I want to begin this post with a brief anecdote.
The other day, a friend of mine with whom I've gamed for many years, confessed to something he considered "embarrassing." What was the source of his shame? He recently tallied up the pages in the house rules document for a game he was refereeing and discovered, to his surprise, that it exceeded sixty pages. The horror! I was quick to reassure him that this was no cause for unease. Indeed, quite the opposite, since these rules were, in part, the accumulation of years of thought and play – tweaks to make the game "as [he] would like it to be," in the phrase from the afterword to OD&D.
My friend's reluctance to admit that he very thoroughly house ruled the game he was refereeing is not unique. Over the years, I've encountered quite a few people who have felt that the addition of house rules was somehow "wrong" and that the only "correct" way to play a RPG was exactly as its rules were written. I'm not quite sure of the origin of this mentality. If I had to guess, I'd lay the blame on the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, part of whose culture is obsessed with "RAW" – "rules as written" – a term that I don't believe I ever heard prior to 3e. I don't want to lay the blame entirely on this edition; Gygax complained about rules lawyers all the way back in 1974, so the mentality has been a constant in the hobby, even if its prevalence seems to have increased in recent years.
I don't think I've ever played a single roleplaying game exactly as it was written. In some cases, this was due to ignorance or misreading of the rules. In other cases, it's because of the existence of a body of folklore that has supplanted the actual rules to the point that "everybody knows" this rule or that should be understood in a particular way (often contrary to the designer's intent). Yet, there are also examples of rules changes that are deliberate and the result of careful thought and consideration, added or subtracted to make the game run more like what the referee and players desire.
Like rules lawyers, this is a venerable tradition, predating the existence of OD&D itself and arising out of the traditions of miniatures wargaming. Arguably, the entire history of RPGs is, to borrow from Benjamin Jowett, a series of house rules to D&D, sometimes explicitly so. Neither Gary Gygax nor Dave Arneson played OD&D precisely as written. From a certain perspective, AD&D might even be called an elaborate set of OD&D house rules, with the game expanded and honed into something Gary found more congenial to the style of play he preferred. There's nothing wrong with house rules and I must confess to be baffled that anyone might seriously think there were.
That said, I do feel that, before one introduces house rules into one's campaign, it's important that one reads, understands, and tries to use the rules as they are written. "Ivory tower" house ruling, which is to say, pre-emptive house ruling before play has actual begun no longer sits well with me, even though (or perhaps because I have engaged in it in the past). I am now much more firmly of the opinion that house rules should arise from play and reflect dissatisfaction with how the actual rules work in a given campaign. In this context, I find house rules not merely laudable but in fact inevitable. Any referee running a long campaign will, I think, introduce house rules into play simply because no RPG ever written is so perfectly written that its rules work for every possible configuration of players.
Again, I'd like to stress that I generally don't think house rules should occur in a vacuum. They should be reflective of play, not to mention reflective of thoughtful engagement with the rules they're supposed to modify or replace. Taking the time to read and understand the rules of the game you're playing seems to me to be a prerequisite to the creation of any house rule. Perhaps I am odd but that strikes me as commonsensical, after the fashion of G.K. Chesterton's metaphor of the fence: "don't tear it down until you know why it was put up in the first place." I think that's sound advice and have tried to put into practice in my own campaigns.
There is no shame in house rules, because they are almost unavoidable if you play a game long enough. That's exactly as it should be, which is why OD&D ends with an exhortation to make the game as you would like it to be. Fight on!
"don't tear it down until you know why it was put up in the first place" - I couldn't have put it better myself. When I came back to RPGs 10 years ago I saw lots of changes which looked to me to be for their own sake, not necessarily improvement s - so we started play with B/X to see why it was so damn popular in the first place. We're still playing it!
ReplyDeleteThese days I'm likely to ask do I really need to write this down as a house rule, or can I just call it a ruling and move on?
ReplyDeleteJames, I am curious - you have indicated that you are playing Pendragon and that you find it be a near perfect role playing game. How much house ruling is going on in your campaign?
ReplyDeleteThere are a few small house rules that have been introduced relating to experience checks, but, so far, nothing major that I can recall. I'd say there are a lot more rulings made on a case by case basis when something occurs not specifically covered by the rules.
DeleteThe real issue with Pendragon, I find, is containing the rules, that is limiting oneself to a mostly non-contradictory set of rules that don't change all that much. And there have been lots of duplicate and contradictory rules and rules versions over the years. The GM has to be choosy about what set of rules they end up using. I think the only house rule I actually have in my current campaign is a re-implementation of the Battle system, which is just a re-working of several previous systems.
DeleteI have made house rules before starting play at a few occasions. Having read so many rules, there are some pitfalls I see over and over again in rules design, like making some stats matter a lot more than any of the others. Those I house rule without feeling bad about it. But, otherwise I tend to agree that if you haven't played the game, you shouldn't be too sure it really is broken.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the idea that you should play the game as written is definitely older than 3rd ed. I lay the blame on Gary. In the AD&D era he often sprouted nonsense and acted like a total dick. That there was only one true way to play D&D, and that was from the holy writ of AD&D was definitely a line he touted.
One attribute to rule them all is not an automatic deal breaker for me. I do pay attention to things like that. That's why I normally don't use point buy in RuneQuest, I don't think you can make a workable scale with INT as written (modifies almost every skill category, is the least changeable attribute, and it also governs how many spells you can memorize). That said, I had one campaign where instead of calculating the ability bonuses from attributes, you got a standard array of ability bonus modifiers to distribute. The first two PCs didn't even use point buy for attributes, I just had the players pick attributes (which turned out to total to about the same for both characters, so I used that number for subsequent characters). Because the other uses of each attribute are somewhat limited, a one for one point buy worked just fine.
DeleteThis, I suppose, is the natural evolution for creative GMs. 1.) Learn the rules and play them RAW, 2.) Start accumulating house rules, 3.) Create a unique area of play, 4.) Author new background and source material, 5.) Gather it all up and put it in a binder and call it a new game. Optional. ) Share it on the internet to inspire others.
ReplyDeleteI've gone through this cycle four times; Gamesh, Challenger Corps, Steam Trek (http://steam-trek.com) and Granite City Heroes. I'm assuming that Vaults of Sha-Arthan is a similar endevor.
House rules which nerf a character class or spell often don't sit well with the players. Much better to fix that kind of stuff before play even starts. That said, you really should know what you're doing.
ReplyDeleteThat's still a house rule - but it's also a fine argument for why "pre-emptive" house rules are not the Bad Idea James contends they are. Most games have at least a few things that are broken badly enough that they need addressing, and thanks to the internet it's pretty easy to determine what the likely problem child rules are. You don't need to wait for some issues to "emerge during play" personally when hundreds of other campaigns have already had the same things prove to need patching. A fine modern example would be the True Strike spell in 5e, which was being called out demonstrating a terrible grasp of basic probability within weeks of release and AFAIK still hasn't had an official fix.
DeleteYou can't always trust the internet gaming community, but when the same problems keep coming up over and over again it's certainly a red flag that a house rule might be needed.
Not only that, there's also years of previous games, both as a player and DM/GM/Referee which provide experience to draw from when house ruling a game. It doesn't need to emerge from game play in THIS campaign, if it emerges from previous game play.
Delete3e has a rather obvious explanation for why it had needed that emphasis – it was the first edition everyone was learning to play in the days of the Internet, and was wildly popular to boot. So people had rules questions, in a way they hadn't in previous editions.
ReplyDeleteYou can allow people to argue what they think the intention of the rules is. This leads to lots of people whining about what a designer said to them at a con one time, what the "obvious" intention of certain words means, and what bad people anyone who thinks otherwise are.
Or you can tell them to sort out what the rules say. If the rules say something stupid, that's a house-ruling issue, but they say what they say. This way is far more functional than the above, though if people are dumb about it it does cause issues.
I think a lot of the contempt for people not playing RAW, ironically, comes from exactly what you're describing – a lot of house rules aren't actually that great or that much of an improvement over what was already there. They're created by people who often don't understand what they're replacing that well, and often struggle with things like 'probability' and 'elegance' and 'spelling.' This was even more true in the early days of 3e.
There's definitely a hefty element of obedience to authority in it, mind. Officialness has a certain cachet and appeal that's really hard to define. But RAW isn't anything to do with 3e in particular other than it being the first of the Internet-era editions. And also probably the first edition coherent enough you could actually take that attitude and not have it immediately explode into a puff of flame and dust.
Also, rules lawyering isn't the same thing as "you should play the official version of the game as written." Rules lawyering is throwing a character at -5 HP into a pond because when they start drowning they rise to 0HP (the official way it works in 3e).
There's different levels of house rules, and different things are meant by them – 'patch obvious absurdities in the game system' is usually acceptable to all but the most unreasonable, IMO.
Surely Gygax was the first person to shame people for house rules? He seemed to think AD&D was perfect and griped endlessly in Dragon about other people's ideas about how to play.
ReplyDeleteMaybe in roleplaying. I feel reasonably confident that some some Prussian running a kriegspiel back in the 19th century had complaints about his game's idiosyncrasies. Might be farther back than that - quite a few games we play today may have started out as house rules for chess or some prototypical version of same. :)
DeleteI largely cleaved to rules as they were written and only had a few unwritten house rules around character generation (4d6 drop lowest re-arrange to suit), stat bonuses except strength and languages were as BX. Strength and languages were as AD&D.
ReplyDeleteNowadays, I'm 3d6 in order and max hp at 1st level and magic users get 4 spells at 1st lvl (RM, offensive, 1 defensive and 1 utility).
I wonder how many people play OD&D as written even to the point of the GM rolling character attributes...
DeleteMinor house rules like you list make a lot of sense, and derive from years of community experience. Still, there is something to be said for understanding WHAT you are changing and not just blindly going with the flow by using popular house rules. On the other hand, there's also something to be said for going with the flow and using popular house rules.
I'm definitely a house-ruler, and sometimes even a pre-emptive house-ruler.
ReplyDeleteWith time, however, I've learned that if my house-rules document grows beyond a handful of pages, I'm probably better off with another game.
I'm a vocal proponent of the "Chesterton's Fence" approach to house-ruling. In fact, I consider it to be the key takeaway of the whole OSR enterprise. "Let D&D be D&D." The game was designed by people who knew what they were doing, and the rules in the manual are there for good reason, so alter or ignore them at your peril.
ReplyDeleteBut that's still a far cry from saying that house rules are never (or even rarely) warranted. I'm also a firm believer in RPGs as DIY toolkits rather than out-of-the-box experiences — which is what both the newly-minted 5e fans of the streaming age and the devotees of Forge/storygame culture and its descendants seem to want. Bespoke visions delivered by auteur designers. Whereas I believe that to be a Dungeon Master is to switch the referee hat or the worldbuilder hat for the game designer hat when you need to. Game design ain't rocket surgery, after all — there's no sense in setting that one element of DMing up on an unreachable pedestal.
I would heavily disagree with one part of what you're saying: "the rules were designed by people who knew what they were doing."
DeleteNo. God no. Hell no. Rules design is a lot like legal drafting, and one of the most important ways in which it is a lot like legal drafting is that the people doing the drafting almost always know what they want to do, but are often expressing it badly, or creating unintended consequences, or including old stuff that really should be redrafted just because it's always been there, or...
Anyway. You get the idea. The rules are definitely there for a reason, and you should probably understand what the reason is before you mess with them. But, like pretty much everyone else on the planet, game designers often don't have a clue what they're doing.
1. EGG is still, to this day, grievously misunderstood. He would endorse the use of house rules more than anyone. ANYONE. Some of the comments on here are incredibly disrespectful, in addition to being wrong,
ReplyDelete2. I can't speak for other games, but anyone who has played D&D since the 80's knows that you have to tweak all kinds of rules. (OK, you don't "have to," but EVERYONE I know does.) No gaming system is perfect as written. As a DM I use 90% of the original 1e AD&D rules, and the other 10% is made up of D&D, UA, 2e, OSRIC, and ideas cultivated from other sources (mostly fantasy literature).
Gygax was a man of many contradictions. He absolutely made a ton of pro-house rules comments. He also made plenty (mostly in the "THERE IS ONLY ONE OFFICIAL D&D AND I MADE IT" days) a lot of comments that can very much imply the opposite.
DeleteHe also could be more than a little disrespectful himself, an I don't think the comments here are particularly so, especially in that context.
How do you explain the wording in the DMG? How do you explain his editorials in the Dragon? How do you explain his ranting at what the APA contributors were doing? People have been reacting to his published words for decades. Now it is true that the intent of those words was misinterpreted, but then it's on the person saying the words to correct the misinterpretation or to be more careful in the word choice in the first place.
DeleteHonestly my frustration with Gary's complaints about people changing rules and such is greater because I respect what he did for the hobby. I have tons of respect for him, but he had a way with words that really rubbed folks the wrong way.
I appreciate both of your responses. My follow up would be: (1) I believe EGG deserves a bit *more* respect than you or I or any other schlub might command or expect, doubly so since he is dead and can't defend himself; (2) the "THERE IS ONLY ONE OFFICIAL D&D AND I MADE IT" days had nothing to do with the game or his fans, and everything to do with his legal battles with Lorraine Williams, TSR, and others, which were unfortunate but totally understandable; and (3) my opinion of EGG was shaped far more by my personal interaction with him online in the last years of his life, after he found peace, rather than whatever he may have said 50 years ago in the DMG or Dragon magazine.
DeleteRe 1: Hey, I respect him plenty. But he has enough bad behaviour that that respect gets dragged down to a close-to-baseline level. Arneson, OTOH, I respect a hell of a lot more, because while his contributions are comparable (or at least nearly so), he doesn't have nearly as much negative stuff dragging him down.
DeleteRe 2: While that's true, his public comments didn't exactly draw that distinction much, and I think the impression it left is understandable.
Re 3: and that's fair. At the same time, Gygax had a long history of public comment, and while he may have changed his mind about things as they went on (or been publicly lying for legal reasons), he still said the stuff, people still got ideas from it, and those ideas are to an extent his fault.
Also, I'm pretty sure Arneson endorsed house rules more. Which I would argue isn't actually a good thing, because at an Arnesonian level of house rules it's debatable if anyone's playing the same game sufficiently to allow things like modules and supplements.
I appreciate some folks had good experiences with Gary later and I'm glad he softened. But he said a lot of hurtful things and really his diatribe against APAs (which I was involved with and was good friends with Glen Blacow, one of The Wild Hunt editors) are hard to totally let pass.
DeleteBack in the day, we mixed D&D and AD&D willy nilly, made up our own rules, tried out Dragon magazine ideas... Ended up having a couple of binders full of photocopies and notes. I'm sure a few people played RAW back then, but I never met them.
ReplyDeleteThe best house rule ever was Justin Howe for his Vaults of Ur (in which Alexei MacDonald of Flailsnails fame and Dennis Laffey of Chanabara fame played): 100 xp for each journal, sketch, map etc contributed; The campaign took fire in my opinion. Players paid attention to every detail, players were inspired by each other's imagination, the dunegon master was invigorated by the enthusiasm. Remember that 100xp is a drop in the bucket of old school XP, but every bit counts in a challenging game.
ReplyDeleteWe did something similar for folks who'd write up a session synopsis or keep a campaign journal, but IIRC the GM scaled up the XP slowly the longer you kept at it without skipping a session. Kept the reward meaningful as levels and XP costs increased, and encouraged you to stick at it. Comparing notes (literally) between different players' takes on a given session was always interesting - what mattered to one person might barely be a footnote to the next guy over.
DeleteIf your house rules are thicker than your rulebook, you're playing the wrong game.
ReplyDeleteOr conversely the right game: the one you have made.
DeleteI think it would be a much better use of one's time to try to find a game that actually suits his playstyle, rather than endlessly pounding square pegs into round holes. But that's just me.
DeleteIn general I agree with the idea that if you need to make lots of house rules, you should look to other games. BUT an appropriate path IS to essentially write your own game. Cold Iron could be looked at as an exhaustive set of D&D house rules (and in fact, originally we called it Christiansen D&D after the designer until he indicated he preferred it be called Cold Iron). But Cold Iron offers another perspective on this. My house rules are indeed longer than the original game (at least if you exclude the spell list), but much of that is because of the exclusions in the original game, and my codification of rulings based on the original rules. And heck, because the game is offered as text or Word files, the rule books I present to my players are actually effectively entirely house rules and as such, they are larger than the original even including the spell descriptions. BUT 95% or more of my text on the spell descriptions is original text. But yea, one of the reasons I started selling all my D&D books in 1990 is that I was just exhausted with feeling like I needed to rewrite the whole game, so yea, I did look to other games, or the home brew I was writing sort of from scratch (I say sort of because the advantages and disadvantages for it were borrowed from Hero and GURPS).
DeleteIf NO ONE had ever decided to take the effort to rewrite game systems, we would at best JUST be playing D&D... And I don't think we should privilege those with the resources and desire to publish commercially above individuals who just want to make a game that works for them. In fact, lots of magic comes when someone does that and their game spreads as happened with Cold Iron. By the time I left college, there were at least 5 folks other than the original designer who had run Cold Iron campaigns. Sometimes those house games even turn out to be popular enough that the designer decides to commercially publish. We wouldn't even have D&D if that hadn't happened in the first place.
No game is perfect; they all need to be house ruled to some extent. But I contend that the system you need to house rule the least, is the best system for you. If you find yourself rewriting a whole rulebook, that system is not a good foundation for the kind of game you want to play.
DeleteI understand that at the dawn of the hobby it was D&D or nothing, but nowadays there are myriad options to choose from. Surely one of them is a close enough fit that you don't have to rewrite the whole thing to get the game you want.
I think D&D would still be the best starting point for Cold Iron. Ultimately it really is a different system, but the attributes and idea of fighter/magic user/cleric and spells divided into levels most closely resembles D&D. It has bits clearly borrowed from RuneQuest and The Fantasy Trip. Yet the system also is genuinely a completely different system than D&D. So I think a game CAN be the start of a new game that ends up with little resemblance to the starting position.
DeleteI think even today, many designers start from an existing game that is familiar to them even if it might actually not be the closest starting point to where they want to go.
I've also seen the progression of games and it's clear to me that something can start off as a few house rules and wind up not looking remotely like the original game. Burning Wheel went through three published versions, the first of which is very different from the final. I'm not sure if Burning Wheel Classic was conceived as a new game but there is some feeling it started from existing games even if conceived as a new game and not just the iteration of house rules where Luke Crane realized he had a new game worthy of publishing.
I think that by the time your house rules are thicker than the original game, you don't need to go looking for other games. You've created the game you want to be playing.
DeleteWhy waste time searching through thousands of other systems hoping for something close to what you are playing now when you've already done the work to make the game you want?
Yea, if you have house ruled a game into a new game that fits your preferences, stick with it. And even if it doesn't quite rise to the level of "new game", if you have invested heavily in a game and have a good set of house rules that make the game fit your preferences and you have no problem getting plenty of players, again stick with it.
DeleteOn the other hand, if you're starting out and a game doesn't look like something you want to play, don't immediately house rule it to death. Either try it out as written, or find something that fits your preferences better.
I am very much in favor of a GM trying to run a game as written before making changes, and these days, I try really hard to limit my house rules. Yet I still wind up with pages of them. I think it's also worth categorizing house rules.
ReplyDeleteOne category of house rules is the collection of errata included in the game, and pretty close to that is stuff taken from different editions (for example, my use of some RQ2 bits in RQ1). Also included would be the set of optional rules in play.
Character generation house rules are another category. Everything from "roll 4d6 keep the best" or "roll 6 sets of 3d6 and arrange as you please" to "PCs start at 3rd level" to which races and character classes are allowed.
Then there's setting house rules. New classes, new races. Total re-writes, for example, the rules I'm working on for Cold Iron Samurai Adventures - I'm taking a friend's 1980s home brew I played (and house ruled) in college and changing it from "pseudo medieval fantasy" to "fantasy Japan". I'm not changing core mechanics, but I do have a few new rules, new weapons and armor tables, and other bits.
For Cold Iron, I have house rules to add non-combat skills (the core game system basically is a combat system and a magic system). I also expanded the weapons table. And I came up with my own pricing for magic items (not included in the core system). I then have a set of house rules that is a codification of rulings made over years of play, most of which are derived from modifiers or procedures in the core system.
But if I pick up a new system, I try very hard to not change rules before we start playing. If there is a vibrant community that has shared some popular house rules, I might give those consideration. But overall, I agree with the idea of understanding the official rules in play before making changes.
It's also worth noting that RuneQuest and Cold Iron are my favorite games because of the limited number of house rules I need (beyond the need to add bits to Cold Iron because they just aren't part of the original rules). I don't have pages of rewrites of magic systems. The magic systems don't frustrate me in play. The combat systems are enjoyable and run smoothly with results that feel good.
I think House Rules are simply a part of roleplay gaming. Sure, to some extent they are created to "fix" a broken rule (in which case, yes, care should be taken - rule of unintended consequences and all), but I've found that far more often, they either;
ReplyDelete1) are created to add a touch more 'flavor' or detail (critical hit rules, for instance), or
2) address some aspect of play to which the rules as written are vague or non-existent (a city-based campaign might benefit for more detailed rules concerning haggling & bartering, whist a wilderness-based campaign might enjoy rules on foraging, hunting, & exposure to the elements). Some games are more complete than others (D&D 5e), or more hyper-focused on a specific setting (Pendragon), and some are more of a framework that almost requires some house ruling (OD&D).
Personally, I much prefer a vaguer framework upon which I can build the game I want, set in the world and campaign style I prefer. If my House Rules out-page the rules as written, cool! That just means I'm having a blast with the game and really making it mine.
I'm tempted to post my 60+ page house rules just so you guys can judge it. :) I think that a lot of the document is just the class explanations and codifying which of the the many alternate rules I am using. Only about 20 or so is stuff I actually wrote on my own.
ReplyDelete