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2018-10-01, 01:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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2018-10-01, 02:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2018
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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2018-10-01, 02:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2018
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- Netherlands
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
Last edited by Maelynn; 2018-10-01 at 02:40 PM.
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2018-10-01, 04:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2010
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.Imagine if all real-world conversations were like internet D&D conversations...
Protip: DnD is an incredibly social game played by some of the most socially inept people on the planet - Lev
I read this somewhere and I stick to it: "I would rather play a bad system with my friends than a great system with nobody". - Trevlac
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2018-10-01, 09:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
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- In a castle under the sea
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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.)
Same. I have literally never played in a campaign that tracked XP.
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.
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.
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...
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.
...It didn't last to the first adventure hook.
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2018-10-02, 01:13 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2016
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- The Old West
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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
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2018-10-02, 03:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2018
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
I've played a French caricature of role playing games ("Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk", 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.
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2018-10-02, 03:56 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2014
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
"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.
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2018-10-02, 05:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
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2018-10-02, 06:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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).
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2018-10-02, 06:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2013
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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 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.Play the world, not the rules. Numbers don't add up to a game - ideas do.
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2018-10-02, 06:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2016
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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
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2018-10-02, 06:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2016
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2018-10-02, 07:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2008
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2018-10-02, 07:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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?)
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.
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?
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2018-10-02, 08:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2005
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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2018-10-02, 09:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2016
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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 ^^Last edited by Kardwill; 2018-10-02 at 09:39 AM.
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2018-10-02, 09:55 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2018
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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?
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2018-10-02, 10:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2016
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- Corvallis, OR
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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...Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2018-10-02, 10:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2018
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2018-10-02, 11:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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).
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.
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2018-10-02, 12:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2008
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- Duitsland
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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2018-10-02, 01:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
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- In a castle under the sea
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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2018-10-02, 01:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2008
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2018-10-02, 02:28 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2013
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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2018-10-02, 02:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015
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2018-10-02, 02:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2018
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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2018-10-02, 03:57 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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2018-10-02, 04:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
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- In a castle under the sea
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Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.
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2018-10-02, 04:47 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2009
- Location
- In my library
Re: Worst REAL house rules you've used
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.