What house rules do you use?

[CRGreathouse]

(The obligitory thread)

If you had to choose five of your house rules (the most basic changes you made to your campaign), what would they be?

 

[CRGreathouse]

Taken from my House Rules document (which has a total of 8 house rules):

1. Change the save on harm to “Will partial” and add the following to the text description: “If the save is successful, the subject instead takes 1d8 damage per caster level; this cannot deal enough damage to drop them below 5 hp.”
2. Add the following feat: “Expanded Repertoire”: Choose 1 exclusive skill or two nonexclusive skills. These skills are always treated as class skills for you.
5. Half-orcs have a +2 racial bonus to Intimidate checks and lesser scent (scent per MM, but with ½ range).
6. Remove the toad from the list of familiars.
8. A combatant can choose to ignore a foe at any time, lasting until the same initiative count the next round. Ignored opponents cannot grant flanking bonuses to allies, are effectively invisible, deal maximum damage, and threaten a critical hit on all hits.

 

[Crothian]

We don't use many, but I'll try to think of them

1) Skill Focus grants +3 bonus
2) Defensive roll: as a move action you can roll a d20 and add all your AC modifiers. If this is better then your original AC, the new AC is used for one round.
3) Bards get 6 skill points a level
4) Hit points: 1d4 or 1d6 reroll all 1s, 1d8 reroll all 1s and 2s, 1d10 rereol 1-3, 1d12 reroll 1-4. (Ya, the barbarian has way to many hitpoints. I didn't make this roll, I'm playing the Bard.)
5) Cirlce kick can be done in place of one of the monk's normal attacks. So, if he attacks at +8/+5/+2 he can circle kick with the +8 and still get an attack at +5 and +2. (Again, not my rule, I'm playing the Bard).

 

[Cloudgatherer]

A few of my own...

Skill Focus
Blatant Use of Rule 0: Bonus will be increased from +2 to +3. Those looking for a feat to change a cross-class skill into a class skill, see Cosmopolitan from the FRCS.

Toughness
Blatant Use of Rule 0: Toughness will add +1 HP per level and can only be taken once.

Death and Resurrection
Instead of suffering a level loss when raised from the dead (as per Raise Dead or Resurrection), a character will incur an “experience debt” which must be paid off before the character can level. When a character is resurrected with a spell that would normally require a loss of a level, the character will incur an XP debt of 500 XP * Character Level instead. The character’s XP total is left unchanged, but the “debt” must be paid off before the character can gain another level. Most often, the character will divert all XP earned in following adventures toward paying off the debt and then continue leveling normally.

Dispel Magic and Greater Dispelling versus Permanency
When a successful dispel magic is cast on a permanent magic effect, it will work using the rules for magic items when they are subject to a dispelling effect. The magic of the item or permanent magic effect will be negated for 1d4 rounds. If the effect is again successfully dispelled while it is negated, then the magic is destroyed/dismissed.

Spellbook rules
Learning a spell from a “borrowed” spellbook: In addition to the normal scribing rules, a wizard may attempt to learn a spell from a discovered spellbook (scrolls must still be copied using existing rules). A wizard may spend a day studying the spell, then make a spellcraft check of DC 20 + spell level to understand the spell. If the check succeeds, he may spend an additional 1-day per spell level to finish learning the spell. Failure means you can try again when you have put another rank into spellcraft. A successfully learned spell may be prepared from the spellbook as if it were in the mage’s own handwriting (preparation is guaranteed, no spellcraft check). The time spent learning the spell does not have to be uninterruptible; it can be done in between adventures or while traveling.

 

[Uller]

1: Bonus spells for sorcerers: At odd levels, a sorcerer may take a new spell one level higher than he can normally cast and cast it once per day if he has a high enough CHA modifier to allow him a bonus spell of that level instead of taking one of his two highest level spells. Example: A sorcerer with at least a 16 CHA may take a 3rd level spell upon gaining 5th level instead of his new 1st and new 2nd level spells. When he gains 6th level, he must take the two spells he passed up at 5th. I've found allowing low-level sorcerers to gain some higher level spells quicker makes them more viable for multiclassing.

2: Elves may substitute Sorcerer for their favored class. Dwarves may use Cleric. This must be determined upon character creation.

3: Harm does 4d8+caster level on successful will save(not reducing target below 1d4 hp)

4: Skill Focus gives +3 bonus

I think that's all I use as "official" house rules....I am pretty lenient when it comes to players modifying PC skills, feats, spells, etc if they find they are not very fun to play.

 

[med stud]

1. When a multi class character has a skill as class skill on any class' skill list, she only pays 1 SP/rank for the skill, no matter what. Ex: Rog 1 advances as Ftr 1, and can buy 1 rank Hide for one SP.

2. Different kinds of mastery feats for different fighting styles available to characters with high BABs. Examples are the Two weapon feats that are posted somewhere in the House rules forum.

3. Classes with d10+ as HD gets ambidexterity for free at lvl 4, the "mastery- limit" for the warriors.

4. Rangers are made to be the warrior- class with the strongest offense but weakest defense, by granting them ambush- bonuses and certain bonus feats (only flavour feats, like Alertness, Endurance, etc).

5. Monks are out of the game.

 

[Velenne]

My group has played for many years and we mostly enjoy combat. Consequently, we focus a lot on the rules related to combat. Most of our characters and baddies are min/maxed to at least some extent (some players have more a taste for this than others). Here are a few of the house rules we've come up with:

1.) Max out hit points at every level. This goes for monsters as well. Combats last longer (which we like), and it's much easier to compute monster hit points.

2.) No death from massive damage, or kill threats (both presented as options in the DMG which we used for awhile). Basically, once you get to the higher levels, it's pretty easy for your spellcaster to do ridiculous amounts of damage, or your figher to have enough attacks that he kill-threats too often. We had a rather anti-climactic ending to an adventure when the fire-immune, cold-vulnerable, final boss died from a single Empowered Cone of Cold.

3.) Skill Focus gives +3 (a common house rule, it seems)

4.) No Psionic Combat. We gave Psions their choice of bonus feats at the same levels as a wizard, and Psychic Warriors bonus powers known. After a few tries, we basically felt the existing system was too complicated, cumbersome, and rarely-applicable to be used.

5.) Completely revised the Ranger class to make it more desirable at higher levels, and less powerful at lower levels. That would make for a much larger post, so suffice to say the overhaul was drastic yet well-recieved.

 

[ruleslawyer]

In addition to many of the above (including the famous Skill Focus +3 rule):

1) Hit points: The BP/HP system detailed in Asgard No. 2.

2) Rangers: Monte Cook's ranger, as (massively) tweaked by me.

3) Bards: get 1 free rank of Perform per class level.

4) Paladins: are a prestige class.

5) Magic: Too detailed to go into here, but haste, polymorph other, harm, teleport spells, and resurrection spells look a heck of a lot different in my game.

 

[trentonjoe]

To create a medium magic item or greater, specific material componets are needed (ie red dragon scales for a 10th level wand of fireballs)

ALl Knowledge skills can be class skills if they make sense.

Creating undead and using poison are always considered evil acts.

NO 1's for hit points unless you are a mage.

Boots of striding and springing do not exist (boots of speed are about to get a serious gp value hike soon too)!

 

[drowdude]

Lesseee here... (in no particular order)

1.) Bonus feat at first level for all characters, and an additional bonus feat for PCs (2 total extra for PCs at first level).

2.) Reroll anything below average for hit points.

3.) Reroll 1s and pairs of 2s during character generation (4d6)

4.) All classes fall into the 4..6..8 range for skill points.

5.) ...and last but not least the most universal house rule....
Skill Focus gives a +3 rather than +2



There are more of course, but you only asked for 5