House Rules
 

Too soon for DF box set house rules yet? Just wondering what folks are changing for their table. Me, the only thing I have house ruled is negative hit points and dying rules. In our campaign, characters die at negative 1xHT, so if they have a 12 HT they die at -12. A little more brutal perhaps, but seems old school in feel to me.

Anybody else have some house rules they care to share?

Re: House Rules
 

HT? or Hit Points?

Re: House Rules
 

My bad. Its negative Hit Points! I just feel normal rules are...long-winded. It's a lot of book keeping. I feel that going to negative hit points is both more sobering to players and easier as well.

Re: House Rules
 

So are you planning to substitute anything for Hard to Kill? I don't believe it's a required trait anywhere, but it is an option for several templates, and this makes it useless.

Re: House Rules
 

Generally, Characters dying is a bad thing. It can **** people off and takes time to rectify by creating a new character. It can throw party balance off or result in replacements with cookie-cutter look-a-likes (my Cleric died... guess I need to make another Cleric or else the party won't have a healer).

I'm not saying that character deaths should never happen - especially when a party or player does something extremely stupid or heroically sacrificial - but changing the rules specifically to increase PC deaths just seems utterly counter-productive to me.

Re: House Rules
 

If you want a gritty, old-school feel, use DF 15's 125-point templates instead. (I've long used them.) The DFRPG templates are supposed to be pretty tough, as, in D&D terms, they're about 6th level characters.

Most characters won't do too much below 0 HP anyways. At -HP, they're almost all down for the count and knocked out. I don't see the value of making that level outright death all the time.

Re: House Rules
 

Well, my group keeps rolling HT and taking risks in those situations. Making death automatic at -1xHP might make some players more careful, and thus prevent deaths.

Re: House Rules
 

It depends on HT levels and related traits, but when someones' sunk 50-odd points into being a metaphorical cockroach, they should get to be a cockroach.

Re: House Rules
 

There are raise dead spells and items.

Also mortal wounds could be left in to allow everyone the chance to come back from death with a lucky roll.

Re: House Rules
 

An idea I've played around with (buy never used) to make the game more "deadly" is to increase the penalty for consciousness checks. Instead of -1 per multiple of -HT it's -2. So at HT 14, you roll 14 to stay up at below 0 HP, 12 at below -HPx1, 10 at -HPx2, 8 at -HPx3, and so on.

This doesn't make it more likely for the player to die directly from damage, but they are more likely to go down and need to be dragged out by their buddies (or left to be captured or eaten).

If that is still not enough, you could even go -3 or -4!