It’s YOUR House

25 Jul

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Though you may play at a friend’s house, as a game master (GM) the rules are yours.

For the past couple of days I’ve been engaged in a discussion with another gamer about 4^th edition Skill Challenges. I’d post a link but the forums are about to be closed down, but this isn’t about summoning the power of our Dominion against this guy to drive home my point … this time.

First off, the thread that spawned the side debate was criticizing Wizards of the Coast (WotC) for printing up lengthy errata for their product so soon. Being that these publishers and editors are actually wizards - performing the Perfect Game for Everyone ritual using the fresh tears of other game publishers mixed with crushed twenty-sided dice - is it so much to ask for perfection? As this would be a first in all of human history, the perfect creation, YES!

Even Skill Challenges, which I took to be one of their best innovations, had some issues on second glance. Difficulty Classes (DC, the number to be rolled for success) were set a bit high, such that a moderate difficulty skill check for a first to third level hero was DC 20. Tough, unless you roll thirty-sided die - even kind of intimidating then. They fixed this by making revisions to lower the DC to 10, taking out the balancing for trained experts and lowering the DC another 5, so making the table of DC by Level true to it‘s name. So Meta, the poster I was debating, thinks the DC’s are too low now. I’m fine with them now, but have been trying to show how although specialist get near automatic success - as they should - can still use their high bonuses for advantage although the rules don’t explicitly state they can.

Many GMs forget that their roll is to adjudicate the rules where unclear. When the tables were saying to add 5 to the DC for skill checks, I was quite content to ignore it: creating my first house rule for 4E. I have house ruled games while first reading them, writing notes in the margins, since no stranger game designer no matter how good knows the story I want to create with their product. Thank Palladium Games for that. Their rules set was the first I GMed, and so abominably convoluted I had to change some things. Further, any new GM that would read all the rules and still try to game instead of tossing out the book and pursuing another hobby is devoted. Running Rifts: trial by fire.

There are those that go to far though, changing rules mid-stream to suit their purposes - like killing the player’s characters (PCs). Changing the rules to create the kind of story you want to tell, good. Not making these changes known to the players, bad. You end up with an adversarial current between game master and player, which have been responsible for turning many away from the hobby and making those that stay into total paranoid assholes.

I publish my house rules to create a level playing field, as level as it can be when one of the participants is god of the setting. Publish enough design changes and you can end up with a new game of your own, and finally get paid for your obsession. If an alteration changes a character I’ll let the player revise for other options to not bone them - unless it‘s an erotic fantasy game, but I seldom play those with groups.

Errata: change “seldom” in the last sentence to “NEVER”.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Everything, with these Tags: Gaming, Insight . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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