Category Archives: House Rules

House Rule: Guns

Concept: Alternate gun mechanics Tested in: Various Eight Arms campaigns What it is: D&D assumes a standard medieval fantasy setting, and Pathfinder assumes a medieval fantasy setting that likes to pretend it isn’t standard. The Eight Arms world time-advanced that … Continue reading

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House Rule: Mitigated Save-or-Dies

For November I had a series of short posts about weird mechanics I’ve used or played in games. Before I posted anything I asked my players about any mechanics they thought would a good fit for one of those posts, … Continue reading

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Faith: Signature Spells

No, I’m not done talking about Faith just because it’s on break. My explicit goal going into Faith was to make it feel like an anime. This means arcs needed a certain pacing, enemies needed a certain charisma, battles needed … Continue reading

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Guest Characters

Concept: Guest characters Tested in: The One Piece campaign, The Eight Arms and the Contract of Barl, the Worldwound campaign What it is: In D&D, players build characters and control them through adventures. That’s the elevator pitch and core concept … Continue reading

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Lucid Dreaming

Concept: Lucid dreaming Tested in: The Great Tower of Oldechi What it is: D&D likes working via cause and effect. Orcs don’t lose hit points at random, they lose hit points when they get hit by hammers. Wounds don’t heal … Continue reading

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Multi-Character Characters

Concept: Multi-character characters Tested in: The One Piece campaign What it is: As a shounen fighting manga, One Piece has a lot of battles. We did a pretty good job of simulating it in the One Piece campaign, with recurring … Continue reading

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The Million Murloc March

Concept: All-minion combat Tested in: The Great Tower of Oldechi What it is: In D&D 4E, minions were a creature type with static damage and only one hit point. They rarely had more than two powers (a melee attack and … Continue reading

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Side-Scrolling Combat

Concept: Side-scrolling combat Tested in: Delve Night and The Great Tower of Oldechi What it is: D&D’s combat map has always been top-down, since before it was even D&D. It is, after all, a tabletop game, not a wallside game. … Continue reading

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Dreamblade Dice

Concept: Atypical damage dice Tested in: Delve Night What it is: The defunct miniatures game Dreamblade used six-sided dice for damage, but not the sort of dice from every other game. Normal dice have the sides 1 / 2 / … Continue reading

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A Month of Healthy Disrespect

It’s November, which means I’m doing National Novel Writing Month again. Since I’ll be spending most of my writing energy on something completely different, this blog won’t have any long-form posts this month. Instead, I want to elaborate on something … Continue reading

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