Here's a few house rules I'm thinking of tossing around for my next campaign. Feel free to comment, or toss out your own rules for review!
1. Going Gridless - that's right, no battle mat. Instead, I'll just convert everything from 1 square to 1 inch and play on an open table, wargames style. Bring your own tape measure! I think this idea is made of win.
2. Players do not keep track of their own HP - the DM tracks the HP of all the characters. Players know when they are at full, and when they are bloodied, and that's it. Cuts down on metagaming (hopefully.)
Interesting... would you use burst and blast templates a la Warhammer?
Interesting... would you use burst and blast templates a la Warhammer?
Yeah, I'm a big Warhammer player, so I've already got a few sets of blast templates.
It's an idea I've toyed with too - I'd rule that all minis should be at least on 1 inch bases to head off any quibbles. :D Ah the heady days of line of sight disputes in Necromunda...
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I like the idea of going gridless, I will propose it to my players at our next game.
My house rules for 4e are:
Weapons with reach get attacks of opportunity when an opponent first enters the weapons range, provided the person has an opportunity attack.
Wizards don't have to pick which power they will use for the day. They can use any of their powers but are limited to the number of uses per day as normal.
Standing up in combat allows an attack of opportunity.
Shooting a ranged attack through your allies squares causes a -1 penalty for each allies square it passes through.
We use the area attack effects from 3.5 not the cubes from 4.0.
I like the idea of going gridless, I will propose it to my players at our next game.
My house rules for 4e are:
Weapons with reach get attacks of opportunity when an opponent first enters the weapons range, provided the person has an opportunity attack.
Wizards don't have to pick which power they will use for the day. They can use any of their powers but are limited to the number of uses per day as normal.
Standing up in combat allows an attack of opportunity.
Shooting a ranged attack through your allies squares causes a -1 penalty for each allies square it passes through.
We use the area attack effects from 3.5 not the cubes from 4.0.
Going Gridless is a nice idea but pracically a bit of a pain in the butt. You'll end up with player leaning across the table with rulers and the like.
Plus it will give it more of a Wargame feel rather than a roleplay! As for the HP's, I agree with the idea but as DM I really don't want to run the players HP's as well as the NPC's and critters. Good luck and let us know how it goes?
Yeah, let us know how they turn out. In theory I'd love to go gridless, but I don't think it'd work very well in my pbp games.
TS
We've been playing 20 years with the DM (me 99% of the time) keeping track of the PC's hps. It totally avoids metagaming and is more realistic. I let the players know when their characters are at half strength, down to single digits (I don't play 4e so I'm not sure about the specifics for "bloodied"). I allow PCs to learn their exact hps by succeeding at a healing check but otherwise they get a rather vague -"you're not feeling so well" or "you're feeling - 'I ain't got time to bleed!'" It works great for us and always has. The extra bookkeeping is not significant (to me anyway). I highly recommend it.
I have been thinking about going gridless as well for my campaign. I had thought to use pipe cleaners cut to the PC's movement rate. They're bendy for when the characters want to manuever, otherwise just lay the pipe cleaner down and move your mini to the end of it.
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Here's a few house rules I'm thinking of tossing around for my next campaign. Feel free to comment, or toss out your own rules for review!
1. Going Gridless - that's right, no battle mat. Instead, I'll just convert everything from 1 square to 1 inch and play on an open table, wargames style. Bring your own tape measure! I think this idea is made of win.
2. Players do not keep track of their own HP - the DM tracks the HP of all the characters. Players know when they are at full, and when they are bloodied, and that's it. Cuts down on metagaming (hopefully.)
What do your players think of these rules? Are they have more fun with the campaign with them?
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Going Gridless is a nice idea but pracically a bit of a pain in the butt. You'll end up with player leaning across the table with rulers and the like.
Plus it will give it more of a Wargame feel rather than a roleplay! As for the HP's, I agree with the idea but as DM I really don't want to run the players HP's as well as the NPC's and critters. Good luck and let us know how it goes?
I've been in campaigns which had both and echo this post. Ugh.
What do your players think of these rules? Are they have more fun with the campaign with them?Here's a few house rules I'm thinking of tossing around for my next campaign. Feel free to comment, or toss out your own rules for review!
1. Going Gridless - that's right, no battle mat. Instead, I'll just convert everything from 1 square to 1 inch and play on an open table, wargames style. Bring your own tape measure! I think this idea is made of win.
2. Players do not keep track of their own HP - the DM tracks the HP of all the characters. Players know when they are at full, and when they are bloodied, and that's it. Cuts down on metagaming (hopefully.)
This is what I'd be concerned about. Grid-wise I don't think it would be a huge deal aside from being a pain to adjudicate, but taking away the players' ability to track their own hit points is removing a level of control from them that the game assumes. Not only is it asking for problems ("I didn't hear you say I was bloodied!") but I know that if I were a player I'd really be averse to this change. It doesn't even qualify as metagaming, because the player is not making use of a knowledge gap between himself and his character - the character should be well aware of how much "fight" he has left in him, how much punishment he's endured, and how in need of assistance he is.
I'm not sure why people mislabel this as metagaming. Just because something is abstracted mechanically to make it possible to deal with that aspect of the game doesn't suddenly mean using the mechanic is metagaming. Metagaming occurs when there is an actual gap between player knowledge and character knowledge. There is no such gap with hit points. Hit points are simply a way of translating into mechanical terms (so that the players can understand and act on them) something that the character would be fully aware of.
2. Players do not keep track of their own HP - the DM tracks the HP of all the characters. Players know when they are at full, and when they are bloodied, and that's it. Cuts down on metagaming (hopefully.)
I have played with the rule that players are not allowed to say their HP totals or remaining HP to any other player at the table. The "blooded" mechanic in 4E is nice for that and of course if a player is at like 4 HP left they can tell another player they are "really staggering" or something like that but no numeric values given. For the players that do mention it you can remind them of the rule or take some sort of "punishment" but I really hate doing the later. This is dnd, not babysitting.
Here's a few house rules I'm thinking of tossing around for my next campaign. Feel free to comment, or toss out your own rules for review!
1. Going Gridless - that's right, no battle mat. Instead, I'll just convert everything from 1 square to 1 inch and play on an open table, wargames style. Bring your own tape measure! I think this idea is made of win.
2. Players do not keep track of their own HP - the DM tracks the HP of all the characters. Players know when they are at full, and when they are bloodied, and that's it. Cuts down on metagaming (hopefully.)
My houserule so far is the fighters Marking ability, although the fighter retains the attack of Opportunity if the Marked character moves, attacks someone else etc, I don't apply the -2 of they attack someone other than the fighter.
Instead the fighter roleplays his actions in intimidations 'you take a step past me to attack the mage I'll tear you a new one!!!' or 'back off and it'll go a lot easier on you!!' the fighter makes an Intimidate check vs the Will of the opponent with plus's or minus's for good roleplay, morale of opponent etc and I roleplay the critters response if the Intimidate is successful.
The reaction isn't set in stone though so I critter might back away from the fighter and the mage and use a ranged weapon at the mage or even run away from the fight if the fighters Intimidate check is that high.
I have played with the rule that players are not allowed to say their HP totals or remaining HP to any other player at the table. The "blooded" mechanic in 4E is nice for that and of course if a player is at like 4 HP left they can tell another player they are "really staggering" or something like that but no numeric values given.
This is essentially where I stand as well. I allow my players to know their own HP, but when discussing it to another player I remind them to be vague with terms like "half strength" or "critical condition." I use the same rules for monsters as well. 4e added "bloodied" so that was taken care of, but I also allow players to know if the monster is "critical" as well.