Oni_Sloth's page

I love house rules, and I love play testing new ideas. I always suggest to people looking to get into game design is to change the rules of a simple game and see how it changes the overall game. It’s a great exercise and it is a lot of fun.
So recently I changed a pretty big rule in pathfinder, I changed how attack of opportunity works. As it stands right now the rule is you may make a single attack once per round at your highest attack bonus against a foe in your threatened square when they provoke it. One of my players asked how come they can only attack, I was only left with one answer, because the rules said so. So after talking it over we decided to try and change the rule, here is how the rule read for our play test
“A player may make an Action of Opportunity (AoO) if a person within a threatened square provokes one, only 1 of AoO may normally be taken a round”

We had to change how certain actions worked but that was it. This meant a person got a single standard or move action when a person provoked one. So what happened was people would get up close, fight and when someone did something that provoked an AoO they got to do more actions. People would use it to grapple, use it to use special attacks. Other times people would use their AoO to follow people as they tried to run away. We found that it lead to a lot of chain events.

For example in one fight our wizard was attacked by a bandit. The wizard used their move action to run away and then cast a spell as the bandit had a weapon with reach and would hit them if they stayed close and cast a spell and the wizard was not comfortable eating the attacking or casting defensively. The wizard moved and provoked an AoO so the bandit followed him instead of attacking him. The wizard was able to get behind friendlies but he brought a friend over. This caused the bandit to run through and out of the fighter’s threat square who used his AoO to grapple the bandit as he ran by, this caused the fighter to provoke an AoO. The bandit had combat reflexes which meant he got more AoO per round. The bandit used this opportunity to use improve dirty trick on the fighter and blinded him. The now blinded fighter failed his grapple and the wizard and bandit moved right along next to the friendly ranger.

This was just one example of these chain events, it seems like it could get complicated kind of quickly but we had a blast with it. We noticed people would use their AoO in different ways, and we are sure we did not find all the strange ways the game could change with this. We did notice spell casters using a lot more spells but also taking a lot more damage. So I put this house rule change out there. What do you think of this house rule change? What changes could you see happen as a result of this rule change?

Hello, new to posting on the boards and this is my first post. So I was lurking for a bit and I have a question for the community from my loitering. Do you prefer to use premade dungeons and monsters, or do you prefer to use homemade dungeons and monsters, and why?

I can start this off by giving my preference. I have always preferred home made to premade. This probably comes from my upbringing, raised on homemade monsters and dungeons. It also comes from seeing so many players crack open the monsters handbook mid battle. I think this is a great loss to everyone because it removes all mystery from the game, and now it just becomes executing strategy 7A from some random person’s guide. I understand though that each group is different, this is just something I have noticed in my experience.

So which do you prefer?