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Old 01-06-2021, 05:05 AM   #41
Chris Rice
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: London Uk, but originally from Scotland
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules - Take 2

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Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck View Post
In days of yore, which is to say when all we had were the microgames Melee and Wizard before official Talents came along, we allowed all PCs to "know" certain things such as swimming, climbing, horseback riding, that seemed appropriate enough to their backgrounds and (this may be the important bit) they successfully demonstrated the use of during actual play. So once you survived swimming across a stream, staying in the saddle, or climbing some steep terrain without killing yourself, your characters could note on their Record Sheets they "knew" Climbing, Riding, or Swimming for future use (we had house rules for all those activities and more before Advanced Melee and ITL came along). Call it trial by fire: if you made the saving rolls to swim a pond or climb a ledge without killing or seriously injuring yourself, you could claim these skills as part of your character, for free, no points to keep track of. Alternatively a PC could claim they knew how to ride or swim because they came from communities where those activities were common, and then got a break on the related saving rolls. It was all loosey goosey, but it worked out just fine in .
I started with D&D in the late ‘70s. The game didn’t have a skill system so we used to do exactly what you describe! I still like this idea as it allows for quick character generation but the depth of the character develops organically over time.
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Old 01-06-2021, 09:47 AM   #42
larsdangly
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules

Four or five years ago I wrote a fantasy-heartbreaker sort of game that was based closely on canonical TFT but totally removed the concepts of talents and the hero/wizard divide and replaced them with a half dozen stats, sort of inspired by the structure of the rules of Prince Valiant. I like the end result, though honestly I wouldn't bother playing it now that I have groaning shelves full of awesome Legacy Edition materials.
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Old 01-07-2021, 03:21 PM   #43
Steve Plambeck
 
Join Date: Jun 2019
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules

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Originally Posted by Chris Rice View Post
I started with D&D in the late ‘70s. The game didn’t have a skill system so we used to do exactly what you describe! I still like this idea as it allows for quick character generation but the depth of the character develops organically over time.
My friends and I started with TFT at that same time, then after a few months we set aside a day to give D&D a try as one of us owned a copy. That was all it took to say, oh heck no, we're going back to TFT!

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Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
Four or five years ago I wrote a fantasy-heartbreaker sort of game that was based closely on canonical TFT but totally removed the concepts of talents and the hero/wizard divide and replaced them with a half dozen stats, sort of inspired by the structure of the rules of Prince Valiant. I like the end result, though honestly I wouldn't bother playing it now that I have groaning shelves full of awesome Legacy Edition materials.
Started writing my own game too during 1997-98, closely based as well on TFT. Mainly because we'd accumulated so many house rules playing TFT since '78 I wanted to integrate it all in one book, especially to make it easier on any new players we hoped to recruit - at that point TFT was long out-of-print so we couldn't exactly tell new players to go buy the canonical books. Of course right away I stated getting my own ideas about a few new directions, one of those also being to remove the wizard/hero divide. It was abandoned in '98 when I stopped playing anything for a number of reasons, but my brain woke up when Legacy came out, I found I still had my ancient manuscript file (a hundred pages written in WordPerfect 4 under DOS!) and I suddenly had the bug to reformat it and get back to work! Now it's been a year of writing, which has been fun, I've got 200 pages of material but still no end in site. I do keep something like talents, but under a revamped memory system, and hold the line at 4 attributes. If it takes another 23 years to finish I'll be 90 when it's ready for playtesting - LOL!
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Last edited by Steve Plambeck; 01-07-2021 at 03:30 PM.
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Old 01-08-2021, 08:21 AM   #44
larsdangly
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules

I completed (and privately distributed) my mega-house-ruled version of TFT around that time; I was pretty happy with it and it contains a ton of monsters and spells and talents not found in the core game, but I don't regret setting it aside when Legacy Edition started being distributed to backers as digital files ~2 years ago. House rules are fun, but when they get out of control the whole thing takes on a life of its own and before you know it you are spending more time making rules than playing. That's not the gaming life I want, so I've scaled way back to just a couple of little tweaks to rules, a carefully curated new weapon list, and the occasional tome of new spells when I am inspired to drop something unexpected in front of the player.
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Old 01-09-2021, 03:52 AM   #45
Steve Plambeck
 
Join Date: Jun 2019
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules

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Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
House rules are fun, but when they get out of control the whole thing takes on a life of its own and before you know it you are spending more time making rules than playing.
We never wasted much time on house rules on game day. We'd take a quick vote at the start if anyone proposed one, if it was unanimous we accepted it and got on with playing. It used up a ton of my personal time between gaming sessions though because I'd volunteered to be "Editor". I'd have to type it up (this is before computers and word processors), add it to one of the binders, and xerox and 3-hole punch enough copies to pass out to everyone to add to their binders the next time we met. We had 4 volumes of house rules after all the years our group lasted! That's what happens when you have 3-4 GMs all contributing to the same campaign world :) Had to xerox 4 volumes of house rules the last time we got a new member. After that is was impossible to recruit new players, because when you hand someone ITL, and Advanced Melee, and Advanced Wizard, and 4 volumes of exceptions to those rules, and say "learn this", well they look at you like you're crazy and then run screaming into the night. That's why I started writing a whole new system from scratch, because it was meant to be less work than maintaining or integrating what had become seven volumes of rules.
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Old 02-12-2021, 05:46 PM   #46
Anomylous
 
Join Date: Jul 2018
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules

I've gotten to like straight RAW pretty well for most purposes, but:

1) I don't think I'm ever going to run a campaign without my elemental wizards expansion / houserule set.

2) Learning talents: happens via "Memory Points" (same as the Talent Points someone else mentioned). You get MPs equal to your IQ on character creation. Later you buy them for either whatever your next attribute point would have cost, or 500 XP, whichever is less. This is meant to be a compromise between original and LE rules.

3) Any player who quotes Monty Python and the Holy Grail must eat their character sheet.
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Old 02-12-2021, 08:18 PM   #47
timm meyers
 
Join Date: May 2020
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules

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Originally Posted by Anomylous View Post
I've gotten to like straight RAW pretty well for most purposes, but:

1) I don't think I'm ever going to run a campaign without my elemental wizards expansion / houserule set.

2) Learning talents: happens via "Memory Points" (same as the Talent Points someone else mentioned). You get MPs equal to your IQ on character creation. Later you buy them for either whatever your next attribute point would have cost, or 500 XP, whichever is less. This is meant to be a compromise between original and LE rules.

3) Any player who quotes Monty Python and the Holy Grail must eat their character sheet.
The 6 aspect wizard mod you wrote is great. I really like the "perk" lists with each school and I can see the personality possibilities of being able to make great unique characters shine.

My only complaint is the added complexity.... I am always torn on how much is to much when it comes to rules, especially ones like these that are so good.

Needless to say I have copied yours for future reference or possible use hope you don't mind.
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Old 02-12-2021, 08:43 PM   #48
Anomylous
 
Join Date: Jul 2018
Default Re: Your all-time top-3 house rules

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Originally Posted by timm meyers View Post
The 6 aspect wizard mod you wrote is great. I really like the "perk" lists with each school and I can see the personality possibilities of being able to make great unique characters shine.

My only complaint is the added complexity.... I am always torn on how much is to much when it comes to rules, especially ones like these that are so good.

Needless to say I have copied yours for future reference or possible use hope you don't mind.
Not at all – thank you! Unique characters is exactly what I was after when designing the system, so that's really good to hear. At this point I've gotten enough positive feedback that I'm considering submitting a more polished version to SJG, for possible inclusion in a Hexagram or something. I kinda doubt they'd go for it, though, even with the draft I'm working on that leaves RAW fully intact.
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