Nemesis Destiny's Houserules Thread

[Ferghis]

You might want to add some houserules regarding warforged, unless you feel that they ought to be able to be action-point batteries. They have a racial feature that makes it impossible for them to fail a death save, so they would feel free to trade them for APs at any point.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

That's a fair point for anyone thinking of adopting any of these houserules. I hadn't thought of it, because there are no Warforged in my campaign. I tried to reflavour as many of the races as I could to suit my setting, but I had nothing for that race.

That said, by my reading of the way death saves work and how they interact with this houserule, is that if a Warforged were to cash in all 3 death saves for action points, and they would be called upon to make a DS (i.e. at negative hp and their turn comes up), they would simply die, as they had no remaining death saves on their sheet. In other words, regardless if they can 'take 10' on an actual roll, under this houserule there is no roll - when you take that action point, you are basically forfeiting your roll, whether you could fail it or not.

It would be possible to 'game' that by perma-burning two of them, then using surges to pay them back at the earliest convenience. One possible fix would be to disallow regaining an AP with healing surges when you're out of APs, but I'm not sure I like how that interacts with the death flag mechanic, since that could make it more difficult to pay back than I intended.

Thanks for pointing this out.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=98255]Nemesis Destiny[/MENTION]
Nice set of house rules! A question about the healing surges for rituals...

Is Raise Dead an exception? For example, say my 14th leave PCs cast raise dead on the rogue, does the ritual caster just spend 1 healing surge? (since its a L-6 ritual?) Or is it treated as a paragon-tier ritual of their level because the original ritual has scaling cost by tier? And if they were epic level and using it on an NPC who the DM rules wanted/could be resurrected, would the ritual be free?

More broadly, I wonder if your system would better fit if there were just healing surges and no action points in the game? Of course, I realize other mechanics reference action points, so that may not be possible. It just seems weird to have two competing piles of plot coupons, doesn't it?

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

@Nemesis Destiny
Nice set of house rules! A question about the healing surges for rituals...

Thanks! I'll try my best to answer.

Is Raise Dead an exception? For example, say my 14th leave PCs cast raise dead on the rogue, does the ritual caster just spend 1 healing surge? (since its a L-6 ritual?) Or is it treated as a paragon-tier ritual of their level because the original ritual has scaling cost by tier? And if they were epic level and using it on an NPC who the DM rules wanted/could be resurrected, would the ritual be free?

All rituals that have special costs, including foci, still have those costs, including ones with additional healing surge costs (that surge cost can never be removed).

The specific example of Raise Dead has not come up in my campaign, as I limit access to such things to maintain the tone I'm after in my games. That said, I would make an exception for this one, and have the cost remain, and have it scale. It would be a safe bet that I likely would do this with any scaling-cost ritual.

In the case of NPCs, I would maintain the cost relative to the characters' level, more than likely.

For what its worth, I hand out exponentially less wealth in my games as well, so this has an effect on things too.

I'm still very much in the process of playtesting and tweaking all of my houserules; they are constantly under review and subject to change. My players know this and are more or less okay with it. Our group has run mostly in the heroic tier, so most of the changes we've made are focused there. I've had one group hit 10th that I play and co-DM in, and another that I strictly play in that has hit 12th. The highest game that I run solo is currently 7th level. We play almost weekly, but we change campaigns often and rotate DM duties, as well as play other games, so despite having played since 4e's launch (and even slightly prior with leaked copies), none of our groups or characters are high level.

I would very much like to get to high paragon at some point; I keep reading about others' experiences and it sounds pretty cool.

More broadly, I wonder if your system would better fit if there were just healing surges and no action points in the game? Of course, I realize other mechanics reference action points, so that may not be possible. It just seems weird to have two competing piles of plot coupons, doesn't it?

Since there is so much interchange between both types of plot coupon, or more precisely, since I've made the Healing Surge more of a de facto plot coupon, yes, I'd considered unifying it into one mechanic.

Ultimately, to maintain greater compatibility, and because I wanted a coupon that is easy to recover (surges) and also one that is harder to recover (APs), I decided to keep both.

 

[Quickleaf]

Yeah, I am running a low-paragon game and it has been fun, but it's the highest I've taken 4e so far, the PCs are 13th. I have been reading a lot about other RPGs like Fiasco, The One Ring, and Dungeon World lately, and definitely have been getting ideas for my 4e games going forward.

I played with a DM who had a customized action point system that was remained to something like "Story Points" which you could spend 3 of to use as an action point, and a whole mess of other uses including spending 10 to change the story. One player used that to take control of a golem for an adventure, it was pretty fun even if a little nonsensical!

So far I only have two house rules that the players see: inherent bonuses & everyone starts with a bonus feat (to cover the "feat tax" of expertise). Mostly, I just tweak the hell out of monsters