I’ve been thinking a lot about my upcoming campaign and the feel I wanted to give to it, that as sprung in the beautiful mass of neuron I call my brain a couple of extremely simple house rules.

Tell me what you think!

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I’m one for heavily modified settings. In fact, I very often run my DnD games in steampunk, or even modern, settings. My main problem always was firearms.

The thing with firearms is that almost every systems who uses them make them extremely complicated, with magazine size, reload time, rate of fire, autofire rule, and so on, and so on. While this, in theory, is not much of a problem, for me who has to often handwave or house-rule firearms into my game, it makes the whole situation unmotivating. I don’t like being bothered by rules, I’m more of a rulings kinda guy, old-school yo.

Thus, here’s what I’m thinking : Why not make a universal rules for firearms? For the D20 players amoungst you, here’s a table with definitions!

• Damage in rules -> equivalent in d20 system -> What it represents
• Glancing damage -> d4 -> A feebly thrown dagger
• Light damage -> d6 -> More or less a hit from a short sword or dagger
• Medium damage -> d8 -> An arrow, or a good sword swing
• Heavy damage -> d10 -> A crossbow bold
• Devastating damage -> d12 -> A sledgehammer to the face

General rules

Autofire : Weapons capable of autofire may make an area attack instead of a normal attack. It uses up the weapon’s ammo, thus the character must reload before being able to shoot again. One cannot make another attack in a round in which he has used autofire.

Reloading : When a character rolls a non-disastrous critical fumble (some systems will define it, some others won’t, most often, you choose), his weapon is empty. Reloading takes a full round (unless you wish to make an advantage that reduces that to a number of actions), and leaves the player vulnerable. It’s hard to dodge and reload at the same time

Pistols

Pistols deal light damage and are rather reliable, they should have decent range (handwaved, define what is “Decent” in your own game). The good thing about pistols, you can have two of them.

Submachine guns

Submachine guns should be treated as pistols with autofire possibility. A character using a pair of submachine guns may make his area attack with a small bonus to damage (consider it one category higher than the submachine gun, thus, medium damage).

Revolvers

The big brother of the pistol. Essentially the same thing, but bigger, bulkier, deals medium damage.

Rifles

Rifles have good to great range, sometimes, they have an autofire mode, sometimes, they have attached grenade launchers (treat as autofire, but you don’t have to reload the gun before shooting again, just have to reload the grenade before using another one). They deal Heavy damage

Shotguns

Shotguns are particular in that they very their damage depending on range. At point blank range, the damage is always Devastating, and for every 2 steps a character  lowers the weapon’s damage, the character may add an additional target to his attack. Thus, a character could shoot two (close-by) targets for Medium damage, or 3 targets for Glancing damage. A shotgun has a maximum range of Short, as should be adjucated by the GM.

That it, really! I wanted to keep it as basic as possible. For anything else, stick to your favorite system’s ranged combat rules, add the numbers and be happy!

Note: Some people might wonder why a shotgun blast would make as much damage as a hit from a great axe in DnD, when firearm damage was much greater in d20 modern for example. My thinking is simple : Get sliced by a freaking greataxe and come back to tell me it was less painful then a shotgun blast. Plus, it balances ranged and melee combat so that melee weapons are still viable.

YAY! HOUSERULES!

So we’ll be using Sword and Wizardry as a system for the Ashenvale mega-dungeon game.

I figured it would make me a decent human being if I actually published my house-rules (and the most gleefully stolen house-rules I have deemed worthy of my interest, of course) to the general public (IE, my players) a bit before the game (in this case, 2 months before the first one, I believe in early prep).

 Enough with the overuse of glorious parentheses! On to the meat of the subject! The house-rules!

 Weapon damage per class

Credits to Akratia for this one, you can find his exact wording  on his blog.

 To be brief (and to force you to give the man a hit or three), all three classes, based on their expertise, cause different damage depending on the type of weapon they use. For example, a fighter with a two handed sword is going to be much lethal than a cleric or magic-user would. As such, they make different dice of damage. If you want the number, check out the creator of the houserule!

 Note : The magic-user does not take a -1 penalty to attack using two-handers.

 Weapon proficiency change

This affects only the cleric and the magic-user. At character creation, the player of a non-fighter must choose a certain number of “weapon groups” he can wield with ease. The cleric chooses 2 and the wizard selects one. Fighters can easily use any weapons.

 The weapon groups are the same as in 4E, with the addition of the following weapon “packs”.

 Wizard’s pack : Dagger, quarterstaff, sickle, club

 Knight’s pack : Longsword, Maces, Lances, Two-handed swords

Gladiator’s pack : Short swords, Flails, two exotic weapons of choice

Assassin pack : Dagger, short sword, crossbow, darts/blowgun

(Other packs can be created by the players if they make sense, the rule is “4 weapons per pack”)

Everyone can backstab!

Again, thanks to Akratia!

The idea is simple. If somebody sneaks in behind a bad guy, carefully positions herself and stabs said evildoer in the squishies with a non-two-handed weapon, she deals more damage. Check out the blog post on Akraticwizardry

Special people get special abilities

Anyone who rolls 17 or 18 on an ability score gets a special ability. It’s decided by both the DM and the player, here are a few examples.

Strength : Player can play an ogre (custom make a race), Player gains cleave (as in 3.X), Once per day, the player may deal max damage.

Constitution: Player may have a berserker rage ability, player gains 1 AC for thick skin, player gets +4 to saves against poison.

Dexterity: Player can make a called shot without penalty (1/day), may cancel a trap or an attack (1/day), may roll her own initiative and act either on her own turn, or with the party.

Intelligence: Player gets a hint when stuck (1/day), may provoke a saving throw to an opponent or said opponent loses 2 AC for the rest of the encounter (Outsmart opponent, 1/day)

Ascending AC

Simple enough.

Magic swords are special

Magic swords don’t give bonuses to damage like other magic weapons. On the plus side, every magic sword is unique and has special abilities. Magic weapons are cool, but magic swords are legendary. There might be other special weapons, of course (Gaebolg was a spear, was it not?) but swords are ALWAYS special.

Guild house system

The party begins play with a crap, shack-like guild-house on a tiny parcel of land. They can invest money in the guild house to make it grow, get special areas that will give the players various bonuses. At every guild level, the guild-leader chooses one new add-on for the house.

 Note: The guild house can only host 8 characters before upgrade.

The add-ons and their effects

Gear locker: The players may purchase miscellaneous adventuring gear at a 25% discount.

Armoury: The players may purchase non-magical, non-exotic weapons at a 25% discount.

Forge: The players can have any non-magical weapon and armour repaired for free.

Laboratory: The laboratory creates one random minor potion per week.

Barracks: The house may hold 5 more characters. This upgrade is repeatable.

Expansion: Add a pointless room; the guild gains a reputation point. This upgrade is repeatable.

Shrine: At any given session in which at least one cleric participates, roll a 2D6 (+1 if the cleric has 15+ of wisdom)

2-5: Nothing happens

6-8: Divine favour: One cleric in the party gains a bonus spell for the day at which she visits the shrine before the adventure. That spell may be of any level.

9-10: Smite evil: The cleric deals 1 more damage with every attack on evil NPCs

11-12: Divine protection: Roll 2d6. The result is a pool of collective HP that may soak damage from any attack until depleted. The cleric is the final administrator of that collective pool of HP.

13: Roll twice, if the cleric scores the same result twice, it stacks (2 Divine protection results would be a pool of 4d6 HP)

Stash: A safe place for the players to place their personal loot if they do not wish to carry it them. It’s safer then leaving it lying around.

Trophy room: Allows a single reputation reroll per trophies considered “noteworthy” by the DM. The head of a dragon is noteworthy, the head of a kobold his not.

Fortifications: Add a decent fence to your guild house, additional level makes the fortification bigger.

Servants: Grants a small number of servants to the guild house. They keep it clean, make the food, etc.

Guards: Provides a group of 5 men-at-arms and one veteran to keep the guild house safe. They will not follow the players on an adventure. Addition purchase of this upgrade gives the guild house another squad of 5 men-at-arms and a veteran.

Library: Here magic-users may research spells of up to their maximum levels. No more then 1 spell per magic-user, per month, may be researched. The player adds the spell to his book.

Training room: Fighters of the guild get once per day +2 to an attack or damage roll, they may declare it after the actual attack or damage roll.

Stables: Provides free horses.

 Reputation system

The guild has a reputation and must maintain it, the guild’s reputation starts at 15, and is modified by the following factors:

Guild leader as 13+ of charisma: -1

Guild leader as 13+ of strength: -1

Guild house gains a level: -1

Leader gains a level: -1

Major achievement: -1

A hireling or a player character dies: +1

Major social blunder by any guild member: +1

Guild leader dies: +leader’s level, +leader’s ability bonuses, -new leader’s ability bonuses

To succeed at a reputation roll, the leader must roll over the guild’s reputation score, modifiers may be applied.

The reputation system will be mostly used to find hirelings.

That is all for now! Love, happiness and joy to all of you

Have you ever felt the holy might of the FATE system, from Spirit of the Century? Apart from that book having one of the strongest GM section  (suggesting, for example, to “Send in the ninjas”) I’ve seen in a book in my short and mostly uneventful life, it brought a few interesting mechanical concepts to the table.

The core of the FATE system is what they call “aspects”.  Although we won’t be studying the intricacies of “aspects” (although you can find the SRD here), I’ve found that they’re fairly easy to implement in any game with a little house-ruling and a tiny bit of time to add a layer of depth to your players’ characters.

Aspects

Aspects are a word, an expression, a quote, that represents something a character is skilled or talented in. For example, a character with the “Daughter of a seamstress” aspect would be pretty skilled in the fine art of sewing.

The exact bonus such an aspect would give depends heavily on “What is decent, following the spirit of the system”. In DnD 4E, it could be an extra +5 on a skill check and not be that ridiculous (the equivalent of a specialization, or skill training, or what-have-you) or in a White Wolf, it’d be, say, one dice, same as a specialization (Hey! Look! A trend!) (more…)