The Golden Rule: They're Your Damn Rules

Due to various medical issues of mine flaring up I was unable to complete my blog post on Wendsday so in return this Sunday will have some extra posts to make up for it.

There's a proud tradition in many games I play of doing things your own way. From tweeking the rules to make combat smoother to creating whole new games out other games it's always been something I've particularly enjoyed.

So this article is for me to share my love of houserules, game modifications and emergent gameplay with you so you too can enjoy playing things how they weren't ment to be played.

Now I'm a massive roleplay nerd and while I'm not old enough to be a grognard I do have the occasional grognardian tendencies. One of the main ones being that Spellcasters are over-powered in D&D 3.5. I can hear the intake of many an angry breath as I say this but bollocks to you, being able to solve an encounter in 6 seconds and having a character sheet that runs on into tens of pages isn't my idea of an amazing fun time as a DM. With this in mind I tend to run low magic games which often include houserules to make them more lethal.

I have a long running on and off campaign called The Dunian Cronicles which is set in a low magic world, usually on a small northen island called Ur'Dun, and has earned a reputation for being spectacularly lethal. Why is this? Simple a few little tweaks to the rules and a realitively accurate knowleadge of severe physical trauma allows combat to become a hellish business at low levels and a risk even at the higher levels. I'll cover some of the changes here and my reasons for it so you can get an idea of the world I've tried to create.

The Big Changes
Crits auto-confirm. So if you roll high enough to hit you deal a crit. This means that training and use of weapons ment for dealing out crits is rewarded far more often than generalising. This also creates rather desparate combat situations where the players will attempt to kill off a crit specialist before he can act to minimise the amount of damage he can dish out.

You do not die at -10 HP instead when you reach 0 HP you take damage directly to your Constitution. Meaning a Barbarian with 22 Con is going to easily outlast a Bard with 8 but still be good and fucked up in the process. Now getting badly hurt means you're in a diminished state for a much longer time than a simple heal spell.

Crits deal damage direct to Constitution, including multiplier. A pickaxe to the head should kill almost anyone regardless of if you're Conan or Pee-Wee Herman. My players didn't realise the impact of this until one of the groups frontline fighters went from perfectly healthy to near death thanks to a single lucky stab from a chav with a shiv. This applies both ways though so a crit specialist can destroy enemies if they're lucky enough to roll it.

When you take Con damage make a Fort save with your new Con mod to avoid death.Weaker characters will die sooner than Fort monkies even if they manage to survive the inital hit.

Fiddly Bits
Rolling a Nat 1 on a skill check is a -10 rolling a Nat 20 is a 30. This removes the 5% chance of godhood and 5% chance of destruction from the infernal die.

A slew of minior changes to things like grapple, disarm and trip along with allowing more loose interpretations of rules in places. Encourages all the usual blah blah blah that I like.

Diplomacy and Bluff recieves a modifier based on roleplay. Thus preventing the Diplomatron from winning fights before they begin.

Specialist damage types exist which deal damage direct to Con unless the character is wearing the correct type of protection. Wearing fullplate don't mean shit if someone shoots you in the chest. This also makes the introduction of firearms at the beginning of the campaign something to take note of.

And a whole heap of other things which I will no doubt cover in another article. But just these few changes, primarily around crits and dying, along with the removal of magic for the most part drastically changed how my players approached situations. So rather than wading into the fire knowing it was 2d6 damage per round they ran the fuck out of burning buildings knowing it was 2d6 Con damage per round and a chance of cooking.

Now this is a more extreme example, my campaign ended up being so far from 3.5 that it earned the nickname 3.Moley, but there's houserules aplenty no matter where you look. Monopoly is rarely played to it's printed rules, which you'll often hear touted about on the internet, the average long term DnD group alters combat to suit their style of play, various gentlemans agreements spring up in CCGs, wargames and RTSs and I could go on.

Most of these changes are done because the players prefer the game that way or because of a percieved abuse in the rules but often completely changing the way the game is played can be just as much fun. Modding has a proud tradition within the FPS world sometimes even spawning whole new ideas on how to play the game in question.

DeFRaG I have already prattled on about in a previous blog post but never the less turning an FPS into some weird hybrid of exibition sport and skill based race always seemed amazing to me. But less gushing about something I've already covered and new gushing about other things.

Grifball is a custom game for Halo in which the usual "shootyshooty, hideyhidey" mechanics get replaced by a pretty silly sport. If you want to know the history of the game just click here and if you want to see how to play presented in the usual Red Vs Blue style just click here. What I love about Grifball is the steady emergence of new styles of play and ways to play; from shockwave surfing to just simply trying fancier ways to score with the ball.

I've always been facinated by this sort of emerging gameplay that some games create and I'm often drawn to games that support and encourage it. While Minecraft has been covered to death by everyone and their dog it does fit into that mold wonderfully. There's almost no game there except what you create for yourself.

Now moving away from the dramatically overexposed Minecraft and into something a little similar but no less cool. Lego make a range of boardgames now, imaginatively titled Lego Games, in which they actively encourage you to make up new rules for your game. I own around 8 of these games now and while some are just roll your dice, move your mice style of games some of them are terrifyingly deep in places and with a little bit of jiggery-pokery you can turn them into surprisingly satisfying ways to lose friends. I urge anyone who's interested in acctual games design to take a look at the range there's some serious fun to be had in there for a tenner.

Now further on from Modding is total conversions and effectively the creation of whole new games using the systems that already exist. I've been malarkying with some of these myself, I hope to put them up on this blog as I steadily develop them over the next few months. One of the most interesting varients I've seen in recent years is E6 which takes the usual DnD 3.5 game and sets a hard limit on your levels at 6 then for each 5000xp you gain after that you choose a feat. This stops DnD from becoming the rules clusterfuck that it inevitably decends into once you hit 9th level and up.

I could continue to prattle on about mods and rules until the stars burn out but I have work in a little under an hour so I need to sign off. This Sunday I'll be beginning a few new design series articles. The first is MachineHammer a conversion of 40k to warmachine that I've been tinkering for a while now that seems to work quite nicely. The second is the start of The Dunian Cronicles in a shiny new E6 format. The third is more information on Bore-Na detailing some more of this proto world. Finally I'll be going through details of the methods I've been using to create the SCP CCG and maybe even finally get the thing finished.

Hope that you come back and visit this Sunday appologies once again for the missed Wendsday update but hopefully 4 posts this Sunday should make up for that.