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Mike Miller
2018-09-28, 12:14 PM
In the made up worst house rules thread, the idea was brought up to talk about the worst house rules people have used. So I made this thread! Fortunately for me, unfortunately for this thread, I haven't really had terrible house rules. However, I am certain other people have experienced some things! Discuss!

Rerem115
2018-09-28, 12:38 PM
Re-rolling initiative every turn. You think combat takes forever? Add re-drawing the initiative table every turn for a 6 person party, 8 mooks, and a boss to that.

noob
2018-09-28, 12:48 PM
Clarifications on how the shrink effect of the rod of wonder works.
No matter which way you pick it is wrong and damage the game.

16bearswutIdo
2018-09-28, 01:15 PM
Let me tell you: adding the sanity rules from CoC to a D&D horror campaign sounds like a fun time, but it will result in the deaths of every party member if my experience is anything to mention.

CharonsHelper
2018-09-28, 01:23 PM
We did a 3.5 campaign where we borrowed Iron Heroes' armor rules. Instead of adding to AC X amount, all armor added 1dX DR. You thought that Power Attack builds dominated before? >.<

Frozen_Feet
2018-09-28, 01:33 PM
In an OSR game, I ignored a rule saying that one treasure can at most give enough experience points for one level up. (Because gold = XP) This, combined with an edition change mid-adventure changing the game from gold standard to a silver standard (so now silver = XP, and one gold is 50 silver), lead to some characters jumping from level 7 to level 16.

noob
2018-09-28, 02:03 PM
We did a 3.5 campaign where we borrowed Iron Heroes' armor rules. Instead of adding to AC X amount, all armor added 1dX DR. You thought that Power Attack builds dominated before? >.<

As usual if you use pa one point of armor is approximately like 2 points of damage reduction.

Hand_of_Vecna
2018-09-28, 02:15 PM
Me: Alright everyone we're using the Book of Carnal Knowledge for this game.

A game I was in: Repricing everything and then refusing to provide a standard price list leaving players with no idea what fair prices are. Couple this with the DM insisting that haggling be roleplayed. Not a rule, but also OOC mockery for not enjoying/being skilled at haggling.

Aetis
2018-09-28, 02:24 PM
In my early days of DMing, I implemented "if you kill the monster, you get the xp for it" houserule.

:smallsigh::smallsigh::smallsigh::smallsigh::small sigh:

Arbane
2018-09-28, 02:36 PM
In my early days of DMing, I implemented "if you kill the monster, you get the xp for it" houserule.

:smallsigh::smallsigh::smallsigh::smallsigh::small sigh:

Any fistfights over killstealing?

One DM I had liked Fumble rules. I remember when one character got a really nice +2 dagger and broke it in the same session.

LordCdrMilitant
2018-09-28, 02:38 PM
Illiteracy. In a recent game, I was persuaded by a player that mass literacy was unrealistic, and that literacy should be tied to INT. I implemented it, because I figured it was harmless and would make him happy without really making a mess for the other players. That said, in the end, while it had minimal mechanical effect, the discussions about it and who could and should be able to read wound up taking up more time and more energy than I was or am willing to give.

Also, trade. The party one member of the party [coincidentally the same player above] wanted the party to be a trading company. Nobody else complained, so I put together a function to model sell and buy prices. In the end, I just tossed it out.

Honestly, I think "The GM takes suggestions from players regarding realism" is the houserule that I'm never going to use again.

Aetis
2018-09-28, 02:43 PM
Any fistfights over killstealing?

We had angry shouting matches.. I got rid of the rule before people started punching each other.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-28, 03:02 PM
Back in the days of first edition AD&D, I implemented the fairly commonly talked about rule of "1 is a fumble (you drop your weapon), 20 is a critical hit for double damage". The crit hits weren't a big deal (though I did think it was odd that if you could only hit on a 20, every hit you made was a critical hit, so I quickly figured out that you needed a "confirmation" roll for crits, long before 3rd edition was a glint in the milkman's eye). But, man, what a comedy of errors it was for every single attack roll of 1 to cause someone to drop their weapon. There was a drow PC (thanks, Unearthed Arcana!) and naturally, he fought with two weapons, with multiple attacks for each hand... there were several combats where he would was constantly dropping both weapons. And he was supposed to be a skilled combatant!

Then, in a palladium game, I didn't understand the rules, so I accidentally created a house rule. The way Iron Man-style armor is supposed to work in the Palladium system (I think) is that if the attacker hits, but doesn't roll high enough, the blow simply glances off the armor; if they hit but roll high enough, the armor takes the damage. (I could be wrong; I never gained any system mastery for Palladium.) Either way, the character in the armor is safe until the armor is smashed to bits. However, I misunderstood and thought it meant that if the attacker rolled low, the armor took the damage, but if the attacker rolled high, the character in the armor took the damage. One poor PC was an Iron Man style character. He took one hit and the guy inside the armor was turned into a bloody pulp... but on the plus side, the armor was still in perfect condition!

lightningcat
2018-09-28, 03:05 PM
Any fumble rules in a D&D game. It always ends badly.

Lord Torath
2018-09-28, 03:38 PM
Any fumble rules in a D&D game. It always ends badly.Except for Sameo (http://funnydndstories.com/sameo/). Okay, I guess it did still end badly for him, but it was a pretty awesome ending, and it wouldn't have been possible without the DM's House Fumble Rule.

That said, I agree with you about fumbles being a terrible idea.

Lapak
2018-09-28, 04:13 PM
Then, in a palladium game, I didn't understand the rules, so I accidentally created a house rule. The way Iron Man-style armor is supposed to work in the Palladium system (I think) is that if the attacker hits, but doesn't roll high enough, the blow simply glances off the armor; if they hit but roll high enough, the armor takes the damage. (I could be wrong; I never gained any system mastery for Palladium.) Either way, the character in the armor is safe until the armor is smashed to bits. However, I misunderstood and thought it meant that if the attacker rolled low, the armor took the damage, but if the attacker rolled high, the character in the armor took the damage. One poor PC was an Iron Man style character. He took one hit and the guy inside the armor was turned into a bloody pulp... but on the plus side, the armor was still in perfect condition!Nah, you had the general idea. Really low rolls (like <4) are a clean miss, rolls between 4 and the AC damage the armor but leave the character unhurt, rolls over the AC bypass the armor and hit the character. For Palladium in general, at least; I don't recall how the superhero-genre subset worked.

CharonsHelper
2018-09-28, 05:58 PM
As usual if you use pa one point of armor is approximately like 2 points of damage reduction.

Then the archer in the group would have been even more hosed than he was.

Lord Arkon
2018-09-28, 10:12 PM
Any fumble rules in a D&D game. It always ends badly.

I recently ran a Pathfinder game and used the rule that a roll of '1' was a potential fumble, requiring another d20 roll below the target's AC to confirm. It was meant to be a minor detail; a fumble meant you dropped your weapon and spent a round recovering it, creatures using natural attacks spent a round recovering their balance.

The result was that big monsters trying to fight the party were unaffected, while the PCs occasionally dropped their weapons. But the real fun came in the orc-infested ruins. Big fights with lots of enemies meant every round someone dropped their weapon. Every. Round.

The orcs down-graded themselves from cannon fodder to jokes, despite the hits they did get in, the orc or two who dropped their weapons drained the menace from the rest. The fighter was unfazed, but every other PC ended up fumbling a couple of times. I began to groan at the '1's as it began to feel to me like slapstick comedy.

It was a bad rule and had to be cut.

Black Jester
2018-09-29, 02:15 AM
Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

JeenLeen
2018-09-29, 02:54 AM
Pathfinder, Kingmaker module.

Players asks about embezzling from their kingdom. Even limiting magic item availability, they had really good magic gear early in the game.

On a humorous note, they put a cowardly and stupid kobold NPC as the treasurer, so at least it was realistic that they could bribe and coerce their treasury into not really noticing.

In practical terms, we were playing the game fairly non-seriously, so it wasn't a big deal. But it was still a broken houserule.

stack
2018-09-29, 09:42 AM
Another crit fumble. Had a character that could summon a levitating weapon. First attack roll in the game is a 1. DM rules that the weapon is destroyed, meaning he can't resummon it until the next day. The kicker: we were not told that critical fumbles were being used. I wouldn't have played if I had known.

Not long after that I quit since there were subsequent issues.

In PBP, not houseruling to use group initiative. I have seen about 1 game make it past the first combat without group initiative.

Hand_of_Vecna
2018-09-29, 09:47 AM
However, I misunderstood and thought it meant that if the attacker rolled low, the armor took the damage, but if the attacker rolled high, the character in the armor took the damage. One poor PC was an Iron Man style character. He took one hit and the guy inside the armor was turned into a bloody pulp... but on the plus side, the armor was still in perfect condition!

Ya Palladium's armor rules are wonky, to be fair a lot of their rules are wonky and have been copy pasta'd between books and editions forever without even getting spelling and grammar mistakes fixed.

There are actually two sets of armor rules for Palladium. Historical and modern armor work as you described with a number you can roll past to ignore while lower hits grind down the armies health. Supertech and some magical armor has a number that works like D&D AC and has health that is deducted before the wearer's when that number is surpassed.

My own Palladium games suffered from bonus inflation to the point that all but the heaviest real world armor was useless. After years of play and reading and rereading various books I found a few lines that seemed to suggest that modern armor made you ignore all natural rolls of 1-4 which actually made light armor somewhat relevent again.

Palladium was also the system in which I first encountered 1's as fumbles which were always illogical and terrible. High tech weapons exploded on ones doing damage equal to the ammo left in the clip which made the weapons average more damage to shoot than to get shot at.

JNAProductions
2018-09-29, 10:26 AM
Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

That doesn't seem like a bad rule at all.

I mean, let's say you have three experienced roleplayers and gamers, and one new person. The new person will likely not do as much in game, due to lacking knowledge, and won't roleplay as much, lacking confidence. If you punish them by not awarding them as much XP, there's a good chance they won't show up again, and you just soured them on TTRPGs for no good reason.

CharonsHelper
2018-09-29, 11:28 AM
Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

Having players at different XPs would be horrid.

GunDragon
2018-09-29, 11:48 AM
Idk if this is a bad houserule or not, but one time I implemented a house rule in a D&D-like game where every confirmed critical hit would result in the target receiving a permanent injury, such as an eye being cut out, an ear being sliced off, a concussion, sometimes even a hand being chopped off. These injuries could be cured of course, but only with the use of magical healing. Idk, it kinda made combat feel more dangerous.

martixy
2018-09-29, 01:42 PM
Does "had used on me" count?

In which case turn-based role-playing. It's as horrendous as it sounds.


Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

Sisyphus isn't lazy either, but is he doing anything useful with his effort?

Your post leaves the impression you subscribe to the badwrongfun school of gaming.

Arbane
2018-09-29, 02:50 PM
Idk if this is a bad houserule or not, but one time I implemented a house rule in a D&D-like game where every confirmed critical hit would result in the target receiving a permanent injury, such as an eye being cut out, an ear being sliced off, a concussion, sometimes even a hand being chopped off. These injuries could be cured of course, but only with the use of magical healing. Idk, it kinda made combat feel more dangerous.

That depends - do you want higher-level characters to all look like extras from 'Night of the Living Dead'? If so, it's great.

(And of course, like every 'make combat more dangerous/realistic' rule, it cripples fighters without inconveniencing casters at all.)

Black Jester
2018-09-29, 05:01 PM
That doesn't seem like a bad rule at all.

I mean, let's say you have three experienced roleplayers and gamers, and one new person. The new person will likely not do as much in game, due to lacking knowledge, and won't roleplay as much, lacking confidence. If you punish them by not awarding them as much XP, there's a good chance they won't show up again, and you just soured them on TTRPGs for no good reason.

Your argument only makes sense if one assumes that XP are something the players are automatically entitled to and therefore one can take them for granted; under any other ideas of how XP could or should work in a game (let's say as a reflection of the actual experiences the charaters make or as a reward mechanism), your argument doesn't work.


I run *a lot* of games for very young and mostly new players, mostly between the age of ten to twelve (I actually get paid for these game sessions, so I can genuinely claim that I am the most professional gamemaster you probably ever talked to, because that matters, right? right?).
Especially for these new players, it is extremely helpful if the XP rewards as a clear orientation, because they lack the experience of older or more established players. Individual rewards are a great instrument to provide this guidance, especially because it does not only affect the game itself but also the general social mores. In this scenario with new/young/inexperienced players, there is very little difference between the distribution of XP and general classroom management.

For kids, it is very beneficial to make it very clear how and why they get their XP - through teamwork and being thoughtful, brave and clever - because these are the parameters that makes the game the most fun for everyone. Bad experiences are most often the result of frustration with other players - the very same problem that individual XP rewards can adress almost infinitely better than an equalized amount of XP, because it allows to concretely adress the good, the bad and the ugly the players do.

So, especially in the case of organising games for new players, my experience tells me that
the actual truth is almost the exact opposite of your example.

Also, the idea that you punish somebody because they do not get the same reward as somebody else... that is not a punishment. Again, only if one assumes that the players are entitled to the XP in the first place, does this idea of a punishment makes any sense.




Sisyphus isn't lazy either, but is he doing anything useful with his effort?

Your post leaves the impression you subscribe to the badwrongfun school of gaming.

Being damned to do the same thing every day in and out, without any proper compensation or encouragement: Sisyphos could act as a nigh perfect analogy of what playing with a GM who refuses to hand out fair XP rewards and encouragements must feel like - but we have to imagine Sisyphos as a happy man, I presume, especially when we are him. Or worse, his warden.
Speaking of that warden, the more fun interpretation is that, through tenacity and effort, Sisyphos is grinding down his rock until it is small and sharp enough to be used as a weapon...

ImNotTrevor
2018-09-29, 08:50 PM
Again, only if one assumes that the players are entitled to the XP in the first place, does this idea of a punishment makes any sense.

Having taken a class in behavioral psychology... you can 100% punish someone by rewarding everyone else and leaving them out. It is, specifically, punishment by removing a good thing or access thereto. I work in a psych hospital and we do this all the time. If you don't participate in the programming, you don't get the goodies that come with doing your part. That the kids experience it as and acknowledge it to be a punishment for not doing things is sufficient to prove the point.

In essence: when speaking on human behaviors, whether it is experienced as a punishment or not matters more than whether it literally is.

If Jim thinks Tim insulted him when Tim meant no such insult, that won't do diddly to make Jim feel less insulted in the moment. And explaining that Tim didn't mean it that way probably won't make things immediately hunky-dory, either.

In short:
No. This sentence is literally wrong.



Being damned to do the same thing every day in and out, without any proper compensation or encouragement: Sisyphos could act as a nigh perfect analogy of what playing with a GM who refuses to hand out fair XP rewards and encouragements must feel like - but we have to imagine Sisyphos as a happy man, I presume, especially when we are him. Or worse, his warden.
Speaking of that warden, the more fun interpretation is that, through tenacity and effort, Sisyphos is grinding down his rock until it is small and sharp enough to be used as a weapon...

The entitlement argument, hilariously enough, can be used here, too. Believing that receiving a good thing in the same amount as everyone else is a personal affront to you is a fairly entitled viewpoint.


Granted, I generally decide how to go based on what system I'm using. In D&D, having the group advance as a whole unit makes sense. You work together as a TEAM. You succeed together or die alone. Singling out the weakest link in any given session is not going to make things cohesive, and a party member not helping is probably an OOC problem, not an IC problem. And, for the most part, since the bonus XP for doing things is 100% arbitrary, you won't be teaching them to play D&D better. Just to play it HOW THE GM PREFERS. Which doesn't help outside of that table.

In a game where the Party structure is minimal or absent (a la Apocalypse World) then individual XP makes the most sense, since individuals may indeed be separated and even acting against one another. (In the last AW game I was a player in, my character literally went like 100 miles away from everyone else to go solo kill a dude he hated. This isn't unheard of and most people were glad I was running off for this murder.)

So even though I'm picking apart this bad logic, I don't necessarily disagree with the concept. But I do disagree that it is a Universal Good of Proper GMing to do individualized XP. It's not that simple.

Luccan
2018-09-29, 09:12 PM
Re-rolling initiative every turn. You think combat takes forever? Add re-drawing the initiative table every turn for a 6 person party, 8 mooks, and a boss to that.

I actually grew up playing this way. Of course, we only ever had 3 players at most.

Edit: Speaking of, this isn't great upon reflection: We also did d6 initiative rolls (we played 3.5 and d20 modern pretty exclusively, so this was a weird change). So if you had a decent dex and improved initiative, you always went before the enemies. I didn't realize we were doing initiative weird for years.

Black Jester
2018-09-30, 03:25 AM
Having taken a class in behavioral psychology... you can 100% punish someone by rewarding everyone else and leaving them out. It is, specifically, punishment by removing a good thing or access thereto. I work in a psych hospital and we do this all the time. If you don't participate in the programming, you don't get the goodies that come with doing your part. That the kids experience it as and acknowledge it to be a punishment for not doing things is sufficient to prove the point.

Yes, by establishing a base line of a group activity/reward, you basically establish a different baseline of assumptions ("This is a group activity, I am part of the group, so, I get the thing"). That is a different issue, though. By establishing privileges as something generally accessible, you establish expectations; unrewarded positive expectations do indeed create a punishment through frustration; on the other hand, the failed fulfilment of expected positive outcome of one's own behaviour ("Why should I put in this extra effort if it is just hard work and I don't get anything for it?") is at least as frustrating, if not more-so, because futility of owns action is a particular bad experience (enter your own worst case scenario about learned helplessness here). Also, steady rewards without recognizable effort create higher expectations or entitlement (enter your other worst case scenario about "spoiled kids" here).

Your fallacy is to transfer this method of sanctioning to a situation of acknowledging individual merit and to assume that entitlement is, by itself, not a neutral concept. There are quite a few things that you as a player are entitled to: You are entitled to respect, a fair share of the GM's (and the other players') attention, consideration and the opportunity to have fun (you are also entitled to fitting seating, a share of the table real estate and so on, but these are so elemental one barely thinks about it until it becomes an issue). Acknowledging individual


If Jim thinks Tim insulted him when Tim meant no such insult, that won't do diddly to make Jim feel less insulted in the moment. And explaining that Tim didn't mean it that way probably won't make things immediately hunky-dory, either.

As this is an example of subjective perception, I fail to see how this is relevant to the issue of rewards and punishment. A much better example would be: nurses are punished by the relative higher wages of surgeons.
And even as silly as that comparison is, it still makes more sense than the idea that another player's bonus XP are a punishment for another player, mostly because, unlike money, XP are an infinite resource and no GM has a limited XP budget that the players somehow must share. Which leads to another, really important point: It's not like XP are a finite resource; just because some players have earned themselves an XP bonus, this doesn't mean that it comes at the cost of player 2's share of XP. Your attention as a gamemaster however is finite and in a very real sense, the players are always competing with each other for this attention, even though they are rarely aware of it. This becomes a lot more obvious if you run a game as the only adult in the room and with a bunch of ten year olds, believe me. Your attention will most likely focus on the player (or sometimes players) who demand it the most, because they are louder, more extrovert or require more attention to play their characters. Individual XP rewards are the only reliable way to mitigate the effects of this attention economy, by specifically addressing and rewarding the less loud players.



The entitlement argument, hilariously enough, can be used here, too. Believing that receiving a good thing in the same amount as everyone else is a personal affront to you is a fairly entitled viewpoint.

Consider this: If two students write a test, and student A gets a significant better grade than student B, because A studied and B didn't, under which circumstances could b legitimately claim that his worse grade is a punishment? Or that student A does not deserve (or is entitled to) a better grade through more effort?

And while we are at asking bloody obvious questions: If a player does not participate in a game session or adventure, should he get the same amount of XP as those who did participate? And how do you explain this forced equalisation to the players who actually played the game in that time period?


In D&D, having the group advance as a whole unit makes sense. You work together as a TEAM. You succeed together or die alone. Singling out the weakest link in any given session is not going to make things cohesive, and a party member not helping is probably an OOC problem, not an IC problem. And, for the most part, since the bonus XP for doing things is 100% arbitrary, you won't be teaching them to play D&D better. Just to play it HOW THE GM PREFERS. Which doesn't help outside of that table.

Apparently rewarding teamwork is somehow bad for teamwork. War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is obviously strength.
Also, all in-game scenarios are the result of OOC activities, because characters are not seperate entities from their players. Also, the idea that XP rewards are fully arbitrary, is just plain wrong. They are directly linked to milestones (defeat a monster, solve a secret, find treasure) and social behaviour (help others, play nice). In the kid's games, I let the players set up their own short term goals (things they want to accomplish, like "getting a magical sword" or "befriending a dragon/unicorn") and miraculously, they very often achieve these goals through fate, I guess and a bit of their own efforts (meeting a dragon is one thing, but you obviously have to be nice and respectful to it if you want to be its friend). And guess what? The players mostly get what they wanted all along, they get an extra token of respect for it, and as result, they are giddy as only ten year olds can be and are super motivated (and I know the direction of the game for the next session or so to make sure that every player can achieve their goal, which makes it a lot easier to distribute attention and come up with plots).


XP rewards are an instrument, and like most instruments, you need a bit of practice to use it well, but the truly arbitrary behaviour is to refuse to use the tools given to you at all and leave it to chance, and that's why the refusal of individualized XP is such a tell-tale sign of hack GMs.

Hand_of_Vecna
2018-09-30, 06:49 AM
Initiative that never stops or starts/ends and arbitrary times. I had one DM who would do things like have a villian monologue when the players wanted to roll for initiative and attack then declare a surprise round when the villian "suddenly" finishes monologuing and attacks. Players describing their character's preparedness were ignored. Same DM would also declare things like that an action happened after your initiative if you talked or said you were moving somewhere during a tense parley.

On a related note I recently gave up on Shadowrun Dragonfall because the festival mechanics functioned like this. Forcing in initiative movement if there were hostiles aware of you anywhere in the zone. Say there are five rooms ahead of you. At least 1 has enemies waiting in defensive positions forcing you to move your team in initiative with action points and ending turns. You can't move your group in a loose formation each has to be moved individually. You also don't know how far you will get before enemies will react on their turn. Now I'd be ok with sending my team members from cover to cover like military squad or breach team, however what puts it over the top for me is that I don't know which advancement will trigger a reaction or allow me to spot enemies. This means I should be ending turn after every movement so that I can actually have a full turn when I open a door or turn a corner and find baddies and that's just too tedious for me.

ijon
2018-09-30, 11:02 AM
And while we are at asking bloody obvious questions: If a player does not participate in a game session or adventure, should he get the same amount of XP as those who did participate? And how do you explain this forced equalisation to the players who actually played the game in that time period?

XP rewards are an instrument, and like most instruments, you need a bit of practice to use it well, but the truly arbitrary behaviour is to refuse to use the tools given to you at all and leave it to chance, and that's why the refusal of individualized XP is such a tell-tale sign of hack GMs.
there is literally nothing wrong with a GM who doles out equal XP to the party (or just levels everyone up at certain milestones)
I'm playing collaborative make-believe with some of my friends because we find it fun. we don't need to be "motivated" by XP. we aren't 10 year olds, dude.

equalized XP means less work for the GM, an easy number to reference when making a new character, and everyone getting their toys at the same time.
if that's what the people at the table want, why is that a bad thing?

Faily
2018-09-30, 11:39 AM
I've played only with a couple of GMs who did different XP-rewards at the end of a session (contributed with ideas and plans, roleplayed actively... that kind of criteria). Which is... well, I found it took away a lot of the fun. Sometimes I'm tired when I show up to a session and I'm unable to think much about clever plans, or maybe my character is someone who is shy and quiet (so I had to act out of character to get attention for XP-reward there). But mostly, it felt like playing the game was work rather than fun. And that's not why I show up to game sessions.

People can have off-days, or some are just naturally quiet or not comfortable with being lead or center of attention. And that's ok. Don't make them feel even more bummed out by denying them XP-rewards. Just make it fair for everyone involved. As a sidenote, one of my groups did away with rewarding XP and we just level up when we hit certain milestones in the campaign (we're playing published adventures), and we've mostly seen improvement in roleplaying. Teamwork is still 100% solid though and hasn't changed there one way or another.



Does "had used on me" count?

In which case turn-based role-playing. It's as horrendous as it sounds.




I... what?

Please, elaborate. My curiosity has been piqued!

Floret
2018-09-30, 11:44 AM
"Why should I put in this extra effort if it is just hard work and I don't get anything for it?"

If gaming to you, at any point, becomes hard work, you should probably just stop.

I mean, seriously. Cool actions will have influence in world. That, to me at least, is a way better reward than a number increasing.

And I've played in games with differing XP levels between the party. It was utterly frustrating to be worse than the rest of the party cause I dared to swap characters to a concept I'd have more fun with. Or cause I clicked less with the GM than some other players (Extra XP for "good roleplaying" are a Pandoras box...)

As for your point of different grades... Always, it is an obvious punishment. A probably deserved one, in this case, but to argue it isn't a punishment in some way is ludicrous.

Worst house rules I played with... Monopolys Free parking money. In RPGs, starting new characters off below the party in terms of XP. Most of my houserules I stand by.

Faily
2018-09-30, 12:03 PM
If gaming to you, at any point, becomes hard work, you should probably just stop.

I mean, seriously. Cool actions will have influence in world. That, to me at least, is a way better reward than a number increasing.

And I've played in games with differing XP levels between the party. It was utterly frustrating to be worse than the rest of the party cause I dared to swap characters to a concept I'd have more fun with. Or cause I clicked less with the GM than some other players (Extra XP for "good roleplaying" are a Pandoras box...)


So much this.

One GM I had who did reward XP for "good roleplaying"... I realised after a few sessions it quickly meant who dished out the most lol-worthy lines. Which was annoying since I was playing a Druid who was quiet and introverted, which meant I got extra XP for "roleplaying" once or something. And that was in a session were I was stepping horribly out of character because I wanted to test my theory that he was only rewarding those who were acting out.

I don't even feel comfortable with doing rewards for roleplaying either (when I GMed L5R for a bunch of newbs, I did do it, but it was always rewarded to the entire group), since my personal tastes and preferences don't nescessarily jive with what a player might think is fun for them to do.

Seto
2018-09-30, 12:25 PM
Black Jester, I am a GM using the rule that everyone in the party gets the same XP, so I admittedly have a stake in the discussion, but... reading your comments, it seems to me like your problem is not so much with the "everyone gets equal XP" part, but with the idea that "XP will be the same no matter what happens in the session". Those are two very different ideas.
I derive XP from what players accomplish, and give it accordingly. However, I give it out as group XP. It's still very much possible to encourage the behaviors you want and reward certain actions. It's just that, instead of "you were very brave and smart, you earned 100 XP for yourself", it's "you were very brave and smart, you earned the group 100 XP". Unless people are playing to be better than other characters, there's no reason it would feel unfair or counter-motivating. Even in the case where some PCs clearly pull more weight than others, the players who do the work generally feel proud and valued ("thanks to my character, we all got stronger"), and the ones who do less work (or were unable to show up at that particular session) are happy to not be left behind.
In the specific case of "a player had to miss a session", they will still get the XP thanks to the group's accomplishments, but might not get the loot. I don't intervene in however the players decide to share treasure.

Now, if your beef was with a GM saying "even though you all stayed at the inn all session long and nothing was accomplished whatsoever, everyone gains 100 XP because that's the progression I planned for", I agree, that would be a bad rule. Did I read you accurately?

martixy
2018-09-30, 01:47 PM
I... what?

Please, elaborate. My curiosity has been piqued!

Well imagine you're in the tavern, sitting there, drinking with your party, planning your next adventure together... and you can only join the conversation in turns, according to initiative order. You can't interject because it's not your turn and landing that good joke after the fact gets all the impact of a deflated balloon... Terrific way to lead a conversation, no?

Faily
2018-09-30, 02:38 PM
Well imagine you're in the tavern, sitting there, drinking with your party, planning your next adventure together... and you can only join the conversation in turns, according to initiative order. You can't interject because it's not your turn and landing that good joke after the fact gets all the impact of a deflated balloon... Terrific way to lead a conversation, no?

Oh gods... xD So it is as bad as I imagined it to be.

Maybe some additional rules of Attack of Opportunity on puns and the like? :smallbiggrin:

Unavenger
2018-09-30, 03:24 PM
Maybe some additional rules of Attack of Opportunity on puns and the like? :smallbiggrin:

Insult of opportunity, a la OotS?

Luccan
2018-09-30, 05:16 PM
Well imagine you're in the tavern, sitting there, drinking with your party, planning your next adventure together... and you can only join the conversation in turns, according to initiative order. You can't interject because it's not your turn and landing that good joke after the fact gets all the impact of a deflated balloon... Terrific way to lead a conversation, no?

I had my new DM do that the other night. Kind of annoying, because I was trying to be the good player that got the characters talking (other than the DM, I'm the only one who has played before) and she knew that. Luckily we dropped it after the characters finally met up.

Knaight
2018-09-30, 05:46 PM
Your argument only makes sense if one assumes that XP are something the players are automatically entitled to and therefore one can take them for granted; under any other ideas of how XP could or should work in a game (let's say as a reflection of the actual experiences the charaters make or as a reward mechanism), your argument doesn't work.
There are plenty of ideas about how it works, starting with the concepts of pacing mechanisms and downtime training.


Being damned to do the same thing every day in and out, without any proper compensation or encouragement: Sisyphos could act as a nigh perfect analogy of what playing with a GM who refuses to hand out fair XP rewards and encouragements must feel like - but we have to imagine Sisyphos as a happy man, I presume, especially when we are him. Or worse, his warden.
Speaking of that warden, the more fun interpretation is that, through tenacity and effort, Sisyphos is grinding down his rock until it is small and sharp enough to be used as a weapon...
The thing about Sisyphus is that rolling a rock up a hill sucks, and he has to roll the rock up the hill. Those two are essential components, and the whole tale doesn't work well at all if he could just choose not to roll the rock up the hill and do something else instead, and also instead of rolling the rock up a hill it was something fun.

This is without getting into how the viewpoint of XP as "compensation" pretty implicitly calls playing an RPG work, or the giant pile of assumptions that go into how not using individual XP rewards is "refusing" to hand them out.



And while we are at asking bloody obvious questions: If a player does not participate in a game session or adventure, should he get the same amount of XP as those who did participate? And how do you explain this forced equalisation to the players who actually played the game in that time period?
The very term "forced equalization" includes an assumption that individual XP is how it is done by default, and that anything else is a change. As for how I explain it, the reward for playing a game is getting to play a game. I don't need to bribe my players with XP to play, because my games are fun.


XP rewards are an instrument, and like most instruments, you need a bit of practice to use it well, but the truly arbitrary behaviour is to refuse to use the tools given to you at all and leave it to chance, and that's why the refusal of individualized XP is such a tell-tale sign of hack GMs.
Using XP as a pacing mechanism is use of an instrument, and not leaving it to chance. Also the idea that you must use every single available tool is itself laughable - picking the tools that work well for what you're doing and only using them is entirely reasonable.


Now, if your beef was with a GM saying "even though you all stayed at the inn all session long and nothing was accomplished whatsoever, everyone gains 100 XP because that's the progression I planned for", I agree, that would be a bad rule. Did I read you accurately?
I'd push back on this as well. A group staying in the inn all session doing nothing is either boring (and thus its own disincentive), which means the GM failure was somewhere else entirely in not pushing the game somewhere more interesting, or it's an example of a good session that works well with a particular play style of very slow campaign movement heavy on scene-exposition where something like "the characters spend a night at an inn" turns into, well, the characters spending a night at an inn in close to real time. Pacing xp should probably go pretty slow in that sort of game, but it's a totally fine use of it.

Sure, I'd find that game boring, but that's more an indication of a preference for a higher pace than anything.

SimonMoon6
2018-09-30, 05:49 PM
In regard to rerolling initiative every turn:

One of my favorite game systems (Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG) has that as a rule, BUT it definitely makes use of that to good effect. One of the best parts of this rule is that once initiatives are rolled, each character has to state what they are doing, in reverse order. And only after all the actions are stated do they actually take place.

Imagine this in D&D:

-----------------------------------------------------
Slow guy: I'm casting magic missile at Fast Guy.

Fast guy: I'm casting shield (making me immune to magic missile).

DM: Okay, Fast Guy, you first cast shield and then, Slow Guy, you cast magic missile, which has no effect.
--------------------------------------------------------

So, you are able to react to what your opponents are going to do. That's huge!

There are other complications (you are allowed to have contingencies, so Slow Guy could say "I cast magic missile unless Fast Guy casts shield, in which case I cast Meteor Swarm")... and you can also spend points called Hero Points to boost your initiative (but it might not help -- since you still might not win initiative-- and then you just lose your points; or it might be the crucial thing that lets you take the vitally important action first).

Aetis
2018-09-30, 11:57 PM
Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

I give out the same amount of xp to the party, no matter what they do in the game. Giving xp for individual accomplishment isn't very fair far as I could tell, because it lead to DM making arbitrary decisions regarding how much XP something was worth.

MoiMagnus
2018-10-01, 03:01 AM
Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

The best house rule my DMs have ever put: delete the XP system from all their campaigns. (Replaced by synchronized level up according to plot)

Particularly in D&D, where having people of different level is a fun-killer. (And spells that ask to spend XP infuriating).

The other post are asking "what if a player is absent", the answer is "he is doing something else in parallel". (We had a player frequently absent. He was charged of diplomaty with the different gods to have them join our side, and was traveling through the planes to negotiate when the player was absent)

Frozen_Feet
2018-10-01, 07:40 AM
As for how I explain it, the reward for playing a game is getting to play a game. I don't need to bribe my players with XP to play, because my games are fun.

This is a stupid answer, because these rewards are of different order. XP is an in-game reward that exists to encourage specific in-game actions, where as "getting to play a game" because it's "fun" is an out-of-game reward which can only exists against a backdrop of no or less "fun" .

They only meet at the middle when the quality and quantity of in-game rewards start influencing how "fun" a player finds your game. Which is hardly unimportant: imagine playing soccer without rules for scoring goals, or tetris without a score counter.

Whether the game gives a score and for what has direct impact on the course of the game and thus whether it is engaging... sorry, "fun", to players.

Knaight
2018-10-01, 07:51 AM
This is a stupid answer, because these rewards are of different order. XP is an in-game reward that exists to encourage specific in-game actions, where as "getting to play a game" because it's "fun" is an out-of-game reward which can only exists against a backdrop of no or less "fun" .

They only meet at the middle when the quality and quantity of in-game rewards start influencing how "fun" a player finds your game. Which is hardly unimportant: imagine playing soccer without rules for scoring goals, or tetris without a score counter.

Whether the game gives a score and for what has direct impact on the course of the game and thus whether it is engaging... sorry, "fun", to players.

Games without scores are extremely common, starting with the vast majority of videogames made after the heyday of the arcade. On top of that, as I discussed extensively in that post XP does not have to be used as a reward. Given that the entire structure the question of why people who aren't there still get XP is that pacing mechanisms still apply to them because the game is still moving - but that's not particularly useful for hypothetical upset players going on about "earning" XP, where pointing out that playing a game isn't a chore they're being paid for potentially is.

Granted, I've just had the good fortune of avoiding these people, so I can't really confirm how either response works in practice.

Maelynn
2018-10-01, 08:11 AM
Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

There are plenty of ways to motivate a player other than xp. Just look up DM Inspiration.

Also, to a lot of players the game itself is motivation enough. They find their motivation in the enjoyment they get from the adventures and the social interactions. By rewarding individual xp, the focus shifts from enjoyment to a sense of urgency to achieve things - things you feel your character normally might not do or say. It encourages people do go and do their own thing, rather than be part of the party who does things together.

Example. The Barbarian will not stick around while the Wizard solves the door puzzle, because he's not smart enough to contribute anything useful and know he gets no xp for it... so instead, he'll just go down another corridor and find some more monsters to slay. Party divided, each doing their own thing. Is that what you want? I sure as hell don't, and my players don't either.

If xp is your only means of motivating a player, that's when you're the hack DM. Not when you forego individual xp at the benefit of player.

Frozen_Feet
2018-10-01, 08:24 AM
Games without scores are extremely common, starting with the vast majority of videogames made after the heyday of the arcade.

So? That doesn't make what I said any less true. I could just as well say "games that are poorly designed are extremely common", that's how much of a red herring your statement is.


On top of that, as I discussed extensively in that post XP does not have to be used as a reward.

... then why does your chief counter example still use them as a reward? Using XP as a "pacing mechanism" is just rewarding hitting certain checkpoints instead of individual actions, but it's still a reward if it leads to character improvement.

That's what causes the feel of it being "unearned". Saying "the game is still moving" doesn't address that. Yeah, we can assume the characters are still present and doing stuff... but unless their actions are actually played out, they improve for seemingly no reason. Without input, effort or thought from part of their nominal player.

It's not hard to see why that would cause resentment, even if you personally lack such emotional response or think it is unwarranted.

Kardwill
2018-10-01, 08:48 AM
I mean, seriously. Cool actions will have influence in world. That, to me at least, is a way better reward than a number increasing.


Yeah, that's a strong incentive in RPGs. When you do cool stuff, you're the one in the spotlight, you're the one who's shaping the story, the hero who saved the princess, who negociated a peace treaty between orcs and elves, who protected the wizard during this fateful casting round, who finished the dragon, who solved that dastardly riddle. And you get to advance your character's agenda, or to steer the story in the direction you enjoy. That's huge!

If I play the strong, silent type, it means my character will have trouble contributing meaningfully to the negociation scene, and that already stings a little (okay, if said negociation goes for a whole game session, that sucks a lot). I don't feel the need to drive it even more into the ground by giving bonus XP to everyone else.

Doesn't mean there are no case where individual XPs are not a useful thing (in "organic" games where the stats change according to a character's activities like Runequest or Mous Guard). And I sometimes give bonus XP (or other rewards, like a homebase, an ally, a story arc...) to the group to aknowledge cool stuff that happened during the game. But I moved past the "individual XP as incentive" idea some time ago, as they were mostly an incentive to being a diva who hogged the spotlight.

Kardwill
2018-10-01, 08:58 AM
... then why does your chief counter example still use them as a reward? Using XP as a "pacing mechanism" is just rewarding hitting certain checkpoints instead of individual actions, but it's still a reward if it leads to character improvement.

Nope, from the pacing point of view, it's not a reward, but a way to change the scale of the campaign over time with characters who are able to tackle tasks that were daunting at the beginning of the campaign, thus advancing the story. And they ensure that the game will not be stale, since the characters and stakes will change throughout the campaign.

Doesn't mean they cannot also be a reward, of course. We all know that familiar rush that comes with XP, and the enjoyment of planning how we will spend them to become ubercool. But they are not only a reward, but also a pacing and evolving tool, a way to simulate some "zero-to-hero" stories, a way to keep the game fresh and to ensure the players will have new toys to play with.

That's the reason why, in my last game, my players asked me to give them LESS XP per session. Not because they want to be punished, but because they felt the characters were changing and getting to their "ideal future self" too quickly.

Kurald Galain
2018-10-01, 09:09 AM
Worst houserules that come to mind from four different DMs,


When struck in melee, you may make a reflex save to avoid the attack. But only if you're the GM's girlfriend.
Repeatedly calling lawful characters out for non-lawful behavior, but never calling good characters out for outright evil behavior.
All enemies always use flawless tactics, even if they're mindless skeletons or something.
Conversely, all enemies always use the tactic of charging or blasting the closest PC, even if they're highly trained assassins or something.

Pelle
2018-10-01, 09:36 AM
That's the reason why, in my last game, my players asked me to give them LESS XP per session. Not because they want to be punished, but because they felt the characters were changing and getting to their "ideal future self" too quickly.

Yes, not all players have the need to level up and get powerful as soon as possible. I also see XP mostly as a pacing mechanism, there to ensure that players level up not too fast or not too slow. I think every 2-3 session is fine, so you get to experience each level, but not get too bored. Therefore I think it works fine to track individual xp, giving xp only to the characters of players attending the session. If the character/player is missing some sessions, it feels weird to just level up again without having done anything with the character, just because the other characters did.

Frozen_Feet
2018-10-01, 09:46 AM
There are plenty of ways to motivate a player other than xp.

Irrelevant claim; the existence of other motivational methods has no bearing on the truth value of what I said.


Also, to a lot of players the game itself is motivation enough. They find their motivation in the enjoyment they get from the adventures and the social interactions.

Which is equally true of soccer, yet the rules of scoring still have obvious impact on the shape of the game.


By rewarding individual xp, the focus shifts from enjoyment to a sense of urgency to achieve things - things you feel your character normally might not do or say. It encourages people do go and do their own thing, rather than be part of the party who does things together.

Now you're not even arguing against anything I said, you're affirming it via claimed example.


Example. The Barbarian will not stick around while the Wizard solves the door puzzle, because he's not smart enough to contribute anything useful and know he gets no xp for it... so instead, he'll just go down another corridor and find some more monsters to slay. Party divided, each doing their own thing. Is that what you want? I sure as hell don't, and my players don't either.

Irrelevant question; I wasn't talking about what I want. Or you, for that matter.


xp is your only means of motivating a player, that's when you're the hack DM. Not when you forego individual xp at the benefit of player.

You can keep throwing accusations of being a hack between yourselves, thank you very much. Leave me out of it.

---

@Kardwill: the only thing your post successfully establishes is that XP being a reward is not mutually exclusive with being something else... but that's not what I'm questioning. I'm saying the example was bad. Yours isn't any better, because your claim that XP as a pacing tool isn't a reward is basically followed by a list of things players would find rewarding.

SimonMoon6
2018-10-01, 10:35 AM
Example. The Barbarian will not stick around while the Wizard solves the door puzzle, because he's not smart enough to contribute anything useful and know he gets no xp for it... so instead, he'll just go down another corridor and find some more monsters to slay.

Or worse yet: the Barbarian is played by a smart player who is good at puzzles, while the super-intelligent wizard is played by a less intelligent player who has no interest in puzzles. So, the dumb barbarian sits around, thinking up solutions to the puzzles, while the wizard wanders off since there's no way that the wizard would be smart enough to figure out a puzzle.

But, really, the ideal situation would be something like this:

The door slams behind the party, trapping them in a small room. The only exit involves a puzzle along one side of a wall. However, while the PCs try to figure out the puzzle, the room starts slowly filling with monsters. Thus, the barbarian has something to do (fight monsters) while the wizard has something to do (roll intelligence checks to beat the puzzle).

Capt Spanner
2018-10-01, 11:22 AM
I'm a big fan of the "all players get the same XP". For one thing, falling behind on XP can mean falling behind on abilities / combat effectiveness / etc..., making it harder to keep up with the rest of the players in terms of XP, and you end up in a spiral of being left behind without some help to catch back up again. This isn't particularly fun. It's especially noticeable at lower levels.

The other, more philosophical reason, is that giving everyone the same amount of XP helps the party function better as a team. Not all contributions are quantifiable, or easily discernible.

As an analogy, consider a football (soccer) player who has a particular style: in possession they find a good place to receive the ball, and make one good pass to set off an attack, which they execute with one touch. In attack they make runs which draw defenders away from where they should be, opening space for the other attackers to make the goal. Out of possession, they work hard to close down the opponents and never give them space, forcing them to make bad passes which can be intercepted. Else, they find an opponent on the attack and mark them out of the game.

This player is likely to have very stats on most metrics: tackles, interceptions, goals, assists, touches of the ball. Probably "distance covered" will be their best one, but that's not a great indicator by itself. And yet this player is making an invaluable contribution to the team and the team may find they really struggle to get possession of the ball, or to get their attacks off well.

If the team were being awarded XP based on what they did, this player might rightly feel left out.

I prefer the attitude that the party plays as a team and wins as a team. Just because the GM isn't particularly cogent of a player's contribution, doesn't mean that player didn't contribute. Splitting XP equally between players regardless of how much they contributed means players will think more about the challenge in front of them than the XP they can get.

Just my 2c.




In regard to rerolling initiative every turn:

One of my favorite game systems (Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG) has that as a rule, BUT it definitely makes use of that to good effect. One of the best parts of this rule is that once initiatives are rolled, each character has to state what they are doing, in reverse order. And only after all the actions are stated do they actually take place.

Imagine this in D&D:

-----------------------------------------------------
Slow guy: I'm casting magic missile at Fast Guy.

Fast guy: I'm casting shield (making me immune to magic missile).

DM: Okay, Fast Guy, you first cast shield and then, Slow Guy, you cast magic missile, which has no effect.
--------------------------------------------------------

So, you are able to react to what your opponents are going to do. That's huge!

There are other complications (you are allowed to have contingencies, so Slow Guy could say "I cast magic missile unless Fast Guy casts shield, in which case I cast Meteor Swarm")... and you can also spend points called Hero Points to boost your initiative (but it might not help -- since you still might not win initiative-- and then you just lose your points; or it might be the crucial thing that lets you take the vitally important action first).

I played one system like this, but my character was low dex and the party fairly large. It meant that I could go 15-25 minutes between announcing my action and then the action actually firing, at which point it wasn't that uncommon for it to have been invalidated by something the opponents did.

That said, near the top of initiative order (when I rolled well) it was a lot more fun. Being able to react to bad stuff about to happen to me was great, and the more immediate feedback on my action made the downside a lot less. I'd be really willing to play this again with a small party of high initiative characters.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for OP's actual question: I had a DM who would pretty much always give a surprise round to whoever attacked first, usually his monsters.

I remember once we could hear a creature rooting through the dungeon, looking for us, and we could hear which direction it was coming from. So I resolved to set a trap for it by the door, and to ready an action to sneak-attack it as soon as it came through the door.

"It comes through the door, and *rolls* fails its dex check to avoid the trap. Bad stuff happens to it, and it takes X damage. Enraged by this, it attacks the nearest person, which is you *rolls* and hits."

"That only hits if I'm flat-footed."

"You haven't acted in combat yet."

"I had readied action to hit it as soon as it came through the door. What happened to that?"

"It hits you first."

"How? It didn't even know the trap was there, let alone me. I was really angling to get a surprise round against it with that readied attack."

"Well, you weren't expecting it to attack you."

"So IT gets the surprise round?"

"Yes."

I was not impressed.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-01, 11:31 AM
(Extra XP for "good roleplaying" are a Pandoras box...)

The only time I enjoyed this was when one player doing 'good roleplaying' got the entire party XP. Instead of the people who don't get RPXP being annoyed that they're less able to contribute EVERYBODY loves the person who got them more XP.

The worst houserule I ever saw was free aims with all ranged attacks. Simply putting a scope on your gun mean you hit 98% of the time, and that was only because the system had automatic misses on 17s and 18s (it was a 3d6 roll under system). The end result was hitting was effectively based entirely on the opponent's Dodge skill, but because we compared Margin of Success (another houserule that was okay without the auto aiming) and Dodge tended to be lower than effective Attack values by ten or more attacks missed maybe three or four percent of the time.

Worked much better when we were forced to use our unscopped sidearms, and so we spent most of the campaign leaving the rifles at home, but whenever we or the GM managed to justify pulling them out combats went from tense to hilarious (near perfect hit rates, 4d6 damage for a rifle, an average HP value of ten, and my character was the only person in the entire game to wear armour, the results are obvious).

ijon
2018-10-01, 11:51 AM
This is a stupid answer, because these rewards are of different order. XP is an in-game reward that exists to encourage specific in-game actions, where as "getting to play a game" because it's "fun" is an out-of-game reward which can only exists against a backdrop of no or less "fun" .

They only meet at the middle when the quality and quantity of in-game rewards start influencing how "fun" a player finds your game. Which is hardly unimportant: imagine playing soccer without rules for scoring goals, or tetris without a score counter.

Whether the game gives a score and for what has direct impact on the course of the game and thus whether it is engaging... sorry, "fun", to players.
... ok?
like, what you're saying isn't wrong, it's just... completely beside the point?

the whole argument came from the idea that you have to use individualized XP as a motivator, and if you don't you're "just plain lazy" and a "hack GM" (his words).
but that's simply not true at all - most people don't need to be motivated by XP to enjoy the game, or play it The Right Way, or whatever. that's what knaight was getting at.
and hell, a lot of people here are arguing the opposite, that individualized XP just ends up encouraging the wrong things and harming the game more than equalized XP ever could.

so yeah, what does anything you're saying have to do with that?

hotflungwok
2018-10-01, 12:14 PM
Back when I played 2nd Ed one of the GMs I played with had a rule that on a roll of 1 whatever you're using breaks. Wooden club, steel sword, leather sling, Dwarven forged adamantium axe +3, roll a 1 and it broke. And by broke I mean in pieces, totally useless, magic all gone, none of this broken condition stuff. First game I ever played where players told me to fill my bags with whatever weapons I used, as they emptied we would use them for treasure. (the second was of course Rollmaster, where half the crits broke your weapon) One player found a Sword of the Lyons, really nice magic sword, something like you're invisible while wielding it and the sword is invisible while it's sheathed. Lasted about 20 minutes real time, it broke in the very next fight.

Not really bad rules, but one time I played Battletech with a group that used house rules for a few things. Only, they didn't mention that they were using house rules. So I played with them, and then went and played with another group of friends, and looked like an idiot cuz I kept doing things that were against the rules and insisting that that's how it's played.

I tend to prefer to keep groups at or very near the same XP total. It makes planning for them easier and you don't get players sitting and twiddling their thumbs sadly while everyone else is leveling their characters. In the few times where only some characters gets an XP award for doing something I usually try to even it out with the others characters when convenient.

I've seen enough stupidly arbitrary XP awards that I tend to shy away from it. I played with one guy (briefly) who would award a female player at the table whenever she jiggled. The weird part about this was that this woman was not his wife, who was also at the table, and didn't have high enough "stats" to perform that "maneuver".

Knaight
2018-10-01, 12:34 PM
I've seen enough stupidly arbitrary XP awards that I tend to shy away from it. I played with one guy (briefly) who would award a female player at the table whenever she jiggled. The weird part about this was that this woman was not his wife, who was also at the table, and didn't have high enough "stats" to perform that "maneuver".

For all that I prefer leaving XP to end game bookkeeping this seems less like a system issue and more a personal one. Creepers gonna creep.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-01, 01:49 PM
I've seen enough stupidly arbitrary XP awards that I tend to shy away from it. I played with one guy (briefly) who would award a female player at the table whenever she jiggled. The weird part about this was that this woman was not his wife, who was also at the table, and didn't have high enough "stats" to perform that "maneuver".

Yeah, Knaight is right here. In a system with milestone levelling it would have just been a level every X jiggles.

Plus maybe he had an agreement with his wife? I've seen it happen.

hotflungwok
2018-10-01, 02:27 PM
Yeah, Knaight is right here. In a system with milestone levelling it would have just been a level every X jiggles.

Plus maybe he had an agreement with his wife? I've seen it happen.
Kind of, and I don't think so. First, the XP rewards were always small, 50 or 100 or so (we were L10ish), and he occasionally just told us to level whenever he felt like, so they didn't really matter a lot. I doubt he would have just handed her a level. Second, it was kind of obvious that his wife didn't like it.

But the guy had more mental problems than I could count, calling him a creeper is an insult to wholesome normal creepers everywhere. Belittling his wife was just one nut in the whole scary fruitcake.

Maelynn
2018-10-01, 02:39 PM
Now you're not even arguing against anything I said [..]

Maybe that's because I wasn't. If you look a bit more closely, you could see I quoted and responded to someone else.


Leave me out of it.

I wasn't even including you? You're the one trying to make my post revolve around you, not I.

Arbane
2018-10-01, 04:37 PM
But the guy had more mental problems than I could count, calling him a creeper is an insult to wholesome normal creepers everywhere. Belittling his wife was just one nut in the whole scary fruitcake.

Yeesh. Any stories that are entertaining, instead of skin-crawling or just sad?

As for me... Well, there was the time a DM offered to raise my character a level if I helped him move... in a game that never got off the ground. I helped him anyway.

Not a rule, but an entire system: A gamer I know wanted to run Feng Shui, in the GURPS system. Anyone who knows both systems is probably laughing incredulously right now.
Same guy also ran a GURPS Mage: the Ascension game where using magic had a small risk of rupturing the universe. So the players used magic unrestrainedly - one way or another, it made sure their problems would be over.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-01, 09:44 PM
I had a campaign at a local gaming shop which had the worst kind of houserules...the kind that were never written down, and ruled differently at different times. It doesn't help that the houserules which the DM did keep track of seem tailor-made to screw the players over (for instance, nerfing one player's attempts at doing things with Bigsby's Hand by saying spell effects can't go beyond the range), and his bad habit of being irritatingly inconsistent with his descriptions (one example from just before I left the campaign was what the DM described as the only path the enemy could have taken, which the entire table thought was a dirt road or something...but when a couple flying PCs sent out to scout flew 60 feet away and had to roll Perception to find it again, we learned that it was apparently a game trail. The only game trail in the area. With a bridge later, though that's just because the DM's map had a bridge on it.)
I'm glad that the group also runs games elsewhere. Most of them are fun to play with.



(And of course, like every 'make combat more dangerous/realistic' rule, it cripples fighters without inconveniencing casters at all.)
Naturally. Since casters never existed, it's realistic for them to not suffer any serious drawbacks. They didn't in reality, after all!
(More seriously...there's an ounce of truth in that joke. We know how to screw over martials because our societies have been finding new and better ways to do that for centuries, but we don't know crap about magicians. Any restrictions we put on them are going to seem way more arbitrary than detailed injury rules, because everything about magic rules has to be arbitrary.)



The best house rule my DMs have ever put: delete the XP system from all their campaigns. (Replaced by synchronized level up according to plot)
Same. I have literally never played in a campaign that tracked XP.



This is a stupid answer, because these rewards are of different order. XP is an in-game reward that exists to encourage specific in-game actions, where as "getting to play a game" because it's "fun" is an out-of-game reward which can only exists against a backdrop of no or less "fun" .

They only meet at the middle when the quality and quantity of in-game rewards start influencing how "fun" a player finds your game. Which is hardly unimportant: imagine playing soccer without rules for scoring goals, or tetris without a score counter.
There's a big problem with that comparison. Soccer is a game played between two teams, who score points. Tetris's points are essentially a way for a player to play against his past self, everyone else at the arcade, or what-have-you. Experience points...are not that, because it's not a friggin' competition! If your players' primary motivation is a competition to outdo each other, you're probably doing something wrong.



So? That doesn't make what I said any less true. I could just as well say "games that are poorly designed are extremely common", that's how much of a red herring your statement is.
Unless you're trying to say that games without scoring systems are badly-designed, I don't see how it's a red herring at all.



The worst houserule I ever saw was free aims with all ranged attacks. Simply putting a scope on your gun mean you hit 98% of the time, and that was only because the system had automatic misses on 17s and 18s (it was a 3d6 roll under system). The end result was hitting was effectively based entirely on the opponent's Dodge skill, but because we compared Margin of Success (another houserule that was okay without the auto aiming) and Dodge tended to be lower than effective Attack values by ten or more attacks missed maybe three or four percent of the time.

Worked much better when we were forced to use our unscopped sidearms, and so we spent most of the campaign leaving the rifles at home, but whenever we or the GM managed to justify pulling them out combats went from tense to hilarious (near perfect hit rates, 4d6 damage for a rifle, an average HP value of ten, and my character was the only person in the entire game to wear armour, the results are obvious).
Ah, GURPS.
Rifles can be powerful even if the DM read the aiming rules. Especially if one of your players thinks far enough ahead to find a good sniping position...



Yeesh. Any stories that are entertaining, instead of skin-crawling or just sad?
I had a DM running Rise of the Runelords who didn't notice that Malfeshnekor was supposed to be magically bound in his little closet, or the bits which described how he'd try to lure PCs into there to be torn apart. So when we opened the wrong door, a fiend several CRs higher than the party level came running out. (Also, sometimes he had an axe and sometimes he didn't. That's still a source of jokes.)
One member of the group had a nice, heroic moment of trying to hold off the monster while his friends escaped...and then the barbarian joined in because he thought it looked fun. And then the gunslinger joined in because the boss had shattered his rifle. Another thing we joked about (mostly at the third player's expense).
When I took over the campaign, I threw together a quick mini-adventure to get used to running the system, and had Malfeshnekor return, stronger than ever. Turns out, not strong enough to survive the action-economical power of five adventurers.


Same guy also ran a GURPS Mage: the Ascension game where using magic had a small risk of rupturing the universe. So the players used magic unrestrainedly - one way or another, it made sure their problems would be over.
Reminds me of a forum game I ran with a simple homebrew system where rolling badly enough could result in regional disasters a la Frozen.
...It didn't last to the first adventure hook.

Luccan
2018-10-02, 01:13 AM
Reminds me of a forum game I ran with a simple homebrew system where rolling badly enough could result in regional disasters a la Frozen.
...It didn't last to the first adventure hook.

I don't even get rules like this. Do people want their games to end randomly? I know, it can happen in normal games too (I'm sure many of us have stories of accidental TPK), but it's to a far lesser degree. Adding in "and the campaign ends before it begins" rules just seems arbitrary. Then again, I guess you could die in character creation in some older RPGs. Maybe it's just trying to harken back to the Good Ol' DaysTM

MoiMagnus
2018-10-02, 03:49 AM
I don't even get rules like this. Do people want their games to end randomly? I know, it can happen in normal games too (I'm sure many of us have stories of accidental TPK), but it's to a far lesser degree. Adding in "and the campaign ends before it begins" rules just seems arbitrary. Then again, I guess you could die in character creation in some older RPGs. Maybe it's just trying to harken back to the Good Ol' DaysTM

I've played a French caricature of role playing games ("Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk" (https://www.naheulbeuk.com/fast-download.htm), only in French unfortunately) that had some of those (one high level time manipulation spell had "if you triple fumble, then the universe disappear and become a giant blue cube") and a lot of similar stuff.
Those stuff only works because that's a caricature.

And to answer the question, a lot of peoples want the feeling of "the game could end randomly at any moment", and would even enjoy the moment where it happens (a misfortune is always a great story to talk about).
That does not mean they will enjoy the fact that the campaign has to end due to a misfortune. But we (humans) are not rational, so we may try to have something even if we don't want its consequences.

AvatarVecna
2018-10-02, 03:56 AM
"Real weapons and armor require regular maintenance, and that's part of why basically ever class has the Craft skill available. So every time you attack, or get attacked, your weapon and armor degrades a tiny bit. If you aren't investing in those skills, taking some time out of your shopping to seek out a blacksmith, or carry backup weapons/armor for when these break, eventually they're gonna break and you're gonna be out of options."

Cool cool, so what I'm hearing is 'play VoP druid', got it.

noob
2018-10-02, 05:43 AM
"Real weapons and armor require regular maintenance, and that's part of why basically ever class has the Craft skill available. So every time you attack, or get attacked, your weapon and armor degrades a tiny bit. If you aren't investing in those skills, taking some time out of your shopping to seek out a blacksmith, or carry backup weapons/armor for when these break, eventually they're gonna break and you're gonna be out of options."

Cool cool, so what I'm hearing is 'play VoP druid', got it.

or as a normal person play a wizard without armor(you can still wear the classical dagger or staff since you use them so rarely they are only going to break from rust which can take a long time).

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-02, 06:20 AM
"Real weapons and armor require regular maintenance, and that's part of why basically ever class has the Craft skill available. So every time you attack, or get attacked, your weapon and armor degrades a tiny bit. If you aren't investing in those skills, taking some time out of your shopping to seek out a blacksmith, or carry backup weapons/armor for when these break, eventually they're gonna break and you're gonna be out of options."

Cool cool, so what I'm hearing is 'play VoP druid', got it.

Yeah, part of what I do is assume that most characters know how to care for their weapons, you'll want a backup for the less than one in four hundred chance that you'll have it break or bend to uselessness (critical hit on attack, critical failure on your party), but I also run adventures where being able to get a new blade before the next combat is fairly easy. So players don't have to worry about wear and tear, but there's still a chance that nonmagical stuff could break.

Then again, I also like to run systems where magic isn't really a viable alternative to weapons. Stuff like The Dark Eye or Unknown Armies. In the former magic is expensive and not better than a sword, in the latter magic is difficult to charge up (bar dipsomancers, which one of my players is using) and not any better than a gun. Breaking weapons here is more of an uncertainty than a massive nerf because brutes are some of the more powerful builds (along with nonmagical faces).

Black Jester
2018-10-02, 06:39 AM
If gaming to you, at any point, becomes hard work, you should probably just stop.
.

Anything worth doing is worth doing it well.
Doing something well requires frequent effort and input, and yes, that is work. That is the cost of being at least adequate and content with what you are doing. At the end of the day, I want to be satisfied with what I have done and the overall result, and I will still ask how it could have been better.

That counts for all aspects of life, period.


The very term "forced equalization" includes an assumption that individual XP is how it is done by default, and that anything else is a change. As for how I explain it, the reward for playing a game is getting to play a game. I don't need to bribe my players with XP to play, because my games are fun.

Of course Individual XP is the default way of handling this affair, because it is the only solution that is actually fair, and therefore appropriate. As any gamemaster who refuses to acknolwedge each player individually inevitably acts as a jerk to his players, deliberately or not, one should clearly hope that the solution that's actually respectful to the players and their efforts and achievements is supposed to be the default.


The thing about Sisyphus is that rolling a rock up a hill sucks, and he has to roll the rock up the hill. Those two are essential components, and the whole tale doesn't work well at all if he could just choose not to roll the rock up the hill and do something else instead, and also instead of rolling the rock up a hill it was something fun.

The whole tale only becomes relevant by making it reative to oneself, which requires permutations, as Camus' idea of Sysiphos as a happy man (a recommendable perspective, at least for Sysiphos himself), or the concept of the plotting prisoner, slowly preparing a weapon for the time to rise up against a cruel fate.

Kardwill
2018-10-02, 06:54 AM
or as a normal person play a wizard without armor(you can still wear the classical dagger or staff since you use them so rarely they are only going to break from rust which can take a long time).

When I was young and foolish (and a basic/expert D&D DM), I had the party wizard's grimoire destroyed on a fumble. The player was NOT amused. Especially when he also lost an arm (hobgoblin scoring a critical) and a leg (acid lake) in the next fight.

So yeah, "fumbles, hard crits and targeted damage are awesome in Runequest, let's introduce them in D&D" may be a classical houserule-gone-wrong :smallbiggrin:

Kardwill
2018-10-02, 06:57 AM
Of course Individual XP is the default way of handling this affair,

It's been a long time since I played D&D (I'm more a FATE player nowadays), but aren't party XP the default mode in modern D&D games? Because if so, claiming individual XP is the norm might be a little excessive.

Knaight
2018-10-02, 07:27 AM
It's been a long time since I played D&D (I'm more a FATE player nowadays), but aren't party XP the default mode in modern D&D games? Because if so, claiming individual XP is the norm might be a little excessive.

That's not even the argument being made at this point. Instead it's been reduced to "I'm right, therefore I'm right".

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-02, 07:48 AM
I don't even get rules like this. Do people want their games to end randomly? I know, it can happen in normal games too (I'm sure many of us have stories of accidental TPK), but it's to a far lesser degree. Adding in "and the campaign ends before it begins" rules just seems arbitrary. Then again, I guess you could die in character creation in some older RPGs. Maybe it's just trying to harken back to the Good Ol' DaysTM
In my case, it wasn't supposed to end the campaign. If it had happened at some point when the PCs were at least in enemy territory, it wouldn't have posed any serious problem beyond the mission at hand. I just assumed the PCs would recognize it as a "Don't mess around with magic when mundane solutions would work just as well," and that I'd made the horrible misfires unlikely enough to not come up that often.
But they kind of caused a local apocalypse at home base. That sure made an a out of u and me.
(I never understood that saying; how does assuming make an a out of the guy who was assumed?)



Anything worth doing is worth doing it well.
Doing something well requires frequent effort and input, and yes, that is work. That is the cost of being at least adequate and content with what you are doing. At the end of the day, I want to be satisfied with what I have done and the overall result, and I will still ask how it could have been better.

That counts for all aspects of life, period.
No argument there...except that you should avoid sunk-cost fallacying. Keep in mind the costs and benefits of doing something as well as you can; sometimes, it's better overall to do something just okay if the benefits aren't high enough to justify the cost. (It's admittedly a lesson I sometimes still need to learn...)


Of course Individual XP is the default way of handling this affair, because it is the only solution that is actually fair, and therefore appropriate. As any gamemaster who refuses to acknolwedge each player individually inevitably acts as a jerk to his players, deliberately or not, one should clearly hope that the solution that's actually respectful to the players and their efforts and achievements is supposed to be the default.
Let's ignore the assertion of default-ness, which is somewhat hard to justify when the majority of people talking about it don't seem to use that system.
Jerkiness is in the eyes of the jerked-upon, and some people don't see XP being given equally as jerky behavior (especially if it's been established as ). After all, a TRPG isn't a competition; if everyone's at the same level, everyone can contribute equally, and it doesn't make sense to punish the people contributing less by making them less able to contribute.
Besides, how bad does a player need to do for them to deserve an XP penalty (relative to the party)? Are they're being penalized for not roleplaying "well enough," and if so what are your provisions for times when it would be out-of-character to speak out? Or are they being penalized for not contributing to overcoming challenges enough, in which case how do you determine that?

And if we're talking about jerk behavior...look at the concrete examples in this thread of people who played with such rules and were screwed over for one reason or another. Now look at how all you have is an assertion that if everyone gets equal XP, the ones who did "more" would feel "cheated" out of XP.
It's almost as if people don't think twice about how fairly something is distributed when it's clearly marked as not being a carrot or stick for specific player behavior, but for group accomplishments. Hm, I wonder if making such a valuable resource dependent on team success rather than individual accomplishment could also encourage players to focus on working together as a team over trying to take the spotlight?

Faily
2018-10-02, 08:48 AM
Anything worth doing is worth doing it well.
Doing something well requires frequent effort and input, and yes, that is work. That is the cost of being at least adequate and content with what you are doing. At the end of the day, I want to be satisfied with what I have done and the overall result, and I will still ask how it could have been better.

That counts for all aspects of life, period.




Sure, but the moment something that's supposed to be fun feels like a chore and/or a second job, it has failed imo.

Kardwill
2018-10-02, 09:38 AM
That's not even the argument being made at this point. Instead it's been reduced to "I'm right, therefore I'm right".

Well, yeah, but if I had to respond to the holier-than-thou and one-true-wayism dripping from that post, I might end up saying stuff I would regret later. So instead, I chose to cling to what looked like a factually ridiculous allegation.

And I'm not even a D&D fan, he? I dislike this game, and often play with systems with individual XP (I'm not a fan of those either, though. When you give a cookie to a player, you make him a target of envy. When you give a cookie to the group because of that player, you make him a hero, which I find better for both the ego and the overall group dynamics).

But when you talk about the "default" in RPG, it's kinda difficult to ignore the 300 tons Dragon in the room ^^

Resileaf
2018-10-02, 09:55 AM
Huh, I didn't know there was so much opposition to fumble rules. I tend to enjoy them myself, though I use a deck of critical fumbles to make them varied. Also use the 'confirm fumble' rule rather than a 1 being an instant fumble.
Also use the 'hero point' house rule to make re-rolling bad fumbles possible. Maybe that's why they're not as painful as they might be otherwise?

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-02, 10:04 AM
Huh, I didn't know there was so much opposition to fumble rules. I tend to enjoy them myself, though I use a deck of critical fumbles to make them varied. Also use the 'confirm fumble' rule rather than a 1 being an instant fumble.


I had a game of 5e D&D that used PF crit cards (both fumbles and hits). That sucked.

1) The results of the cards required ad lib translations between the very different mechanics of the systems.
2) The effects were debilitating on both sides, but worse against players.
3) since no confirmation of crits happens in 5e, crits happened way more frequently (especially against players).
4) drawing and translating slowed things down to a crawl. Especially when there's on set of cards for 3 tables...

hotflungwok
2018-10-02, 10:04 AM
Yeesh. Any stories that are entertaining, instead of skin-crawling or just sad?

Unfortunately no. Pretty much any story I can tell about him would inspire justly deserved mobs complete with pitchforks and torches.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-02, 11:56 AM
Can I put in a vote for 'learning by use' systems, where you have to use a skill to increase it at the end of the session and which tend to ignore XP entirely? In really liking it in UA3, because with the split between Abilities and Identities it doesn't result in cookie cutter characters (so only somebody with a combat related identity well get better at combat through the system).


Huh, I didn't know there was so much opposition to fumble rules. I tend to enjoy them myself, though I use a deck of critical fumbles to make them varied. Also use the 'confirm fumble' rule rather than a 1 being an instant fumble.
Also use the 'hero point' house rule to make re-rolling bad fumbles possible. Maybe that's why they're not as painful as they might be otherwise?

Fumbles only really work when the system is designed around it. D&D is terrible about it, but they work well enough in GURPS, DSA, Eclipse Phase, Unknown Armies, BRP, and others where they're in there from the start instead of being tacked on.

PersonMan
2018-10-02, 12:43 PM
Your attention will most likely focus on the player (or sometimes players) who demand it the most, because they are louder, more extrovert or require more attention to play their characters. Individual XP rewards are the only reliable way to mitigate the effects of this attention economy, by specifically addressing and rewarding the less loud players.

I'm not sure I understand...If the GM inevitably pays more attention to those who are more demanding of it, how does letting the more demanding players increase their XP gain relative to more quiet ones solve the issue? I understand the idea that a quieter player can be awarded for the smaller number of actions they take, but doesn't the louder one, by virtue of being able to take more actions, have a far higher likelihood of taking more XP-granting actions per session? I don't see how it works, unless you throttle the XP gain of a particularly dominant player (which seems to go against the entire philosophy of individual XP gain).

Not directly related, but - what happens when, over an extended period, a "bad" player (one who doesn't earn much XP) inevitably falls further and further behind their party? If the quiet player who mostly enjoys doing things with others doesn't do much on their own, they won't earn much XP relative to the others, and become significantly weaker than the others.

How do you reward things that don't quite fit, IC? Things like "the one playing the illiterate warrior loves puzzles, and solves the word-puzzle easily, while the one playing the well-read scholar hates and is bad at them"? Does the XP go to the warrior, who would probably do nothing helpful IC, or to the wizard, who hasn't helped OOC?

More system-specific, doesn't this also risk rewarding players with stronger characters? If the character who can only fight is heavily limited in individual action, but another has a large array of abilities they can use to enable solo work, the latter could easily end up with far more bonus XP, thereby increasing the power gap in a potentially problematic way.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-02, 01:05 PM
Can I put in a vote for 'learning by use' systems, where you have to use a skill to increase it at the end of the session and which tend to ignore XP entirely?
That sort of thing works better in video games than TRPGs. Same with any other rule that adds significant bookkeeping to the game; they can be interesting and add meaningful depth to the game, but only if you don't get sick of it and start ignoring the rule two sessions in.

Knaight
2018-10-02, 01:07 PM
That sort of thing works better in video games than TRPGs. Same with any other rule that adds significant bookkeeping to the game; they can be interesting and add meaningful depth to the game, but only if you don't get sick of it and start ignoring the rule two sessions in.

Eh. The book keeping usually works out pretty simply if the character sheet is well designed. It's an occasional tick mark.

Aetis
2018-10-02, 02:28 PM
Of course Individual XP is the default way of handling this affair, because it is the only solution that is actually fair, and therefore appropriate. As any gamemaster who refuses to acknolwedge each player individually inevitably acts as a jerk to his players, deliberately or not, one should clearly hope that the solution that's actually respectful to the players and their efforts and achievements is supposed to be the default.

Individual XP is only fair if player's efforts and achievements can be accurately quantified. How would you decide how much XP to award for a player who successfully negotiated a peace treaty between elves and orcs, versus a player who stopped a king from drinking poisoned wine at the last second? I cannot think of a comprehensive and fair set of criteria.

ATHATH
2018-10-02, 02:48 PM
Can we please move this discussion about individual XP to another thread so that this one can get back on topic?

hotflungwok
2018-10-02, 02:48 PM
The problem with individual XP awards is that there is no standard for it. If you give out what you think of as fair awards, even if they really are fair someone else might not think so. Maybe they're used to something different, maybe they just have a different idea of what should or should not deserve an award, they think they're not being treated fairly. This doesn't mean what you're doing is unfair, it means that this kind of thing is arbitrary by it's nature, and everyone is going to have a different idea on what constitutes fair individual awards.

It's way too easy to make a mistake with it, and have someone feeling put out. The benefits don't outweigh the possible problems associated with this system.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-02, 03:57 PM
That sort of thing works better in video games than TRPGs. Same with any other rule that adds significant bookkeeping to the game; they can be interesting and add meaningful depth to the game, but only if you don't get sick of it and start ignoring the rule two sessions in.

It depends on how deep you go. I'm using Unknown Armies 3e, where if you fail at a roll with an Identity (or succeed at one for Avatar Identities) you gain 1d5 percentiles in the Identity at the end of the session. Like Basic Role Playing, but the advancement is automatic and it's only for Identities, not Abilities.

All you need to do is make a mark by the Identity when you fail and roll 1d5 at the end of the session. Not hard.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-02, 04:44 PM
It depends on how deep you go. I'm using Unknown Armies 3e, where if you fail at a roll with an Identity (or succeed at one for Avatar Identities) you gain 1d5 percentiles in the Identity at the end of the session. Like Basic Role Playing, but the advancement is automatic and it's only for Identities, not Abilities.

All you need to do is make a mark by the Identity when you fail and roll 1d5 at the end of the session. Not hard.
For one skill, yes. How many skills do you fail in a typical session?
And as you said, that's a pretty simple example. Video games let you get more of the quasi-realistic complexity which those systems try to evoke, and let it be tuned more finely, with even less player effort.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-02, 04:47 PM
For one skill, yes. How many skills do you fail in a typical session?
And as you said, that's a pretty simple example. Video games let you get more of the quasi-realistic complexity which those systems try to evoke, and let it be tuned more finely, with even less player effort.

With characters having two to four Identities you'll have to check them every time you fail to see if they've been marked, unless you have a decent memory. BRP has a lot more problems with it's multitude of skills and 'no more than ten checks a session' rule.

Also, why do I care about it being quasi-realistic? I want simple, and for a variety of reasons (including playing online) I don't want to be messing around with XP.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-02, 09:09 PM
I'm not sure how leveling up only skills you've used in a specific session is better for online play than, say, getting skill points you can spent anywhere.

Lemmy
2018-10-03, 06:19 PM
Every class has a Paladinesque Code of Conduct... Except Fighters and Rogues.

Not only that was bad as expected, the game was also run by the 2nd worst GM I've ever had. At least the game only lasted 3 sessions.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-03, 06:34 PM
I'm not sure how leveling up only skills you've used in a specific session is better for online play than, say, getting skill points you can spent anywhere.

Quick to adjudicate at the end of the session, which allows me to take copies of sheets to stop players cheating between sessions. In person I prefer XP and for people to spend it at the beginning/end of a session, but I also used to collect all the sheets at the end of the session via group demand.

You're assuming this is the kind of group where most people wouldn't spend twenty minute over where to put every skill point.

Celestia
2018-10-03, 07:10 PM
Every class has a Paladinesque Code of Conduct... Except Fighters and Rogues.

Not only that was bad as expected, the game was also run by the 2nd worst GM I've ever had. At least the game only lasted 3 sessions.
Why fighters? Like, if we're going to start doling out codes to non-paladin classes, I'd pit the soldier-esque fighter nearer to the top than most. I mean, sorcerer got a code, but not fighter? That's just weird and inconsistent.

theMycon
2018-10-03, 07:12 PM
You need to declare your will saves.

For example, your barbarian will never notice they're attacking an illusion unless you say out loud (while the DM is listening to you) "I make a will save to disbelieve the illusion". And it has to make sense (to the DM) that your character would do this. Among all the other issues with this, it means you need to be aware both IC & OOC that you're dealing with an illusion to try and realize it's an illusion. And the characters who're least likely to make the save can have a success dismissed by the DM if he wants his clever trap to have a bigger effect space he realizes you could solve the problem he wanted his girlfriend to handle you don't metagame just the right amount.

And, of course, save or lose spells are just "lose" if your character didn't make a successful spellcraft check.

Lemmy
2018-10-03, 09:11 PM
Why fighters? Like, if we're going to start doling out codes to non-paladin classes, I'd pit the soldier-esque fighter nearer to the top than most. I mean, sorcerer got a code, but not fighter? That's just weird and inconsistent.
Believe me... Fighters and Rogues were the lucky ones. Well... Except for the fact that they still had the class featurea of Fighters and Rogues, of course.

Celestia
2018-10-03, 09:50 PM
Believe me... Fighters and Rogues were the lucky ones. Well... Except for the fact that they still had the class featurea of Fighters and Rogues, of course.
Maybe that's it: your DM was attempting to balance the classes by making the worthwhile ones annoying to play.

But then why give monk a code?

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-04, 02:48 AM
Maybe that's it: your DM was attempting to balance the classes by making the worthwhile ones annoying to play.

But then why give monk a code?

Have you seen how many abilities monks get? Totally overpowered.

Having to ask the GM if our attacks had full effect. Because apparently when I use a crossbow I don't check to see if it hurt.

Lemmy
2018-10-04, 07:14 AM
Maybe that's it: your DM was attempting to balance the classes by making the worthwhile ones annoying to play.

But then why give monk a code?
Oh no... Then at least he'd have had a valid reason (but a horrible solution). He had this idea that every single magical ability in his setting was literally the gods acting through the character. Therefore, every magical ability could be lost by displeasing a god. It was awful. We eventually got fed up with it when a Bard lost his spells and performances for refusing to play at a nobleman's dinner party (said nobleman was an annoying GMPC).

In truth, what he wanted was to have a tool to keep the players "in line". He was possibly the most rail-roady GM I've ever seen. Downright ignoring or nullifying character abilities to fit his script... And of course, having deities directly interfere with the life of random level 3 adventurers... While simultaneously telling us that they are just random level 3 adventurers that are not chosen or special in any way, completely undeserving of special attention by the gods or nobles.

Like I said... He was the 2nd worst GM my group ever had (we kicked him out shortly after his game ended, when he tried to unilaterally kick another player out).

Kicking him out really was the best decision our group ever made.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-04, 07:56 AM
Honestly I've used 'all magic it's of the gods' before, although generally I either work out the code the god put on then with the player (so a bard might be unable to refuse to perform, or might instead be barred from taking money for their performance), or the bargain is explicitly 'power in this life for service in the next', which allows the character to do whatever they want because they'll be fighting the battles their patron really cares about after they die.

AtlasSniperman
2018-10-04, 08:49 AM
WHELLL

"On time" xp bonus
Critical Fumble rules. Always stupid
Custom(or card) Critical Hit rules. See Crit Fumbles
Nat 1 is always a failure. On anything. Ever. Including skills. Got a nice tasty +19 to something where the max DC is 20? Too bad you wasted that extra point, since a 1 will still fail.
Nat 20 is always a success. Unless the DM decides he doesn't want you succeeding in a particular case.
New characters enter the game with starting wealth equal to the average of the other PC's(Add to that, complaining that the PC's were looting their dead allies in a game dry of loot)
Everyone gets Diehard as a bonus feat. Announced 4 sessions in. You selected it as a feat earlier? Oh well, sucks to be you, no replacement feats.
Changing the rules every session, whenever one player attempts to use the rule to their benefit in any way.


I've probably used some bad rules myself but these come to mind immediately.

As for the Nat 1/Nat 20 thing. I too like to reward good luck and laugh at bad luck, but the worst I go is that Nat 20 double's your mod and Nat 1 halves it.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-10-04, 09:41 AM
Reading some of these horror stories makes me wonder.

Why do people stay with such horrible DMs after even one session? Are the crappy houserules and creepy behavior not visible at that point?

I can understand staying with a game that's generally fun but has an annoying house rule (finding out that you were using variant encumbrance in 5e a month after you started playing was obnoxious), but ones where the DM is on a mad power trip or is creepy like a clown?

The Glyphstone
2018-10-04, 09:50 AM
Reading some of these horror stories makes me wonder.

Why do people stay with such horrible DMs after even one session? Are the crappy houserules and creepy behavior not visible at that point?

I can understand staying with a game that's generally fun but has an annoying house rule (finding out that you were using variant encumbrance in 5e a month after you started playing was obnoxious), but ones where the DM is on a mad power trip or is creepy like a clown?

Lack of alternatives is the most common answer. If they're the only game in town and you can't or don't want to run it yourself, they are the only option. Far too many people ascribe to 'bad gaming is better than no gaming'.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-04, 10:28 AM
Lack of alternatives is the most common answer. If they're the only game in town and you can't or don't want to run it yourself, they are the only option. Far too many people ascribe to 'bad gaming is better than no gaming'.

Also the occasional case of trying to stay with a group long enough to convince them to play what you want to run (or to run at all).

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-05, 09:54 AM
Why fighters? Like, if we're going to start doling out codes to non-paladin classes, I'd pit the soldier-esque fighter nearer to the top than most. I mean, sorcerer got a code, but not fighter? That's just weird and inconsistent.
I'd probably put rogues before sorcerers, too. (Honor among thieves and all that.) When you get down to it, sorcerers are just guys who were born with arcane power.
Bards would probably be somewhere in the middle; there's probably some kind of bardic etiquette, but since they don't congregate in guilds or colleges or whatever, it would have to be pretty informal.



Oh no... Then at least he'd have had a valid reason (but a horrible solution). He had this idea that every single magical ability in his setting was literally the gods acting through the character. Therefore, every magical ability could be lost by displeasing a god.
If designed properly, and run by a competent DM, that could be interesting. Of course, proper design would include things like "giving characters tools required to survive while they atone," which nobody ay WotC thought to give e.g. wizards. Also:

In truth, what he wanted was to have a tool to keep the players "in line". He was possibly the most rail-roady GM I've ever seen.



"On time" xp bonus
On one hand, I've played in games where one or more players were almost always late, and giving them a small incentive to arrive on time makes sense. On the other hand, the reason why the oft-late players were late frequently involved inconvenient work schedules.


Nat 1 is always a failure. On anything. Ever. Including skills. Got a nice tasty +19 to something where the max DC is 20? Too bad you wasted that extra point, since a 1 will still fail.
I like the idea that success is never guaranteed, that even the greatest masters can "roll a 1" and make a stupid mistake. What's good for the swordsman is good for the swordsmith, you know?


New characters enter the game with starting wealth equal to the average of the other PC's(Add to that, complaining that the PC's were looting their dead allies in a game dry of loot)
The first doesn't sound too bad. It puts the players on even footing, loot-wise. My group has used that for a while in a relatively loot-dry section of a published adventure path.
The latter is kinda stupid. Looting your dead allies is a natural negative feedback mechanism; if you don't give the PCs enough loot for their level, they'll rapidly die off until the accumulated gear from dead party members compensates for the treasure deficit.


Changing the rules every session, whenever one player attempts to use the rule to their benefit in any way.
I feel your pain...but I already shared it halfway up the thread.



Reading some of these horror stories makes me wonder.

Why do people stay with such horrible DMs after even one session? Are the crappy houserules and creepy behavior not visible at that point?
In most cases, the "horror stories" accumulate over the months; they're not all obvious from the first session. In my case with the "it's the only game trail they could be following" DM I've mentioned a couple times, it took a couple of bad examples (including that one and a long argument over if the barbarian and wild-shaped druid could spend their turns to have the former mount the latter—with them giving multiple mechanical implementations and the DM being reluctant because he was afraid they'd keep abusing that apparently OP in the future) to convince me to leave; I stuck around until the next plot point wrapped up*, and then headed out.
My friends are still in that campaign, because they want to fight the BBEG. (Not necessarily win, mind you.) They're currently in a series of side-quests, which the DM is justifying by saying they need to be higher level to fight the dragon (which is apparently CR 20-something) and tying up "plot threads" that were forgotten about since before any of the characters currently in play were created.
Aside from the plot-wrappy-up stuff, there's the fact that the current DM used to(?) work at the comic/game shop we play at, and is still on good terms with them (to the point that when the DM showed up halfway through the scheduled 1.5-hour play session, one of the other employees was annoyed that the players were so hard on the DM...by not stopping the game they'd started in the meantime, and had offered to deal the DM into, which he refused. I mean, maybe the employee didn't realize the offer had been made, but still). Nobody wants to make a scene about it in the game shop, and the DM in that game is pretty much the only regular there who doesn't show up at the Sunday game the rest of us play, so we don't have another time to discuss things with him.
Oh, and the players like the post-game going-out-to-dinner, too. I've said they don't have to play D&D first, but...
...So yeah, there's a lot of reasons that dropping the campaign isn't always as simple as it sounds.


*Which involved the DM doing everything in his power to nerf the cheesy tactic known as "an ambush," up to and including an argument that we couldn't use hallucinatory terrain to hide holes dug in a natural environment, since they count as manufactured structures, even if they were dug by a summoned earth elemental or other natural creature. Which lead to the players pointing out that footprints should also count as manufactured structures, rendering the spell useless.
...This was followed by the DM arguing with a former soldier about if it was plausible to hide the holes through mundane means. The guy with experience won, thankfully.

Eldan
2018-10-05, 10:03 AM
I honestly understand On Time XP bonus. We hd a player who, in the last two years, never showed up less than half an hour late. At that point, the pre-game chatter and catching up was definitely done and it was annoying. No reason for it either. He lived nearby and it was on the weekends.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-05, 01:15 PM
I honestly understand On Time XP bonus. We hd a player who, in the last two years, never showed up less than half an hour late. At that point, the pre-game chatter and catching up was definitely done and it was annoying. No reason for it either. He lived nearby and it was on the weekends.

I tend to prefer metacurrencies as a reward. Extra Fate Point for turning up early, extra Fate Point for chipping in for pizza, Fate Point for getting everybody back on track, Fate Point for letting something bad happen to make the story more interesting, Fate Point for buying the GM some ale...

JNAProductions
2018-10-05, 01:20 PM
I tend to prefer metacurrencies as a reward. Extra Fate Point for turning up early, extra Fate Point for chipping in for pizza, Fate Point for getting everybody back on track, Fate Point for letting something bad happen to make the story more interesting, Fate Point for buying the GM some ale...

Yeah. Perhaps, in 5th edition, give Inspiration for being early or whatnot? (For those who don't know, that lets you roll a single d20 with advantage, and then it's gone.)

Man_Over_Game
2018-10-05, 01:30 PM
Yeah. Perhaps, in 5th edition, give Inspiration for being early or whatnot? (For those who don't know, that lets you roll a single d20 with advantage, and then it's gone.)

For those who don't know advantage, it's a reroll to keep the higher of two d20s.

Basically, Inspiration is a free d20 reroll that you have to spend BEFORE you roll the d20. So you go to do something important, and rather than to leave it to fate, you expend your Inspiration to roll 2d20 and keep the better one.

JNAProductions
2018-10-05, 01:35 PM
For those who don't know advantage, it's a reroll to keep the higher of two d20s.

Basically, Inspiration is a free d20 reroll that you have to spend BEFORE you roll the d20. So you go to do something important, and rather than to leave it to fate, you expend your Inspiration to roll 2d20 and keep the better one.

Or to negate disadvantage (which is the same thing in reverse-roll 2d20, take the lower one).

Now, officially, there's a cap of one on inspiration, but I could see raising it.

Quertus
2018-10-06, 10:22 AM
I didn't see anyone create a thread to continue discussing XP, so I created this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?570842-Game-Theory-XP-Rewards-Realism-Power-Ups&p=23419124#post23419124). My opinion of the discussion of XP in this thread is this: of course you should give individual XP. That way, if someone is getting less XP, you know that they are the one who is underperforming, and needs a Power-Up. Or, better yet, give group XP, but track individual contribution, and Power-Up those who underperform.


That sure made an a out of u and me.
(I never understood that saying; how does assuming make an a out of the guy who was assumed?)

Well, that one's easy - the jerk who didn't provide sufficient information forced the other party to make assumptions. Kinda like jerks who wrote ambiguous RAW, and didn't clarify their intentions.

Make sense now?

JMS
2018-10-06, 05:08 PM
\
Bards would probably be somewhere in the middle; there's probably some kind of bardic etiquette, but since they don't congregate in guilds or colleges or whatever, it would have to be pretty informal.
Actually, bards have a long history of colleges, starting with their introduction and a whole hierarchy of colleges in AD&D (Not familiar with earlier), to the the fact that 5e bard subclasses are called colleges.
This goes a lot deeper

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-06, 07:45 PM
Yeah. Perhaps, in 5th edition, give Inspiration for being early or whatnot? (For those who don't know, that lets you roll a single d20 with advantage, and then it's gone.)


Actually, bards have a long history of colleges, starting with their introduction and a whole hierarchy of colleges in AD&D (Not familiar with earlier), to the the fact that 5e bard subclasses are called colleges.
This goes a lot deeper

Hmmmm.... Wizards get Schools, Bards get Colleges.... I sure hope the Artificer subclasses are called Universities.....

redwizard007
2018-10-06, 08:21 PM
Played 3.5 with a group that swore AoO were provoked by moving into a threatened square instead of out of a threatened square. I milked the living **** out of that little rule.

sakuuya
2018-10-06, 09:43 PM
Hmmmm.... Wizards get Schools, Bards get Colleges.... I sure hope the Artificer subclasses are called Universities.....

Artificers get Vocational Programs. :smalltongue:

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-07, 02:45 AM
Played 3.5 with a group that swore AoO were provoked by moving into a threatened square instead of out of a threatened square. I milked the living **** out of that little rule.

Made that mistake originally, although when we played with it I also houseruled that charging allowed you to delay the AoO until after your attack without realising it (specifically because I thought 'I charge at you and get hit before I can strike' as stupid and couldn't possibly be the designers' intent).

Johel
2018-10-07, 05:40 AM
Worst Rule I actually played with: All PCs gain the same amount of XP, no matter what they do in the game. Infuriatingly unfair, removes the most effective motivational tool a GM has and it is just plain lazy. I got better, though.

If they go together through a challenge, isn't it normal they get the same amount ?
Most of the time, this encourages cooperation.

Now it can also encourage people to not make their characters take any risks, knowing that somebody else will do it eventually and they'll get their share of XP anyway.

If this situation persists, it can lead to IC dispute, with the party simply asking the questions :
"what do you contribute to this venture, already ?"
"why should we share the wealth with you if you aren't pulling your weight ?"
"why should we even keep you around when anybody else would be better ?"
True, it can be good roleplaying if that's how the character is supposed to act... but then nothing force other characters to tolerate such individual.

OOC, the situation might be more tricky but, most players being friends with each other, it shouldn't become a problem.
If the player doesn't understand the problem or doesn't agree to adapt, one solution can be to act IC : the party refuse to split evenly the loot.
Sure, the problematic character is getting his share of XP because that's something the GM hands out.
But the loot ? If a character do not contribute, another character can act and steal stuff from #1.

Darth Ultron
2018-10-07, 12:15 PM
Reading some of these horror stories makes me wonder.

Why do people stay with such horrible DMs after even one session? Are the crappy houserules and creepy behavior not visible at that point?


Other then no alternative game, the other big reason is the game is not a bad game. Quite often a game can be fun and exciting even with a 'bad' house rule.

And, of course, a lot of players call ''any'' house rule ''bad''. And way to many only like positive house rules: if it is ''characters get bonus hp per level" the players love that house rule.

Some I have seen:


Sneak attack(or any at will ability) is limited to once/turn.
Monks hurt themselves and take 1d6 damage while punching "hard" stuff.
You can Hide for hours without any opposed Spot check.
If two very attractive people come across one another, they must do opposed Charisma checks. The one who loses the check falls madly in love with the other.

Jay R
2018-10-07, 12:51 PM
In a game of AD&D 2e, one DM automatically gave each PC and NPC maximum die rolls for hit points. OK, that's completely balanced, since is just about doubles hit points for everybody. The only real effect is that it makes CON bonuses less important overall. [A fighter's CON bonus of +3 per die is a 30% increase (10 to 13) rather than a 55% increase (5.5 to 8.5).]

To keep things fair, he also made magical attacks -- fireballs and the like -- deal out maximum hp damage. OK, again, that makes sense. Double the characters' hp, double the damage from attacks. No real change, right?

But you still rolled for damage from weapons. This had the relative affect of reducing the damage from weapons, since the did the same damage to monsters with nearly doubled points.

I don't think the players with the paladin, fighter, or ranger ever figured out that their swords had been effectively dulled. I did, but my wife was the wizard and I was the wizard/ thief, so I had no objections.

awa
2018-10-07, 12:56 PM
well sneak attack is weakened but at least in 3rd edition most of a martial damage comes from modifiers not the die roll. I mean it is a slight nerf and all.

Knaight
2018-10-07, 01:34 PM
well sneak attack is weakened but at least in 3rd edition most of a martial damage comes from modifiers not the die roll. I mean it is a slight nerf and all.

That's not really the case in 2e. The dice were generally pretty comparable to 3e, the modifiers usually far smaller.

Khedrac
2018-10-07, 03:36 PM
Playing Avalon Hill RuneQuest (and it seemed a good idea at the time):

Instead of being able to get one skill gain check per skill per adventure (each check giving one chance to get 1d6 or 3 skill points) you got half Int checks per skill, each check giving a chance to get 1 skill point.

The problem is that Int is already probably the most important statistic in the game, and this rule just penalised low Int characters more.

No, it wasn't my idea, but it was when I was going to run and planned to use the same rule that I realised the drawback.

Quertus
2018-10-07, 05:24 PM
How about "metamagics are free" as my contribution to bad house rules I've seen?


And, of course, a lot of players call ''any'' house rule ''bad''.

Well, every house rule is bad. And every house rule is good.

That is, every house rule is that much head space required to remember it. And that much of a barrier to playing at another table.

But every house rule is also the opportunity to play something different, that you wouldn't or couldn't at a "normal" table.

awa
2018-10-07, 06:59 PM
That's not really the case in 2e. The dice were generally pretty comparable to 3e, the modifiers usually far smaller.

didn't read carefully enough missed the second edition so yeah that's a bad rule

Capt Spanner
2018-10-08, 05:47 AM
Reading some of these horror stories makes me wonder.

Why do people stay with such horrible DMs after even one session? Are the crappy houserules and creepy behavior not visible at that point?

I can understand staying with a game that's generally fun but has an annoying house rule (finding out that you were using variant encumbrance in 5e a month after you started playing was obnoxious), but ones where the DM is on a mad power trip or is creepy like a clown?

I know one guy who's mostly a great DM. He has a gift for characterisation and worldbuilding and improvisation that means the world we inhabit and the characters we meet feel real, and full of life.

He knows how to craft plots, and quests, and if you play one of his games you always have some goal and something to engage you.

BUT: he never really grokked combat, and particularly combat rules. And so he houserules some bits of it to make it easier for him, even though it kind of makes the combat unengaging for us. Fortunately his games aren't combat heavy, and his skill at everything else more than makes up for it.

RandomNPC
2018-10-08, 07:32 AM
First time I ever actually sat down to play D&D, 3e was new and the DM handed me a sheet of paper, here's some examples.

You showed up! 100xp.
Used a skill (5 times per skill) that's 5xp
dealt damage with a weapon, here's a formula! xp=damage
used perishables (scroll/wand/potion/limited number of use items) 50xp
Used daily spell slot: level of spell X 15

it was things like that down the entire sheet. He figured out what class got the least average XP and awarded extra to those classes, but he had some minmaxers at the table and didn't adjust for that.

Quertus
2018-10-08, 08:38 AM
Used daily spell slot: level of spell X 15


Another week of downtime, and I'll go epic! :smallbiggrin:

awa
2018-10-08, 08:44 AM
First time I ever actually sat down to play D&D, 3e was new and the DM handed me a sheet of paper, here's some examples.

You showed up! 100xp.
Used a skill (5 times per skill) that's 5xp
dealt damage with a weapon, here's a formula! xp=damage
used perishables (scroll/wand/potion/limited number of use items) 50xp
Used daily spell slot: level of spell X 15

it was things like that down the entire sheet. He figured out what class got the least average XP and awarded extra to those classes, but he had some minmaxers at the table and didn't adjust for that.

Ive seen something like this for 2nd edition. but 3rd edition has way to many moving parts to ever make that work even without minmaxers

stack
2018-10-08, 08:44 AM
Just make sure you are jumping as you cast those spells for maximum efficiency.

It's like playing Morrowind again.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-08, 10:24 AM
First time I ever actually sat down to play D&D, 3e was new and the DM handed me a sheet of paper, here's some examples.

You showed up! 100xp.
Used a skill (5 times per skill) that's 5xp
dealt damage with a weapon, here's a formula! xp=damage
used perishables (scroll/wand/potion/limited number of use items) 50xp
Used daily spell slot: level of spell X 15

it was things like that down the entire sheet. He figured out what class got the least average XP and awarded extra to those classes, but he had some minmaxers at the table and didn't adjust for that.

Ah, 2e's individual XP awards. Which I'm about 60% certain most groups ignored back in 2e beyond 'you did warrior/priest/rogue/wizard stuff, have what seems reasonable'.

Isn't reall a houserule, but I once played in a homebrew system where there was no floor on damage. My character had a one in six chance of restoring hp when he hit somebody with a knife (I was so minmaxed it was untrue, because it was presented as a playtest). It took something like three sessions to notice this, as my character also had a crippling fear of sharp objects, and a scratch damage rule was implemented.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-08, 11:53 AM
If two very attractive people come across one another, they must do opposed Charisma checks. The one who loses the check falls madly in love with the other.

In a sufficiently silly campaign, with other silly houserules driving people to do silly things as the main driver of the plot, that could work. I don't think many people play like that.



Another week of downtime, and I'll go epic! :smallbiggrin:
Now I want to figure out how quickly one could go epic like that. Thanks for nerd-sniping me...

awa
2018-10-08, 12:20 PM
actually a war-forged fighter might be able to go epic much fast by becoming a lumber jack. He can power attack trees far more often then the wizard can cast spells because the wizard still needs to rest to get his new higher levels spells.

noob
2018-10-08, 12:22 PM
Do not forget that with craft wondrous item you can make thaumathurgy pearls which allows to cast even more spells.
level 1 thaumathurgy pearls costs 1000 po and one day of crafting and 5 xp but provide 15 xp per day.
If casting a spell with a wand or a scroll counts then you can craft wands of magic missile and empty them in the air for getting 750 xp per wand(and they cost way less xp).
If more cheeze is allowed you can at the right amount of gold buy a scroll of energy transformation field of mage lucubration and then at that moment gain approximately 75 xp per turn if you have 5 paladin servitors(so leadership + enough gold means epic levels fast).

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-08, 12:33 PM
Nerd-snipedness finished.

According to my data (https://prnt.sc/l3o88d), it would take just over one year, three months for a wizard with no bonus spell slots (somehow) to reach epic levels. It would take nearly two years at 10 XP/spell level, more than three and nine months at 5 XP, and close to 19 years at 1 XP each.

On the other hand...it would take less than a year at 20 XP/spell level, about 280 days at 25 each, six months at 40 XP, 100 days even at 75 XP, 77 days at 100 XP, 53 at 150, 41 at 200, 35 at 250, 32 at 300, 27 at 400, 24 at 500, 23 at 600, 22 at 750, and (finally) 20 days at 1000 XP/spell level.
Towards the end, most levels took only a single day to achieve, but you only have a couple of spells per day at the earliest levels. Available spell levels increase much more quickly than XP requirements.

noob
2018-10-08, 12:42 PM
Nerd-snipedness finished.

According to my data (https://prnt.sc/l3o88d), it would take just over one year, three months for a wizard with no bonus spell slots (somehow) to reach epic levels. It would take nearly two years at 10 XP/spell level, more than three and nine months at 5 XP, and close to 19 years at 1 XP each.

On the other hand...it would take less than a year at 20 XP/spell level, about 280 days at 25 each, six months at 40 XP, 100 days even at 75 XP, 77 days at 100 XP, 53 at 150, 41 at 200, 35 at 250, 32 at 300, 27 at 400, 24 at 500, 23 at 600, 22 at 750, and (finally) 20 days at 1000 XP/spell level.
Towards the end, most levels took only a single day to achieve, but you only have a couple of spells per day at the earliest levels. Available spell levels increase much more quickly than XP requirements.

But at low levels you can do a bunch of quests easily by hiring a swarm of mercenaries with the starting gold and the spellcasting service and so gain the first few levels very fast.
Alternatively buy slaves and then manage to have a slave revolt and beat the slaves with paid mercenaries if somehow quests does not exists in your world.
Or even buy traps with the gold from spellcasting service and then get in the traps to gain xp.

If wands allows to gain xp since it is still casting the spell then with the gold you get by selling spellcasting service and scrolls you can buy wands and speed up considerably your exp gain in early levels.
also did you take in account the int modifier?

Oh sorry did not see you calculated for older versions of dnd.
I assumed you did it with dnd 3e because it was what the poster mentioned
in 3e wizards starts with 3 level 1 spells per day(usually 4 because I have not yet met wizards with less than 12 int)

So your calculations are for which edition?

Arbane
2018-10-08, 01:50 PM
If two very attractive people come across one another, they must do opposed Charisma checks. The one who loses the check falls madly in love with the other.


That IS a terrible houserule.

They should each have to roll a Will save against a DC set by the other one's Charisma, so they can BOTH fall in love against all reason! :smallbiggrin:

Rater202
2018-10-08, 02:27 PM
I once played a Warshaper after my character got bit by a wererat in D&D 3.5.

the GM made the judgment call that I got one natural weapon per appendage. That uh...

considering that Warshaper has a middling BAB progression, that severely limits the advantage of producing natural weapons. Bite/Claw/Claw at 1 damage size higher or changing my claws to slams isn't worth the lowered BAB in comparison to Bite+1/Gore/Probiscus/Claw+1/Claw+1/Rake/Rake/Slam/Slam/Tentacle/Tentacle/Tentacle/Tentacle/Wing Buffet/Wing Buffet/Tail Slap/Sting.

Okay, that's a bit excessive, but the point of Warshapder is to make Druid Gish Builds better and to let MArtials compete with casters in terms of damage dealing, depending on how you enter it. The Nerf made that less effective.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-09, 12:03 PM
But at low levels you can do a bunch of quests easily by hiring a swarm of mercenaries with the starting gold and the spellcasting service and so gain the first few levels very fast.
I was assuming only casting spells.


Oh sorry did not see you calculated for older versions of dnd.
I assumed you did it with dnd 3e because it was what the poster mentioned
in 3e wizards starts with 3 level 1 spells per day(usually 4 because I have not yet met wizards with less than 12 int)

So your calculations are for which edition?
3.5, because that's what I could quickly find (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/classes/sorcererWizard.htm). Three 0-level spells and one 1st-level spell at 1st level.



That IS a terrible houserule.
They should each have to roll a Will save against a DC set by the other one's Charisma, so they can BOTH fall in love against all reason! :smallbiggrin:
But then you have people who share mutual romantic interest getting into healthy, stable relationships. Where's the drama in that?

The Glyphstone
2018-10-09, 12:12 PM
That IS a terrible houserule.

They should each have to roll a Will save against a DC set by the other one's Charisma, so they can BOTH fall in love against all reason! :smallbiggrin:

Nah, you have to have every character roll against each other character with a higher Charisma. Nothing creates drama like multi-sided unrequited love polyhedrons.

Knaight
2018-10-09, 01:10 PM
But then you have people who share mutual romantic interest getting into healthy, stable relationships. Where's the drama in that?

This would be a mutual romantic interest between two total strangers who know nothing about each other other than that the other one is smoking hot, with plenty of room for literally every other incompatibility.

I'm sure the drama can find a way.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-09, 04:55 PM
This would be a mutual romantic interest between two total strangers who know nothing about each other other than that the other one is smoking hot, with plenty of room for literally every other incompatibility.
I'm sure the drama can find a way.
I kinda wish more stories would take this perspective on things, especially sequels to stories with a mediocre romance subplot. I mean, they kinda do, but it's almost always a "temporary setback followed by returning the hero's romantic prize," not "coming to the realization that they're just not right for each other followed by staying friends". The one exception I can think of is from The Legend of Korra.

Akisa
2018-10-10, 12:16 AM
I honestly understand On Time XP bonus. We hd a player who, in the last two years, never showed up less than half an hour late. At that point, the pre-game chatter and catching up was definitely done and it was annoying. No reason for it either. He lived nearby and it was on the weekends.

Try having someone who 30 min late when they live in same dorm/apartment building.

AshfireMage
2018-10-10, 01:53 AM
Try having someone who 30 min late when they live in same dorm/apartment building.

I've played with people who did that, and it's the worst. These people literally lived in the same building we played in, heck, one of them was the GM's roommate, yet they were still consistently 20+ minutes late, and for stupid reasons. "Oh, I had to make dinner." Apparently making a sandwich, filling a bowl of cereal, sticking something in the microwave, or having a snack and getting more later were not options. Nor was starting dinner earlier than 5 minutes before we played.


On-topic, I once had a VtM ST who ruled that all clans got access to physical disciplines (Potence, Celerity, and Fortitude) without a teacher, and at a much lower XP cost than a standard OOC discipline. It might have been a houserule, might have been a port from a different edition, but I think the idea was that it shouldn't take a specific clan to figure out that you can make yourself tougher by using blood. In practice, not only did it forget that blood buffing already allowed you to do that to some extent, but it created all kinds of balance issues by de-incentivising players from playing clans that got those as in-clan because it was so comparatively easy to pick them up elsewhere.

I had a different ST who was in the process of attempting to houserule out Thaumaturgy requiring BP costs. Yes, you read that right. Blood magic no longer required blood to use. Why he felt the need to drastically increase the power level of one of the best disciplines in the game already, I have no idea

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-10, 05:53 AM
Try having someone who 30 min late when they live in same dorm/apartment building.

Once was in a group with a player who was routinely ten minutes late when we were playing in his kitchen. Part of this was because most of the time we'd all arrive at the Hall( of Residence) on time, his girlfriend would get or message, come down and connect us, we'd all be at the table in five minutes, then his gf would have to go and let him know we'd arrive so that he could stop his online games.

When we played in a different room on campus he and his girlfriend were always half an hour late, which was actually significantly less annoying.

Stuebi
2018-10-10, 06:54 AM
On my neverending quest to prove what a terrible person I actually am, why not post here? And yes, at some point the genius that is me thought these were actually good rules.


Rogue Trader:

- Most Techpriests I ever see in Lore are often mostly machine. So it made sense to me that the Explorator class should start with a few levels of "the Flesh is weak" as opposed to just the one you get at creation. (For the uninitiated: "The Flesh is weak" gives you a point of armour per level) Cue the Explorator having twice as much Armour as everybody else.

- Thinking that stats seemed generally way too low in RT after character creation, I adjusted the provided formula, and basically allowed player to swap their individual stats around as they pleased for creation. This led to many of them having statlines more in line with a Space Marine, than more "normal" people.

- Tying into the above, I had to massively boost a lot of enemies to even pose half a challenge for the party. Being unexperienced I did not take into Account that some of them had quite a few talents and traits, which would not scale the same way. This led to embarassing moments where the GM realizes the moment he makes the first roll, that whatever he just put on screen was basically murder made manifest.


CoC:

- In the same vein as above, the basic statline of investigators struck me as way too small, so I inflated a lot of the proposed rolls. This meant that a lot of the campaign turned from

"It's Shub-Niggurath! Run!"

to

"It's Shub-Niggurath! I climb the top rope and roll for flying knee!"

- A lot of the Monsters had some way around not just being shot to death (For obvious reasons), inexperienced-me thought having unkillable stuff in your campaign is boring, so I frequently just gave them a bunch of health. This led to a lot of Shoggoths being killed by the equivalent of "stutter-step" from Starcraft 2.

- There was always a weird abundance of guns too. For some reason while preparing session, most maps I designed had one or multiple firearms lying around. A thing I only noticed once my players stopped reloading and just throwing down their empty piece, Reaper-Style.



Before any of you lynch me, all of these were corrected after much feedback and mandy apologies, early in my DM career. I just had this phase where I felt like I knew BETTER than the people who actually design games for a living.

noob
2018-10-10, 08:22 AM
On my neverending quest to prove what a terrible person I actually am, why not post here? And yes, at some point the genius that is me thought these were actually good rules.


Rogue Trader:

- Most Techpriests I ever see in Lore are often mostly machine. So it made sense to me that the Explorator class should start with a few levels of "the Flesh is weak" as opposed to just the one you get at creation. (For the uninitiated: "The Flesh is weak" gives you a point of armour per level) Cue the Explorator having twice as much Armour as everybody else.

- Thinking that stats seemed generally way too low in RT after character creation, I adjusted the provided formula, and basically allowed player to swap their individual stats around as they pleased for creation. This led to many of them having statlines more in line with a Space Marine, than more "normal" people.

- Tying into the above, I had to massively boost a lot of enemies to even pose half a challenge for the party. Being unexperienced I did not take into Account that some of them had quite a few talents and traits, which would not scale the same way. This led to embarassing moments where the GM realizes the moment he makes the first roll, that whatever he just put on screen was basically murder made manifest.


CoC:

- In the same vein as above, the basic statline of investigators struck me as way too small, so I inflated a lot of the proposed rolls. This meant that a lot of the campaign turned from

"It's Shub-Niggurath! Run!"

to

"It's Shub-Niggurath! I climb the top rope and roll for flying knee!"

- A lot of the Monsters had some way around not just being shot to death (For obvious reasons), inexperienced-me thought having unkillable stuff in your campaign is boring, so I frequently just gave them a bunch of health. This led to a lot of Shoggoths being killed by the equivalent of "stutter-step" from Starcraft 2.

- There was always a weird abundance of guns too. For some reason while preparing session, most maps I designed had one or multiple firearms lying around. A thing I only noticed once my players stopped reloading and just throwing down their empty piece, Reaper-Style.



Before any of you lynch me, all of these were corrected after much feedback and mandy apologies, early in my DM career. I just had this phase where I felt like I knew BETTER than the people who actually design games for a living.

Your coc campaign looks awesome when described.
When there is insane cultists that are ready to kill everything that is coming it is only normal those cultists would wear 3 guns each and have some back up guns but the guns on the ground are a bit weird on the other hand it is common in videogames so I do not see that as a big problem.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-10, 08:42 AM
CoC:

- In the same vein as above, the basic statline of investigators struck me as way too small, so I inflated a lot of the proposed rolls. This meant that a lot of the campaign turned from

"It's Shub-Niggurath! Run!"

to

"It's Shub-Niggurath! I climb the top rope and roll for flying knee!"

- A lot of the Monsters had some way around not just being shot to death (For obvious reasons), inexperienced-me thought having unkillable stuff in your campaign is boring, so I frequently just gave them a bunch of health. This led to a lot of Shoggoths being killed by the equivalent of "stutter-step" from Starcraft 2.

- There was always a weird abundance of guns too. For some reason while preparing session, most maps I designed had one or multiple firearms lying around. A thing I only noticed once my players stopped reloading and just throwing down their empty piece, Reaper-Style.

I'm giggling, because that's exactly what my current group is going to try to do with any monsters I throw into my Unknown Armies game, and they don't even have decent combat stats (I think only one of them has Struggle at over 30%, and nobody has an Identity to substitute better than their Struggle). No guns though, only one character can do more than just spray shots randomly and that player has stated they don't carry the weapon they own because it's illegal, and so far I only have one NPC who owns one, and not for actual use in combat (it's an emergency Charge-generation method for when they're low on magic and need it now).

Then again, this is a setting where supernatural stuff is generally either killable, or affects you indirectly. Significantly less killable without guns, because your damage has been cut to less than a third what it probably was, but still killable enough that you only have to drag a couple of people to the hospital. We are playing the anti-CoC.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-10, 09:17 AM
Your coc campaign looks awesome when described.
Seconded. It's like Aliens crossed with The Matrix, marinated in Warhammer.

Resileaf
2018-10-10, 09:24 AM
Your coc campaign looks awesome when described.
When there is insane cultists that are ready to kill everything that is coming it is only normal those cultists would wear 3 guns each and have some back up guns but the guns on the ground are a bit weird on the other hand it is common in videogames so I do not see that as a big problem.

Let's be honest here, the only thing cooler than running away from the cosmic horrors of the universe is punching them in the face.

The Glyphstone
2018-10-10, 10:22 AM
- Most Techpriests I ever see in Lore are often mostly machine. So it made sense to me that the Explorator class should start with a few levels of "the Flesh is weak" as opposed to just the one you get at creation. (For the uninitiated: "The Flesh is weak" gives you a point of armour per level) Cue the Explorator having twice as much Armour as everybody else.


A lot of people make this mistake, leading to the reputation that tech-priests are invincible ubertanks. Our RT game didn't even give bonus levels of FIW and the GM needed anti-tank weaponry to hurt the Explorator. One thing a lot of people forget is that Machine armor does not stack with worn armor. It overlaps, except against Fire damage.



- Thinking that stats seemed generally way too low in RT after character creation, I adjusted the provided formula, and basically allowed player to swap their individual stats around as they pleased for creation. This led to many of them having statlines more in line with a Space Marine, than more "normal" people.


This...on the other hand. I've played in games where going dead-by-the-book for stat generation was used, and I would call not houseruling it the way you did the worst decision. With the high variance of 2d10 and the massive degree that characters depend on their 'prime stat' to do their rules-forced niche protection role, it's practically a way of using RNG to determine what career you are allowed to play this game, and I'm pretty sure 'our DM made us roll randomly to see what class we could play' would definitely earn a spot in a Worse Houserules list.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-10, 10:52 AM
This...on the other hand. I've played in games where going dead-by-the-book for stat generation was used, and I would call not houseruling it the way you did the worst decision. With the high variance of 2d10 and the massive degree that characters depend on their 'prime stat' to do their rules-forced niche protection role, it's practically a way of using RNG to determine what career you are allowed to play this game, and I'm pretty sure 'our DM made us roll randomly to see what class we could play' would definitely earn a spot in a Worse Houserules list.

Part of the problem is that the default method is 'roll in order and reroll one', and it's surprisingly easy to get a character without a good score spread for any class (which I suspect is half the reason for the reroll, but even then you aren't certain to see the stat improve). The alternative method does give you complete freedom to play what you want, but I'd probably bump it up to 105 or 110 points if I ever ran a 40kRPG again (which I might try getting ahold of once more if I don't like Wrath and Glory).

Note that I did run Dark Heresy with default statlines, and it sort of worked because most roles have one or two Careers that cover them and you're supposed to feel underpowered anyway. It also worked a lot better with random Homeworlds than without, as it got players thinking about possible origins they wouldn't have considered otherwise. Still annoying if you had your heart set on an Adept and only rolled 27 Int, but the relatively lack of niche protection (barring the Psyker and Tech-Priest, neither of which were essential( meant that if you rolled the stats to be your party's warrior or scout or whatever there were probably two or three careers you could choose from to fill the role.

The Glyphstone
2018-10-10, 10:59 AM
Yeah, in DH I can see it working just because everyone is meant to suck. But Explorers are expected to be competent, otherwise they'd never have gotten to their job in the first place. Inquisitors just grab whoever is available and looks reasonably disposable, and the lucky ones survive to get used a second time.

Quertus
2018-10-10, 11:36 AM
I'm pretty sure 'our DM made us roll randomly to see what class we could play' would definitely earn a spot in a Worse Houserules list.

Hmmm... I mean, it's how a lot of games run. And it solves a lot of problems. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's easier to play in any play style with the least invasive house rules / least social pressure when starting from this base.

As one of the simplest example of this, one can play with a balanced party, or an unbalanced party. Both styles are valid, neither style is inherently wrong. If your group wants balance, it is easy enough to empower weak characters, and I've seen GMs aplenty nerf (what they considered) OP characters (like the 3e Monk). And people who agree this mindset will call it "fair". But starting from a balanced system, and trying to enforce imbalance? It's a bit harder to know what will break if a 50-point GURPS character adventures with a 500-point character, and the system is rarely designed with such imbalance mind. It's much less work to make a system designed for imbalance work with balanced characters than the other way around.

So, while I agree that it's probably bad to add to a game not designed for it, I feel the need to point out that it's not only not inherently bad, but probably the best way for games to be designed in the first place. So it should never have to be a house rule in the first place.

LordCdrMilitant
2018-10-10, 11:36 AM
I and my players haven't had a problem with the rolled-in-order statblocks for DH.

Mostly because 20+2d10 isn't a whole lot of range on the scale the stats are measured, and if it's really bad and it's important to you you can spend your re-roll on it.

That said, I've been moving away from rolled-for stats anyway, since I don't think it's a particularly valuable exercise.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-10, 04:18 PM
In general, I see rolled stats as being useful mainly for reducing the number of decisions one needs to make in character creation (which can speed it up) and making characters feel more "organic". This means it has a strong place in games like Paranoia, where random Red-level characters are pulled out of the barracks, given lasrifles, and expected to blow through all six clones in reasonably short order. From what I've heard, WH40k is only slightly less extreme in this regard (both in the quality of individual agents and their mortality rate).

Stuebi
2018-10-11, 01:29 AM
This...on the other hand. I've played in games where going dead-by-the-book for stat generation was used, and I would call not houseruling it the way you did the worst decision. With the high variance of 2d10 and the massive degree that characters depend on their 'prime stat' to do their rules-forced niche protection role, it's practically a way of using RNG to determine what career you are allowed to play this game, and I'm pretty sure 'our DM made us roll randomly to see what class we could play' would definitely earn a spot in a Worse Houserules list.


Part of the problem is that the default method is 'roll in order and reroll one', and it's surprisingly easy to get a character without a good score spread for any class (which I suspect is half the reason for the reroll, but even then you aren't certain to see the stat improve). The alternative method does give you complete freedom to play what you want, but I'd probably bump it up to 105 or 110 points if I ever ran a 40kRPG again (which I might try getting ahold of once more if I don't like Wrath and Glory).


I did end up Houseruling it, in a way were people ended up with statlines that made them "competent" at their class, but was still in line with the way RT tries to represent the curve your party follows. We basically did a number crunch the same way WoW at some point did, and it did wonders for general balance and my sanity. In retrospect, I'm actually somewhat glad I fell into this pit, because it gave me context for powerlevels and such, which was helpful for future experiences as a DM.

RT is a weird one in that regard. From what most people tell me, Dark Heresy for example WANTS you to feel underpowered in many ways. But in RT, it seems to me that the party is supposed to be at least baseline competent (And compensate for any failings with the massive amount of ressources RTs have available). If I ever run RT again, I would probably just straight up do a point bank that you spend on your stats, and then go over it with the players to ensure everybody is okay at the thing they want to do, but are still in line with what the setting will throw at you.


As far as the CoC Campaign is concerned, it def. did make for some cinematic moments, and the people I played it with remember it somewhat fondly. But it was a complete subversion of what we expected it to be (And what the game tries to be).

It has that specific problem that many videogames have as well. No matter how horrific the opposition is, if the player is able to meet said opposition with two barrels of molten lead, the amount of suspense and fear tends to be very low. Of course CoC provides plenty of enemies that don't just Lemming their way towards the party and make gurgling noises. But a lot of the pre-designed adventures and such sort of rely on the party being on their backfoot. And that's not happening if their arsenal would embarass Doomguy, and said arsenal also works on whatever cosmic horror is lurking about at the time.

Here again, I am glad for the experience, because I learned a few things from it.

- "Your attacks do nothing" engagements should not be something you rely on constantly, but on the opposite side, not every enemy needs to be kill- or defeatable by regular means. Overreliance on the former makes players feel like they have no agency, on the latter it makes them default to "shoot first, ask after" and robs some of the more horrific encounters of their meaning.

- As "cool" as guns are for interior decoration, do not plaster the environment with free equipment. Yes, technically taking it would be stealing. But if the Goat of the black woods just walked into the foyer with eyes on the applepie, all bets, and considerations for human decency, are off.

- While the thought itself is comical, having to think up a formula for rolling against lead poisoning due to having most of your body replaced with bullets, is generally a bad sign for your "Horror"-Campaign.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-11, 02:37 AM
It depends, I've seen horror computer games work quite well with the shooty bang bangs, but they also involved a sense of being alone, limited ammunition, and/or something that scared me personally. There's also the inherent horror of broken people pursuing something, is the fact that You Did It worthwhile when you had to cross every moral line you've had and descend into madness?

Stuebi
2018-10-11, 03:16 AM
It depends, I've seen horror computer games work quite well with the shooty bang bangs, but they also involved a sense of being alone, limited ammunition, and/or something that scared me personally. There's also the inherent horror of broken people pursuing something, is the fact that You Did It worthwhile when you had to cross every moral line you've had and descend into madness?

I don't want to drive too far offtopic, but since this is something I like to discuss:

To me personally, when you play something that is within the horror genre, there is a certain expectation of dread. And these very rarely hold up for me if I am given any sort of means to dispatch whatever monster or enemy is threatening me. It's mostly a case of feeling in control. Even if whatever I'm encountering is terrifying, if I know I can actually kill the thing, a fundamental part of the dread the medium is trying to provide falls away. This holds especially true for anything Lovecraft, which relies on things beyond our understanding, and more importantly, beyond our more mundane means of self-defense to provide it's brand of horror. Eldritch abominations fall apart for me, if they bleed and die. Because it only leaves them as "Looking kinda gross". The CoC Campaign was fun, but we played it in a way that was probably completely unintended and goofy.


To keep some semblance of staying on topic:

One houserule I used to have, but turned out terribly in the end, was one that prevented players from ever aquiring or leveling anything they had not used during play.

It made sense to me back then. People don't just magically learn to be better at haggling from completeing a more combat focused campaign or some such. But it turned bad pretty quickly. I had players trying to shoehorn in checks and the like to make sure they could level what they wanted later, and arguments on "Does it or does it not make sense". And that's not mentioning how weird the leaps got when people wanted to cross-class.

I still have a variant on it today, but I handwave most of the more mundane stuff and only ask for explanations on more specialized skillsets and the like.

Glorthindel
2018-10-11, 06:18 AM
Part of the problem is that the default method is 'roll in order and reroll one', and it's surprisingly easy to get a character without a good score spread for any class (which I suspect is half the reason for the reroll, but even then you aren't certain to see the stat improve).

The problem is that these days we are using a stat generation system from an earlier version of the game where starting stats had an entirely different level of importance.

Back when I first played AD&D you could quite easily play a Fighter with a Strength score of 9, or a Rogue with a Dex of 12 and not feel useless. But these days most players will consider themselves screwed if they haven't got at least a 16 in their base stat, because the bonuses from stats occur at much lower level scores, and increase much faster and steadily.

Just compare a character with 16 strength - in 5th ed that gives you +3 to hit and damage, while in AD&D that got you just +1 damage.

How about a 16 Dex - in 5th ed thats +3 AC, +3 Initiative, and if using a finesse weapon, +3 to hit and damage, again while in AD&D it gave you +1 Initiative, -2 AC (equivalent of a +2 now), and +1 to hit with missile weapons only. And there was literally no difference between a Dex 7 and a Dex 14 character, both had straight no modifiers across the board. There is a gulf of difference.

Then when you add in the fact that bonuses from other places have gone down, and you see the problem. Fighters used to get +1 to hit every level, and they are now reduced to the same same scaling proficiency as everyone else (A level 10 Fighter in AD&D got +10 to hit from level alone, and another +1 to hit and +2 damage from weapon specialisation, while a level 10 5th ed Fighter gets just +4 to hit). The game has moved the majority of bonuses out of classes and magic items, and moved it into stats, so of course stats are now more important.

The problem is we are all kind of misled into believing it is fundamentally the same game, when in reality, in some places, the differences are vast. I love rolling for stats, and that is part of the trick - those of us who played the old editions have always done it this way, and because it is still the default option, are misled into believing it still should be. When in reality, what really didn't matter to much (because the effects of stats was so marginal compared to the bonuses from spells and magic items) is now character breaking (because it does make up the majority of your bonuses).

The Insanity
2018-10-11, 06:37 AM
You can only play characters with gender matching your IRL gender. Ot was a PBP game, BTW.

Lapak
2018-10-11, 08:59 AM
The game has moved the majority of bonuses out of classes and magic items, and moved it into stats, so of course stats are now more important.
Tangential to the thread, but this is why as I fiddle with my own house rule-set on a roughly D&D base I have considered keeping the broader bonuses from attributes but having them overlap (and not stack) with class/level based bonuses. So a strong first-level fighter might get +3 to hit, but he won't see that go up until level 4, at which point he hits as well as any other level 4 fighter because skill has become more relevant than raw strength. It would make high stats relevant to early survival but not make them necessary to keep up at all levels. Haven't settled on it, but I keep tossing it around in my head.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-11, 01:17 PM
It has that specific problem that many videogames have as well. No matter how horrific the opposition is, if the player is able to meet said opposition with two barrels of molten lead, the amount of suspense and fear tends to be very low.
Which is why Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation are considered horror games while Dead Space and most Resident Evil games aren't.


- While the thought itself is comical, having to think up a formula for rolling against lead poisoning due to having most of your body replaced with bullets, is generally a bad sign for your "Horror"-Campaign.
For the enemies or the PCs? Having a PC who gets shot a hundred times but still lives, suffering from the pain of bullet wounds and lead poisoning, sounds pretty horrific.



To me personally, when you play something that is within the horror genre, there is a certain expectation of dread. And these very rarely hold up for me if I am given any sort of means to dispatch whatever monster or enemy is threatening me. It's mostly a case of feeling in control.
It's a fine balance to tread, but there are absolutely ways to tread it well. The most important part is to make sure the player has limited control over the situation. Say, you're in an underground facility full of zombies, and while you can dispatch any single zombie with ease, you don't have enough ammo to shoot them all or the melee skills to deal with more than one attacking you at once.

Velaryon
2018-10-16, 01:57 PM
Sneak attack(or any at will ability) is limited to once/turn.

I've encountered this one, but usually it's because the DM has done a poor job reading the rules and thinks that's how it's supposed to work. Most of the time when I encounter games with fumbles or automatic success/failure on skill checks with a natural 20 or natural 1, it's the same reason - people didn't read the rules carefully enough and think that's the actual rule.

Some other poor houserules I've encountered in 3.X D&D:

1. Characters may only take one prestige class. Once you start a prestige class, you must keep taking levels in it until you've completed it or the game ends (though this never actually happened because that DM never once finished a game in all the years I've known him).
2. You can't put points into skills unless you've used them or described yourself practicing them during downtime (makes sense in theory from a "realism" perspective, but adds more work and less fun to the gaming experience).
3. One DM, in a hamfisted attempt to make a "low-magic" game, would allow a single arcane OR divine caster in the party, not both. And he banned Mystic Theurge because he thought it was OP (though in all fairness, the whole group were noobs and most of us thought the same of MT).
4. Roll your stats and put them on your sheet in order (he wanted to experience how it was done in the old days. None of us enjoyed it and scrapped the game after maybe 2 sessions max).

Jlerpy
2018-10-24, 09:41 PM
Re: the shared xp/individual xp thing-
One solution I'm fond of is similar to the system for Fate Points (Fortune Points? Not sure now) from 3rd Ed. WFRP: When someone does x (where x is something that's good and noteworthy), put a token in a container. When there are a number of tokens in the container equal to the number of players, everyone gets one.
This can easily be adjusted to work for xp stuff as well.

What I really like about it is that it keeps the group even, but still recognises individual contributions.

Quertus
2018-10-25, 04:00 PM
Re: the shared xp/individual xp thing-
One solution I'm fond of is similar to the system for Fate Points (Fortune Points? Not sure now) from 3rd Ed. WFRP: When someone does x (where x is something that's good and noteworthy), put a token in a container. When there are a number of tokens in the container equal to the number of players, everyone gets one.
This can easily be adjusted to work for xp stuff as well.

What I really like about it is that it keeps the group even, but still recognises individual contributions.

That... doesn't sound like the worst house rule ever.

Jlerpy
2018-10-25, 04:11 PM
That... doesn't sound like the worst house rule ever.

Aw dang! ;)

Silly Name
2018-10-25, 04:46 PM
You can only play characters with gender matching your IRL gender. Ot was a PBP game, BTW.

This sounds like the GM had bad experiences with people who played characters of the opposing gender in a creepy, fetishizing way. Still a dumb houserule, though.

As for bad houserules I used:


Early in my GM career, I thought AoOs were caused by entering a square. I corrected that early and apologised.
Multiple iterations of a system to run a city. I eventually dropped it completely and just let the players roleplay their way through HQ management.
Everyone gets 2 extra skill points. This made skill point-starved classes a bit happier, but mostly made the skillmonkeys even more skillmonkey-er.

Rules I've been subject to...

High damage causes wounds. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, we were playing D&D 3.5, which meant that as we levelled up, the GM was regularly mutilating or disfiguring my PCs. Having high HP somehow made me feel more vulnerable than having little HP.
I'll second crit fumbles as an horrid thing to do in D&D. I'm sure there are systems where they work, but they can't just be injected into any system.
DM ruled that, on a critical hit, you received double damage and suffered other stuff, such as being stunned or getting grievous wounds. I later learnt he pulled that from another system which had a table for such critical wounds. Coincidentally, a system meant to have an higher mortality rate than D&D. Oh, and only enemies got to use that table.
DM rolled the dice randomly to see if something happened. I once fell, and he rolls a d20, lands on a 20, declared I broke my hips (at least he let me get away with healing magic to fix it). I have the suspicion this would have happened on a low roll as well, since he never bothered to explain to us what parameters he was using.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-25, 05:33 PM
DM ruled that, on a critical hit, you received double damage and suffered other stuff...Oh, and only enemies got to use that table.
DM rolled the dice randomly to see if something happened. I once fell, and he rolls a d20, lands on a 20, declared I broke my hips (at least he let me get away with healing magic to fix it). I have the suspicion this would have happened on a low roll as well, since he never bothered to explain to us what parameters he was using.

Nothing is worse than a DM who's out to get you, followed closely by a DM whose incompetence or insecurity manifests nearly identically to being out to get you.

JeenLeen
2018-10-26, 03:53 PM
One bad houserule-ish thing a DM of mine did was something he was aware of but kept forgetting to correct.

He'd often roll a die to determine something basically caused by luck, like if someone is in a good mood or not, or if a store happens to have something rare but not really rare available in stock. (There were better examples in play, but I can't remember them.) If he rolled low, bad for us; if rolled high, good for us. But he often didn't have an exact cutoff, so a middling roll would sometimes be chosen by whatever he felt was easier or more fun/dramatic (which more often than not was bad for us.)

He did later correct and just rerolled until he got a high or low result, or after realizing he didn't set a cutoff, set one and rerolled.

---

That's not nearly the worse houserule I dealt with, but probably the most common with my usual DM (who's a pretty great DM.)

Most annoying houserule I dealt with that a Pathfinder game where the DM said we couldn't pool money to buy supplies. We wanted to buy a Wand of Cure Light Wounds. It wouldn't have bothered me if his reasoning was he felt such was abusing the magic-item-curve or just said he didn't want us to have such yet so it wasn't in the shop, but the reason was to align with Pathfinder Society rules. And this wasn't a Pathfinder Society module (albeit it was part of one of the campaigns you get credit for completing.)

Cluedrew
2018-10-26, 09:00 PM
You can only play characters with gender matching your IRL gender. Ot was a PBP game, BTW.There are good reasons to have this rule. If they come up you have larger problems and should leave immediately.

On Fumbles: Yup, me too. Critical fumbles. I managed to talk the GM into at least having people role to confirm so the fighter didn't suffer as much.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-27, 02:49 AM
Most annoying houserule I dealt with that a Pathfinder game where the DM said we couldn't pool money to buy supplies. We wanted to buy a Wand of Cure Light Wounds. It wouldn't have bothered me if his reasoning was he felt such was abusing the magic-item-curve or just said he didn't want us to have such yet so it wasn't in the shop, but the reason was to align with Pathfinder Society rules. And this wasn't a Pathfinder Society module (albeit it was part of one of the campaigns you get credit for completing.)
I had a DM like that. (I think I complained about him previously in this thread?) We were playing 5e, so it was Adventurer's League, but same idea—even though we weren't playing Adventurer's League, and even though we sometimes didn't play by AL rules, he still made rulings based on AL rules.
Like many of his rulings that I loathe, I think he was trying to prevent "abuse". Which essentially came down to solving problems in ways he didn't like/expect/something, which included even basic attempts to set up combat in our favor (whether it's attacking from range, setting up an ambush, or something as cheesy as asking how far away the enemy is when he says said enemy is out of range). Regarding that last point, he also had a nasty habit of having enemies run away and finding ways to ignore all attempts to stop them (sometimes by not giving ranges, sometimes by not allowing reactions or follow-up actions, once by saying that he swam his full movement plus the absurdly-fast speed of the river's current, which we couldn't also do).
There's one incident I vaguely remember where some ice mephits tossed our gear down an icy crevasse, and the DM tried his hardest to make sure any plan more complicated than "climb down the crevasse with our bare hands" wouldn't work. I think I yelled at him that time? It was frustrating, since he was saying he wanted us to come up with creative solutions, and then shooting them down.

GloatingSwine
2018-10-27, 06:03 AM
Any fumble rules in a D&D game. It always ends badly.

The reason fumble rules tend to end badly is because people always assign wildly inappropriate consequences to them.

You could do an easy but consequential fumble rule by just saying if you roll a 1 on an attack your next attack is at -1 (or if you're rolling a handful at once for each 1 the lowest other die in the handful also goes down by 1, but only once per die)

It's not a big threat, it might turn a marginal hit into a whiff.

(The other reason is that it only affects sword swingers who tend not to need any more kicks in the teeth in most RPG systems)

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-27, 07:13 AM
Everyone gets 2 extra skill points. This made skill point-starved classes a bit happier, but mostly made the skillmonkeys even more skillmonkey-er.

Eh, this works well if you restrict it to a selection of skills. Crafting skills and most profession skills work, as most people wouldn't mind one but need to put their points elsewhere, but opening it up to everything can be problematic. I do remember playing Pathfinder without background skills, my Fighter took the Favoured Class extra skill point because while he extra HP might be useful for his party role, he felt skill-point starved despite being human and having 12 or 14 INT. Really it's much better to increase most 2+int mod classes to 3+int or 4+int.


Rules I've been subject to...

High damage causes wounds. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, we were playing D&D 3.5, which meant that as we levelled up, the GM was regularly mutilating or disfiguring my PCs. Having high HP somehow made me feel more vulnerable than having little HP.
I'll second crit fumbles as an horrid thing to do in D&D. I'm sure there are systems where they work, but they can't just be injected into any system.
DM ruled that, on a critical hit, you received double damage and suffered other stuff, such as being stunned or getting grievous wounds. I later learnt he pulled that from another system which had a table for such critical wounds. Coincidentally, a system meant to have an higher mortality rate than D&D. Oh, and only enemies got to use that table.
DM rolled the dice randomly to see if something happened. I once fell, and he rolls a d20, lands on a 20, declared I broke my hips (at least he let me get away with healing magic to fix it). I have the suspicion this would have happened on a low roll as well, since he never bothered to explain to us what parameters he was using.


I've used the first, but in systems that didn't scale damage/hp anywhere near as much as D&D. Generally generic wounds though, with mutilation generally being something an enemy has to aim for (from a simple 'scaring strike' to a difficult 'limb removal'). Each individual wound gives minor penalties (normally -1 to all actions), but even with healing magic they'll stick around for a few days to a couple of weeks, and the system does not mix with dungeon crawls (it works best in scenarios where you might be fighting once or twice a day).

Also done the third, but only when the system recommends it and applied equally.

The last is just horrible. I mean, I've used luck dice to determine stuff before, but generally allowed players to back out of their course of action before rolling.

Silly Name
2018-10-27, 10:13 AM
I've used the first, but in systems that didn't scale damage/hp anywhere near as much as D&D. Generally generic wounds though, with mutilation generally being something an enemy has to aim for (from a simple 'scaring strike' to a difficult 'limb removal'). Each individual wound gives minor penalties (normally -1 to all actions), but even with healing magic they'll stick around for a few days to a couple of weeks, and the system does not mix with dungeon crawls (it works best in scenarios where you might be fighting once or twice a day).

Also done the third, but only when the system recommends it and applied equally.

I agree that those are rules which can be applied in certain systems, and I'm sure they enhance combat. It's just that they have very little place in a game of D&D, where HP is highly abstracted and damage tends to grow exponentially.

The fact that the GM in question was grinning everytime something "cool", as he put it, was happening certainly didn't help.

Wardog
2018-10-27, 12:36 PM
The reason fumble rules tend to end badly is because people always assign wildly inappropriate consequences to them.

Also, by the sounds of it, wildly inappropriate probabilities.

A 1-in-20 chance of botching an attack (balanced by a 1-in-20 chance of getting a really lucky hit) regardless of skill is not neccessarily statistically accurate, but is at least believable.

A 1-in-20 chance of dropping your weapon, breaking your weapon, or hitting the wrong target every time you attack is completely unrealistic unless either the charcter is totally incompetant, or their weapon is horrendously badly designed or maintained.

Quertus
2018-10-27, 05:25 PM
Yeah, I've used fumble rules, but I gave Fighters immunity to fumbles (and better chances of scoring criticals, and better criticals) as they leveled.

But, even so, my fumble rules were not as bad as some I've seen.

One of the worst I've seen made the fumbles worse the more you worked to prevent them.

One of the funniest I've seen involved a two-weapon PC losing a weapon every round. He was surrounded by - I kid you not - a long sword, a short sword, several daggers, and some rather confused orcs, and was down to wielding (I think) a rock and a pointy stick. My character just sat in a tree, watching the whole thing*.

*OK, to be fair, my character was evaluating the fight, and the orcs' tactics, and eventually came to the conclusion that this was a diversionary force, and the main force wasn't planning on intervening in this fight. My character rushed back to town, having never actually met the other PCs. Unfortunately, it took me too long to realize what was going on, and he was too late to stop the main force.

Miz_Liz
2018-10-27, 07:14 PM
All 5e experiences.

Hardcore critical fumbles. Like, my warlock almost killed the poor rogue with a nat1 eldritch blast fumbles.

Also from the same DM: warlock patron rules. You could legit lose all access to your powers if you pissed off your patron. I was an archfey warlock with a treant patron, burned up some bushes, and lost my powers for three days.

Different DM: having to declare use of bardic or DM inspiration before rolling. Defeated the whole purpose.

Luccan
2018-10-27, 11:40 PM
A recent DM let me try to shoot between an ally's legs (My character was a forest gnome who was down on one knee, the other character was Medium and standing). I rolled an 11 and so missed my target, but apparently in those circumstances missing at all was a fumble. Admittedly, I shouldn't have tried it anyway since its not really rules legal, but I figured it looked cool and the DM allowed it. Anyways, that's how I nearly killed the party Ranger in out first combat.

It wasn't really malicious, but I found it annoying since if I allowed in one of my games, I would have treated it as a normal miss.


All 5e experiences.

Hardcore critical fumbles. Like, my warlock almost killed the poor rogue with a nat1 eldritch blast fumbles.

Also from the same DM: warlock patron rules. You could legit lose all access to your powers if you pissed off your patron. I was an archfey warlock with a treant patron, burned up some bushes, and lost my powers for three days.

Different DM: having to declare use of bardic or DM inspiration before rolling. Defeated the whole purpose.

I can see doing that for Inspiration, which doesn't actually say when you can use it as I recall (so technically any ruling on that is a houserule), but Bardic Inspiration specifically calls out being used after the roll before the DM says it succeeds or fails.

Bohandas
2018-10-28, 02:11 AM
Me: Alright everyone we're using the Book of Carnal Knowledge for this game.

Af least it wasn't the Book of Erotic Fanatsy

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-28, 09:14 PM
It wasn't really malicious, but I found it annoying since if I allowed in one of my games, I would have treated it as a normal miss.
I'd probably have made the arrow come distressingly close to delicate bits of the ranger, maybe have him roll a Fortitude save against being staggered if the mood was light and the stakes low, but nothing life-threatening.

hotflungwok
2018-10-29, 10:18 AM
A recent DM let me try to shoot between an ally's legs (My character was a forest gnome who was down on one knee, the other character was Medium and standing). I rolled an 11 and so missed my target, but apparently in those circumstances missing at all was a fumble. Admittedly, I shouldn't have tried it anyway since its not really rules legal, but I figured it looked cool and the DM allowed it. Anyways, that's how I nearly killed the party Ranger in out first combat.
I had a DM in 2nd ed rule that anytime the ranger rolled a 1 with his bow he hit one of us if we were in front of him. We didn't even have to be next to his target, just in his front 90 degrees. Since my character was the main fighter I took lots of damage from him. Once he was able to milk poison from a dead monster, and started poisoning his arrows. The first time my character got poisoned by him (like 20 min later IIRC) I took it off of him and smashed the vial on the ground.

Kardwill
2018-10-29, 10:49 AM
Also from the same DM: warlock patron rules. You could legit lose all access to your powers if you pissed off your patron. I was an archfey warlock with a treant patron, burned up some bushes, and lost my powers for three days.


Oooh, I got one!

In D&D 3, I once perpetrated ruled that divine spellcasters had to get access to their "patron's" domain to renew their spells. So a Druid had to meditate in a natural place, a paladin prayed holding his sword, etc...

I had Story Reasons (tm) for it, too, but yup, it went about as well as you can expect. The Sun god cleric was hosed HARD when the party got trapped in the underdark for several weeks. Killed the campaign faster than a marauding tarrasque.

Kardwill
2018-10-29, 10:57 AM
It wasn't really malicious, but I found it annoying since if I allowed in one of my games, I would have treated it as a normal miss.


Discovering the stakes of a roll AFTER the roll is a common DM mistake, but it's kinda irritating. In your case, ruling that a failed roll hits your friend might be a fair/fun ruling, but only if the DM makes it known, so that the gnome can make an informed choice and decide if he's willing to take the risk.
Announcing it after the fact is something I may have done when I was younger (hell, I did far worse, see my previous post), but nowadays, I find this kind of "gotcha!" GMing irritating.

Rater202
2018-10-29, 11:27 AM
I kind of liekt he critical Fumble Rules that Chris Zito uses at TFS at the Table.

Natural One and he roles a d20 and then a d% to determine how big a fumble it is, with the higher the results equally a less severe fumble

He also apl;ies it equally to PCs and NPCs--most notbaly the Downfall of "Johnny Dark Souls," a Vampire Paladin who wielded a giant cross he was nailed to as a club(and it was on fire due to a PC missing with a scorching ray while fighting another vampire), fought in the hold of a ship in the middle of the ocean.

The rogue throws ball bearings, GM rolls a nat 1 to avoid tripping, a Nat one on the second d20, nat one on the percentile.. trips, falls, throws the giant cross into the air, which lands on bhim, breaks the floorboards, causing him to fall through the ship into the ocean, where his full plate mail makes him sink.

Meanwhile the worst that's happened to the PCs with a fumble is a Crossbow getting jammed while an exploding bolt was in the thing and already lit, causing some mild fire damage to the PC and an nearby ally.

JNAProductions
2018-10-29, 11:29 AM
That's a big thing-it's gotta get applied equally to even have a chance of being fun.

Quertus
2018-10-29, 11:43 AM
That's a big thing-it's gotta get applied equally to even have a chance of being fun.

And, if it can cause permanent injury, it's got to have clearly been applied to the NPCs in the past, for the worldbuilding to be sensical. In the land of the blind warriors, the one-eyed peasant is king!

Luccan
2018-10-29, 12:21 PM
I kind of liekt he critical Fumble Rules that Chris Zito uses at TFS at the Table.

Natural One and he roles a d20 and then a d% to determine how big a fumble it is, with the higher the results equally a less severe fumble

He also apl;ies it equally to PCs and NPCs--most notbaly the Downfall of "Johnny Dark Souls," a Vampire Paladin who wielded a giant cross he was nailed to as a club(and it was on fire due to a PC missing with a scorching ray while fighting another vampire), fought in the hold of a ship in the middle of the ocean.

The rogue throws ball bearings, GM rolls a nat 1 to avoid tripping, a Nat one on the second d20, nat one on the percentile.. trips, falls, throws the giant cross into the air, which lands on bhim, breaks the floorboards, causing him to fall through the ship into the ocean, where his full plate mail makes him sink.

Meanwhile the worst that's happened to the PCs with a fumble is a Crossbow getting jammed while an exploding bolt was in the thing and already lit, causing some mild fire damage to the PC and an nearby ally.

Honestly, I like TFS at the Table, but Zito's fumble rules always come off as emanating from the south side of a bull. Like, he has a somewhat consistent ruling base (low on the % is bad), but I'm pretty sure all his fumbles are made up on the spot. Which is the problem with fumble rules in most games: you can't account for what the PCs/NPCs might mess up with a bad roll. If you roll a 1 on a check to keep your balance walking on a rope, do you just fall? Do you also somehow cut the rope? Does it impact your chance to avoid damage when you hit the ground and if so is that impacted by height? What if you're only a foot out on the rope, can you fall backwards onto a stable platform?

The Random NPC
2018-10-29, 12:25 PM
I had a DM in 2nd ed rule that anytime the ranger rolled a 1 with his bow he hit one of us if we were in front of him. We didn't even have to be next to his target, just in his front 90 degrees. Since my character was the main fighter I took lots of damage from him. Once he was able to milk poison from a dead monster, and started poisoning his arrows. The first time my character got poisoned by him (like 20 min later IIRC) I took it off of him and smashed the vial on the ground.

I had a GM who did the same thing! Meanwhile, anyone who played an elf got all sorts of freebies. Because it doesn't make sense that a long lived elf can't X, where X is anything from playing a prohibited class to breaking level restrictions.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-29, 01:04 PM
Killed the campaign faster than a marauding tarrasque.

Homebrewed Tarrasque I assume, or did it stop the campaign for a single combat round?


That's a big thing-it's gotta get applied equally to even have a chance of being fun.

Yep, and has to not be too damaging because it'll tend to hit the PCs harder.


And, if it can cause permanent injury, it's got to have clearly been applied to the NPCs in the past, for the worldbuilding to be sensical. In the land of the blind warriors, the one-eyed peasant is king!

It should also reflect the severity. If losing a limb requires a fumble/crit and them a 00 on a d% roll then the majority of major characters should be intact with a few missing hands or legs. If it happens every other time you roll a 1 then most of the cast should be missing bits.

The core idea of fumbles isn't bad, but the way they tend to be implemented is way off. If a roll of 00 in your percentile system is a critical fail then that's true whenever. This is why I roll openly when GMing, it helps with the urge to cheat fumbles.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-29, 01:04 PM
That's a big thing-it's gotta get applied equally to even have a chance of being fun.
I'd argue it should be slanted in the PC's favor. (Like with what Zito did—the worst that happens to PCs is fire damage, the worst that happens to NPCs is drowning.) After all, any given PC will probably roll more fumbles over the course of a campaign than any given villain, or even some villainous organizations. (Also, players are going to be way grumpier about losing their character to one horrendous roll than they would be if the villain offs himself through sheer misfortune.)



Honestly, I like TFS at the Table, but Zito's fumble rules always come off as emanating from the south side of a bull.
I probably wouldn't want that kind of rule at my table, but it works great for its intended purpose. The needs of a DM running a game for his players are different than the needs of a DM running a game for a live audience. (That show gets livestreamed, right?) It's improv comedy, and given the viewcounts, it apparently works.



And, if it can cause permanent injury, it's got to have clearly been applied to the NPCs in the past, for the worldbuilding to be sensical. In the land of the blind warriors, the one-eyed peasant is king!
Read about King Charles II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain) and tell me that physical ability outweighs bloodline for inheritance.



Meanwhile, anyone who played an elf got all sorts of freebies. Because it doesn't make sense that a long lived elf can't X, where X is anything from playing a prohibited class to breaking level restrictions.
Ugh. I'm not sure if I should complain about the elf fanboyism or the fact that fluff shouldn't distort rules like that. (Fluff should have some effect on the rules, but only insofar as it resonates with themes or improves immersion, and even then it needs to be built into the system or carefully added.)

Khay
2018-10-29, 03:39 PM
I once had this GM who had a weirdly intense dislike for anything he saw as downtime. Among other things, he ruled this: "Anything that's technically listed in the sourcebook as having a price can always be bought or sold for exactly that price, as long as we're in between adventures or you're in a civilised area." This might not sound so bad, but this was a sci-fi game system, and a lot of the stuff that was technically in the sourcebook really wasn't intended to ever be used. Like WMDs. Add a slightly wonky pricing system and you end up with some very silly games.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-29, 07:39 PM
Reminds me of how when me and my little brother would play RPGs together, if he was DMing, I'd always take advantage of the fact that he didn't bother double-checking much of anything. Sometimes I'd fudge the attribute rolls, other times I'd forget to ask for GM permission before buying light artillery.
...I'm pretty sure that's not the only reason he wasn't good at running long-term games. Probably the worst example I can remember (playing a pixie, which my brother didn't realize was permanently invisible) was also the longest-running campaign I remember him running.

AtS
2018-10-30, 04:26 PM
1d20x6 for ability score generation. This was back in middle school before we fully understood the rules, though.

weet555
2018-10-30, 04:46 PM
1d20x6 for ability score generation. This was back in middle school before we fully understood the rules, though.

While it probably wasn't fun in most campaigns, I can see it being interesting in the right campaign or session.

Although I should say I have run gestalt and tristalt campaigns with 5d6 drop the lowest two or 42 point buy.

noob
2018-10-30, 05:50 PM
So if you got 1 on the twenty sided dice the character had 1 int and so was as dumb as an insect?

Luccan
2018-10-30, 05:58 PM
So if you got 1 on the twenty sided dice the character had 1 int and so was as dumb as an insect?

1d20*6. 1*6 is 6.

noob
2018-10-30, 06:36 PM
1d20*6. 1*6 is 6.

I believed you rolled for the total stat points and with that rule it would have meant you had 6 points to spend in the 6 stats and so exactly one point in each stat(because a 0 makes your character unable to act or dead).

Ravens_cry
2018-10-30, 08:18 PM
A critical failure and success mechanic for skill checks in Pathfinder. Now, it was still 'only' a -10, +10, but it was still highly irritating when playing a skill monkey character, especially a Rogue or Ninja, where you make a lot of successive rolls.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-30, 10:47 PM
While it probably wasn't fun in most campaigns, I can see it being interesting in the right campaign or session.
Ideally along with some kind of random race/class selection, some tools to help you rapidly generate characters on the fly, and villains on the level of Team Rocket.

Pelle
2018-10-31, 04:06 AM
I believed you rolled for the total stat points and with that rule it would have meant you had 6 points to spend in the 6 stats and so exactly one point in each stat(because a 0 makes your character unable to act or dead).

I'm guessing it's 6x 1d20, i.e. roll 1d20 6 times to generate your 6 ability scores. If so, 1 Int is then possible, hence WORST houserule...

Bacon Elemental
2018-10-31, 05:20 AM
An annoying one I've recently encountered is that your movement must all be used in one go, before your other actions, X-COM style. This sort of nullifies the point of the rogue ability which is specifically to let you run in, stab the enemy, then Disengage and run back out of their reach

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-31, 06:43 AM
1d20x6 for ability score generation. This was back in middle school before we fully understood the rules, though.

Sounds even worse than what I once had to do (7d20, reroll any score below 8, assign the highest six as desired). I requested being allowed to just use 4d6b3 and was denied. The idea was to have more varied characters without them being bad, but in reality...

An 8, 10, 13, 14, 14, 16 in the same party with a 14, 16, 18, 18, 20, 20 and a 14, 16, 20, 20, 20, 20 (I kid you not, this was me and I only had this many 20s because I was forced to reroll my 7 and take the best six).


An annoying one I've recently encountered is that your movement must all be used in one go, before your other actions, X-COM style. This sort of nullifies the point of the rogue ability which is specifically to let you run in, stab the enemy, then Disengage and run back out of their reach

Ah, once had to use that rule in a game of Mutants & Masterminds. It would have made Move-by-Action somewhat useful even without investment in movement based powers, except Move-by-Action was nerfed into allowing you to take half your move action before your action and half after it.

How did we discover it? My Toughness 0 flier wanted to use their relatively short ranged attack and then retreat to the top of the massive room, out of the movement range of the GM's melee-based flier*. The GM insisted that this was the way Mutants & Masterminds worked, even after I pointed out the statement to the contrary in his own book. Next session I'd spent a PP on Move-by-Action (I'd passed it up as my character wasn't trained enough to reposition for tactical dive ins and the like), allowing me to move three miles after my action.

* He had a 60ft/turn movement speed, I could hit 1km/s, it shouldn't have been a contest.

AtS
2018-10-31, 10:26 AM
I'm guessing it's 6x 1d20, i.e. roll 1d20 6 times to generate your 6 ability scores. If so, 1 Int is then possible, hence WORST houserule...

Yeah, this is what I meant by 1d20x6, roll 1d20, 6 times, assign the 6 rolled numbers to your ability scores.


Sounds even worse than what I once had to do (7d20, reroll any score below 8, assign the highest six as desired). I requested being allowed to just use 4d6b3 and was denied. The idea was to have more varied characters without them being bad, but in reality...

An 8, 10, 13, 14, 14, 16 in the same party with a 14, 16, 18, 18, 20, 20 and a 14, 16, 20, 20, 20, 20 (I kid you not, this was me and I only had this many 20s because I was forced to reroll my 7 and take the best six).

Yeah, we ended up with a similar spread, predictably. My Half-Elf Bard didn't have a single Ability score above a 15, while my friend's Dragonborn Half-Dragon (Dragonborn didn't exist back then!) Paladin had 20 STR and 20 CHA. Also, we didn't understand how LA worked, so we just ignored it. :smallbiggrin:

I still had fun, it was my first time playing D&D 3.0 and I barely had a grasp on the rules, let alone how unbalanced the party was. My character ended up the party sidekick because he really couldn't accomplish anything on his own. Everyone in that group eventually learned the rules for real, but it's just funny to look back and laugh at how wrong we played, fifteen years ago.

Resileaf
2018-10-31, 10:29 AM
Yeah, this is what I meant by 1d20x6, roll 1d20, 6 times, assign the 6 rolled numbers to your ability scores.

I kind of want to try it out, just to see what kind of crazy stats this could give.

Quertus
2018-10-31, 10:49 AM
I had a group that rolled, if I've got the notation correct, 3d20b1 for each stat. And it came as no surprise to us when one of the players requested a reroll - and no surprise that it was because he had a 1 for Intelligence. He was allowed a reroll, and happily took his 3 Intelligence. His dice really hated him that much.


An 8, 10, 13, 14, 14, 16 in the same party with a 14, 16, 18, 18, 20, 20 and a 14, 16, 20, 20, 20, 20 (I kid you not, this was me and I only had this many 20s because I was forced to reroll my 7 and take the best six).

Nice spread! I don't recall anyone having that many 20's even in the 3d20b1 group.

However, I intentionally played a sentient potted plant in a group with a divine entity (a figurative Thor), so, comparitively, what's a little thing like different stats?

Pelle
2018-10-31, 11:05 AM
I requested being allowed to just use 4d6b3 and was denied. The idea was to have more varied characters without them being bad, but in reality...


Also for 4d6b3 rolling of stats, you can expect great inter-party difference in power level. Less chance sure, but still possible. You should accept being weaker than the rest of the party if you want to roll your stats, otherwise find alternative methods.

Rater202
2018-10-31, 11:47 AM
Personally, if I were Gming in d20 I'd just give everyone 1 18, 2 16s, 1 14, 1 12, and a 10 and let them pick which stat gets which score.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-31, 12:05 PM
Nice spread! I don't recall anyone having that many 20's even in the 3d20b1 group.

However, I intentionally played a sentient potted plant in a group with a divine entity (a figurative Thor), so, comparitively, what's a little thing like different stats?

This was after racial and feat adjustments, but yes, it was a stupidly good spread. To the point that the character lasted one session, I retired to stop overshadowing the party by having more HP than the tank, more firepower than the sorceress, and more stealth than the rogue.


Also for 4d6b3 rolling of stats, you can expect great inter-party difference in power level. Less chance sure, but still possible. You should accept being weaker than the rest of the party if you want to roll your stats, otherwise find alternative methods.

I mean, what I like about 4d6b3 is that it reduces the chance of low stats without eliminating it entirely. Although I do alter that stat generation rules based on the games I run.

In Lamentations of the Flame Princess I just do good old 3d6 straight down, but allow the swapping of two stats. It lets people play what they want, but you might have to deal with being a fighter with 6 CON, and the game's lethal enough that all 3s and all 18s doesn't make that much difference in lifespan.

If I ever run 5e again I'll be doing 4d6b3, reroll if you have no stat of 14+. It allows terrible arrays, but allows everybody to at the very least be good at something. Or I'd just do point-buy if the group is okay with it.

In Fantasy AGE I'll do the 'roll and assign' method (3d6, compare to table for value) or 12 point point-buy (only the latter if online).

In almost every other game I do point-buy only.

'But point buy leads to cookie cutter characters' I hear the roll-fans cry. I tend to find that that's more a result of having few points relative to your cap, with higher points buy values leading to more intelligent Fighters or strong Wizards, but I do understand that you'll almost never get a low-int Wizard or low-wis Cleric under point buy. Plus it's not like I haven't seen any cookie-cuttering with rolled characters, if a character has 12STR, 10DEX, 13CON, and 15INT they'll always be a wizard instead of a Fighter (mostly, I have met some players you'll assign the same class for every stat, or roll in order and then randomly determine their class).


Oh, the worst houserule I ever ran was enforced random race/class allocation. Nobody was happy with their class, although the random race selection worked a lot better (and led to fewer elves than normal).

GreatWyrmGold
2018-10-31, 01:17 PM
An annoying one I've recently encountered is that your movement must all be used in one go, before your other actions, X-COM style. This sort of nullifies the point of the rogue ability which is specifically to let you run in, stab the enemy, then Disengage and run back out of their reach
It works that way by intent in some games (e.g, basically any version of D&D before 5). But games where that isn't the intent tend to be designed with interruptible movement in mind...



Oh, the worst houserule I ever ran was enforced random race/class allocation. Nobody was happy with their class, although the random race selection worked a lot better (and led to fewer elves than normal).
Great houserule for silly one-shots, not much good for anything else.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-31, 02:05 PM
Great houserule for silly one-shots, not much good for anything else.

I thought it would reflect the oppressive nature of the 40k universe :smalltongue:

Resileaf
2018-10-31, 02:18 PM
I thought it would reflect the oppressive nature of the 40k universe :smalltongue:

Isn't it the most common rule in Warhammer Fantasy that stats and class are rolled randomly on character creation?

Quertus
2018-10-31, 04:53 PM
Isn't it the most common rule in Warhammer Fantasy that stats and class are rolled randomly on character creation?

That's certainly been my experience.

Anonymouswizard
2018-10-31, 05:10 PM
Isn't it the most common rule in Warhammer Fantasy that stats and class are rolled randomly on character creation?

Yep, again in Dark Heresy (no point buy option available), although by Rogue Trader picking your Homeworld and Career became standard practice.

lightningcat
2018-11-01, 01:06 AM
I thought it would reflect the oppressive nature of the 40k universe :smalltongue:

Every time that I have played Dark Heresy I have random rolled characters, and they have all been a lot of fun, although not always long lasting. The first was a feral world guardsman with the mutation that made him bigger and stronger. He one-shotted a orc with a sledgehammer, and then used morse code to comunicate with someone on the other side of a bulkhead. Random rolls can be fun as long as you go into them not expecting anything. But not every game should use them.

LordCdrMilitant
2018-11-01, 02:53 AM
Yep, again in Dark Heresy (no point buy option available), although by Rogue Trader picking your Homeworld and Career became standard practice.

There is a point buy option in DH2e, it's like 60 points to distribute to raise scores above 25.

That said, the general variance between having a high stat and having a low stat doesn't make rolled stats a serious concern. You'll be able to buy 25 points of characteristic advances, 30 points of skill bonus [+ more from Talents], and for combat stats, many, if not most, attacks will have quite a lot of bonuses.


Compared to D&D or Traveller, the general variance in capability between having a high stat and a low stat from rolled-in-order stats isn't a big deal. Of course, you shouldn't be playing Traveller if you're going to have an issue with random stats and classes!


Speaking of contentious houserules; I houseruled away the 10 corruption mutation in my Black Crusade game, and I'm considering removing more. I will also almost certainly be assigning mutations at GM's choice when they get them. One of my players thinks this is too few, though, so we have discussions. I've been considering using 30/50/70/80/90 as the track, to end-load the mutations at the high end, so they'll either add trouble when the party nears victory or hasten their demise when they're dying [or, more probably, both]. I'd rather not have their arms explode into tentacles early in the game, because that will severely hinder their ability to operate their cell.

Vknight
2018-11-06, 12:53 AM
Yeah no there is not or if it is the 2nd edition one is probably some garbage like 60 points all stats start at 0. Meaning it will never work out well.

Mutations and Corruption is all over the place.

My personal experience.

For Mutants & Masterminds
All major bad guys have luck control so you know they can 1per round force a re-roll on your attacks or there own saves just cause

Optional Gestalt
Seriously played a game where the gm said game built around not gestalt but allowed it. So in walks me with a cleric/wizard comapred to the rogue, vigilante, and paladin/ranger yeah gestalt not great but making it optional hurt

Resileaf
2018-11-13, 10:38 AM
So seeing everyone's seering hatred for fumbles, I'm going to try something in my future games. From now on, mooks will not be able to crit (natural 20s can still hit though), but will be able to fumble (nat 1 + confirming for miss), while named enemies and the players will not fumble, but will be able to crit. Would such a house rule be welcome in your tables?

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-13, 11:19 AM
So seeing everyone's seering hatred for fumbles, I'm going to try something in my future games. From now on, mooks will not be able to crit (natural 20s can still hit though), but will be able to fumble (nat 1 + confirming for miss), while named enemies and the players will not fumble, but will be able to crit. Would such a house rule be welcome in your tables?

For me, this depends on the genre. In a more pulpy or comedic genre (like superheroes, etc) where there's a clear "mook vs important" distinction, it's great. In a more "realistic" genre, not so much because it forces a mechanical distinction down to the fiction layer. But overall, it's much better than fumbles for everyone.

LordCdrMilitant
2018-11-13, 12:49 PM
Yeah no there is not or if it is the 2nd edition one is probably some garbage like 60 points all stats start at 0. Meaning it will never work out well.

Mutations and Corruption is all over the place.


It's 60 points to spend raising stats above 25. If it's a - stat, you raise it from 20, if it's a + stat, you raise it from 30. No stat may be raised above 40. It's on page 31 of the 2E DH rulebook.

Deathwatch [1e] has points buy rules on page 26. It's spend 100 points between the stats, stats start at 30, and cannot be bought above 50.


Heavy mutation just isn't something I want in most of my games, so I don't award a lot of corruption. However, corruption vs. infamy is important in Black Crusade, so I was thinking of just reducing mutation incidence.

Lord Torath
2018-11-14, 02:48 PM
So seeing everyone's seering hatred for fumbles, I'm going to try something in my future games. From now on, mooks will not be able to crit (natural 20s can still hit though), but will be able to fumble (nat 1 + confirming for miss), while named enemies and the players will not fumble, but will be able to crit. Would such a house rule be welcome in your tables?At first I thought you said MONKS instead of mooks, and I found myself wondering how you could possibly think that monks were overpowered enough to need to be able to fumble. Pity the poor monk, with multiple chances to fumble each round, but no chance for a critical hit! :smallbiggrin:

Resileaf
2018-11-14, 02:56 PM
At first I thought you said MONKS instead of mooks, and I found myself wondering how you could possibly think that monks were overpowered enough to need to be able to fumble. Pity the poor monk, with multiple chances to fumble each round, but no chance for a critical hit! :smallbiggrin:

Well really, it's only logical that the monk would have multiple chances to fumble when he keeps hitting people with his fists. Without protection either! Really, he should feel lucky he only has a 5% chance on attack to sprain his wrists.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-11-14, 04:01 PM
At first I thought you said MONKS instead of mooks, and I found myself wondering how you could possibly think that monks were overpowered enough to need to be able to fumble. Pity the poor monk, with multiple chances to fumble each round, but no chance for a critical hit! :smallbiggrin:
Honestly, I'm surprised they only have a 5% chance to fumble after spending all their lives inside, singing hymns and copying books.

Ken Murikumo
2018-11-16, 11:29 AM
At first I thought you said MONKS instead of mooks, and I found myself wondering how you could possibly think that monks were overpowered enough to need to be able to fumble. Pity the poor monk, with multiple chances to fumble each round, but no chance for a critical hit! :smallbiggrin:

Monks ARE overpowered! They get more attacks, better unarmed damage, and have all good saves! Why would you never want to be a monk!


For a sizable period of time my group used a quasi-houserule that massive-damage threshold is equal to your constitution score. We played in a d20 modern campaign (where IIRC that was a normal rule to make guns more lethal). Eventually we migrated to Pathfinder but that rule carried over. Doing more than 18 damage isn't terribly hard, so almost every combat at least 1 PC would go down. Some GMs have wet dreams about this happening, but ultimately it's really boring. Getting removed from a 2 hour combat session on the first round really sucks, especially when there is no more healing to go around because the "rule" would devour any means of restoring HP.

Luckily we (I) ditched the rule after a few campaigns and suggested we do 50 damage or half the characters total HP, whichever is greater. Also, they don't die, but instead drop to -1 and begin bleeding out. So far it's worked out great, no PCs have gone down, and when they dispatch an uninjured enemy with a single crit, the social energy for the table increases.

MesiDoomstalker
2018-11-17, 02:28 AM
In a Pokemon game, had a GM who wanted more 'realism'. Such efforts were things like;

Center's cost money
Death was very present (the poorly mathed system was at least half to blame). The only way to avoid accidentally killing in a friendly bout was to intentionally take a -1 penalty to avoid crits. Not this didn't prevent deaths, it just prevented "Oh no, I critted and knocked your mon into Dead range by accident"
Pokemon didn't evolve when they reached X level. They evolved when they reached X level and some arbitrary other requirement for the mon. The main one was Beldum having to (violently) absorb large mass of metal via magnetism so strong it gets stuck to the ground as it tries to pull the earth's magnetic core into its body.
Not a houserule so much as a worldbuilding blunder; the distance between cities was immense and filled with hyper aggressive wild pokemon. It was 4,000 miles between Saffron City and Lavender Town

Luccan
2018-11-17, 02:55 AM
In a Pokemon game, had a GM who wanted more 'realism'. Such efforts were things like;

Center's cost money
Death was very present (the poorly mathed system was at least half to blame). The only way to avoid accidentally killing in a friendly bout was to intentionally take a -1 penalty to avoid crits. Not this didn't prevent deaths, it just prevented "Oh no, I critted and knocked your mon into Dead range by accident"
Pokemon didn't evolve when they reached X level. They evolved when they reached X level and some arbitrary other requirement for the mon. The main one was Beldum having to (violently) absorb large mass of metal via magnetism so strong it gets stuck to the ground as it tries to pull the earth's magnetic core into its body.
Not a houserule so much as a worldbuilding blunder; the distance between cities was immense and filled with hyper aggressive wild pokemon. It was 4,000 miles between Saffron City and Lavender Town


A Pokemon game? Fine, but it can't be Pokemon.

Knaight
2018-11-17, 03:09 AM
In a Pokemon game, had a GM who wanted more 'realism'. Such efforts were things like;

Center's cost money
Death was very present (the poorly mathed system was at least half to blame). The only way to avoid accidentally killing in a friendly bout was to intentionally take a -1 penalty to avoid crits. Not this didn't prevent deaths, it just prevented "Oh no, I critted and knocked your mon into Dead range by accident"
Pokemon didn't evolve when they reached X level. They evolved when they reached X level and some arbitrary other requirement for the mon. The main one was Beldum having to (violently) absorb large mass of metal via magnetism so strong it gets stuck to the ground as it tries to pull the earth's magnetic core into its body.
Not a houserule so much as a worldbuilding blunder; the distance between cities was immense and filled with hyper aggressive wild pokemon. It was 4,000 miles between Saffron City and Lavender Town


Some of these work for the setting, but the worldbuilding is just so terrible. That was clearly never an entire massive continent, and shouldn't be treated as one, and that makes it less realistic*.

*Or for a word better suited than "realistic", "naturalistic". Pokemon as fictional ecosystem with all the predation and starvation that involves? Interesting. Barely populating a setting that's been so developed that omnidomestication is a thing and people are trying to do comprehensive lists of the local ecology? Less interesting.

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-17, 03:38 AM
In a Pokemon game, had a GM who wanted more 'realism'. Such efforts were things like;

Center's cost money
Death was very present (the poorly mathed system was at least half to blame). The only way to avoid accidentally killing in a friendly bout was to intentionally take a -1 penalty to avoid crits. Not this didn't prevent deaths, it just prevented "Oh no, I critted and knocked your mon into Dead range by accident"
Pokemon didn't evolve when they reached X level. They evolved when they reached X level and some arbitrary other requirement for the mon. The main one was Beldum having to (violently) absorb large mass of metal via magnetism so strong it gets stuck to the ground as it tries to pull the earth's magnetic core into its body.
Not a houserule so much as a worldbuilding blunder; the distance between cities was immense and filled with hyper aggressive wild pokemon. It was 4,000 miles between Saffron City and Lavender Town


That's not realism, that's the GM running Shin Megami Tensei and you not noticing!

For the record, it's very easy to justify Pokémon Centres being free at point of delivery. Countries with socialist healthcare do it with human medicine, which is much more complex than the care Pokémon Centres are shown to give (which IIRC involves sticking the pokéballs in a machine). While we've yet to see a national government in a Pokémon game they probably exist, and as such can fund centres from taxes.

Knaight
2018-11-17, 04:08 AM
For the record, it's very easy to justify Pokémon Centres being free at point of delivery. Countries with socialist healthcare do it with human medicine, which is much more complex than the care Pokémon Centres are shown to give (which IIRC involves sticking the pokéballs in a machine). While we've yet to see a national government in a Pokémon game they probably exist, and as such can fund centres from taxes.

I'm not sure I'd call it more complex - the pokemon universe is full of super tech, built on a basis of flagrant violations of conservation of energy. The point of delivery treatment seems pretty straightforward, but that machine is a whole different matter.

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-17, 04:44 AM
I'm not sure I'd call it more complex - the pokemon universe is full of super tech, built on a basis of flagrant violations of conservation of energy. The point of delivery treatment seems pretty straightforward, but that machine is a whole different matter.

True, but we also have massive staff savings compared to our hospitals (I think you could pull it off easily with 8 permanent staff, as long as they're willing to cover for each other's minor illnesses, with the occasional hire for long term absences, probably better to go with 10-20 in practice), so we can't day for sure how expensive it would be. My point was that it's so easy to justify, and Pokémon are so important, that having them not be free is a massive, massive blunder. Unless there's since easy alternative to them, of course, but in that case you'll find players just doing that instead of using the centre.

Arbane
2018-11-17, 02:11 PM
That's not realism, that's the GM running Shin Megami Tensei and you not noticing!

They're the same game, anyway. :smallbiggrin:

The Random NPC
2018-11-17, 04:24 PM
That's not realism, that's the GM running Shin Megami Tensei and you not noticing!

For the record, it's very easy to justify Pokémon Centres being free at point of delivery. Countries with socialist healthcare do it with human medicine, which is much more complex than the care Pokémon Centres are shown to give (which IIRC involves sticking the pokéballs in a machine). While we've yet to see a national government in a Pokémon game they probably exist, and as such can fund centres from taxes.

Don't forget, the Pokémon game that was set in New York didn't have free Centres, because the USA isn't socialized.

sktarq
2018-11-17, 04:31 PM
"We are going to play this game strait, no joke or ridiculous added character traits, and have no house rules."

Problem was we were trying to play FATAL (1e I think) (mostly to prove it could be done)

GreatWyrmGold
2018-11-17, 05:33 PM
"We are going to play this game strait, no joke or ridiculous added character traits, and have no house rules."

Problem was we were trying to play FATAL (1e I think) (mostly to prove it could be done)
Makes sense to me. If you start houseruling FATAL, you risk turning it from the most infamously terrible pile f garbage masquerading as an RPG into a normal bad RPG. It would be like trying to make a better cut of The Room.

Knaight
2018-11-17, 06:33 PM
Makes sense to me. If you start houseruling FATAL, you risk turning it from the most infamously terrible pile f garbage masquerading as an RPG into a normal bad RPG. It would be like trying to make a better cut of The Room.

You'd need some heavy house rules to reach normally bad.

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-17, 06:40 PM
You'd need some heavy house rules to reach normally bad.

Well if we cut out the setting information bits, the magic items list, the ritual components table, and the bad philosophy, we're left with bland rules text. From there we just have trio sanitise the character creation rules, the grappling (especially first edition grappling, second edition cleaned it up a bit), the skill list, and a few other bits.

We'll end up with about sixty pages of rules we're using, but it's still technically FATAL.

JMS
2018-11-18, 10:17 AM
Well if we cut out the setting information bits, the magic items list, the ritual components table, and the bad philosophy, we're left with bland rules text. From there we just have trio sanitise the character creation rules, the grappling (especially first edition grappling, second edition cleaned it up a bit), the skill list, and a few other bits.

We'll end up with about sixty pages of rules we're using, but it's still technically FATAL.
Or D&D, I think, other than the ritual stuff, and maybe, maybe character creation. (AD&D grapples are weird)

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-18, 11:22 AM
Or D&D, I think, other than the ritual stuff, and maybe, maybe character creation. (AD&D grapples are weird)

Oh, FATAL is a fantasy heartbreaker, and a system that would like have been hailed as good or even revolutionary in the 70s or early 80s. As it is the rules are essentially all the worst aspects of D&D, GURPS, and Rolemaster, with a heap more of rather offensive stuff in there.

Now, it's been a while since I read the pdf, but the problem with the grapple rules is you can RAW accidentally rape your target due to a poorly worded rule which leads to the conclusion that all sensible ladies have undergarments that consists of full gothic plate.

The Glyphstone
2018-11-18, 11:51 AM
Oh, FATAL is a fantasy heartbreaker, and a system that would like have been hailed as good or even revolutionary in the 70s or early 80s. As it is the rules are essentially all the worst aspects of D&D, GURPS, and Rolemaster, with a heap more of rather offensive stuff in there.

Now, it's been a while since I read the pdf, but the problem with the grapple rules is you can RAW accidentally rape your target due to a poorly worded rule which leads to the conclusion that all sensible ladies have undergarments that consists of full gothic plate.

It's FATAL. Why would you assume that is a poorly worded rule, and not Working As Intended?

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-18, 12:16 PM
It's FATAL. Why would you assume that is a poorly worded rule, and not Working As Intended?

True, but I assume it's a weirdly worded rule because it begins by using the word 'may', before moving into a jumble of words that technically only make the first bit optional. At least here I don't have to solve a quadratic equation.

vasilidor
2018-11-19, 04:27 AM
Enemies are now represented with chocolate, whosoever kills the enemy gets the chocolate.
Critical fumbles... do I need to elaborate?
scrying magic is an automatic two way window. always.
true sight can see your mundane hiding rogue even though he is behind the rock that is bigger than him and the castor has no line of sight.
you get seventy points to split between 7 stats (early 3.0 game with a dm who had no idea about the rule changes, after I had just finished reading half the dmg, I was the ugliest wizard ever).

Velaryon
2018-11-19, 12:52 PM
Enemies are now represented with chocolate, whosoever kills the enemy gets the chocolate.

What makes this one of the worst? Is it because certain characters get more chocolate than others this way?

Cozzer
2018-11-19, 01:57 PM
In general, in a game such as D&D, I believe granting bonuses to whoever finihses an enemy is extremely wrong, since the point is contributing to the victory, not kill-stealing for EXP or whatever. But with chocolate it's just a funny harmless quirk of the game, I would say. Unless the players take chocolate very seriously, I guess. :smalltongue:

(Now I'm picturing players being like, "Sorry guys, I need to play a bard or a cleric this time, I'm on a diet").

Luccan
2018-11-19, 02:43 PM
What makes this one of the worst? Is it because certain characters get more chocolate than others this way?

My guess would be it is a bonus reward (delicious chocolate specifically), which does on some level encourage focusing on being the person to kill a monster, rather than working together to defeat your foes. Or they got melty.

Edit: On top of that, there's really no reason to do this extra incentive. If you're party isn't accomplishing things because they enjoy the adventure, then you have a different problem. At best this just warps the objective of a cooperative RPG.

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-19, 02:59 PM
Edit: On top of that, there's really no reason to do this extra incentive. If you're party isn't accomplishing things because they enjoy the adventure, then you have a different problem. At best this just warps the objective of a cooperative RPG.

Notably I've noticed that using something edible for metagame currency encourages players to actually spend them. Otherwise I tend to see players ending the game with them all saved up 'just in case'.

Luccan
2018-11-19, 03:24 PM
Notably I've noticed that using something edible for metagame currency encourages players to actually spend them. Otherwise I tend to see players ending the game with them all saved up 'just in case'.

Sure, but it isn't really a currency. It's not like 5e's inspiration, you aren't getting anything in-game. It's purely an out of game reward that's encouraging a behavior more likely to cause problems (in most RPGs) than facilitate good/desirable behavior.

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-19, 03:29 PM
Sure, but it isn't really a currency. It's not like 5e's inspiration, you aren't getting anything in-game. It's purely an out of game reward that's encouraging a behavior more likely to cause problems (in most RPGs) than facilitate good/desirable behavior.

Sure, my point was that sometimes you really do want that temptation to eat the thing. I really do agree it's bad to represent enemies with them, but with metagame currencies and other 'per PC' things there's no competition to worry about.

Although I do always have the temptation to run a campaign about a bear invasion just to use gummi bears as minis...

Luccan
2018-11-19, 03:44 PM
Sure, my point was that sometimes you really do want that temptation to eat the thing. I really do agree it's bad to represent enemies with them, but with metagame currencies and other 'per PC' things there's no competition to worry about.

Although I do always have the temptation to run a campaign about a bear invasion just to use gummi bears as minis...

Yeah, I can see the value in that.

Candyland: Bearpocalypse... Dang it, now I want to see this game.

SimonMoon6
2018-11-19, 06:37 PM
Another potential problem is players eating the miniatures when they're not supposed to (which doesn't usually happen with metal miniatures).

"Where did this army of orcs go?"

"Mmm... delicious!"

vasilidor
2018-11-19, 07:53 PM
yeah, there were several issues with the chocolate one, but for us the nail in the coffin was when the girl who really liked chocolate got upset because her character never killed anyone.
she was given a bag of Hershey kiss's as an apology later, and we never used that rule again.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-11-19, 08:30 PM
true sight can see your mundane hiding rogue even though he is behind the rock that is bigger than him and the castor has no line of sight.
What about the Pollux?
But seriously...did the DM not think magic made mundane methods of doing things obsolete enough?