House Rules Thread

[Skjaldbakka]

It seems a thread pops up every now and then suggesting a 'house' rule. I think it would be great if there was one thread to hold all of them, that way if anyone wants to play a 'different' OOTS game, they can just look through one thread. Of course that would mean that said thread would need to be stickied. *nudge*

I also have some ideas:

On Vacation:
This variant only works if you don't have a full game. Before players draw characters, draw one character that is 'on vacation'. That character is not in the dungeon, and thus cannot assist battles.

Teams:
This variant works better if you have an even number of players. You split the characters into two teams. At the end of the game, each team pools its loot and win conditions to determine who wins. In this variant, the 'first man out' bonus is based on whichever team gets 'all' of its team members out first. In the case of NPCs, they get split up between the teams, but do not automatically go to the lowest floor with a PC. Instead, they 'shadow' a player of the team's choice (If that player rests or goes to the dungeon entrance, the NPC can start shadowing someone else).

[Theli]

I want to propose a new houserule to counter an issue we had with a game yesterday.

The game started with 3 people, then ballooned to 6. New people were added with some bonus shticks to help them since they came late. So that's one houserule we used at the time, but I don't think it really affected the game much.

What happened, which is the reason for this post, is that almost every player cashed in loot for shticks. They just kept putting more and more into the discard pile, removing it from game temporarily. And I say temporarily because we ended up reshuffling the shtick deck twice. (Only ones who didn't really exploit the loot for shticks was Elan -- who tended to get shared loot back for bard song bonus, trading only a very few pieces of loot for shticks, and even managed to defeat Xykon and win the game -- and V, who never traded loot for shticks and placed 3rd-4th. V might have done better, except that they ran into a mark of doom trap at a really, really bad time.)

The game lasted THAT long (2-3 times the length of time printed in the manual) even though we were using the quickest game rules. Now what I think caused this is that since the loot was discarded to get shticks, which is usually only a small gain in power if anything for each shtick, that loot wasn't available to trade for other players. So it seems like the players ended up hurting themselves even as their innate power increased. While assistance was asked for many times, individual pieces of loot very rarely passed hands between the same two people repeatedly. This must have slowed the game down a lot even though many people had 12+ shticks available. (Also, nobody played Roy until the 6th person joined and Haley got screwed early on.) It essentially resulted in a type of prisoner's dilemma, where you only really win out if most of the people in the game don't take the quick and easy way to help themselves.

So the houserule I propose is simple:

You can't trade loot for shticks unless it has no player-played player character faces or wildcards on it.

This ensures that loot stays in the game and follows the same principle as preventing loot from being discarded to npcs that other players can benefit from. It may slow down the gathering of shticks a small bit, but at least you don't have to rely on the loot deck to be reshuffled in order to have a chance to win the game.