Has anyone done a compilation of the most common house rules that the developer's have in their own games? I did not manage to find anything by searching this or the general forum.
I've read a little here and there, and from what I gather most of the time they give the expertise and some defense feats for free. And I also remember someone leveling the characters after each session. But the big picture remains unclear.
In any case, it would be interesting to get a better feeling what the people who have has their say in one or another part of of the rules want to do to spice up their own games. Might give some good ideas to other people's home games as well.
Anybody got a link to a good thread on teh subject or a deeper knowledge on the matter?
Variants or homebrews sure, but shouldn't a dev be the last person to need houserules?
Firstly, they are not designing a game for themselves, but for other people. And those others are probably not assumed have the samel level of involvement in understanding the mechanics as a whole. SO these two groups' interests might conflict at some points at least.
Secondly, no one designer developed the system all alone (I assume), so it is full of compromises. So one designer might have a another vision for a particular rule than the consensus one that made the print.
These are just two possible reasons why I do not find house rules in developers' games strange or somehow wrong. But since they are very intimately involved with at least some portion of the rules, so it'd be interesting to see theie solutions.
One other I have read about is not letting the characters benefit from a extended rest until they've reached a set number, two is good, of milestones. This probably to prevent the ever-feared five minute workday and its variants.
One that I've been using that I got from Dias Ex Machina's Ultramodern4 rules is the DM setting when an extended rest takes place, usually at the end of a "chapter" or adventure. It prevents the five minute workday and it also allows the DM to set encounters in a manner that makes the most sense, so you could have a single encounter in a day without worrying about the PCs burning all their dailies and fully recovering before the next encounter.
I do have a pdf collection of 4e's best and most common house rules though. I use it for my own games.
Firstly, they are not designing a game for themselves, but for other people. And those others are probably not assumed have the samel level of involvement in understanding the mechanics as a whole. SO these two groups' interests might conflict at some points at least.
Secondly, no one designer developed the system all alone (I assume), so it is full of compromises. So one designer might have a another vision for a particular rule than the consensus one that made the print.
Also, sometimes the design team simply screws up.
(Remember, devs are people like us.)
You hear mention of house rules on occasion, but never the specifics. I think they are tight lipped for a few reasons.
Reasons to be tight lipped
1- Potential Future Ideas. They design RPGs for a living. They aren't going to give those ideas away for free.
2- Competition. They don't want to divide the player base. If it got out that SKR didn't like skill challenges but was running his own system that worked like [idea] a huge ammount of people would use that instead of the published rules. It would be fairly common that groups would say "We are using SKR skill challenges" or "We aren't using SKR Skills, sorry guys".
3- Fan Freak Out. Some fans would freak out if a developer didn't use 100% RAW at their table. "Why should we pay them to use it, if they don't use it" See also "Signs of 7th edition".
4- The Rules are Perfect. Even if the rules have flaws, you need to totally deny, cover up, and draw attention away from those flaws until you release the product that fixes them. Whether a skill challenge rewrite, or a new edition.
5- Going Against the Grain. You don't want the Big Wigs at your company knowing that you drink anywhere but the company well. Saw an documentary about Coke, and the guy they interviewed claimed he had never tasted Pepsi in his life. See also "We pay you to write the best rules, why didn't you write these when we paid you to write some?".
Reasons for Dev house rules
1- Beta Testing new ideas.
2- Wildley unbalanced idea that they are fine with in their game, but would never publish. One dev mentioned he let his son play a fire giant straight from the MM in his home games.
3- Variant rules for quicker X, or longer Y.
4- Out voted when writing the actual rules. "Fine, publish those rules. I am using something different in my own games".
5- Variant settings and themes. EX. If a dev runs spelljammer I would expect lots of homebrew content.
Your best bet to finding dev houserules is to find devs who no longer work there on message boards talking about them. IIRC thats how we got the 3.5 hexblade buff.
The idea that the game makers are using houserules at all is kinda disturbing.
Variants or homebrews sure, but shouldn't a dev be the last person to need houserules?
How do "variants" and "homebrews" differ from "houserules"? (Or, for that matter, from each other?)
I'm not really sure what rampant means with Variant, the only ones I know are Houserules, so he'll probably have to explain that himself.
Has anyone done a compilation of the most common house rules that the developer's have in their own games? I did not manage to find anything by searching this or the general forum.
I've read a little here and there, and from what I gather most of the time they give the expertise and some defense feats for free. And I also remember someone leveling the characters after each session. But the big picture remains unclear.
In any case, it would be interesting to get a better feeling what the people who have has their say in one or another part of of the rules want to do to spice up their own games. Might give some good ideas to other people's home games as well.
Anybody got a link to a good thread on teh subject or a deeper knowledge on the matter?
Here is a link to Greg Bilsland's house rules. I'm pretty curious myself so I'm going to keep a close eye on this thread with bated breath
Sure they might use a 'Campaign Setting Bible' specific to a given campaign (so when the PCs run across some zero level NPC with a rules defying Intelligence of 21 they have rules governing his existance as a mover and shaker in the world who analyzes information and alerts King Rizold by mail that the Hobgoblins are up to something because several adventurers report that the Hobgoblins in all the caves in the Mountains of Zoar have taken to mining) when creating their product, but When I do campaign development i resort to a collection of text books on Cultural Anthropology, Information Theory, Geography and soforth to build a solid setting background.
Thatway the descriptions of communities include wagon/riverboat traffic volumes, calculated human density in the street or market square, number of people in the logging camp outside the city, Odds of an individual knowing some piece of information about some other community a hundred miles down the road, The effects of the bell curve on intelligence diversity in the community (bob the animal with 3 int fighting in a pit for food under Wyndsword Tavern and Albus the Mage with 18 Intelligence in the Tower of Astronomy).