What are your go to house rules?

[Celebrim]

As others have noted it depends on the system.

I have my own Chargen for CoC, documented here: [PEACH] House Rules for Call of Cthulhu (roughly 5e, 1920's setting)

For Star Wars WEG D6, I likewise have my own rules for races, most notably that Human characters can after CharGen pick six skills that they put no skill points into and add one pip to each of those six skills. As with almost every game I play, I have extensive house rules though. In Star Wars they cover such things hyperspace navigation and travel times, ship maintenance and fuel costs, exposure to vacuum, revised costs of equipment and more standardized rules on weapons and armor, revised rules on shield usage, standardized blast radiuses when using higher scale weapons against lower scale targets, revised cybernetics, revised power armor, narcotics, employment of sensors to detect other ships, called shots, use of tractor beams and combat with or between capital ships. So there is no "go to rule", but just lots of rules for covering what the rules handwave away - typically things that the system designer either didn't fit with how the game should be played or else didn't think important and so didn't play test.

For 3e D&D I think my go to house rule would be spell level and monster HD do not add to the DC of a saving through, followed closely thereafter by "There are no Prestige Classes". But again, I have at least 700 pages of house rules at this point, covering almost everything in the game that I would feel isn't covered well by the core rules because the core rules didn't consider it core to the play loop they imagined, or else didn't get the balance and the math right.

For 1e AD&D I'm actually in the process of developing house rules, as some recent threads demonstrate. And as usual, they are proving to be not so much house rules as a completely editorial revision.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

The One Ring

• Because a Tolkien game that doesn't have rules for languages seems wrong, I have the house rule that for every point of Lore you know one language outside common and your racial language.
• When traveling, you can use any skill to resolve a challenge but I will assign penalties if it seems less appropriate than the defined one.

Night's Black Agents

• To give more of a Jason Bourne feel, if you switch attack skill (shoot, weapon, hand-to-hand) you get a +1 on the roll. If you use an environment item I haev described, you get a +1.

13th Age

• If I think your background is bit of a stretch, I only apply half the bonus, rounding down. I actually like the way the new Blue Planet handles this -- each background has a broad area (for a small bonus), a normal area (for the usual bonus) and a focus (narrow that gives a great bonus)

 

[Thervin]

Not many. Most of my rulings are just clarifications for rules that are needlessly vague or poorly written, or are answering questions that have been asked before. However, I've been considering a change to Summoning to streamline it. Instead of a variable cost based on threat level, I want to fix its cost, probably at 2 points per rank. Then, the first time a player uses Summoning in a scene, they can choose :

- Summon a single ally with threat level equal to Summoning rank - 1. If they choose this, Summoning has one charge.

- Summon a group of weaker allies. If they choose this, Summoning has a number of charges equal to Summoning rank, each ally summoned expends a charge (you can still summon any number up to you limit with one action). Their threat level is equal to half Summoning rank, rounded up as usual.

I'm not sure about this, as I do like the high degree of granularity and customization that the original power offers. I might offer it as an additional, variant option, alongside the original.