Mar 12
Tweaking my death/dying house rule. Pretty simple and it came to me this morning in the wee hours. If you make your death save you get a minor action. This doesn’t seem like much but as long as you have a potion of healing on your person and the surge to use it, this gives …
Mar 03
Something I’ve been tossing around in my head today is a way to have the group actually try to use stealth from time to time. Successfully I mean. As it stands, only one person in the group is actually trained in stealth and the other four have pretty low Dexterity all things considered so it …
Feb 19
Since I don’t like players able to survive just flat out silly falls I’m changing the falling rules to make them a little more drastic. As an example a level 6 character can survive on average a 100′ fall. That’s just silly to me. To offer an anecdote, I’m specifically working to avoid a recurrence …
Dec 19
[D'oh. There is a similar kind of thing that you can find here by GreyScott. Different from mine but the spirit is the same. I like mine better but then I like my kids a lot more than other people's kids so that's not unexpected.] Barring dungeon crawls I don’t really do trivial encounters, that …
Oct 26
Updated my KOC Nerf application to 1.1. I’ve added in two new check boxes to help deal with the power disparity from level 1 to 30 that have ‘necessitated’ the need for Expertise and Masterwork armours. One box reduces a creatures defenses by -1 per Tier. Thus negating the need for Expertise which adds +1 …
Oct 26
Ran this encounter a second time. Same creature mix and numbers, 5 new characters. This time we had a Warden, Shaman, Seeker, Monk and Sorcerer going up against the masses of creatures. Even without all that much radiant damage what was on the middle of the Hard scale went better, primarily because Action Points were …
Oct 19
Piercings and Tattoo’s for fantasy characters? Magical piercings and tatoos? WTH?! That’s just about the du… Hmmm you know that might actually work… This thought train this morning was put into motion by the Tattoo’s and Piercing’s article over here. My first ‘visual’ was one of the demons that escaped from Hell in the TV …
Oct 13
Found this today and thought it worthy of posting to spread the knowledge. As a general rule I like the way 4th Edition does critical hits especially since I’ve been using a house rule that has attacks doing average damage during playtests of houserules. Which works well I think. But I can see where 1 …
Oct 12
I’ve been meaning to make these and finally got around to finishing them up. They’re Player Bonus Cards much like the official RPGA ones (and some ideas were based on those cards obviously). Other ideas come from this article which I’d posted about before. This is the first draft and doesn’t include any ‘cursed’ cards. …
Oct 10
Okay I ran this playtest this afternoon with my wife running the characters. The party was 6th level and comprised of a Assassin, Fighter, Warlock, Invoker and Bard. None of the characters were ‘character op’ped’. I quick built them in the Character Builder then went in and tweaked them where they needed it to make …
Oct 01
Okay just in case anyone else is remotely interested I’ve uploaded the KOC Nerfer to the site. Here’s the included Read Me below. This is based on my thoughts on House Rules that are intended to make the game more fun (better hit rate for both sides), less draggy (increased damage), monsters are able to …
Sep 28
Wrote a quickly little app that can parse a .monster file and remove 1/2 level to the defenses, add 1/2 level to the damages and adds +2 static attack bonus to the attacks. With the current iteration of the Monster Builder you have to have a custom version of any official monster in order to …
Sep 23
This is an interesting idea. To sum it up, you seperate the gold of the world from the magic of the world by making magic items not a corner store inventory item. The only way to get magic (which is how I’ve always done it BTW other than consumables) is to go take them from …
Sep 18
I was going to post an encounter I made last night for testing some house rules but I forgot to export the files and send them to myself here at work so I’ll have to do it later. Which really begs the question where the MB keeps it’s files? I couldn’t figure it out at …
Sep 10
I see the whole ‘average damage’ has resurfaced. To sum it up, rather than the player’s rolling dice they simply determine what their average damage is and use that for all non-critical rolls. Â So if you do a 1d6+5 then you apply 5 damage per hit. A 3d6+7 is 9 damage etc. I can see …
Aug 06
Someone else mentioned this and it reinforced my own observations. Defenders and and Leaders, the ones primarily in the front lines usually at least in my experience in tough fights tend to drop and then a turn later stand back up. Aka they wobble but they don’t fall down (or stay down anyway). What would …
Aug 05
In RPG’s, DnD specifically but most of them, there is typically no way to do the classic “Sentry Takedown” (referred to hereafter as STD because it’s funny. Unless you have one and then you have my sympathy but not empathy). You know the scene, the hero sneaks up to some roving watcher, grabs him by …
Jul 16
Found an article that has an interesting idea. If you’ve played Munchkin then you know about their Cheat cards. These cards let you basically cheat, you can ignore any restrictions or requirements for any other card and play it as if you weren’t restricted by the card’s text. So you could equip a weapon that …
Jul 07
Now about those character stats… Are they really necessary for the enjoyment of the game? Or are they a sacred cow that no one’s quite willing to kill off and make a nice burger with? True20 did away with them and seems to work pretty well. They’re not completely gone but instead are simply your …
Jun 26
This is the list of house rules I’ll be using for my upcoming game(s). There are others that I’d use that would vary by the level of the party and if it was planned to be a long term permanent group and even by the party make up, but these are some basic changes that …
