Rules are meant to be broken. It’s a saying we’ve all heard countless times, and it’s one that holds very true among tabletop RPGs as much as anywhere else. Not only are house rules as old as the hobby itself, in recent years, game designers themselves outright give players and GMs their blessing to remove or tweak any rules they disagree with or don’t like.
But use caution, dear gamers. What can seem like an innocent enough house rule might reveal that the house in question is a house of cards that comes crashing down completely if you’re not careful.
A General Word of Caution
I am a professional writer, and one of the things I’ve done for many years now is give advice to novice writers on writing panels at conventions. For amateur writers who are just starting out, one of their major trepidations tends to be how sternly they need to adhere to the proper rules of grammar and syntax. After all, aren’t some of the greatest English-language writers–Jane Austen, E.E. Cummings, and even William Shakespeare himself–known for having broken the rules of English to great poetic effect?
They are indeed. But there’s the rub: you aren’t Shakespeare. And, if you’re a novice player or game master, you’re also not a roleplaying game designer. At least, not yet.
To properly break a rule, you need to understand the rule, what it’s function is, why it was included in the first place, and what the ramifications of breaking it might be further down the line than you might be able to see at first glance.
The Road to Hell
The fact of the matter is that, in most cases, house rules are made with the best of intentions. They’re made because the GM and/or the players feel that the game would be more fun for everyone involved if things worked slightly differently from how the book says it’s supposed to. And that’s a great reason to change things if they’re not working the way you want them to; the main reason we get together to play these games, after all, is for fun and enjoyment.
Oftentimes, a house rule has its genesis in someone looking at an existing rule and thinking or saying something along the lines of, “Why does this work like that? That’s silly.” And while a rule might legitimately strike you as silly, that should probably give you extra pause to look at it long and hard to determine why it’s there in the first place.
(There’s always the chance, of course, that a game is legitimately poorly designed in some way or another, but until you’re well-versed enough in game design and balance to be able to determine that, it’s safer to assume that the people who spent years putting the rules together know better than what might well be a knee-jerk reaction on your part.)
Here’s an example from one of my own gaming groups that demonstrates this effect pretty well.
We were playing in a Pathfinder game, and were starting to make our way out of the earliest levels into somewhere around Level 5 or 6, where character classes really start to hit the meat of what makes them stand out a bit more. One of the PCs was playing a Barbarian character who belonged to a sort of tiger-man race (home-brewed species, another RPG house rule staple!) who preferred to use claws and teeth in battle over that traditional Barbarian staple, the greataxe.
The reality of the Pathfinder system, however, is that to be a truly excellent bare-handed combatant, you need to be a Monk, not a Barbarian. The GM didn’t want to penalize the player for making a sensible and fun roleplaying choice in having his character forego weapons, so the decision was made to allow the character to make multiple attacks in the same way that a monster might, in order to be on par with the other melee combatants in the group.
Almost instantly, this proved to be a poor decision. Not only did having multiple, non-penalized attacks work too well for a player character, it also became a logistical nightmare. When you have a mix of iterative attacks and multiple natural attacks, it’s bad enough, but to add the different bonuses and penalties for the character raging, or being subjected to the Enlarge Person spell, or to be raging while under the effects of Enlarge Person–the player literally made a spreadsheet to keep track of all the variables.
And at the end of it all, not only was this a huge hassle logistically, the character was now too good compared to the more traditional characters in the group. Now instead of having one character feeling left behind, there were four characters feeling like they were constantly being shown up. The GM had allowed for a rules change to help balance the game to be fun for everyone, and it backfired, even onto himself.
Avoiding the Knee-Jerk Response
Few players or GMs are out to break the game when they change rules. In my example above, for instance, the intent was to bring parity to the PC group, but instead it just highlighted exactly why PCs and monsters follow different rules in that particular system. This was a unique situation, admittedly, but this is a unique hobby with any number of unique groups out there.
Another major reason for ill-advised house rules coming into effect is because a system does things differently than how another system (or other editions of the same system) might do it. For instance, when Fantasy Flight Games released Edge of the Empire, there was a minor uproar over the fact that a character’s Agility had no bearing on how difficult a character was to hit.
Now, the Star Wars franchise had been the domain of d20-based systems for quite some time by the time Edge of the Empire rolled around, and so for over a decade, players had grown used to the idea that having a higher Dexterity added to their Armor Class (or Reflex Defense, depending on the edition). Now, suddenly, to-hit difficulty based on range was the order of the day, and players and GMs alike were quick to want to change it back to the old ways.
“It doesn’t make sense that personal skill wouldn’t come into the equation!” they would clamor. And the fact of the matter was that there were (and are!) abilities that characters can take to make themselves more difficult to hit; just because difficulty wasn’t a function of Agility didn’t mean it wasn’t the function of something else. And so, by changing to-hit difficulty to be a function of Agility, this completely changed the value of these talents that were meant to improve one’s survivability–to the effect that investing XP into defensive combat skills was now much less effective than simply starting as unhittable out of the box.
One simple change–range to Agility–completely upsets the balance of the entire combat system, and changes the value of both offensive and defensive abilities as a result. A change that really only comes about because of a mindset that, because another system handled something one way, that’s how it should be handled always.
Rules as Intended
Whenever the effects of certain rules are being debated amongst gamers, the terms RAW (“Rules as Written”) and RAI (“Rules as Intended”) get bandied about a lot. For those who aren’t familiar with these terms, essentially, they simply refer to the specifics of what the rulebook says versus what the logical interpretation is meant to be, and sometimes, unfortunately and/or frustratingly, there can be a bit of a gulf there.
I see less examination of intent, however, when it comes to house-ruling something–which is unusual, because that’s arguably the most important time to look at it. After all, at the end of the day, a game system on the whole is meant to allow players to simulate or recreate a certain thing, whether that’s high fantasy heroics, noir mystique, slapstick action, or any number of other things. Moreover, there are differences in how they go about allowing these things, and also in the tone, theme, feel, and scope. Exalted and Dungeons & Dragons can both be used to recreate action and drama amongst ancient civilizations, but the feel of those two games and the characters therein are going to be very different.
To use Edge of the Empire as an example yet again, another frequent complaint early on (still present later on as well, though to a lesser extent) was the fact that beginning characters, especially Force-users, seemed so weak. Compared to Wizards of the Coast’s Saga Edition, where a Level 1 character could start with a fully functional lightsaber and a skill rating in Use the Force high enough to trounce an enemy six levels higher than him, starting characters in Edge of the Empire can struggle to pull a lightsaber back into their hand while hanging frozen upside-down from a cave ceiling.
Does this mean that Edge of the Empire needs house-ruling to make starting characters more powerful? Does Saga Edition need to be tweaked to make its starting characters less powerful? The reality is that these two systems are presenting gamers with an entirely different game experience (as tempted I am, personally, to answer that second question with a “yes”). In this example, the two game systems are both about Star Wars, but changing one to make it work more like the other makes about as much sense, from a mechanics perspective, as forcing a house rule into Shadowrun to allow for your Elf to not have to sleep ever because that’s how old-school D&D did it.
The Bottom Line
Jason Holmgren, the creator of Ironclaw, has a saying he’s fond of: “rules endorse behavior.” What this means is that the actions the players take, and the ones they’re likely to think of taking, are the ones that the system explicitly allows for.
Game systems that are about over-the-top action and daring heroics are structured differently from games that try to capture gritty realism and real-world stakes; in the former, the risk of taking a few shots from a 9mm pistol would be drastically different than in the latter, and if the systems are laid out properly, the mechanical effects will represent this (say, as the difference between losing 12 out of a total of 64 hit points versus possibly being severely injured for weeks or months or even being killed outright).
Now, if daring heroics are what you want, then the former is the way to go: the player is encouraged to take a risk that, in another system, he or she wouldn’t, because the potential ramifications don’t carry that severe of a penalty if the risk doesn’t pay off. House-ruling pistols to make them appreciably more lethal changes what the player will be willing to do–and that’s completely fine, provided that’s what you want, and that everyone at the table is on board with it. Perhaps the PCs will be less likely to expose themselves to gunfire, but conversely, the drama of a PC stepping in to save a friend from a gunman is now enhanced because of the increased stakes involved.
I’ve never known a gaming table, my own included, that didn’t use house rules in some form or another. They’re a part of our hobby, and there’s no right or wrong when it comes to using them versus not using them, or the extent to which you apply them to a given system.
Still, with the above in mind, there are some good guidelines to consider when devising and implementing house rules that will (in all hope) make things better for everyone. Try to consider:
- Why am I changing or adding this rule? What is the original rule trying to do?
- What are the ramifications of changing this rule beyond the immediate scope of the issue I’m trying to address?
- Does the system on the whole support the rules change I want to make?
- How will this house rule change the way that my players act and/or how the game plays out in ways that I don’t want?
Be honest with yourself! If you find yourself needing to tweak or alter a whole bunch of rules, perhaps you’re using the wrong system for the kind of game you’re trying to run. On the other hand, if the changes fix the issues you have and everyone at the table is having more fun as a result, then great! When all’s said and done, having more fun is what this is all about.
Kevin Frane
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