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House Rules

Started by Merc, September 18, 2009, 01:05:09 AM

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Merc

Right, since Drac was bugging about this board, might as well start putting up house rules thread. Post if you have any ideas or some suggestions/disagreements on any rules I put up.

House Rules
1. We will be using this Masterwork System.

2. Add 20 HP to your base health (this also affects your reserve points). You all are heroes in the making, you're all made of sterner stuff than most, at least at the start. (That, and I don't want you dying from one hit. It should take at least 3!)

3. You don't have to roll for gold, as the rules suggest. Rather, you all get max gold at start (200 gold).

4. Don't worry about languages. Generally, same language is spoken by everyone, and if they don't speak in it, it's probably a local/personal laguage you wouldn't have had a chance/reason to learn anyway.

5. I'm going to go with the "Story-based Levelling" system. You level up when I tell you you're due.

6. Feat Retraining: Since everyone's new with the system and experimenting with what their class can do, I'll allow feat retraining between adventures, though generally only one feat at a time.

7. Critical roll effects do occur outside of attack rolls of 20. Note that this does not mean that a roll of 20 is an automatic success or a roll of 1 is an automatic failure. Rather, -IF- you succeed on a roll of 20, you gain some appropriate effect bonus to improve your success. Similarly, if you fail on a roll of 1, you suffer an appropriate penalty in addition to failing.

You can still succeed on a roll of 1 or fail on a roll of 20.

8. Characters gain an appropriate skill/save/etc throw to avoid a critical failure effect, or at least minimize it. NPCs generally do not gain this chance, however.

9. On a threat confirmation roll, if you roll a 20, you automatically inflict max damage for that strike. Note that this does not include precision/magical/other damage that is tied to the same strike, you must still roll that component separately, at least. This bonus effect is only for players. NPCs would still have to roll out damage as normal.

10. Arcanist:
- Eldritch Darts do not require a Concentration check to use, and they can crit (x2) on a roll of 20.
- Also appending stuff from Jeremy Puckett's Magic System Fixes.

11. For medium armor, subtract 2 from the dice, and change it to 2+dX/magic DR. Similarly, for heavy armor, subtract 4 and change it to 4+dX/magic DR.
- Example: scale mail is normally 1d4/magic. Under this rule, it'd instead by (2+d2)/magic.

12. Harrier:
- We will not be counting squares. Assuming big field, Maya can move up to full movement. If there are difficult squares or limited space, I will say what the maximum number of squares Maya can move through, and assume she moves through that many.

13. Abilities that reduce the active defense bonus (such as "tumbling attack"), will now only reduce dexterity bonus.

Change Log
1. Edit: 9/18/09 - Modified the masterwork system so it's more balanced.
2. New: 10/21/09 - Added/modified Iron Heroes crit effects. Rules 7-9 are the relevant rules. Also, decided to simplify the use of eldritch darts so they don't suck so much while they're relevant/useful.
3. New: 10/26/09 - Armor DR rule.
4. New: 12/13/09 - Magic System Fix, ADF fix, Harrier fix.
<Cidward> God willing, we'll all meet in Buttquest 2: The Quest for More Butts.

Merc

#1
Potential house rule up for discussion: Natural 1 or natural 20 rolls.

According to rules, a natural 1 is not an auto-fail and a natural 20 is not an auto-pass on task resolutions (exception being a natural 20 on an attack, which is an auto-hit, but not necessarily a crit).

However, thinking of making a change (just for task resolutions, doesn't affect attack rolls).

If you roll a natural 1 or 20, roll a second d20 (unmodified, just the d20).

If you'd originally rolled a 1, subtract the value. If you'd originally rolled a 20, add the value.

You do not roll a third d20 if you happened to roll another natural 1 or 20.

I do like having a bit of random chance where you just get lucky or screw up despite whatever your modifier is, but not to the point of an exact 5% chance. This sort of fudges things in your benefit if you roll a 20 while still not guaranteeing a success, and likewise fudges things against you if you roll a 1 while still not guaranteeing failure.

Thoughts? I'll go by player choice on this. I like it, but don't care enough to force it on you guys if you'd rather keep it simple.
<Cidward> God willing, we'll all meet in Buttquest 2: The Quest for More Butts.

Sierra

Sounds like a novel way to deal with outlier rolls. Could be fun.

Dracos

#3
Not really that interested in it personally.  I like that at certain levels of skill, it's basically presumed that even on a bad day when fumbling around, and off your beat, a person skilled at x can do the basic x without failing.  So, different preference there.

If you (on a 1), subtract 1d20, that's on average removing 10.5 from the roll that is already low.  It in many cases might as well be a house ruled crit fail.  For instance, at level 8, my outlier case for tumbling will be 24.  Enough to consistently make the basic tumble check to avoid AoOs and a ridiculously high score.  -10 from it and now I have about 2.5 percent chance of failing the basic tumble check.  And that's going to be by far the most pumped up score of anyone in the party.  If I take a more average skill, at level 8, my Diplomacy will probably be 15 on the outlier case.  15 minus almost anything moves it right into the fail case.  For right now, at the level 1 we're at, it doesn't matter too much as a 1 will often be a solid fail anyway, but as soon as we reach say, level 3?  A large portion of skills will potentially be in the 'autosucceed at basic trial' range and now effectively get a 5 percent 'fail' rate.

Meanwhile on the other side, IH rules basically indicate you have to set the high DC to be aimed for to get the benefit beforehand.  You can't say "I rolled a 35.  I want it to play against this double skill challenge DC."  You could change that I suppose, but without that changing, there'd be little to no value outside of diplomacy (Which I think overrules that).  Moreso, a 20 on a task resolution is generally already launching us very solidly into the high successes without adding anything, and when its actually in a trained skill?  The rare times it might be are rolls opposed by base attack, and I'm doubtful that it will be there.

In general, it feels like it would weaken skill heavy characters as it'd give them a real (but small 2-5 percent) chance of failure on any roll they've pumped up.  The opposite end seems to give gains (rarely) only to the folks who are really bad at it in most cases after they succeed anyway and on opposed rolls will slightly boost the odds of the weaker opposed roller (often the NPC as PCs tend to enter opposed rolls they think they'll win).  It seems more likely to play against the skill challenges IH provides which encourage boosting the DC for neat tricks at higher skill.
Well, Goodbye.

Dracos

#4
Just tossing here.  We played some math games in SR today and the masterwork system proposed is very silly as stands, generally taking decades for level 20 characters to craft the top tier weapons and costing generally far more at any point in the process for far less.  It also makes crafting far weaker as failure is costly in Result rather than cost.  So a level 5 smith could reasonably make a masterwork (4th tier) weapon by IH rules is totally out of his abilities to make one by these.  You'd need a level 20-25 smith to hope to make a level ten one and even so they'd take decades.

I propose 1-4 system, with the same benefits.  use IH's failure rules and its better material rules

DC 27+ (rank * 3).   So 30 to 42 DCs.

Cost: 60*5^rank.  So 300 to 37500.

It still has the problem that a super master smith takes 1.5 - 2 years to craft a legendary weapon, which means if we go by these, it is impossible for us to commission neat weapons if we want.  Personally, I kind of like that stuff, so I dislike that we wouldn't be able to special order.

Maybe really just increase the DC and keep the time about the same?  Those costs would be reasonable, but crafting in either IH or D&D was never meant to scale to things of 10000 gp or more.  The rules they set assume prices between 5 and 500 gp as that contains the base cost of every item.  Masterwork normally adds a flat rate increase, not an exponetial one.

A possible mod that may work well is just make the amount crafting reduces in gold instead of silver.  That would leave master smiths potentially doing 500-1800 gp a week of work, rather than 50-180 gp of work.  Eh.  Still not good.  That means a master smith takes .5 years to do it.  Realistic?  Yes.  Basically still a 'no commissioning, no matter how much gold you accrue' option.
Well, Goodbye.

Dracos

And I think I've jotted proof that I do too many number crunches :P
Well, Goodbye.

Merc

No go with the natural 1/20 rule. Drac's comment is valid.

Tentative replacement masterwork system: HERE.

Better? Worse? Just stick to ol' +300 gp masterwork and that's all you get?

According to my numbers with that, assuming someone was making a level 10 masterwork longbow (100gp base) and didn't fail any rolls, it'd take him about 15-17 weeks. That's about 4 months. Also, still hurts to fail a craft check, but it doesn't hurt as bad.
<Cidward> God willing, we'll all meet in Buttquest 2: The Quest for More Butts.

Sierra

I'll yield to the math here. Whatever makes it more efficient works for me.

Merc

Ironically, you're the most affected. You'er the only one with points in Craft (metal trinkets/tools) ^_~
<Cidward> God willing, we'll all meet in Buttquest 2: The Quest for More Butts.

Dracos

Generally, much better.   I hope, in general, it is paired with fairly reliable blacksmiths (since basically we're saying "Buy->Go on 1-2 adventures->Come back).  Obviously we're not making masterwork stuff ourselves regardless of skill put to it, since that'd subject the team to .5-4 months of downtime but no one is going heavy blacksmith anyway :)

But Cheers to the work, Merc :)
Well, Goodbye.

Dracos

#10
as another house rule suggestion:

I suggest blasting the multiclassing penalties to Active Defense Bonus.  Instead, if moving between two classes with the same progression, keep counting as if you hadn't moved (Or simply ignore it and add normally).  Namingly as their logic is silly.  Anyone who abuses this for an excellent defense progression is also blocking themselves out of higher level abilities entirely and dealing with extra complex token juggling anyway by having several pools with special rules on them.  I'd suggest blasting their mastery progression as well, but the math checks out on it reasonably.  Pity though as it is unnecessarily complex for anyone who does want to switch classes.
Well, Goodbye.

Merc

Added crit effect rules mentioned in general discussion. If anybody has issue with them now that you didn't back then, feel free to speak up now.

Also added rule on eldritch darts mentioned in general discussion.

Also, there's a lot of things I'm pondering centered around the mechanics of armor and defense. They're really not prevalent at low levels, so I'm not too worried at this moment, but it may come up later as a balance issue. We'll see.

For now, here's a pretty minor proposal for improving armor damage reduction mechanics. Proposal rule:

11) For medium armor, subtract 2 from the dice, and change it to 2+dX/magic DR. Similarly, for heavy armor, subtract 4 and change it to 4+dX/magic DR.

As an example, scale mail is normally 1d4/magic. Under this rule, it'd instead by (2+d2)/magic.

Basically, the purpose of this rule is so that dicebot hate doesn't just gravitate everything towards "Dammit, I might as well just wear light armor. It's easier to use, and I keep rolling 1-2 anyhow." As it is, the lowest medium armor gives same or better DR than max for light armor, and ditto for heavy armor against medium armor.

It feels pretty minor but, changing DR for armor so it's 2+dX for medium armor and 4+dX for heavy armor. So Scale Mail, which is d4 instead is 2+d2. Basically, at the lowest roll result, an armor of a certain weight is still equivalent or better to the lighter counterpart.
<Cidward> God willing, we'll all meet in Buttquest 2: The Quest for More Butts.

Dracos

as I said in PM:  Thumbs up for the concept.  Good change.
Well, Goodbye.

Dracos

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcb64csk_62qk54chg

I can share edit if folks give their gmails to send it to. :)  Requests for add go in this topic.

Here's something to help everybody have an easier time in combat by getting all the core rules in one place.
Well, Goodbye.

Merc

#14
Added the armor houserule, due to lack of comments.
***
Also, as was mentioned in general discussion, I was tinkering with Stunts and similar manuevers. Nobody besides Drac commented though. Bums. =p

Anyhow, to summarize current status before it becomes a house rule:

- If it is a feat, combat challenge, or miscellaneous manuever, you may use it as often as you are capable of during your turn.
- If it is a combat manuever, there is a limit to how many you can use during your turn.

- Combat Manuevers:
* TRICKS: Find Weak Point, Share Weak Point, Combat Feint, Taunt, Focused Determination, Demoralize, Leaping Strike, Vertical Strike, Uncover Weakness, Describe Weakness, Battle Sense, Inspire Courage, Inspire Doom, Combat Sense, Faster than the Eye, Tumbling Attack, Perfect Balance.
* CHALLENGES: Fighting Climb, Secured Climb, Shadow Strike.
* STUNTS: Damage Stunt, Attack Stunt, Fast Dmg Stunt, Fast Atk Stunt, Disrupting Attack, Inflict Penalty, Defense Bonus, Save Bonus.


- Combat Manuever Limit (CML): You can only use one combat manuever per action available during your turn.
- For clarification:
* You get 1 combat manuever if you are taking a full round action.
* You get 2 combat manuevers if you are taking a move and standard action.
* You get 3 combat manuevers if you are taking a move action, a standard action, and then a second move action.
(Note that you can only get a second move action through a feat, such as Mobility 3 or Shot on the Run 1)


- While Fast Completion may be taken twice, it cannot reduce a standard action to a free action. Note that this is not the case, if the standard action was reduced to a move action by some other source, such as a feat.
* Ex: Imp. Feint 1 allows you to do a combat feint as a move action, which you can take the challenge to make it a free action.
* You could not, however, take two Fast Completion challenges to do combat feint as a free action from a standard action.


- "Free Action" Skill Tricks: For the purpose of the combat manuever limit, they count as part of one of your action(s).
- You may select which action it is attached to, unless otherwise specified (such as tumbling attack requiring it to be part of a move action).

- No "Simultaneous Action" challenge allowed, since it breaks the CML.

Miscellaneous changes:
- Changed Appraise's "Find Weak Point" into a move action (used to be std action).
- Made Perform's "Taunt" also work with Bluff (so it can be done untrained as well).
- Also made "Taunt" be a standard action, not a full-round action.

All of the above is listed in spreadsheet attached.
<Cidward> God willing, we'll all meet in Buttquest 2: The Quest for More Butts.