What's the first thing you guess you'll have to house-rule?

[FireLance]

If it isn't in the rules, I'll probably want to make it possible for a warlock to make a pact with obviously good entities. This could involve simply changing the flavor of some of their powers, adapting them, or making entirely new ones.

 

[I'm A Banana]

And those are completely unrelated to the functions they fulfill in combat. There is no reason why the striker cannot also be your economist or the controller cannot also be the peacekeaper.

Well, that's kind of the point. I never said these roles were exclusive. Quite the opposite, I imagine they wouldn't be. Different roles for different uses. Combat roles, social roles, etc.

I didn't say I'd vastly expand the classes, just that I'd vastly expand the use of the "role" idea.

That's what I tried to get at with the "noncombat guy". I have played systems before in which you have the characters mostly focused on combat and the characters mostly focused on other things, L5R for example. The danger is that during combat, the combat characters take care of things and the others sit on the sidelines, and the same thing in reverse outside of combat.

You missed the part where I said combat wasn't going to be that important in these political or horror campaigns. If it was, then yes, Noncombat Nellie would have to stand around being unamused for quite a while. But that's (a) why they don't have to be exclusive, and (b) why you don't really have combat in these games.

I've got a hypothesis about the combat focus that relates to combat being D&D's particular obsession. The reason combat is fun is because you're rolling a lot of dice and using a lot of abilities and you've got some risk and some reward. D&D has typically thrown all it's eggs in the combat basket, and ignored the noncombat basket as "role playing." Which lead to things like the 2e proficiencies system and the 3e skills system, which aren't really the most nuanced ways to portray the noncombat aspect of a game. If you take what's fun about combat and add it to noncombat things (such as politics or survival horror) you can have fun doing that, too. The fact that 4e plans on having "social encounters" is support for this hypothesis: independent research varifies it.

But I think the strongest argument for that house rule coming in is that they don't have to be exclusive. What is a Negotiator during a political encounter can still be a Striker during a combat encounter.

So in a game that has a fair amount of combat by defintion (D&D is not well suited for campaigns without combat), you are probably best off keeping combat and noncombat abilities entirely seperate, so that everyone is useful in both situations.

I'm confused. Let's start at the end: "combat" and "noncombat" abilities, you say, should be entirely separate. I don't really know what you mean by that, or how I implied that they would somehow entwine by saying that vastly expanding the roles system is something I plan on doing with 4e. Before that, you say that D&D is not well suited for campaigns without combat, but the d20 system was used for everything from horror to romance to vehicular combat to biblical era armada marching to...well, things that are really not just about combat. Furthermore, you say that as if it is self-evident, when obviously in my games (where I've mentioned a desire in this thread to play things politically or horrifically as examples of where I take D&D) the game isn't quite limited to combat and dungeon crawling exclusively. Also, you say that the game has a "fair amount of combat," ignoring that individual DM's will, of course, vary on the amount of combat in the game.

I mean, obviously the designers of 4e realize combat isn't all D&D does, though it is something D&D keeps getting better at doing. My hope is that they don't loose sight of the other things D&D does in pursuit of combat excellence. Part of the reason I'll be houseruling the expansion of roles is because I realize the designers will focus on combat, and want to appropriate the notion of roles (really, archetypes) for more than just combat. In fact, in FFZ, I already have "roles" for the typical FF-style storyline in the form of Character Concepts.

Do you understand, or is this somehow still me somehow proposing that 4e should morph itself into Blue Rose?

 

[FireLance]

One more thought: I like the idea of players rolling for their characters' saving throws, so I'll be flipping the opponents' attack rolls into defence rolls/saving throws for the PCs.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

The first thing I'll houserule is making action points be handed out per session, rather than per level.

The second thing will probably be to slow advancement.

The third might be to tack a couple of pre-1st level levels onto the game for the occassional, "you're a schmuck, get along in the big bad world" type games.

Later
silver

 

[StarFyre]

And let the list begin:

These are house rules we use currently:

1) critical hits work differently (we use the spells & magic/Combat & tactics, detailed 'realistic' crit hits, so our method is a combination - we have a computer program a friend created that does it all for us, so upon a crit hit (we stopped the confirmation role btw, waste of time), we click on the program, with some settings, and it tells us the effect)

2) alignment - have changed to a more real world system..Basically, no such thing as good & evil since these are comparative terms based on perspective. Chars are played like us in real life; we do what we feel will benefit us, for whatever goal we want to achieve. This is good since we play planar campaigns most of the time, the planes can be set to specific aspects of alignment, and thus it enhances the roleplay between the character's own beliefs vs the hard and fast set rules within a game.

3) spells - some spells are changed (ie. disintegrate works very differently in our campaign...instead, we make a target role...if it hit the arm for example, save for the arm..if it fails, the arm takes the damage and turns to dust..then save on the torso to see if it spreads, etc...it takes longer, but makes for much cooler descriptions and more brutal results).

4) item saves - upon a failed save (not just a 1), save for the item (if magical). THen compre damage vs teh hp of the item, and see if it breaks (a lot more risk and stuff breaking but makes more sense and causes them to be more careful with what they do)

5) classes - some prestige classes have been re-written/modified (not many) - wild mage, Chronomancer specialist mage

6) monsters - i give back/remove abilities from creatures if the cahnges in 3.5 got rid of the flavour of the creature (ie. demons are supposed to fight via attrition....hence, summons/gates can now be used immediately upon the initial creature being summoned, just like in older editions). This means CRs go up, but our party is larger (8 chars) and we fidn that in general, the CR doesn't mean as much (ie. at level 1, they easily took our a large group of orcs that the CR says should not have been possible).

7) some cosmology changes..not really great wheel but we do use Sigil at the top of the spire in a large landscape called outlands. THe rest of the planes though; not in the greatwheel structure.

in 4E:

I think the same changes as currently will be needed as well for our campaign, as creatures such as dragons, in our standard, we believe and players do as well, that many should have spells (that they can use naturally)...but they have removed them from most creatures; so we will add them back. May also change how spell resistance works if we don't agree with any changes there.

Cosmology - can easily take what they have done and accomodate our changes to a total revamp. Not a big deal at all so this I am pleased about.

Sanjay

 

[diaglo]

character creation

 

[Baby Samurai]

Halflings will not be an option as a race unless I finally start up my d20 Middle-Earth campaign.

 

[Wormwood]

I'm sure I'll spot something once I see the complete rules, but at the moment? Nothing.

edit: The Spined Devil card listed a Spot check. If Spot and Listen are still separate skills in 4e, then I do have my first House Rule after all.