Most Common House Rules

[catsclaw227]

I use diplomacy as an opposed system to ensure that to change the attitude of the local fishmonger is much easier than to change the attitude of the Baron of Mucky-muck land. It's a GMs responsibility to make sure that abuses are not exploited, as there are many in d20 3.x.

 

[XCorvis]

Terrible house rule, IMO. Rich assumes that a Diplomacy check is intended to allow you to completely circumvent the rest of the game and do things like trade beans for artifacts, and then he makes rules to define how you could do that. He took offense at something that was only imagined and then brought a lot of people over to his way of thinking.

When you have the capability of doing things like that with Diplomacy, the skill is much, much worse. A -20 penalty is completely insufficient for being able to convince anyone of anything, because you can make mid-level characters with +50 bonuses to Diplomacy. The core system may not be perfect, but it works much better- you just have to be able to anticipate what "friendly" or "helpful" means for a particular NPC, and be ready to make compromises on the fly. That's the nature of negotiation.

I'd have to disagree there. He goes into great detail about the problems that the regular diplomacy check has, and the main change is fundamental. Burlew's diplomacy is not the same as the normal diplomacy - his version is "getting someone to do something", not "changing how someone feels about you." And when you take advantage of it, it's just as bad as regular diplomacy, not worse.

Anyway, with your +50 Diplomacy check, you can abuse the current system just as badly. You could change a Hostile character to Helpful automatically, in one minute. (You can rush it and just take them to friendly, if you want.) Kiss your BBEG goodbye.

Rules here: http://www.giantitp.com/Func0010.html

With Burlew's system, assume an equally hostile character: an enemy (+5) of equal level (+15), Wisdom of 14 (+2) and the deal offered is horrible (+10). That's a DC of 47 (15+5+15+10+2). If you make the enemy truly hostile (nemesis, +10) and have a Wisdom of 20 (+5), the DC goes to 55. Sure, with a sucessful check you might get him to stop fighting, or give up the MacGuffin, but he still hates you, and you'll still have to make checks to get him to do anything else. Ultimately, they suffer from the same issue: a specially built character breaks diplomacy. Speaking of specially built, what's the max AC at now? 147 or something like that, right?

You are right about one thing. Beans for artifacts? Not on your life. As with any rule, obviously idiotic things just shouldn't be allowed. That line is a lot fuzzier with regular diplomacy. Under what circumstances is it OK to change how someone feels about your character? Is Hostile to Friendly OK, but Hostile to Helpful not? Hard to say. How does the BBEG feel about you when you suddenly convince him to be friendly or helpful to you? Tough call.

In the end, I like Burlew's system because of the conceptual change, not the actual mechanics (although having it scale with level is also very appealing). I think most DMs would have an easier time adjucating Burlew's system than the regular one.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Oops, double post.

 

[CRGreathouse]

EDIT: Whoops, forgot synergy, circlet, and warlock. I'm pretty sure the two feats don't stack though.

Skill Focus and Negotiator stack. My best attempt at Diplomacy at 10th level was (pulls up Excel workbook) +45*, but that was without the Warlock.

* 13 ranks, +6 synegy, +4 sacred, +3 competence, +2 racial, +9 unnamed, +8 Cha

 

[Stalker0]

The biggest thing I like about rich's system is it makes it very clear how to adjucate diplomacy. Normally its a roll and then a shot in the dark as far as what happens. Rich's system is very clear on how your roll translates into what you get.

I do agree though that the scale of his system probably could use some tweaking. That...and I think the synergies for diplomacy are wonky.

 

[catsclaw227]

I am considering a house rule on falling damage, to make it more dangerous. I have seen some where you take 1d6 per 10' Cumulative. For example:

10' = 1d6
20' = 1d6 + 2d6 = 3d3
30' = 1d6 + 2d6 + 3d6 = 6d6
etc.

In this case, the first 1d6 would only be subdual damage, though. Has anyone seen this in play?

 

[Nebulous]

The NOT QUITE DEAD YET House Rule:

I have yet to actually implement this in a game, but tell me what you think:

If a blow is going to kill a character, i mean, the dice are rolled, the damage is done, the axe is about to drop, there's no frickin' way out of it...the DM asks the player, "Do you want death, or irrevocable maiming and damage and the chance you'll die anyway?"

This is a good opportunity to house rule events like dismemberment, such as when Vader cut Luke's hand off. Or permanent drops of 4 points Cha and Con as the player is mutilated, and never quite the same again as they hang onto a few threads of life. If nothing else it would be an interesting roleplaying scenario, and something a gaming group would never forget.

"Remember when Huey was crushed under the wheels of the Juggernaut in the Tomb of Horrors? And his legless torso pulled himself away until we could stabilize him? Remember that Huey?"

"Yeah."

 

[XCorvis]

The NOT QUITE DEAD YET House Rule...

Ooh, I like that. I'm always worried about lethality. I don't want to have a player invest a lot of time and effort into building up a character, only to have them die from a freak critical hit. But at the same time, if they don't feel threatened it won't be as fun. That offers a nice way out of permanant death while keeping the threat. You should spin that off into another thread so we can discuss it more.

 

[catsclaw227]

I like this too. Not an "official" house rule, but really just a common sense house rule. I'm not afraid to kill PCs, but to allowing them an option to survive would create great RP opportunities, and makes them more careful about throwing caution to the wind.

 

[Firebeetle]

Another house rule I have seen, with regards to hitpoints, is to allow the players to roll their HD 3x and take the highest one. This way if the cleric rolls a 2, 4, 7 she gets 7 HP. Not sure what kind of additional effect this will have. I guess it would have similar results to the system above.

Not bad, I might use it. In the game I DM I let players reroll 1s on a hit die. The other DM at our table uses my old rule, if you roll less than half you get half.