RAW Revision Pitfalls - A Treatise on Houseruling and the Avoidance of Cheese

[willpell]

The 3E rules are incredibly complex, and there are a lot of hard-to-forsee interactions. I'm often tempted to houserule things to make them work more to my preferences, but I'm very hesitant to risk creating more problems than I solve. So I'm looking to crowdsource some trouble spots to watch out for, where a change can have unwanted repercussions. This is intended to benefit others as well, becoming a community resource of sorts. It is emphatically not meant as a way to power up characters, but rather to explain how they would be powered up if a DM were careless in handing out the free candy, so as to avoid such pitfalls.

It's kind of hard to explain broadly what I'm on about, so I'll give an example. I've often found myself building characters who have a "touchy-feely" or "nonlethal force" concept that makes me want to give them Improved Grapple, but it seems wrong to have them take the prerequisite feat Improved Unarmed Strike. It's not a question of getting the feat slots, but rather of whether a "discount" is dangerous for prerequsite purposes. Is there a higher-level feat, a Prestige Class, or something else which becomes available problematically early if you're able to skip having to take IUS before you gain access to IG?

Feel free to list more questions of this sort, as well as to mention any answers to the questions that have been posted. So if, for example, you know of a PrC whose prerequisites include IUS, IG, and two other feats, normally meaning that even humans cannot normally qualify before 6th level, you can tell me what that PrC is here. If many such examples crop up, I'll probably leave things as they are in RAW, but if the only case anyone can come up with is some Forgotten Realms PrC with full Wizard casting, I won't worry about it. So if you've had similar puzzlers on the brain, feel free to bring 'em up, or to share what you know about what's been questioned.

[HunterOfJello]

-Don't try to screw around with the Flat-Footed rules. Leave them how they are and don't try to mess with them. Surprise rounds exist for a reason and so do the flat-footed rules.

-Don't hand out too much gold or break the WBL. The characters will just buy +5 Resistance, +5 armor, and +6 stat items which will screw up character balance.

-Don't make a houserule on something unless you fully and unequivocally understand all situations in which it could be exploited. That means, pretty much never do it.

[Togo]

If you're using your own house rules for your own game, then things become much easier, because you can make additional rulings on any conseqents of your new rule as soon as they come up.

Using rules changes from other people, or for changing the game in general is much harder.

[willpell]

*snip*

Did...you, like, read my OP at all? I didn't ask about anything like that.


If you're using your own house rules for your own game, then things become much easier, because you can make additional rulings on any conseqents of your new rule as soon as they come up.

Sure I could increase the prereqs of a PRC or the like which benefits from my rule, but how many such adjustments will be required? If it's a lot, I'm better off not making the change.

[Story]

If you're using your own house rules for your own game, then things become much easier, because you can make additional rulings on any conseqents of your new rule as soon as they come up.



On the other hand, if you get carried away, you could eventually end up like the GM in AGC season 1 and ban or nerf half the game.

[Phelix-Mu]

There are a number of changes to feats that I've considered, and I agree that one of the most easily foreseeable consequences is early entry into prestige classes, along with earlier access to higher levels of the feat tree. Personally, I was gonna houserule Dodge and Mobility into a single feat, because that whole feat tree is nice, but too big for most builds to tackle without fighter dip, and is underpowered besides (until maybe Bounding Assault and that other one).

As far as I'm concerned, Improved Grapple is even easier judgement, as not as many feats or prc have it as a pre-req. On the other hand, for reasons that aren't clear to me, I hear all over that 3.5 grapple rules are unbalanced, and maybe easy access to Imp Grapple would make that worse.

[The Glyphstone]

Unbalanced, no. Incredibly byzantine and over-complicated, yes.

[willpell]

Unbalanced, no. Incredibly byzantine and over-complicated, yes.

I never thought they were that bad, really. Poorly written, but that's pretty much 3E standard. Thinking about it realistically makes most of the basic rules make sense, although doubtless there are some strange interactions.

Dodge and Mobility are not a pair that I would combine personally. I have considered doing it with Endurance and Diehard however. So that can be another question.

To sum up: What PrCs, high-end Feats, or the like become available ahead of schedule if Diehard and Improved Grapple can be gained without a prerequsitie feat?