Sly Flourish posted "Four Principles for House Rules" and it is clearly a good view to start with for house rules. These four guidelines pave the road to good solid house rules. I just wanted to throw in a couple of key points that might fall under the "Keep it Compatible" portion. These warnings hopefully can help to avoid the road to hell paved with good intentions in adding house rules.
POINT 1 Understand The Side Effects on the Core Mechanics
Side effects are a big problem when adding new rules to the game. Side effects the unexpected consequences of a rule that can result in potentially game-breaking scenarios. Here is a good example of a good house rule with a nasty side effect.
I ran into this house rule recently that required all character actions to be stated at the beginning of the round. To change that action when your turn came up, you had to make an INT or DEX check. The intent was clear -- to speed up combat. However, the results were slightly different. By making the check only INT or DEX based, it favored DEX or INT builds more. In addition, by introducing uncertainty in the battlefield between the time when an action was declared and when it occurred, it heavily favored a high initiative, requiring a high DEX, as well. The result was that non-DEX, non-INT based classes really got screwed by the new rule. The was clearly not the intent of the rule, it was a nasty side effect.
The other side effect of this rule is that it broke a piece of the simulationist view underlying the original rule. If rounds are 6 seconds and I hesitate at the beginning of battle by, let's say, 2 seconds, my effective rounds will always lag by 2 seconds. Essentially this means that everyone gets 6 seconds from one action to the next. In addition, after combat starts and everyone has acted, it no longer matter who went first since the rounds cycles as actions one after another. With the new rule, the start of the round takes on some special meaning as a point in time that repeats every 6 seconds. This makes no sense in the real world and is just an artificial construct in time.
A key indicator for a side effect is an unnatural reliance on a specific feat, ability score, saving throw, class feature or other element that would not be fairly weighted across all characters. Another key indicator is an artificial construct that does not reflect the realism or fidelity of the original rules. Side effects may be sublte, but in systems where often advantages and disadvantages are doled in in portions of a mere %5 (a d20 based-system), subtle can be on equal footing with normal rules.
POINT 2 Understand The Side Effects on the Characters
This point is where most GMs really fail and break rule zero (everyone has fun) when making house rules, especially in the middle of campaigns. A significant portion of many gaming systems is building a character concept. When a GM chooses to house rule (add a rule) or ignore a rule that a character build relies on, it is very easy to break an entire character concept and end up with an unhappy player. Now the problem is that in some systems, there are 10's of character classes with 10's of archetypes and other variations giving hundreds of possible character classes. GMs are usually ill equipped to judge a rule in the context of this many options. Let me give a couple of examples on this:
In certain systems we have the ability to put points into various skills as we level up. In our example, one of these skills is Appraise, and it is used to value items, which is important when buying goods and negotiating the price. It keeps the character from getting ripped off. If the GM decides to never use the Appraise mechanic for goods, then the player can feel cheated because he wasted those points on a useless skill and part of what he expected to be in the game is missing. The player is now upset over her broken character. Rule zero is broken.
Another example is Armor Class Penalty being house-ruled to not be used in Pathfinder. The side effect that may not be readily apparent is that the fighter class, which has several class features for reducing armor class penalty, now is broken. It is better to replace those ACP reducing options with other things. If the GM doesn't catch this, he can end up with broken fighters class players that get real unhappy.
In one game I was in, there was a game ruling that was made giving all characters the ability to do a certain thing in combat given a high enough skill roll. This quickly became an issue since one of the character had specifically taken a feat to allow them to do that, and they now felt they had wasted a feat for nothing.
In other cases, I have heard of blatantly biased rules being introduced in the middle of a campaign to specifically nerf a character from using one of their ability combinations because it was overpowered. This is a recipe for an unhappy player from the get go, and as a player if I ever saw this, I would be very tempted to leave the GM's game for good. In this case the house rule is designed to break a character.
In all of these cases, the impact of the character-breaking house rule is lessened if it is clearly spelled out upfront in a campaign before characters are built. This doesn't completely fix the problem, but it does lessen the impact on rule zero.
Conclusion
Making house rules can be a dangerous game when a GM steps ill-prepared into the realm of game design without understanding the real underpinnings of a system. In addition, as a system grows in size from something relatively simple like D&D 5e to something as voluminous as Pathfinder, one must become more hesitant in adding house rules because the breadth of knowledge required to judge their impact.
However, when the time comes to consider a house rule, the GM, as part of the original 4 principles from SlyFlourish, should also consider the side effects of the new rule on core game mechanics and on individual character builds. GMs should set house rules early so there is a clear expectation when the game starts. More importantly, the GM should be prepared to throw out house rules when players protest breaking the game. After all, when your say your are going to play Pathfinder (or D&D 5e or FATE or Shadowrun, etc) that implies how the game will be played. Breaking that expectation is a slippery slope.
POINT 1 Understand The Side Effects on the Core Mechanics
Side effects are a big problem when adding new rules to the game. Side effects the unexpected consequences of a rule that can result in potentially game-breaking scenarios. Here is a good example of a good house rule with a nasty side effect.
I ran into this house rule recently that required all character actions to be stated at the beginning of the round. To change that action when your turn came up, you had to make an INT or DEX check. The intent was clear -- to speed up combat. However, the results were slightly different. By making the check only INT or DEX based, it favored DEX or INT builds more. In addition, by introducing uncertainty in the battlefield between the time when an action was declared and when it occurred, it heavily favored a high initiative, requiring a high DEX, as well. The result was that non-DEX, non-INT based classes really got screwed by the new rule. The was clearly not the intent of the rule, it was a nasty side effect.
The other side effect of this rule is that it broke a piece of the simulationist view underlying the original rule. If rounds are 6 seconds and I hesitate at the beginning of battle by, let's say, 2 seconds, my effective rounds will always lag by 2 seconds. Essentially this means that everyone gets 6 seconds from one action to the next. In addition, after combat starts and everyone has acted, it no longer matter who went first since the rounds cycles as actions one after another. With the new rule, the start of the round takes on some special meaning as a point in time that repeats every 6 seconds. This makes no sense in the real world and is just an artificial construct in time.
A key indicator for a side effect is an unnatural reliance on a specific feat, ability score, saving throw, class feature or other element that would not be fairly weighted across all characters. Another key indicator is an artificial construct that does not reflect the realism or fidelity of the original rules. Side effects may be sublte, but in systems where often advantages and disadvantages are doled in in portions of a mere %5 (a d20 based-system), subtle can be on equal footing with normal rules.
POINT 2 Understand The Side Effects on the Characters
This point is where most GMs really fail and break rule zero (everyone has fun) when making house rules, especially in the middle of campaigns. A significant portion of many gaming systems is building a character concept. When a GM chooses to house rule (add a rule) or ignore a rule that a character build relies on, it is very easy to break an entire character concept and end up with an unhappy player. Now the problem is that in some systems, there are 10's of character classes with 10's of archetypes and other variations giving hundreds of possible character classes. GMs are usually ill equipped to judge a rule in the context of this many options. Let me give a couple of examples on this:
In certain systems we have the ability to put points into various skills as we level up. In our example, one of these skills is Appraise, and it is used to value items, which is important when buying goods and negotiating the price. It keeps the character from getting ripped off. If the GM decides to never use the Appraise mechanic for goods, then the player can feel cheated because he wasted those points on a useless skill and part of what he expected to be in the game is missing. The player is now upset over her broken character. Rule zero is broken.
Another example is Armor Class Penalty being house-ruled to not be used in Pathfinder. The side effect that may not be readily apparent is that the fighter class, which has several class features for reducing armor class penalty, now is broken. It is better to replace those ACP reducing options with other things. If the GM doesn't catch this, he can end up with broken fighters class players that get real unhappy.
In one game I was in, there was a game ruling that was made giving all characters the ability to do a certain thing in combat given a high enough skill roll. This quickly became an issue since one of the character had specifically taken a feat to allow them to do that, and they now felt they had wasted a feat for nothing.
In other cases, I have heard of blatantly biased rules being introduced in the middle of a campaign to specifically nerf a character from using one of their ability combinations because it was overpowered. This is a recipe for an unhappy player from the get go, and as a player if I ever saw this, I would be very tempted to leave the GM's game for good. In this case the house rule is designed to break a character.
In all of these cases, the impact of the character-breaking house rule is lessened if it is clearly spelled out upfront in a campaign before characters are built. This doesn't completely fix the problem, but it does lessen the impact on rule zero.
Conclusion
Making house rules can be a dangerous game when a GM steps ill-prepared into the realm of game design without understanding the real underpinnings of a system. In addition, as a system grows in size from something relatively simple like D&D 5e to something as voluminous as Pathfinder, one must become more hesitant in adding house rules because the breadth of knowledge required to judge their impact.
However, when the time comes to consider a house rule, the GM, as part of the original 4 principles from SlyFlourish, should also consider the side effects of the new rule on core game mechanics and on individual character builds. GMs should set house rules early so there is a clear expectation when the game starts. More importantly, the GM should be prepared to throw out house rules when players protest breaking the game. After all, when your say your are going to play Pathfinder (or D&D 5e or FATE or Shadowrun, etc) that implies how the game will be played. Breaking that expectation is a slippery slope.
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