What makes us House Rule?

[Dice4Hire]

Well, honestly, the published game is the designer's house rules, at elast in part.

The main reason people house rule, in my experience, is creativity. I do not feel 100% bound by the rules, though I try to follow them pretty closely. I am creative enough to make changes that benefit my own playing of he game.

 

[Jhaelen]

Well, I think the first factor are games with insufficient rule coverage. They tend to have more house rules because they cannot actually be played without them (alternatively, if the game is actively supported, you'll try to get errata or an 'official' opinion on the loop holes).

The second factor is that the number of house-rules increases the more similar games exist: Chances are, each has a couple of rules you especially like, so you'll 'import' them into your favorite game as house-rules to get the best of all worlds.

As a third factor, many house-rules are born when many people actively discuss a game, like, here on ENWorld. More people = more (good) ideas you may want to adopt.

 

[Treebore]

I house rule because I don't like rules as written, or they don't cover a situation at all, or I think of a way that covers it better. Or I play a game that was very intentionally written in a basic manner so that I could house rule on whatever rules I like in order for me to create my perfect game.

Then there are rules that I simply like. For example I hate point buys and random rolling for character creation, so I prefer to just let my players make whatever they want for a character, within the general guidelines given for character generation. Like if the attribute range is 3 to 18, they must decide on their attributes within that range.

These are my biggest reasons for house ruling.

Besides, since when has any game designer, or group of game designers, created a game that everyone thought was perfect? If that had happened I would think we would all be playing it, and message boards like ENWorld would have far fewer forums and there would be far fewer RPG message boards in general.

 

[Dannager]

We think we are smarter and understand the game better than the designers?

And then, as if to illustrate your point:

In my case, I house-rule either out of common sense (e.g. where something would just not work in reality as the rules think it would; the 4e commoner-to-1st-level h.p. jump is one such)

The poster above attempts to justify the change, twice, by handwaving it as "common sense" (as though the change actually falls under the heading of common sense, and as though the idea of common sense itself can really be applied to the game - I particularly like the use of the word "reality" in there), and then implying that the designers of the game ignored common sense when constructing the rules of the game.

I'm not saying that the above change is bad, here. That's for each game to decide. But house ruling your game and calling it common sense is not justification. The only acceptable justification for any house rule (if you actually feel like you need to justify yourself) is, "We have more fun when we play it like this."

 

[Desdichado]

In the case of 3e, the tightly-integrated ruleset makes house ruling harder - change one thing and there is likely to be a cascade of other changes elsewhere.

No it doesn't, and no there isn't.

Although I will agree that the baseless fear of those mysterious "cascading changes" seemed to have discouraged a lot of folks from houseruling.

Never discouraged me. I played very heavily houseruled 3e variants pretty much right from the get-go. Never had a single problem with "cascading problems" or the so-called "tight integration" of the rules.

 

[ExploderWizard]

"Broken" is a subjective term when applied to a lot of rules or systems. In a game where nearly anything is possible trying to create a system without houserules leads to madness.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The poster above attempts to justify the change, twice, by handwaving it as "common sense" (as though the change actually falls under the heading of common sense, and as though the idea of common sense itself can really be applied to the game - I particularly like the use of the word "reality" in there), and then implying that the designers of the game ignored common sense when constructing the rules of the game.

I'm not saying that the above change is bad, here. That's for each game to decide. But house ruling your game and calling it common sense is not justification. The only acceptable justification for any house rule (if you actually feel like you need to justify yourself) is, "We have more fun when we play it like this."

Of course it is a completely valid justification. Just like in Champions, many people didn't like the way a commoner could fall of a 30ft building and walk away unharmed.

You may not care about a sense of reality or common sense in a game, but for people who do, house-ruling to match their sense of common sense or reality is one of the most reasonable justifications there is!

In essence, house rules derive from dissatisfaction. The sense that "this could be better".

That could be because the rules violate ones sense of 'common sense' (falling rules in any version of D&D?). This could be because the rules don't match the particular campaign setting or flavour which is desired (interesting to see how SpyCraft 2.0 embraced this idea and codified it). This could be because one decides that the mechanics don't work as well as the designers thought they would (4e skill challenges?), it could be because a particular combination of effects turns out to break ones game, so it is houseruled in some way (e.g. scry buff teleport in 3e for many people).

The desire to make something work "better" for a given vision of "better" seems to be the main driver behind house rules to me.

Regards,

 

[Aus_Snow]

No it doesn't, and no there isn't.

Although I will agree that the baseless fear of those mysterious "cascading changes" seemed to have discouraged a lot of folks from houseruling.

Never discouraged me. I played very heavily houseruled 3e variants pretty much right from the get-go. Never had a single problem with "cascading problems" or the so-called "tight integration" of the rules.

Indeed. If anything, having a (somewhat) 'more universal' resolution system makes it easier to see what flow-on effects there might be, or might not be. IMO, that is.

When you're dealing with lots of little subsystems, there are still going to be flow-on effects from time to time (and yes, just as many) - but often, they won't be as obvious to the observer. That's the difference.

That said, I'm not opposed to using a boatload of subsystems in any given RPG. Both ways are fine by me, and I will probably end up house-ruling either one anyway.

What 'makes' us house rule? One size does not fit all. Your campaign - or hell, your character concept - isn't necessarily going to mesh perfectly with the ideas, methods, reasoning, beliefs and so on, of some random designer(s) out there. Or hey, you might pick up things about the mechanics in general, that you can improve, sometimes subjectively, other times not so much. Simple as that.

As for different systems being easier to house rule (i.e., lending themselves to it,) I guess I've already made on epoint there. Otherwise, of course, the more complex the system, the harder house ruling is. Can't think of any other major factors, quite honestly.

 

[renau1g]

You ever notice how certain games attract house rules more readily than other? Everyone house rules monopoly, but how many people house rule Risk? (I know I've house-ruled both, but this isn't really a common practice, is it?)

I house rule Risk. We also add a diplomatic theme to the game in that no negotiations can be spoken aloud, but rather require "secure transmission" (i.e. passing notes). Although it can slow things down a bit, it's great fun as you invariably have a flurry of notes passing back and forth, and about half are nonsensical.

Anyways, back to house-ruling. I house-rule anything I don't like, i.e. unbalanced, feat taxes, etc. (assuming you're talking about RPG's) in order to keep things fun.

In 3e I gave everyone Precise Shot for free. Why? Because I thought it sucked to have to take two feats just to shoot into melee. The non-human first level ranger was fubar'd if they used a bow because of that. In 4e, I had disallowed Bloodclaw, Reckless, Wintertouched, Hero of Faith, and a few other cheesey items/powers, and gave everyone Expertise at 5/15/25.

 

[coyote6]

You ever notice how certain games attract house rules more readily than other?

I don't think it's based on the rules so much as it is the people using those rules. For example...

So, I house rule every edition of D&D, which I'm sure isn't that unusual. But then, I'd never house rule Shadowrun (even though I should, since the game's rules are too insanely complex for me). And that goes for Earthdawn, the d6 system (hard to houserule a game that's presented as being only half complete, REQUIRING GM rules decisions, though), and WFRP. I'm pretty sure that were I to play Savage Worlds for any length of time, I'd throw in a few house rules, but not to the extent I went with most editions of D&D.

I've GM'd four editions of Shadowrun, and house-ruled at least three of them (1e being the possible exception; any house rules we used then were probably accidental); when I was looking at Earthdawn a long time ago, I remember thinking there was something I'd change (I don't remember what -- it was at least a dozen years ago). And I'd definitely be doing some tweaks to SW (Shooting covers bows to flintlocks to Steyr AUGs to blasters to cannons and on, but Tracking is a separate skill?).

But I don't know what I'd house rule in Warhammer, if I ran it, aside from maybe starting PCs out with some experience, so they're maybe a little less whiffalicious.

Different people, different impressions of games, and thus different impetuses to house rule (and then probably different house rules).