What could possibly go wrong?

[Alexander123]

Alienating the players is definitely one of the most important reason why houseruling by inexperienced DMs can lead to a disaster.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Alienating the players is definitely one of the most important reason why houseruling by inexperienced DMs can lead to a disaster.

Due to inflexibility or are you talking about something else?

Taking the game (and the rules) too seriously has contributed just as much to dissatisfaction as inflexible DMs IME.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

What could go wrong? It's not so much the possibility of things going wrong - that'll happen regardless. It's the fact that many things don't HAVE to go wrong because so many other DM's have been there before you and already know where the dangers are.

1. LEARN the system well before you decide to start making major changes to it. Yeah, you may have grand ideas for your first campaign being the best game ever and the game to end all games - but the reality is you're not likely the reincarnation of Gagax or Arneson. Give it a year or even two of steady play before you decide to re-write the whole game in order to better fit your masterwork.

2. Know that the more effort you're putting into changing things the less likely it is that the players are going to care or want to put up with it. Every change you make has to be documented for your players to learn and refer to. If they are as new at the game as you are, you're NOT doing anyone any favors by messing up their learning of how things were supposed to work in the first place, much less being able to appreciate whether or not your changes are worth the effort on their part to accomodate YOU.

3. Players want and deserve consistency. For them, the fun of D&D is not found in using it as an ongoing experimentation with rules. The more you change things as a game goes on the less faith players will have in you and your skills as a DM. They won't invest effort in their characters if they know that you're just going to nerf their powers when they figure out good ways to use them, invalidate their builds with changes to how this or that mechanic will work, or learn that eventually you're going to throw yet another wrench into your own works and change it all around AGAIN. Particularly in an RPG whose gameplay for the players revolves around "System Mastery," having a RELIABLE, PROVEN system is generally more important than scratching your itch to tinker.

4. Having said all that don't ever put the RULES in charge of your game. YOU run the game - not the dice, not the rules, not the players. Don't be AFRAID to make changes - just be sure that you're changing things for well-considered reasons and with a good working knowledge of what the consequences of those changes are going to be.

Whatever their various flaws and strengths may have been - every version of D&D WORKS. Every version has both added improvements as well as introduced new problems. Changes and additions made by individual DM's will always be expected, even necessary, but NEW DM's are far better advised to devote their efforts to learning to run the system AS-IS first.

 

[Dungeoneer]

In another thread I've seen some folks advise caution to newer game masters when creating alternative or home-brewed material. Lest they fall victim to poorly conceived mechanics.

Not me! I advise all first-time DMs to run extensively homebrewed sandbox campaigns with built-from-scratch classes and their own custom magic system. If you're not willing to design your own game system from the ground up you have no business being a DM!

 

[Smoss]

What can go wrong? It depends on who designed it and who is running it.

I designed my own RPG system. A lot of the design ended up being happy accidents over time. HOWEVER, I only ran games when the system got a comfortable point for me. AKA a point where it was "safe" to run a group through the system without major problems.

The "Oops TPK due to a bad rule" often means a designer who did not take time to playtest the system (And if people are helping with that, they are people that KNOW it is a playtest). Don't just drop new houserules on people without communication. That leads to BAD THINGS.
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Smoss

 

[Dausuul]

Several games attempted to introduce Fumble mechanics. The fumbles were generally annoying, but not game-breaking until you hit outliers on the chart. Then a character (or 2) died (or worse). Games typically ended and/or had the rules yanked and session retconned at that point. Even with the retconn, player satisfaction dropped since some players had to live with their previous results and the more recently affected were given a pass.

Several games tried to introduce "better and more wild" wild magic and fell apart once all the original arcane casters died or were retired and no one was willing to play one any more.

This is a major example of where you can go wrong with house rules. Injecting random risk of permanent injury/death into a game, without seriously considering what will happen when the dice come up snake eyes for some hapless player, is a recipe for problems. If they can, players will soon start avoiding the risk-bearing element. If they can't, they'll become increasingly more disconnected from their PCs, since nobody wants to get invested in a character who may suddenly and arbitrarily end up a half-blind cripple with leprosy.

That's not to say you can't have such rules, but they have to be thought through with an eye to consequences and player behavior. If combat carries a substantial risk of random, unavoidable death, players will either avoid combat or treat their PCs as disposable. Is that what you want? If so, great. If not, consider a different approach. If every spell has a chance to explode in your face and permanently mess you up, very few people will play mages.

(It doesn't help that a lot of GMs don't have a solid grasp on how probability works. If a natural 1 is a fumble, you're gonna see a lot of fumbles. If fumble results are silly and stupid, there's going to be a lot of silliness.)

 

[Tamlyn]

Don't just drop new houserules on people without communication. That leads to BAD THINGS.

Definitely! It looks like a lot of the issues above originated with lack of notice of the rules changes before character creation.

Also, it may depend on the group. If you're playing with old friends and the group's been together for 10 years, they will probably be more patient and forgiving than those you've just met and just started playing with.

 

[Janx]

If she had played the game a little longer she would have seen how prevalent shifting is in the powers of some classes. However, let me state, 4e (IMO) is a very unforgiving system for house rules, meaning one little change can screw up everything. There are others systems which are easier to fiddle with, such as Mutants and Masterminds.

That was pretty stupid of her. You don't jack with a new ruleset from a big company that had a larger playtesting budget on your first day with it.

You certainly take note of what things utilize the mechanic your fiddling with.

In 2e, after quite some playing, my group decided that all casters didn't have to memorize. Memorization was a PITA and it mostly meant we never used our more interesting spells. Worked fine for many years.

When 3e came out, and I saw they created the Sorceror class, and how they changed the cleric, I held off on using that old house rule. Clearly, WotC had considered a similar mechanic, and had I brought in my rule, it would have invalidated an entire class.

Its my opinion that newbs should not be messing with changing rules. Because they tend to be getting the RAW wrong as it is. If they can't correctly understand and implement the RAW they are in no position to design and implement rules changes.

I'm also not a big fan of changing rules in large swaths. I tend to favor making few changes and making them simple. "You don't have to memorize your spells, but are still limited by the # of spells per day" is a big change in impact, but easy to summarize and thus remember to implement correctly.

 

[Dausuul]

If she had played the game a little longer she would have seen how prevalent shifting is in the powers of some classes. However, let me state, 4e (IMO) is a very unforgiving system for house rules, meaning one little change can screw up everything.

This is sadly true. It's a weakness of exception-based design. When you've got a system that consists of an underlying rules infrastructure supporting a whole bunch of little self-encapsulated "rules packets," you can tinker with individual packets to your heart's content, but you touch the infrastructure at your peril.

 

[The Shaman]

The "Oops TPK due to a bad rule" often means a designer who did not take time to playtest the system (And if people are helping with that, they are people that KNOW it is a playtest).

Yeah, I think playtesting house rules is important, and not just playtesting them by yourself with mock encounters, but actually putting them in players' hands and seeing what they do with them.

Even just putting them on a forum like this one for other gamers to sound out can be helpful. Someone else might've tried the same thing, or something similar, and other gamers familiar with the system may spot holes in the proposed rule.