The relevance of house rules

[Emirikol]

Andor,

That's true if you are playing FR or GH, but even Ebberron is a big bunch of house rules. Our group plays in Hyboria (CONAN's world..not the tweaky-d20). We have a bunch of house rules that are relevant for play in that world.

Ebberron for example has new classes, races and rules.
Our Hyborian world has new classes, races and rules.

Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk can be played "as is" without any house ruling whatsoever.

jh

There have been several articles, and threads of discussion lately about how easy it is to make house rules 4e.

What is the point of these? Any system can be house ruled, there isn't anything suggested in these articles that couldn't be done of 3.x, or 2e, or 1e, or GURPS. Furthermore ease of houserulesing isn't why people play D&D. There are better games out there for customizing your game to suit your playstyle, from the 'Build your own game' approach of the HERO system to the modular approaches of GURPS or the FUZION system.

People, as far as I can tell, play D&D becuase they don't want to do that kind of work. They want a system where they can pick up a module and play it with minimal prep work, or reply on encounter tables and guidelines to let them wing encounters without a TPK.

So why all the gushing about a game designer hinting it's easy to change things?

 

[smetzger]

it is the ease of house rules that might make it nice. For instance, in 3.5 I would have loved to have been able to strip alignment out of the core rules, but it wasn't an easy solution. Too many effects depended on it. A simplified rule system with open math can more easily be tweaked to fight any campaign feel I might want to focus on.

it isn't a huge deal for me, but it is a bonus.

I took alignments out, or at least greatly simplified them, and had very few problems.

I just had good, evil and nuetral. Removed all spells, special abilities, domains etc that relied on law chaos and didn't have any problems in a campaign from 4th - 14th lvl.

 

[Mark Hope]

I took alignments out, or at least greatly simplified them, and had very few problems.

I just had good, evil and nuetral. Removed all spells, special abilities, domains etc that relied on law chaos and didn't have any problems in a campaign from 4th - 14th lvl.

I ditched alignment entirely for my Dark Sun games. For my homebrew I replaced with the Allegiance system from d20 Modern - you can still have Good, Evil, Law or Chaos as part of your allegiance, so alignment-specific effects can still feature if desired, but you can also ignore them entirely if it suits your character concept. Using this approach, Law, Chaos, Good and Evil become less relevant for those who don't care for them and more relevant for those who do. Works well.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

There have been several articles, and threads of discussion lately about how easy it is to make house rules 4e.

What is the point of these? ...
So why all the gushing about a game designer hinting it's easy to change things?

My take is that these comments are targetted at a complaint raised in 3.x editions. Namely that the mechanics create an assumed setting.
In 3.x, that assumed setting was discovered and worked through, griped at, and finally house rules.

In these articles, we are being told 'the 4e assumed setting is that characters get boosts from magic items at certain levels. But if you want to play a low magic game, this is how the math/mechanics can still work without magic items.'

Personally I think this is great. Instead of having to stumble through the rules to determine the underlying mechanics, WoTC is putting that information out in front and allowing DMs to customize the mechanics 'out of the box' with less of a chance of royally messing up something.

In 3x, running a low magic game means alot of guessing at the impact on CRs and ELs. Apparently in 4e, providing a flat bonus by level instead of magic items will mean you can use the same encounters {which means modules off the shelf, easily shifting to someone elses campaign, etc..}

I expect the 4E dmg will be full of variants of the baseline assumptions that still work. I vaguely remember an article stating that the focus of the DMG would be to open the door to understanding how the mechanics interact instead of reprinting the 'normal' variant rules and campaign suggestions.