House Rules. Do you have them and what are they?

[Etarnon]

My 2e group wizard does that, bat guano, mimicking picking it up and all.

[Tony Misfeldt]

My roommate downloaded the PDF of The Book Of Erotic Fantasy onto my computer. It's available on isohunt.com for those of you who are interested.

As I thought, there are a few gems to be found in that book. There were some parts a skimmed through but didn't care enough to read fully. And there were some things that are strictly a matter of taste.

The feats that boost your stats through sustained sex are interesting (and useful). In using those feats, the rules on sustaining sex are very important. The rules for seduction are different from mine (they use the Diplomacy skill). And some of the spells and classes are kinda cool. Like the Tantrist Mage, who recharges his spent spells by having sex for one hour. Or the Sacred Prostitute, who can heal people by having sex with them, and even recharge another spellcaster's spells with sex.

The "Cursed Orgasm" spell can have some clever uses (cast it on someone covertly then seduce them). The "Disrobe" spell can trip someone up during battle (kinda hard to fight when your armour is falling off). "Touch Me Not" grants a +2 to your AC, and inflicts 1d8+1/level (to a max of 1d8+5) damage/round to anyone you're grappled with.

The STD, "Whore's Delight" can actually be a very useful tool. Get infected, sleep with the enemy, if he fails his Fort check he's paralyzed for 1d4 hours. Need help convincing him to go to bed with you? Black Out has a Fort DC of 20, is relatively affordable (only 25 gp), and makes them suseptable to sexual suggestions (like from a "Suggestion" spell).

Of course, there are several things in there not worth adding. But that's the kinda stuff you just ignore and choose not to use.

[Tony Misfeldt]

My DM has a few "campaign specific" house rules which he cooked up. As we're playing in a homebrew setting of his own creation, he came up with some changes to make his world different from all the others out there. Here are some of the ones I know about.

1) The horse has not evolved on this world (our characters do an aweful lot of walking). Some of the wealthy elite are known to ride domesticated deer, but mostly people travel by ox drawn carts. Of course, this also means no one has any cavalry units in their armies, or devised any tactics to combat cavalry, such as pike men.

2) The elves have left the continent about 600 years ago. Imagine playing D&D in Middle Earth set 600 years after the events of The Lord Of The Rings. Although he has hinted that they may one day return.

3) The halfling race is extinct. There's a huge backstory to this, but essentially they were hunted into extinction by worshippers of the world's God Of War. The DM's reason for doing this was that halflings & gnomes filled the same niche in a campaign. So why bother having both?

4) There are no half-orcs. Orcs and humans aren't just two different races, they're two different species. Breeding a human and an orc would be like trying to breed a cat and a dog. They can have sex with each other, but not procreate. He fills this niche by making hobgoblins a playable character race.

5) Ogres are a subspecies of goblinoid. He chose to do this because in every edition before 3rd, ogres were drawn to look like giant neanderthals. In the 3rd Edition MM, they look like giant, muscular goblins. This raises the question of crossbreeding goblinoids. Would an ogre mating with a hobgoblin result in a new subspecies of goblin? After all, it's not like trying to breed cats with dogs. It would be more like breeding Great Danes with Bulldogs, or canines with lupines, or lions with tigers (all of which are not only plausible, they HAVE happened).

6) Resurrection spells require a human sacrifice. In the world's backstory, this is due to a world shattering cataclysm (not unlike the one in the Dragonlance setting), which occurred 6000 years ago. All high level magics (7th level and higher) have been altered in some way. Resurrection is the only one I know about so far. Specifically, in order to resurrect a character, you have to balance things with a life of equal value. As we haven't tried this yet, we're all a little vague on what "equal value" means (and the DM isn't very forthcoming). It could mean socially (in order to resurrect the slain king, you must sacrifice a king or queen). Or it could mean of equal experience level (to resurrect a 5th level fighter, you must sacrifice a 5th level fighter). Although I'm unsure, if it's the latter, if an NPC class can be substituted for a PC class (resurrecting a 5th level PC fighter by sacrificing a 5th level NPC warrior). I guess we'll find out once our cleric is powerful enough to cast Resurrection.

[wizarddog]

I am currently experimenting with a mechani I call Destiny poinst and a few other house rules for my 4e Red Hand of Doom Campaign.
Red Hand of Doom.

1. I was impressed by Old School Hack's awesome points and in creating collaborative gaming experiences with my last group before it disbanded. I like the idea of having the players help tell the story so I have been using them to fill out certain aspects in the game as we progress. I created the Destiny point system as a hybrid of the awesome points and the Saga System Destiny Point systems to allow the players to make changes to the game. Each player gains a destiny point per session and may use it to give advantages to their character as long as the group agree's it a proper sue of the Destiny point that fist the characters chosen destiny.

2. I allow players to use any skill to complete a task as long as they can justify its use; For example using insight instead of perception "If I was trying to hide something, I would most likely would hide it..."

3. Instead of placing treasure, I have the PC's choose one player to make a treasure roll. They choose the skill and if they hit the target DC they find an item of value and they get to describe it. Occasionally, I will place a "Plot Item' that would be a treasure that is important to the plot (A Magic sword, a pan flute, etc.) but this free's up me trying to make treasure to fit the party.


So far, the group seems to enjoy the game.
http://www.meetup.com/pasadena-dnd

[Tony Misfeldt]

Here's something I came up with for when PCs have to lead large groups of NPCs into battle, especially against exceptionally large armies and when the players and/or DM don't have enough minis to play out the battle. I borrowed the idea from the board game Axis & Allies. In order to make a single mini represent a large group of soldiers, place it on top of some sort of token. Personally, I purchased a bunch of poker chips from the dollar store for this purpose.

Each colour of token represents a different number of NPCs. When you place a mini on the token, it multiplies the number of NPCs by that many. For example, I painted a number 10 on all the white poker chips, 20 on the blue ones, 50 on the red ones, and 100 on the green ones. Take a soldier/orc/goblin/whatever and put it on a green token and you now have 100 of whatever is standing on top of it.

During combat, you treat the individual minis as individual NPCs, but multiply their hitpoints by the number of their assigned token. For damage, use half the number of their assaigned token as the multiplier.

For example, an orc with a scimitar on a green token would have 800 hit points and do 1d8 x 50 damage per hit. If that unit is brought down to half hitpoints during a battle, the green token is switched for red and they do 1d8 x 25 damage. And so on and so forth.