forced to houserule a lot because none of them come close to doing what I want. 4e D&D is great for me, because there's so little need to houserule.

Some people take a very different approach. I've seen Korgoth express the view that the GM's main job is to write houserules. Fine if you like that kind of thing but I don't.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Down my way, houseruling has always been very rare. The few times I have seen it done, the results were almost always worse than the original rules.

That's my usual experience with house rules, and why I'm not generally a fan.

Often, it's not even that the house rule itself is bad, it's that the interaction between the house rules and unmodified rules is wonky.


In 4e, the only house rule we're using right now is that each real encounter counts as a milestone, and it seems okay, but I can see that we're plowing through monsters significantly faster on the 2x as much action pointage. The DMs haven't quite adjusted yet, so some encounters have been ridiculously easy. (One has a bad habit of thinking we're able to handle far more than we are, so it's kind of a refreshing change)

Brad

 

[jmucchiello]

Sorry I'm late but I find the comparisons with Monopoly fascinating. On boardgamegeek, a website devote to all forms of boardgaming, Monopoly is generally reviled not so much for its rules (although its rules are pretty annoying) but because of what it does to people whose only experience with boardgames is a game like Monopoly.

Many folks "hate" boardgames because of their bad experiences with house-ruled Monopoly. By the book, Monopoly should play to completion in 60-90 minutes but with the "standard" house rules, Monopoly can last 3+ hours. Combine this long duration with early elimination and runaway winner and you have a game that quickly loses any fun it had after the first hour or so (except for that runaway winner).

I played Monopoly for DECADES before I bothered to read the rules and learn that Free Parking is actually FREE; that UNmortgaging property costs you interest; that selling back houses/hotels is not done AT COST; and perhaps a few other niceties. This did not mean that those who taught me to play it were being UNFAIR to Monopoly. It didn't mean that they were being unfair to me or others who were playing.

See this is where you differ from the vast majority of Monopoly players. Most people hear "want to play a boardgame?" and immediately think of never-ending games of Monopoly where it was a grind to get to the end of the game. Most games of "traditional" Monopoly end with the last 2-3 remaining players conceding the game to the obvious runaway winner. So while a game of Monopoly might start out fun, it rarely ends fun.

In the context of boardgaming in general, Monopoly has caused far more harm to the boargame hobby than it has caused good.

 

[Umbran]

Sorry I'm late but I find the comparisons with Monopoly fascinating. On boardgamegeek, a website devote to all forms of boardgaming, Monopoly is generally reviled not so much for its rules (although its rules are pretty annoying) but because of what it does to people whose only experience with boardgames is a game like Monopoly.

Interesting....

You see, while the folks at boardgamegeek are generally correct that the common house rules (or, more often, poorly understood rules) of Monopoly don't generally lead to better game play, I find the criticism a little ironic, and oddly parallel to RPGs. Most of the supposedly "great board games" I see these days need a special turn track monitor, and a person expert in the rules to lead new players by the nose through their first half-dozen games before the player can be expected to get the hang of it.

I don't see how that's any less a turn-off for most folks than poorly house-ruled Monopoly. Physician, heal thyself!

Especially when the single-resource model of Monopoly tends to lend itself to that runaway-winner phenomenon even when played by the book, I begin to wonder... is a "geek" about a particular topic is in a good place to critique based on what non-geeks want out of the same activity?

Now, RPGs have the same learning-curve issues. Very few games created these days have rules of compelling simplicity and subtlety found in chess or backgammon, say. The difference, of course, is that Monopoly isn't designed to have a human referee or game master to mitigate issues, and standard boardgames are supposed last a few hours, while most RPGs can last a lifetime. Different design goals lead to different needs and tolerances for the same behavior.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Yeah, the BGG'ers definitely need to get their panties untwisted about Monopoly. Their complaints about Monopoly (which is presumably still one of the best selling board games of all time) come off like the people who complain that Titanic can't possibly be a good movie because it made so much money and won so many awards.

I do think that bad house rules can make a game less fun for people, certainly. So when you're teaching someone an RPG (or a boardgame) and you want to use house rules, make sure you're using good house rules!

 

[Rel]

Yeah, the BGG'ers definitely need to get their panties untwisted about Monopoly. Their complaints about Monopoly (which is presumably still one of the best selling board games of all time) come off like the people who complain that Titanic can't possibly be a good movie because it made so much money and won so many awards.

Agreed. Titanic was terrible for entirely different reasons.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Is it fair to your friends -- since you are introducing them to the game -- to house rule parts of the rules as written?

Presumably the house rules exist because I believe they make the game better. So, yes, it's fair. If anything, it would be unfair to my friends to force them to play through a less fun version of the game before allowing them to play the improved version.

For example, I would never force someone to play through Munchkin Quest without the much-needed house rules we use at our table.

Now, I might be wrong about the house rules making the game better. But that's largely irrelevant: If you start making ethical choices on the presumption that you're wrong if you don't think that you're actually wrong, then you're going to end up taking some really horrible actions.

With that being said, I also tell new players that we're using house rules and what they are and even why we're using them (if they're interested).

Roleplaying games do present a bit of a corner case: I have house rules for RPGs which aren't designed to actually "improve" the game in a general sense, but merely to match the content of a game world or the personal preferences of my gaming group. When teaching new players the game, I often won't burden them with these types of house rules. OTOH, the typical roleplaying game is so complicated that I'm usually not burdening new players with about 90% of the rules. I give them the 10% they need to start playing and then we add more rules expertise as the situation in the game calls for it. (This works largely because there is no true competitive element in the game.)