Hot answers tagged house-rules
15
Wizards has pretty carefully balanced combat advantage and flanking and it might be inadvisable to change it. Let's look at some reasons why.
This makes the rogue incredibly overpowered. Instead of having to use an at-will power like Clever Strike to get CA when she is around an enemy with an ally, she now has the freedom (with no expenditure of action) to ...
13
Yes, you can craft without spending gold.
The description of the craft skill does indeed include paying one third of the item's price for the cost of the raw materials. This is an abstraction, a simplification of the crafting, relieving players and the DM of the shopping for the multitude of different ingredients required for the process.
If one can not ...
12
Rule number 1: This is your world. Your rule. If you think that firearms would be common to the point of like, even the commoner protects his farm with a shotgun, hey..go for it!
Just keep in mind that you would have to make the guns Martial weapon instead of requiring a specific feat. So that any military-grade training will provide training with guns. Or ...
11
Alignment is a description of how you have acted in the past, NOT a restriction on how you act in the future
There can be no penalties because alignment is not a straitjacket. This was one thing that 4e absolutely got 100% right (though I prefer the 9 alignments to the 5).
Playing out of alignment may anger others who share your alignment, may draw the ...
10
It will have an effect, because people won't bother with armor. There's no reason to get weighed down/slowed/possibly drowned if people can easily and cheaply shoot at your touch AC instead.
From the sounds of it, that's an intended effect of moving things into an Old West style world.
The unintended consequences are likely to be in what makes the scissors ...
10
Here are some house rules I've used to great effect – based on the writings of many bloggers and forum posters.
Simplify casting times to Short rest and Extended Rest
If casting time is less than 1 hour, make it a short rest instead. If it's longer, make it a extended rest.
Severely cut the casting cost
Cut casting cost by at least 50%. Consider cutting ...
10
You may find it more effective to give monsters new traits or powers.
In terms of flanking, there is a theme called Stormraider that does something similar:
Stormraider Level 10 Feature (10th level): If you and one or more allies are adjacent to an enemy, you and those allies are considered to be flanking that enemy.
It's not much of a stretch for a ...
9
The main issue is the difference in how useful Int, Wis, & Cha are for non-casting purposes.
Intelligence: great for everybody, since it gives more skills (plus it boosts knowledge skills, which tend to be popular with casters)
Wisdom: meh; it boosts your will save, which is nice, but most casters have pretty good will saves from their class anyway, so ...
9
No
There are two reasons for this. One is that reading the rules is very different from running the game. The other is that potential players also have a role to play in the creation of house rules.
If you don't have any direct experience of how things work at the table, it's a lot harder to feel where the balance actually lies. For example, creating a ...
9
The simplest is to simply use the Sorcerer instead of Wizard - you get a small list of known spells, and a number of spells, and nothing else changes.
Slightly more effort, but more easily used for all classes...
Spell Points
Allow the usual numbers of known spells. Each spell costs spell points equal to twice it's level, with zero levels being treated ...
8
Don't hack systems until you've played them! There are all kinds of reasons why, but the most important is that it's nearly impossible to understand every rule of a game until you've used it… and that's the case here.
Abilities do not cap at 3. 3 is merely above-average, while 5 is peak human ability. What you thought the rule should be is almost exactly ...
7
Both systems define "improvised weapons," found in the weapons rules.
Sometimes objects not crafted to be weapons nonetheless see use in
combat. Because such objects are not designed for this use, any
creature that uses an improvised weapon in combat is considered to be
nonproficient with it and takes a –4 penalty on attack rolls made with
that ...
7
Pathfinder vs. D&D 3.5
There really aren’t any major differences between the two as far as this is concerned; the only one is for non-Core spellcasting classes (Beguiler, Spirit Shaman, Wu Jen, etc. for 3.5, Witch, Magus, Oracle, etc. for Pathfinder). I don’t know enough of Pathfinder to know if any of those non-Core classes is going to ...
7
The penalties are too harsh; you’ll still have no one using Counterspells.
I’d suggest straight-up just letting Counterspell be an immediate action, always and without additional penalties. No lost actions on the following turn (aside from the Swift as normal for Immediate actions), no penalty on your Caster Level check. It will make ...
6
It looks like Steve Winter has weighed in here that what happens is that the values stack, meaning :
With no rest (fighting, casting) : 0HP/day
With rest (traveling allowed) but no help from a healer : 1HP/day
With rest (traveling allowed) and help from a healer : 2HP/day
With bed rest (no traveling) but no help from a healer : 3HP/day
With bed rest (no ...
6
There is actually a Paragon Path that can help with this. Specifically, its utility power "Ride the Giant Down":
Ride the Giant Down
Daily ✦ Martial
Move Action
Melee 1
Target: One Large or larger creature
Effect: You move into the target’s space, provoking opportunity attacks as ...
6
… combat is so lethal means that you really, really, don't want to get hit.
And yes, that's the way it should be. :) And your players may have to go through a couple of (dead) characters before realising that. The best way to avoid getting hit is to avoid combat at all costs.
In my opinion, modifying the formula for a character's dodge score will ...
5
No, nothing official. You can make Intimidate checks but that's a poor substitute. I made a quick cut at a 3e morale system with two factors, aggression and morale, on my blog. There's not a lot of reason not to just use the old school morale system straight, though, it's not like you threw away all your d6's with the d20 system.
5
There is no "counter attack" system in Pathfinder as such. First off attacks are presumed to be happening at the same time, and swords, maces, and fists are expected to be flying all the time. The closest thing in Pathfinder is the Attack of Opportunity which models how attacking a character when they have effectively left themselves open, by casting a ...
5
No.
Under the standard rules, each dice keeps exploding until you stop rolling 10s.
Remember that each dice explodes seperately. If you have 3k2 and roll 10, 10, 6 then you get to reroll the 10s. Say they come up 10 and 7, you'd have 20, 17 and 6. Assume the next roll comes up 3, you'd have 23, 17 and 6. Keep 2 means you'd choose two dice and the best two ...
5
Note that not all guns have a ridiculous ranged touch attack.
"Early" firearms only do touch attacks within their first range increment, typically 50 or less. (often much less). "Advanced firearms" like the rifle have an amazing range (80ft), with touch attacks out to 5x that, but the "advanced" list is pretty short.
Honestly, we had a gunslinger in our ...
4
D&D Blogger Zak Snyder came up with an elegant solution, which I'll reproduce here. (The blog is NSFW.)
Attacking big monsters: for every round spent climbing on (not attacking) a big monster without falling or being thrown off, you get +2 to hit and damage for when you do attack while on it. You are also protected from many of the creature's usual ...
4
Resources, and equipment's resource requirement, represent permanent attachments to a character. These are things that are simply part of the character's existence and not just items that happen to be lying around. You don't have to have resources to have access to a weapon for a scene where you need it, you need to have resources to have access to that ...
4
I found an interesting reference in The Blood for Vampire: The Requiem that explains that players may have access outside of their merits, but that the merit points represent semi-permanent gains — things that are part of the character.
Specifically, they mention that you can have a haven without spending dots, you simply do not get the mechanical benefit, ...
4
Lets start with the Kusari-gama
The Kusari-gama is a superior double melee weapon. The main end does 1d10 damage and has a +2 proficiency bonus. The weapon also has the defensive property (a +1 bonus to AC when you wield it along with another melee weapon (in this case the other end of the Kusari-gama)) and the reach property (allowing you to make a melee ...
4
Microscope
Microscope is a good example of what you're wanting, but it does not occur during gameplay of another game.
Essentially, it is a collaborative world-building game where you and the other players work together to create a universe. Play begins with a list of must and must-nots that the players determine one at a time, until someone declines to ...
4
In Mystic Empyrean the players create the world as they explore it with a mix of individual authority, shared authority, and random card draws. It's non-traditional in a lot of ways though, so not everyone's cup of tea. It is definitely a worthwhile example of how such a system could be built. Studying the interplay between the system mechanics, character ...
4
Understanding Fate in general
One of the problems in understanding Strands is the lack of the labels.
The standard fate "Ladder" is labeled:
+8 Legendary
+7 Epic
+6 Fantastic
+5 Superb
+4 Great
+3 Good
+2 Fair
+1 Average
+0 Mediocre
-1 Poor
-2 Terrible
-3 Awful
-4 Abysmal
(Taken from Fate Basics, by Michael Moceri)
The Ladder is inherited from FUDGE, ...
4
Here are the guidelines I used in my last game.
1) Give out rituals with loot. They're not worth selling, so the players end up keeping the ritual. Left to their own devices, the players would buy the half dozen rituals the internet has deemed worthwhile. This method gave them those circumstantial rituals that are useless once or twice in the game. The ...
4
I would houserule dodge defense to be derived from several different attributes/skills, so player's wouldn't feel like they have to buff up a single defense skill (dodge).
For example; back with D6 (with 6 attributes), I made a static dodge defense stat that was equal to 4 + the number of D you have in Dodge + the number of D you have in Perception (plus ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
