Got a house rule document? Share it!

[Fizban]

I had a quick scan of the document. While I think there's some good changes in there, and it is better than vanilla 3e, you would have a problem with people buying into your house rules. There's nearly three hundred pages of rules that you want people to understand and agree with to play the version of the game you want.

I think the saying, "don't let perfect be the enemy of great", is applicable here.

And yet, if you read it, the very first thing is says is that you don't have to read the whole thing. Pre-Edit: okay it's the second thing, after the introduction, but very clearly labeled as "How to Use This Book." No one expects anyone to read every single 1st party book to play the game, why would you need to read my entire "update" book? That's what I'm for, I know what in there. Or you can just search for whatever you're doing and ignore the rest. The only reason to even provide it to players is because well yeah, being blindsided is no fun, but more importantly if you want people to try your homebrew stuff you have to actually give it to them, and I've got quite a bit of homebrew stuff. But even then, I can just hand feats to the feat people, spells to the casters, etc.

The initial bits were even intentionally truncated so that this or that section could be printed on a single page*, though eventually I decided I'd rather have clarity and let them start creeping larger: The entire core base class tweaks list minus the Paladin fit on a single page, and most of the remaining base classes fit on a single page -and those that don't fit are themselves only a single page, aside from spell lists because those take up a ton of space. Every change individually can be described in only a few sentences.

*Of course I'm cheating and have it set to A4 paper rather than American Letter for better formatting/bit more space.

But eventually, if you bring everything together, yeah instead of having two dozen shorter documents I've just combined most of it into one. Though if you want to be combative, I could also say it is in some way a direct refutation of char-op claims that "you can't just nerf everything, the only way to fix the broken is to make everyone broken!" Sure I can- this doesn't even include my list of tweaks to every single spell from all the rest of the books- sure I got burned out a couple books before finishing, but yes, obviously, it is 100% possible to go through every broken thing in the game and judge it as fine, removed, or make a change. It's exhausting and not even necessarily worth it if you have a bunch of time to kill, but you can, if you want. Except that's not really what this is either, because huge swathes of problems are instead covered by "I'm a DM and I will in fact do my job," with discussion of what that job is and why I'm doing it the way I do- the "every spell change" list is emphatically not part of this document, just the important ones (which were written one at a time, long before I got bored and decided to try going through every spell at once), nor is the "every magic item change" list here either (which was also unfinished and out of date). Some 20 pages are tweaked and new feats, mostly new because those take more space, and about 50 are new spells and invocations, around another 10 for items, etc. Pretty sure that's a comparable ratio to most splatbooks actually.

The document reads more as a thought experiment, a long-term project, theorizing, advice on picking and choosing what you will from the document, philosophy on the history of the game and where 3.x sits in that context, as well as how it was shaped over the course of its lifespan and what those implications are.

What use is it presenting a pile of rules without context? Even the published books had little "Behind the Curtain" sidebars on occasion, I just think one of the major problems was not enough of them. If I'm sending a tweaks and brew doc out into the void, do I want people to read and then immediately disregard it because they don't already understand and agree? Of course not. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem with discussion on these boards is a failure to adequately communicate such context, leading to whole threads of shouting back and forth before someone finally provides the one missing sentence that makes it clear why they shouldn't have been arguing in the first place.

So naturally, I've gone and summarized a bunch of my thoughts and have tons of notes all over everything (to the point where the older minimalist stuff looks weirdly out of place at times).

I don't get the idea that the author would hand this to a new group and ask them to read it over and adhere to it all. It is so well thought out and written that I imagine that Fizban would be able to bring most of these changes up on the fly during play, making it easy for the group. Many of the changes are individual changes to how classes work, so a player would only need to know what the document says about their class. I also imagine this document would be approached differently between a long term group that Fizban was playing with for years vs some newer people who may be strangers.

Exactly. And while my old group trusted me enough to take the (very limited) changes I'd been working on at the time without question even as a player, or let me use homebrew (to some somewhat negative learning experiences), running a group again I could just slip most of it in as it came up without them even knowing I had anything other than some homebrew I printed off to hand them. The most onerous stuff comes up in character creation and some particular spell nerfs that can be got out of the way quickly.


And since we're a couple posts past I'll add this here instead of editing: regarding looking at stuff as too much or too little, it can be further noted that when I started I was still aiming for a boosted power level (I'm traditionally inclined to Sorcery), and the stuff I was working on was buffs. Buff the Monk, Hexblade, Sohei, Paladin, and even give the Warmage a few more options, tons of new invocations including overall buffs for high level Warlocks, cram a bunch of stuff into "LA +1" for Manaketes, etc. Meanwhile the biggest nerfs for Sor/Wiz are in the spells themselves, with some stuff applied to base Cleric and Druid. But as time has gone on and I've built up the document and moved even further away from char-op mentality, I've trended to aiming lower than that- moving from just nerfing the Beguiler to "soft-banning" it entirely, for example, or how I'm thinking the best fix for "animal companions" now is to just 5e them and export the non-mount HD-based companions to a Bonded-Summoner style PrC entirely. I've not abandoned the old slightly more powerful stuff, but I'm also ever increasingly just over the idea of dealing with char-op problems, while also acknowledging that, especially with the DnD of today, random and new players are just not going to be a "GitP" levels of optimization. Even getting people to read the PHB is a challenge much of the time, just getting them to read the homebrew is likely to be daunting enough.

At the end of the day, I'll only know what power level the game is going to be when I have a group of players submitting characters, and even if I've been making "blander" stuff more recently on the assumption of tamer players, that doesn't mean I don't want to see the cool stuff in action if that's what they want.