| Mackackee |
Hey folks, so I'm new to pen and paper role playing games and Pathfinder is my first pen and paper game. Been playing for about a year now and GMing for a couple of months.
My thoughts on Pathfinder are that sometimes what I want isn't there or that some stuff is unnecessarily complicated. So I add in rules or take out rules to provide the experience I want. One of my players has been playing for years and I ask his advice whenever I'm planning on putting in a rule. His general arguments against my rules seem to come from a place of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'. And he mentioned today that he gets annoyed whenever I try to "reinvent the wheel". I wouldn't exactly use those words and explained that I generally don't see a reason to limit myself. GMing is essentially designing a game, adding in rules is part of the toolset a GM has as far as I'm concerned. He on the other hand seems to see Pathfinder as a sacred document that shouldn't be touched.
Another player is new and has started Gming his own game. I play in that and he uses rules for everything. You want to Barter? Well no need to RP there are rules for rolling. There's a chase? Well this is how the books say how you should do chases. He doesn't seemed thrilled about rule changes in my game either.
The other two players. One is onboard with whatever I want to do and we generally agree on our complaints. The other is new and is kind of up in the air.
To be clear I do propose the rules at the beginning of the session and hear feedback, make changes based on feedback about balance etc. If everyone hates a rule then I don't put it in.
I guess my question is: how do I get a player who is focused on rules, and offical rules at that, to be more accepting of house rules even if it didn't come from Paizo?
To give context here are some examples of house rules I've tried/am trying:
I was running a survival campaign and wanted more rules on food, hunger, and survival. So you had to roll 1d4 for each degree of success and 1d4 for how long the food will last and you can cook it for it to last longer. I wanted it to be 1d8 for how long it took you to find the food but that kinda got shot down. I also had an idea for a morale system that revamped starving but that wasn't popular.
Learning spells from spellbooks takes too long so I've told them they could just roll 1d4 and they could learn that many spells that day and the die they could roll would go up or down based on how many ranks in spellcraft they have. They often opt out and choose to just roll their spellcraft over and over again, even if their chances are lower.
Right now I'm adding in fumble/crit charts. There will be chances for players to break their weapon on the fumble chart. The problem seemed to be with fragile weapons. No player has a fragile weapon and the chances they'd roll two 1s is much higher than my chart. Plus they're fragile so...
And I'm adding personal quests since a player said he wanted more exp. The rules guy suggested story feats since they're in the book but...that...doesn't really address the issue for the player wanting exp.
Also the main story thing right now is that there is a demon in a spirit form possessing people who then get +4 to their strength mod and two of the players are being buffed by this demon at all times. The demon is also subtype undead for the purposes of detect undead and positive energy doing damage to it. As far as I know this doesn't exist. The players don't know what's happening but seem to love it. However the player that knows all the rules killed a 6 year old kid that was possessed. The player assumed since the kid did a lot of damage on a crit that it would have a lot of health. It had 1hp and the player punched it, the player was a warrior. The player as a person I would consider to be LG, so he was not very happy about that. He also meta gamed and didn't do any knowledge checks.
My problem isn't disagreements based on balance etc. My problem is that every time I propose a change, I have to get over the hump of 'this isn't in the book, therefore it's bad'.