Please review my house rules.


Homebrew and House Rules


I'm starting a Rise of the Runelords campaign this weekend and am finalizing the house rules I am handing out during session zero.

Here are my house rules. Please let me know if you see any problems or have any suggestions/corrections/concerns.

Players will begin the game at first level and with 350 gold pieces.

Use 20 point buy to determine ability scores.

I will not bring every book to every session so if possible please keep a personal record of relevant rules information that you need, especially if I need to ask questions on how your abilities work. If you use the MasterWorks Tools app on your phone or tablet, keep in mind that Eudemonia does not allow charging with their outlets so keep that in mind. Build sessions will be available at request taking place at my home where all my books are.

For Rise of the Runelords, any options from the Rise of the Runelords Player's guide and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Pathfinder Campaign Setting and Pathfinder Player Companion lines are available with the following exceptions.

Only use the core races.

The Combat Expertise feat is no longer a prerequisite. Remove Combat Expertise and the associated Int 13 from the prerequisites of all feats. Combat Expertise still exists for the purpose of feats that do not function without the use of Combat Expertise.

Cohorts and followers are banned. Any class feature or ability that would gain the Leadership feat or a cohort instead gains the Persuasive feat. (I have a list of third party replacements for Leadership upon request)

The following feats are banned; Paragon Surge, Blood Money, Glorious Heat and Divine Protection. (These are banned for obvious reasons. There are more ways than these to break the game but rather than ban those options I will simply ask you all to refrain from excessive cheese when building. )

Third party house rules:

Fighters gain an additional point to their martial pool for each Technique feat that they have.
Monks gain an additional point to their ki pool for each Ki feat that they have. This includes the Extra Ki feat.
Monks may gain ki feats using their bonus feats. They must meet the prerequisites of these feats except for Ki Meditation.

With Adventurer's Armory (Note: A lot of material from this product has been erratta'd and placed in Ultimate Equipment. Ultimate Equipment will be the final word on how equipment works.)

Additionally I will allow options from the following third party products:

Dreamscarred Press' Ultimate Psionics (available on d20pfsrd.com)
Dreamscarred Press’ Path of War (available on d20pfsrd.com)
The Red Dragon Inn: Guide to Inns and Taverns
Rite Publishing's 101 New Skill Uses
Rite Publishing's 101 Combat Feats
Rite Publishing's Feats 101
Rite Publishing's The Secrets of Adventuring
Kobold Press' New Paths Compendium (available on d20pfsrd.com)
Rite Publishing's 1001 Spells
Abandoned Art's Class Acts
Tripod Machine's A Fistful of Denarii (available on d20pfsrd.com)
Kobold Press' Deep Magic
Kobold Press' Advanced Feats (available on d20pfsrd.com)Dreamscarred Press' Path of War (available on d20pfsrd.com)
Radiance House's Pact Magic Unbound Vol 1-2 (available on d20pfsrd.com)
Legendary Games’ Way of Ki
Necromancers of the Northwest’s Book of Martial Actions 1&2

I own physical copies of each of these products and they will be available upon request. (Exception: Path of War, which does not have a hard copy release yet. )

Psionics and Firearms are considered 'emerging' so related items will have limited availability in shops and will not be in loot drops at alll. Psionics will be working with magic transparency. (meaning they are subject to effects that affect magic.)

Item shops are pre-stocked so specific equipment purchases will be limited.

Please bring your own dice.

A pawn from the Pathfinder NPC Codex can be provided, but I do encourage bringing your own miniature.

I can provide and store character sheets upon request but I encourage you to print and maintain your own.

I will bring additional mechanical pencils, condition cards and index cards for player use.

I will be on location an hour before the session begins. Come early if you need individual help for anything or build time with books you do not have access to.

Sovereign Court

I'm not sure what a fighter's martial pool is, or what technique feats are. Blood Money is a spell, not a feat, though it's certainly abusive.

On the whole your rules seem pretty reasonable and in fact broader than the baseline I'd expect.


Martial Pool is an optional rule set from Necromancers of the Northwest’s Book of Martial Actions 1&2. A feat grants you a martial pool (equal to 3+your BAB) that you can spend to get and attack/damage bonus and refreshes after ten minutes of inactivity. You can then take feats that use martial points to perform 'techniques'. These do different things from attacking with two weapons as a standard action or gaining bonuses to saves against the thing you're attacking to making multiple full attack actions. Its sort of a mix between Book of 9 Swords and grit/grit feats.

Changed it to disclude Blood Money as a feat. Hopefully it will fall under the 'no excessive cheese' rule.

Out of curiousity, what would be the expected baseline?


Your post consists of fairly few house rules. Most of your post is what your players should expect in your game.


Ciaran Barnes wrote:
Your post consists of fairly few house rules. Most of your post is what your players should expect in your game.

That was my thought but I was told elsewhere that they are numerous and strict. I'm not saying that you're wrong just what was said.

Sovereign Court

I can tell you from experience, you have a pretty modest amount of house rules. :)


I started the same thread and some of the issues some had was

20 point buy may be too powerful.

Third party content may be unbalanced

Third party content may be overwhelming.

Race restriction is harsh.

Pre-rolling items in magic shops is harsh.

Restricting spells/feats like Paragon Surge and Glorious Heat is harsh.

Removing a major prerequisite (Combat Expertise) and adding third party content may be unbalanced.


My group always plays 25 point. It's more fun for the players, and I personally don't feel like anything is a cakewalk. Maybe that's GM tactics, maybe it's the lack of dump scores.

I see no problem with a GM making a list of what is allowed and what is banned. That's just good sense.

As for the pre stocked Magic shops, if your players are fine with it then who cares?

Sovereign Court

Pre-rolling might nudge people in the direction of item creation feats as a workaround, but chances are they were going to do that anyway because crafting is just a very powerful choice.


race restriction should go


Malwing wrote:
20 point buy may be too powerful.

Having played Pathfinder Society for about a year (in which all characters are built with 20 points), I can say from experience that it is generally not imbalanced. YMMV.

Malwing wrote:
Pre-rolling items in magic shops is harsh.

If people think that this is too harsh, you could use the base value rules for available magic items (see Settlement rules in the Game Mastery Guide). For instance, in a small town like Sandpoint, there is a 75% chance that any magic item a PC wants to buy that costs less than 1,000 gp exists; for more expensive magic items, there are only the ones you pre-rolled.

Malwing wrote:
Restricting spells/feats like Paragon Surge and Glorious Heat is harsh.

Rules as written, Glorious Heat is unlimited healing at the cheap, cheap price of one orison. I don't believe there has been errata on this feat, and it should be restricted for sanity's sake.

If you keep the FAQ on paragon surge in mind, it is not as much of a game-breaking spell for casters as you'd think.

Malwing wrote:
Removing a major prerequisite (Combat Expertise) and adding third party content may be unbalanced.

At the very least, it opens up some Improved combat maneuver feats for characters faster. You may want to see how this change interacts with third party content, however.


Glorious Heat has a 'suggested' reworked version, but because errata is only on reprints we're unlikely to see a true errata of it. The rework heals for spell level instead, so no orison spamming.

Only core races but tons of third party stuff seems pretty weird to me... but whatever works for you.


kestral287 wrote:

Glorious Heat has a 'suggested' reworked version, but because errata is only on reprints we're unlikely to see a true errata of it. The rework heals for spell level instead, so no orison spamming.

Only core races but tons of third party stuff seems pretty weird to me... but whatever works for you.

I tend to get very setting-centric when it comes to races. I wanted core only because I have some campaigns down the pipeline that are almost exclusively non-core races and third party races.


The feat Sacred Geometry should be banned. False Focus should not function in spells which the resulting product is a mundane item that is permanent, for example Fabricate. An exception might be made for bless water though a flask is needed.


Emmanuel Nouvellon-Pugh wrote:
The feat Sacred Geometry should be banned. False Focus should not function in spells which the resulting product is a mundane item that is permanent, for example Fabricate. An exception might be made for bless water though a flask is needed.

I'm hoping that my "no excessive cheese" rule will cover Sacred Geometry.

Added a line to ask me if something has an unofficial errata or doesn't work properly.


Malwing wrote:
20 point buy may be too powerful.

It depends. For instance, I allow 25-point builds but with a stipulation that I don't want to see any stat-dumping. Nobody is ever allowed to have anything lower than a 10 before racial adjustment, for instance. I do this specifically to allow (for instance) fighters to put a couple points into Int to have some skills. This is for flexibility, not max/min.

With that explanation I've never had a problem.

Quote:
Third party content may be unbalanced

The list you've provided seem reasonable. I allow basically all of that too.

Quote:
Third party content may be overwhelming.

If players don't use it, it isn't.

Quote:
Race restriction is harsh.

Meh. If a player has a specific concept in mind, they can pitch it.

Quote:
Pre-rolling items in magic shops is harsh.

Meh. Up to you. It's style. Me, I let my players have basically what they want.

Quote:
Restricting spells/feats like Paragon Surge and Glorious Heat is harsh.

Yeah, right. If a player desperately needs to use the most powerful abilities in the game, specifically, they can pitch them at you.

Quote:
Removing a major prerequisite (Combat Expertise) and adding third party content may be unbalanced.

Meh. Nobody (in my experience) ever uses Combat Expertise.

Dark Archive

Little surprised how.open you are to 3rd party materials(bug thumbs up as a fan of dreamscared press and new paths) but closed to races of ten points or less from the ARG. Though you explained that.

I would be really turned off by the idea that I cannot buy what I want within reason. I am not exaggerating when I say 99% of items I see in adventures are not the gear i want for that PC. I think a reasonable.guideline is the freedom to purchase any item as long as it's value is less then half total gear expected for the wealth by level table on p. 399.

Good to mention excessive cheese should.be discouraged but I would suggest yu go further by mentioning all such items you know and add that the list will be expaned as cases develop.

By eliminating combat exp & 13 int, you are envourageing massive str/dex/con as the players essentially have an extra 3 or extra 7 point buy when dumping to int 7. The brawler somewhat gets tnis but they are mostly expected to use close weapons group, not 2 handed wrapons for even mire bonus damage.


Raymond Lambert wrote:

Little surprised how.open you are to 3rd party materials(bug thumbs up as a fan of dreamscared press and new paths) but closed to races of ten points or less from the ARG. Though you explained that.

I would be really turned off by the idea that I cannot buy what I want within reason. I am not exaggerating when I say 99% of items I see in adventures are not the gear i want for that PC. I think a reasonable.guideline is the freedom to purchase any item as long as it's value is less then half total gear expected for the wealth by level table on p. 399.

Good to mention excessive cheese should.be discouraged but I would suggest yu go further by mentioning all such items you know and add that the list will be expaned as cases develop.

By eliminating combat exp & 13 int, you are envourageing massive str/dex/con as the players essentially have an extra 3 or extra 7 point buy when dumping to int 7. The brawler somewhat gets tnis but they are mostly expected to use close weapons group, not 2 handed wrapons for even mire bonus damage.

I'm added to the pre-rolled shops with a note that crafting, hiring an NPC to craft, and side-questing are acceptable means of getting specific gear that they want, although overall I wish I could seriously discourage building with specific gear in mind. In the past I've been much harsher about it and this lead to allowing players to do things like make a lich's thighbone into a magic club, or dipping their sword into a dragon's 'fire bladder' to make a flaming sword, or kidnapping the haunted scythe and train it to fight for them. I'm going through the trouble of rolling shop items because this is my first time running an adventure path so I didn't want to be that harsh. [rant] Besides what are players psychic?! I never understood building around equipment if you don't start with it. Sure if its something you can easily get your hands on sure, but why rely on it? For that matter why do so many players lock themselves into one weapon or one thing to do. What if that thing gets sundered? Uh oh! now that thing you invested half your loot in is gone and you don't have a weapon. I'm okay, I just switched to that axe that I lifted off that bugbear. Sure its worse than my main weapon but now I'm the only one in the party with a weapon. The last game I played the GM asked what magic weapons did we want, y'know what I told her? I said "I don't need your handouts." I wield what I find and if that's not good enough I'll take the enemy's weapon. Or a tree branch. Clubs are simple weapons right? I'll Captain Caveman my way through the whole dungeon before I start whining about needing my special shiny magic sword that I just can't live without. I've done it before. Then a kobold caster tried to kill us and I saved the day. By throwing the club. Readied an action, and when he tried to cast TPK Party, I threw my club made out of a tree branch and made him mess up his spell. Then I got him in a headlock and killed him. Because f@#% you and your caster/martial disparity. Do you know who I am? [/rant]


Sometimes - the good times - a player has a concept or image in their mind. In your example, you like to play characters with a common theme: versatility. That's no less or more valid than one with a concept "beats people with a huge hammer".

When you don't let the player "shop", you are basically doing the video game equivalent of only having a handful of prebuilt avatars. What if I want to have long hair? Sorry, the random avatar builder didn't include one.

If equipment doesn't matter and you should be able to use "whatever", then why bother preventing players from picking what their "whatever" is?

Why go to any effort specifically to deny players the pleasure of "skinning" their build?

I'm playiny devil's advocate here for discussion's sake. I'm pointing out that your view that weapon choice isn't important, then why not default to permissiveness?


I would argue that I don't play characters centered around versatility, I just make my specialty versatile. I'm a huge fan of schticks and if my schtick is to hit things really hard with a sword I'm not going to waste time locking myself into using a very specific sword because a new better sword could pop up and I'll miss out on it and if I have no sword then I'll grab something sword-like and handle business until I can get my hands on one. Its not that specific equipment doesn't matter its that it's a bonus not something that defines you.

Partially I'm just frustrated with online assumptions and builds and the GMs I have that don't think I can't do what I want without their help. If I really want a magic item and they don't have that specific one in stores (How the Abyss did they get that thing in stock in the first place?) There are so many ways to get it. Make it. Pay someone to make it. Beat up an evil warlord and take it from him. Speaking of which, why doesn't someone else handle the BBEG? Obviously someone with enough caster levels to make this Deity-damned thing is running around, what's that guy doing? Where is he? Is he in the back of the shop? Get his lazy butt out here and help me. There's goblins everywhere and he's just leaving our level 1 butts to handle it.

I'd say that the more apt videogame equivalent is 'Resident Evil Ammo'. "You don't have that much ammo but you have to shoot zombies?! Oh how will I survive!" Conserve your ammo and aim better. What's the point of ammo if you expect it to not run out. (This is also how I feel about spells.) Locking one's self into a specific build that relies on specific things to happen isn't a concept its a trap, a way to get easily screwed over.


This isn't an argument. That's in room 2B. <Grin>

Here's all I'm saying... Darth Maul.. awesome. I wanna play him. Got me a nice double-sword. Only I'll never get my hands on a masterwork one without jumping through huge hoops.

Indiana Jones... awesome. I wanna play him. Got me a nice whip. Only my DM keeps throwing uber-enchanted tempting longswords at us. We've been looting really neat unique magic items left, right, and centre, but I can't use it without playing "Guy Who Used To Be Indiana Jones".

There's nothing inherently wrong about letting the players have a vision for their character and accommodating it. Sure, maybe it's a HUGE coincidence that the BBEG was using just the right weapon. Sure, maybe it's a HUGE coincidence the local blacksmith happens to have made a masterwork double-sword because he too thinks they're just awesome, despite the lack of a market for them.

There's nothing wrong with letting players who have a neat vision that involves wings of flying or a nice psychoactive skin of the claw because he's planning a claw-using psychic warrior.

There's nothing wrong with panties that match the bra.

There's also nothing wrong with making your players do with whatever they're given, and they'd better appreciate it, damnit. <Grin>

Just saying... it's not all munchkinism, and that which is, well, it might very well be fun munchkinism.

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