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Let me start by saying I loathe house rules. I understand some of them sometimes, but I try to shy away from the big game-altering ones as I feel people more qualified than myself have poured their intelligence and experience into the rules in my books, and they know more about balance than I do.
But spell resistance has got to get got.
As written, spell resistance almost provides more of a detriment to a PC than a boon. Sure it makes it hard to target a character with a big bad spell, but it also makes it hard to target a character with a sugar sweet spell, like haste or your various cure wounds spells. A character could lower it, sure, but that requires a standard action and to keep it lowered requires continuous burning of standard actions each round, effectively letting you do nothing except move.
Monks, a class already designed to turn on "hard mode" for players playing as one, get this as a class ability eventually, forcing them to behave this way or risk not being cured, not being hasted, or not being zapped out of a dangerous situation when he resists the teleport spell the party wizard casts. A class ability shouldn't make a character worse, or at the least, harder to play, so I'm curious as to how people have house ruled this in their games. So far from browsing the boards I've come upon these methods:
1) Allow the lowering of Spell Resistance as a standard action like normal, but have it "reset" not at the beginning of next turn, but rather at the discretion of the player.
2) Allow the lowering of Spell Resistance as a swift or immediate action, the latter of which would rob a character of his next swift action next round.
3) Allow the lowering of Spell Resistance as a free action, basically treating it the same way that saving throws can be purposefully failed. I believe this is the way James Jacobs himself plays it in his games.
4) Allow spells that have "(harmless)" at the ends of their SR entries to bypass spell resistance if the character so chooses.
Any one else with 2cp or similar homerules?
NOTE TO STAFF: If this belongs in a different section of the boards, feel free to move it. Not that you need my permission, anyway.