Posted on July 22, 2011
House Rules for Pathfinder
I think it would be kind of helpful if I kept track of house rules. So I’m going to, here.
If you think of any others, let me know and I’ll add them here.
– Normally when you have lost a number of negative hit points equal to your constitution score, you die. House rule is that when you have lost a number of negative hit points equal to your normal hit point total, you die. Dangerous at 1st level, less so as you progress. Although this still means that a 1st level Wizard can take 12 points of damage before the gray rain-curtain of this world rolls back and all turns to silver glass. 12 points at 1st level is a lot and probably more than his CON score.
– Normally Grease doesn’t create flammable grease. House rule is that yes it does.
– Normally skill checks with a natural roll of 1 or 20 just count as 1+skill or 20+skill. House rule is that 1 is an auto-fuck-up and 20 is an automatic, however extremely unlikely, success. Taking a 20 is not the same thing as rolling a 20.
– Normally if you take Massive Damage (1/2 your hit points as long as you have 100+ hit points) you have to make a Fort save or die. Fuck that. House Rule is that if you get to the point where you have 100+ hit points, you can take that shit on the chin like you were Bruce Fucking Campbell.
– Normally Elves sleep. House rule, they have to trance, but it isn’t sleep and they don’t have to do that.
– The rules for Criticals and Fumbles are house rules too. If you fight with heroic recklessness, you Fumble when you roll a 1. However, if you fight with heroic recklessness, your Critical range is increased by one. You get your critical multiplier in Critical Cards. Bad guys don’t typically fumble and they don’t get Critical Cards. They just multiply their dice roll for damage by their Crit multiplier.
– Character creation is 4d6 with the lowest dice discarded, seven times with the lowest overall result discarded.
– I assign a skill bonus based on the fortune cookie you get while you were rolling your character/ a.s.a.p.
– Unless you are reasonably expecting danger or making a point of presenting yourself in such a way, you aren’t wearing armour and your bows aren’t strung. No they aren’t, that’s not how they work. Also, I assume you climb off horses when you go into buildings. Correct me if I’m ever wrong about that.
– Normally wearable magic items resize to their wearer’s size. House rule is that this applies to weapons too.
– (Thanks Ben) The rules for tabulating critical damage. Roll one die and multiply it (instead of rolling multiple dice), do not multiply any modifiers.
The rules for tabulating critical damage. Role one die and multiply it (instead of rolling multiple dice), do not multiply any modifiers.
Here are several I use for 3.5 and Pathfinder.
– On turn order, if there are multiple people on the same side taking turns one after the other, they can all act simultaneously. (EG: Guard, Player, Guard, Guard, Player, Player: Guard goes, then player, two guards go at the same time, two players go at the same time, repeat). Since all of my gaming is online this well and truly speeds things up.
– You can move up to half your speed as a full attack. It has always, ALWAYS bugged me that no matter how fast you are, 30ft, 150ft, superluminal, warp-speed, if you move more than five feet in a round you can’t make a full attack.
– Iterative attack penalty is revoked. At higher levels unless you are heavily optimized, the cumulative penalty of -25% chance to hit every attack is nothing but a huge liability. I believe this is how AD&D 2nd Edition did it.
– During a critical, you may revoke the extra damage and instead get additional attack actions equal to the critical multiplier, all of them at the roll that confirmed the crit. Meaning a nat20 on a scythe and a 17 on the confirm roll means those three extra attack actions are all natural 17s. This gives you a chance to utterly devastate your opponent.
– If a Lawful person violates his alignment/class oaths/etc, and if this would cause loss of class abilities, he must be proven guilty of the act in a fair trial. This is more setting fluff but when it comes to the divine, alignment is extremely powerful.
I like that second rule, stranger. I’m going to have to think about that one.
It does seem a bit odd that you can’t move at all – walking while firing arrows and short charges wouldn’t be too terribly difficult to imagine.
That said, freeing up melee classes like that does seem like it would tip the game in their favour – how do you stop your spellcasters from complaining?