Fumbles in combat. I loathe them.
Check out the snake animal companion.
What is the snake point you are talking about?
They have the Grab special ability . I am looking right at the Ball Python stat block. And that is for free after an attack roll in line with how snakes tend to operative
Is your complaint that they...
Yeah, I was going to point this out. Bestiary Ball Python can grab just fine because their Jaws get the Grab ability. The Companion snake can't, because it's jaws do not have that. It can only give the Grabbed condition by grappling, but it can't Grapple because that requires 1 hand free, and snakes have no hands.
Therefore it can't use Constrict.
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This is probably one of those situations where you should use "common sense", much like how ghosts don't fall in to the earth if they don't use Fly actions and creatures with spells don't need material components. It's clearly meant to be able to grab... so let it grab. Amazing and simple.
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Check out the snake animal companion.
What is the snake point you are talking about?
They have the Grab special ability . I am looking right at the Ball Python stat block. And that is for free after an attack roll in line with how snakes tend to operative
Is your complaint that they...
Yeah, I was going to point this out. Bestiary Ball Python can grab just fine because their Jaws get the Grab ability. The Companion snake can't, because it's jaws do not have that. It can only give the Grabbed condition by grappling, but it can't Grapple because that requires 1 hand free, and snakes have no hands.
Therefore it can't use Constrict.
No no no, you see, the snake may not have any hands, but it still has two "hands" - the same "hands" that would be too occupied to wield armor spikes if it attacked with a two-handed weapon. Grappling requires a "hand" free - which is why a four-armed creature can't grapple if they are also dual wielding - so the snake can grapple just fine using one of its "hands" even though it doesn't have any hands.
...Have I mentioned that I don't miss 1e? :P
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I mentioned this thread to three of my players. They pointed out that since I never implemented a houserule without player approval, they never had a houserule in my games that they hated. I thought I had nothing to say here. However, this thread introduced another topic.
- Anything made to "correct problems" in a system before a GM has even run a campaign or tried to see the design elements in play "I know better" syndrome. Also includes people who going into something planning on proving it not working so they can justify their dislike.
Yup, all those design ronin who claim to have fixed glaring issues with the system, yet when you ask them if they did playtest their house rules the answer is "I'm a great designer with excellent insight" and later somewhere you discover that their first game is now at level 2.
In general terms I agree with you. For a system as complex as PF2 you for need to test it. It is a poorly laid out rules set and you often have to pull together 3 different rules sections to understand it. Fixing a system early most often comes from not understanding it. You should not try to fix anything systemic early.
However:
a) I could tell Traveller was a highly unbalanced system from my first read of the rules.
b) I put down the D&D5e handbook for the first time and said it is way too easy to build a character with an AC that is almost unhittable - and it is, most GMs are very careful about handing out magical armour and shields.Further in PF2:
The first time I read the rules on Incapacitation or Hero Points or Point Buy, I knew that these were parts of the game my players would not want. We used Point Buy but some of the players have still refused to use Hero Points.
In February 2020 I set up a thread in the Homebrew and House Rules subforum, Mathmuse's Houserules. I still have only my initial post in it. Declaring that I have finished playtesting a houserule and it won't change again is difficult. I had to write out the changes to Craft, Subsist, and Snares in detail, so they made a good first entry. But the changes to Recall Knowledge, Sneak, Climb, and Hero Points are not yet set in stone.
For Climb and Sneak, I tried playing the PF2 rules as written and they bogged down the game. We had a comedy of errors as the party tried to climb down a ladder. We had players try to scout via the Hide and Sneak rules and scout-like actions such as Recall Knowledge checks or Drawing a Weapon broke stealth. Technically, the Sneak rules have a built-in loophole, "The GM might allow you to perform a particularly unobtrusive action without being noticed, possibly requiring another Stealth check." That loophole requires more GM skill than a rule ought to require. Now we have rules that appear workable. I should add them to my houserules thread.
The change to Snares occurred before playing snares by RAW because the ranger's player in my game was wondering whether to invest in Snare Crafting and Snare Specialist at 4th level. The change let the ranger at 3rd level use snares manufactured by someone else, so that the player had a experience with snares to make her decision. She went with Snare Specialist.
Three of my houserules carried over from earlier editions, so they were already tested. However, the conversion to PF2 required its own playtesting. The Harvest activity, which I called a change to Subsist, was developed back in 2013, Raw Materials for Crafting Magic Items. The tweak to Hero Points was developed by my wife for PF1 in 2016. The change to Recall Knowledge was suggested by her in 2019 during the PF2 playtest, and the main problem I have with writing it down is that it requires more GM skill than a rule ought to require.
I am a retired applied mathematician. I could write proofs that my algorithms would do exactly what I intended them to do. Yet I still had to test them with real data. My assumptions about the data and its internal correlations could be wrong, which would make my mathematical proofs based on those assumptions useless. These testing habits carrried over to playtesting my own tweaks to the game. My players deserve better than guesswork when I design houserules.
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There are some fairly obvious bugs in the rules. Like Snakes not be able to Grapple as they don't have a hand. As soon as you see stuff like this you have to either house rule to get past it, or just avoid that part of the game.
Since the snake companion entry said under Support Benefit, "Your snake holds your enemies with its coils," I would houserule that the snake can use its coils in place of a free hand for Grapple. That feels like rules as intended. We are using out-of-game knowledge that snakes lack limbs for Manual Dexterity, so we can use the same out-of-game knowledge that snakes constrict with their coils.
Oh, I made another houserule for my champion's dromaeosaur animal companion. I dropped the rule that animal companions cannot get item bonuses. The druid might cast Magic Fang on it. That spell was designed as an item bonus, presumably to prevent stacking, so it gets weird with animal companions. The druid has cast Magic Fang on a summoned animal, but not yet on the dromaeosaur, so this change is not yet playtested. I might reinstate that rule if I find any abuse of item bonuses.
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Btw I always disliked the house rule that limited you to only 2 books. I always felt that rule was overly punishing and only served to limit character variability.
I hate this rule too, but for a different reason. Casters have been core book broken in every edition of D&D/PF I've played except AD&D 2e. With just the player's handbook/core rulebook, you can destroy any challenge as a spellcaster. As a martial, with just the core rulebook, you'd be lucky to still be relevant around level 7-9.
2 book houserules aim at the wrong place to limit game system exploitation.
Every time someone brings it up I ask if they have a 5% chance of blowing up anything they do at work, the answer is usually a blank stare.5% is a little high, but I'm a chemist, so the answer isn't 0%. :P
Never had anything explode, but I've had two flasks implode and I've had to put out 3 fires (I've only caused one of them).
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More on topic, I think critical failures / fumbles are fine so long as they're creative. If you drop your weapon every time you roll a 1, that gets boring, and 5% is high.
I think the Glass Cannon Podcast did a good job. It's a random list, and that list is populated by fans, so nobody knows what's going to happen. I think they confirm their fumbles, too, which is a way of lowering the chance of absurdity from 5% to something much lower.
But you were performing your reactions in a fume hood with a shatter proof sash right? Because if so I wouldn't call that a critical failure of the situation, just a failure (mostly because you planned ahead like a good chemist should).
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My group has used the "two book limit" (usually its 3 books) more as an extra challenge than to prevent exploits.
We have one player who is a master of multiclassing (we checked, he's virtually never built a single class character and his most classes was 4, and that wasn't even a 12th level character). He's done crazy stuff with multiclassing, and restricted books, and other such limitations (just as an example of some of the stuff we've done: everyone rolls six sets of 4d6 drop lowest, everyone gets to pick any array generated).
Our new-to-the-group player was struggling a bit and one of his issues was the restricted book set and the GM said without hesitation, "Oh, you can disregard that, that's something we do to ourselves because we've got so much system mastery."
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I dislike hero points, and don't like that they became not a house rule in pf2, it feels like hey, we couldn't quite get the balance right, so here's some get out of death free coupons for when you get one shot.
I liked pf1 crits & fumbles, but it sounds like most people didn't implement them consistently. That's my big dislike about house rulings, is when they are inconsistent.
On fumbles:
The way I've always used them, they work the same as crits. Meaning they were only applicable to attack rolls, and you roll to confirm the fumble just like you roll to confirm a crit. On a nat 1, you roll again, if the second attack misses, you confirmed the fumble. A fumble means you provoke an attack of opportunity. This systems is way more benefit to PCs than monsters, because enemies are far more likely to miss and generally roll more attacks.
Critical fumbles is an added house rule I use, which is that if you confirm a fumble with another nat 1, something bad happens. There's also the flip side where if you confirm a crit with a nat 20 something good happens. This makes them extremely rare and special occurrences.
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I dislike hero points, and don't like that they became not a house rule in pf2, it feels like hey, we couldn't quite get the balance right, so here's some get out of death free coupons for when you get one shot.
I liked pf1 crits & fumbles, but it sounds like most people didn't implement them consistently. That's my big dislike about house rulings, is when they are inconsistent.
On fumbles:
The way I've always used them, they work the same as crits. Meaning they were only applicable to attack rolls, and you roll to confirm the fumble just like you roll to confirm a crit. On a nat 1, you roll again, if the second attack misses, you confirmed the fumble. A fumble means you provoke an attack of opportunity. This systems is way more benefit to PCs than monsters, because enemies are far more likely to miss and generally roll more attacks.Critical fumbles is an added house rule I use, which is that if you confirm a fumble with another nat 1, something bad happens. There's also the flip side where if you confirm a crit with a nat 20 something good happens. This makes them extremely rare and special occurrences.
Obviously if your table enjoys these house rules, it's fine, but the "normal" fumbles you describe disproportionately affect melee warriors: they're gonna be rolling a lot more attack rolls, and AoOs only matter if you're in reach. So most spellcasters and ranged characters won't ever notice this. Which seems more than a little bit unfair.
- Auto succeed everything 20s auto fail everything 1s.
If you cannot succeed on a 20 or fail on a 1 there is no point in rolling.
I dislike hero points, and don't like that they became not a house rule in pf2, it feels like hey, we couldn't quite get the balance right, so here's some get out of death free coupons for when you get one shot.
In PF1, hero points were introduced in the Advanced Player's Guide under Optional Rules Systems. I feel that an optional rule tested by Paizo will be better designed than a houserule. Yet an optional rule is not a standard rule. PF2 made them a standard rule.
I tend to overthink all rules, but I contemplated hero points in PF2 even more, because I was houseruling them from the very beginning. Back in PF1, I tended to be highly distracted whenever a player character did something that would earn a hero point, because I had to figure out how the opponents would react. Thus, I missed many chances to award hero points. My wife introduced a post-game session where we discussed such heroic deeds and awarded one to the most valuable player. This worked, but it was incompatible with the PF1 rule: "you lose any remaining Hero Points at the end of a session." Yet without the MVP rule, I would make the same mistake of forgetting to give hero points. For me, unmodified hero points don't work.
My players use teamwork to avoid death and use hero points for a reroll or buying an extra action (oops, that's a houserule). They use them for cinematic effect to ensure that a heroic stunt works. One player did once use a hero point to stablize because she let her character stray too far from her teammates (her ranger gets obsessed with hunting enemies). Once in 4 levels of play.
In PF1 a lot of my players would hoard 2 hero points for Cheat Death rather than using the points for impressive actions. That was not heroic. Hero points as a safety net to avoid risk is disappointing.
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- Auto succeed everything 20s auto fail everything 1s.If you cannot succeed on a 20 or fail on a 1 there is no point in rolling.
Its not exactly the topic, but I do have a strong distaste for the player expectation that they should be allowed to roll to attempt something, not matter how ridiculous, and have a chance of success on a natural 20.
Its come up before.
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I dislike hero points, and don't like that they became not a house rule in pf2, it feels like hey, we couldn't quite get the balance right, so here's some get out of death free coupons for when you get one shot.
This isn't really what I see happening in practice though. Hero points to stabilize don't happen all that much (except in Plaguestone - that's a universe on its own). Far more often, I see people using them to retry a skill check that they think is important to success conditions, or for example when their character is showing off and unexpectedly rolls poorly - to save their pride.
Also common, hero points on saving throws there the player rolls low and thinks it's gonna really hurt to fail. Less common but occasionally, hero points on a crucial attack roll (like deliver a deathblow to an enemy before the enemy gets another turn).
In my experience they aren't get out of death coupons, they're an intended-from -the-start counterbalance to the heightened randomness that got into the game when Take 10 was removed.
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I dislike hero points, and don't like that they became not a house rule in pf2, it feels like hey, we couldn't quite get the balance right, so here's some get out of death free coupons for when you get one shot.This isn't really what I see happening in practice though. Hero points to stabilize don't happen all that much (except in Plaguestone - that's a universe on its own). Far more often, I see people using them to retry a skill check that they think is important to success conditions, or for example when their character is showing off and unexpectedly rolls poorly - to save their pride.
Also common, hero points on saving throws there the player rolls low and thinks it's gonna really hurt to fail. Less common but occasionally, hero points on a crucial attack roll (like deliver a deathblow to an enemy before the enemy gets another turn).
In my experience they aren't get out of death coupons, they're an intended-from -the-start counterbalance to the heightened randomness that got into the game when Take 10 was removed.
This has been my experience, too. I do have one player who never spends her last hero point because she wants to save it to cheat death in an emergency, and another player who places a lot of import on spending his last hero point because he sees it as saying "this is worth risking dying for".
But in all my games so far I've have the "cheat death" use come up twice; the vast majority of hero points are spent when a player does something cool and the dice disagree.
- Auto succeed everything 20s auto fail everything 1s.If you cannot succeed on a 20 or fail on a 1 there is no point in rolling.Its not exactly the topic, but I do have a strong distaste for the player expectation that they should be allowed to roll to attempt something, not matter how ridiculous, and have a chance of success on a natural 20.
Its come up before.
I enjoy rolling with no chance of success to see how much someone fails. PF2's critical failure system plays well into this.
I enjoy rolling with no chance of success to see how much someone fails. PF2's critical failure system plays well into this.- Auto succeed everything 20s auto fail everything 1s.If you cannot succeed on a 20 or fail on a 1 there is no point in rolling.Its not exactly the topic, but I do have a strong distaste for the player expectation that they should be allowed to roll to attempt something, not matter how ridiculous, and have a chance of success on a natural 20.
Its come up before.
Don't get me wrong, PF2 RAW is pretty amazing for this once players understand that there are now consequences for critically failing and that critically failing isn't related to rolling a natural 1 - its predictable based on your relative badness to a task, and YOLOing has a more reasonable result.
"I'm not going to roll this, I'm more likely to hurt the party than help." Is great IMO.
I dislike hero points, and don't like that they became not a house rule in pf2, it feels like hey, we couldn't quite get the balance right, so here's some get out of death free coupons for when you get one shot.
In my experience saving points for when you hit dying 4 is a really inefficient method of using them. Better to use them earlier so the group either isn't in that situation or is less likely to have to worry about getting you up.
The benefits are too minor outside of major clutch moments where it is just as likely not going to save you anyway. It doesn't clear conditions, it doesn't bring you back up, it doesn't increase you wounded condition which is nice... But if you are hovering at 3 wounds you are already in deep trouble as it is.Prevention is better than a bandaid.
If you cannot succeed on a 20 or fail on a 1 there is no point in rolling.
If a 20 is an auto success and a natural 1 is an auto failure. Everything can succeed or fail so everything is worth rolling on no matter what the DC is.
Its not exactly the topic, but I do have a strong distaste for the player expectation that they should be allowed to roll to attempt something, not matter how ridiculous, and have a chance of success on a natural 20.
Its come up before.
That is on topic, it is exactly what I was referencing. :)
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Oh another couple of common house rules I absolutely loath.
- Charisma determines if your character is ugly or not. Play a low charisma character and now you are "ugly".
- Social skills (diplomacy, bluff, intimidate) are the ONLY way to get a result out of ANY conversation. To a degree that anyone other than the party face shouldn't bother talking even for the most mundane of things (haven't seen this in PF2e yet, but it was rampant in PF1e groups over here).
Oh and one I have seen people talk about in PF2e
- Split movement, boy does split movement like 5e turn combat into a messy jumble when it is so common for adventurers to have so much movement in a turn as is with most people sitting at 35-40ft speed from a very early level.
Oh another couple of common house rules I absolutely loath.
- Charisma determines if your character is ugly or not. Play a low charisma character and now you are "ugly".
- Social skills (diplomacy, bluff, intimidate) are the ONLY way to get a result out of ANY conversation. To a degree that anyone other than the party face shouldn't bother talking even for the most mundane of things (haven't seen this in PF2e yet, but it was rampant in PF1e groups over here).
Oh and one I have seen people talk about in PF2e
- Split movement, boy does split movement like 5e turn combat into a messy jumble when it is so common for adventurers to have so much movement in a turn as is with most people sitting at 35-40ft speed from a very early level.
As a GM I would hate a low-Charisma-means-ugly rule. I have fun explaining why a player's Charisma-based skill check failed because the listener interpreted a careless wording badly. Making the listener simply react poorly to an unattractive face would be dull.
I am curious about the split movement rules and the messy jumble they create. Could The Gleeful Grognard please provide more description or links to other descriptions? I have been considering a houserule to be able to open a door in the middle of movement and I would like to be forewarned about trouble.
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Haven't seen it in 2E yet but one of my favs to hate...
You have to be able to talk in real life to be the party face. You can't let your dice and a quick explanation of your lie do the work nope you have to craft the lie and roll but even if you roll high if your lie had a hole you didn'trealize you fail.
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Feel like some of the house rules being talked aren't really house rules.
Stuff like allowing snakes to grapple or someone to cast spells feels less like a house rule and more like looking at the mechanics of the game, realizing that mechanics are supposed to work like they say they work, and letting them.
- Split movement, boy does split movement like 5e turn combat into a messy jumble when it is so common for adventurers to have so much movement in a turn as is with most people sitting at 35-40ft speed from a very early level.
Yeah, I'm curious about this one, too. What messy jumble?
Split movement also creates a lot of choice paralysis as players agonize over how to get the most use out of every 5 feet of their speed.
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The GM determines whether you can use reactions before your first turn begins, depending on the situation in which the encounter happens.When GMs interpret this to clutch onto 1E ideas that you should never get a reaction before your first turn. Or worse, when they try to link it to exploration activities in a vain attempt to force people to do something other than Search. Especially when the other activity is redundant (Scout, when multiple party members already gain that bonus from feats/features and it won't stack).
To be fair, while your concerns are valid, they are off-topic here.
This is more like a pet-peeve against GM arbitration of a specific case than dislike for a houserule!
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(To preface, I'm talking about 1st Edition here)
I do like Hero Points in theory, and I implement them sort of like Shadowrun 5th's Edge: as a cushion for humiliatingly randomly generated numbers. Though that may be what they're actually for in the first place. I hand them out for stuff like who wants to write in the adventure journal, or who figures out an important plot point. Rewarding the players as well as their characters, and not just the numbers they roll.
Similarly, rolling a natural 1 is more like Shadowrun's Glitches: in combat, you still miss in an embarassing way, but you don't drop your weapon/target yourself with your spell. Or, you underestimate your foe, who dodges in an awesome way.
For skill checks, if you can still succeed on a 1, you do, but something happens. Your nat 1 Stealth still beats their Perception? You make it, but you accidentally leave clues to your passage that could make later tracking with Survival easier. You balance across that plank with a 1 on Acrobatics? You did it, but you forgot your shield on the other side, and one of your allies should probably toss it over or something.
As for house rules I don't like: Critical Skill Checks.
As the house rule goes, if you roll a 20 on a skill check (or initiative), you get to roll the 20 again and add that number to what you already rolled.
Predictably, the bard who always made multiple Perform checks at every city stop got Perform: 50+ on multiple occasions, leading to Shelyn and Desna stopping by his performances when they were on a date; the wizard got one while making a Bag of Holding and inadvertantly made a lesser artifact, which was used to cheese a good portion of the AP (though I didn't mind the part where we got a hundred or two captives out of captivity safely); and I only got them on Acrobatics checks with a flat DC, or Perception checks when there was nothing hidden. Also, there were a couple of times where my (15)+18=33 Stealth check was rendered useless by a (20+12)+3=35 Perception check.
That house rule ended up giving everyone else times where they ended up being like Mythic Tier 8 all of a sudden, and I was afraid to sneak by anyone in case Aroden made his Second Coming just to point out where I was.
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The GM determines whether you can use reactions before your first turn begins, depending on the situation in which the encounter happens.When GMs interpret this to clutch onto 1E ideas that you should never get a reaction before your first turn. Or worse, when they try to link it to exploration activities in a vain attempt to force people to do something other than Search. Especially when the other activity is redundant (Scout, when multiple party members already gain that bonus from feats/features and it won't stack).To be fair, while your concerns are valid, they are off-topic here.
This is more like a pet-peeve against GM arbitration of a specific case than dislike for a houserule!
I would say it goes from being GM arbitration to a house rule when the GM has a standing rule saying "to get reaction X before your turn, you had to have been doing activity Y".
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I dislike hero points, and don't like that they became not a house rule in pf2, it feels like hey, we couldn't quite get the balance right, so here's some get out of death free coupons for when you get one shot.This isn't really what I see happening in practice though. Hero points to stabilize don't happen all that much (except in Plaguestone - that's a universe on its own). Far more often, I see people using them to retry a skill check that they think is important to success conditions, or for example when their character is showing off and unexpectedly rolls poorly - to save their pride.
Also common, hero points on saving throws there the player rolls low and thinks it's gonna really hurt to fail. Less common but occasionally, hero points on a crucial attack roll (like deliver a deathblow to an enemy before the enemy gets another turn).
In my experience they aren't get out of death coupons, they're an intended-from -the-start counterbalance to the heightened randomness that got into the game when Take 10 was removed.
Well I'm glad to hear that. My experience is still limited to low levels in pf2, and I've seen multiple people get one shot (as in instant death from taking over double their max hp in one hit). So that's where that comes from (these weren't homebrew either, all from pfs scenarios)
There's also a feeling of in pf1 you didn't fail very often and when you did and got to reroll with a hero point, that made failures even less frequent, which I disliked. In pf2, you fail too often, so now you need hero points to offset that, which I also dislike. I realize they're necessary in pf2, I just wish they weren't.
In our game a critical failure is > you just end your turn for the round. This applies equally to everyone, NPC's, players and Monsters.
We use Fantasy grounds and its pretty easy to keep track and all it does is make player do movement actions and things that do not require a roll first. For example, a fighter will have 3 actions. So first action will not be 'raise shield' (sometimes) or move or another move action and than strike.
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Haven't seen it in 2E yet but one of my favs to hate...
You have to be able to talk in real life to be the party face. You can't let your dice and a quick explanation of your lie do the work nope you have to craft the lie and roll but even if you roll high if your lie had a hole you didn'trealize you fail.
This one's always been weird, since it gets really bad at both ends.
On the one side "your lie was badly phrased, so you have a big penalty to the check" is terrible.
I've also seen this get bad in the other direction, with things like:
"I try to bluff past the guy."
"Alright, what are you trying to convince him of?"
"I'm just trying to use bluff skill!" *rolls dice*
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ooh, that reminded me of one that I really truly hate. Giving players a surprise round for interrupting conversations. People are trying to negotiate with the (goblins, bandits, whatever) and aren't making progress, one player says they stab the guy, the GM lets them roll an attack, and then goes into initiative.
That one infuriates me, it encourages players to interrupt conversations, and it's usually some dumb barbarian who should fail at any sort of bluff check so should not be able to catch the opponent off guard in such a situation.
Haven't seen it in 2E yet but one of my favs to hate...
You have to be able to talk in real life to be the party face. You can't let your dice and a quick explanation of your lie do the work nope you have to craft the lie and roll but even if you roll high if your lie had a hole you didn'trealize you fail.
This one is a bit of a mixed bag for me, because, while I completely understand why this can be a huge problem, I tried to run social things the way the rulebook expects you to (explain what you want to convince the person of > roll > result) and see how it goes during the Playtest, and pretty much all of my players complained that it took away from the roleplaying and the magic of the game. I guess I just have some players who really like acting. What I try to do to at least mitigate the possible issues is being lenient with "okay, their character probably said the same thing but in a better elaborated manner" if they roll high.
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I would say it goes from being GM arbitration to a house rule when the GM has a standing rule saying "to get reaction X before your turn, you had to have been doing activity Y".The GM determines whether you can use reactions before your first turn begins, depending on the situation in which the encounter happens.When GMs interpret this to clutch onto 1E ideas that you should never get a reaction before your first turn. Or worse, when they try to link it to exploration activities in a vain attempt to force people to do something other than Search. Especially when the other activity is redundant (Scout, when multiple party members already gain that bonus from feats/features and it won't stack).To be fair, while your concerns are valid, they are off-topic here.
This is more like a pet-peeve against GM arbitration of a specific case than dislike for a houserule!
Interesting.
I have come across more than a few GMs who will consistently say "Is the party being ambushed?: Yes or No?" and use the answer to that question to determine if All or None of the PCs has Reactions readied prior to Acting.
Would you consider that a houserule?
If not, how is that different?
Or, how is it different to consistently say "PCs always have their Reactions ready"?
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ooh, that reminded me of one that I really truly hate. Giving players a surprise round for interrupting conversations. People are trying to negotiate with the (goblins, bandits, whatever) and aren't making progress, one player says they stab the guy, the GM lets them roll an attack, and then goes into initiative.
That one infuriates me, it encourages players to interrupt conversations, and it's usually some dumb barbarian who should fail at any sort of bluff check so should not be able to catch the opponent off guard in such a situation.
I always make it clear to my players that
- there will be no mechanical advantage for cutting short a villain monologue- there will be no mechanical disadvantage for hearing them out
We want to hear what it was all about, don't we?
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Interesting.
I have come across more than a few GMs who will consistently say "Is the party being ambushed?: Yes or No?" and use the answer to that question to determine if All or None of the PCs has Reactions readied prior to Acting.
Would you consider that a houserule?
If not, how is that different?
Or, how is it different to consistently say "PCs always have their Reactions ready"?
Ah, no that is reasonable. Compare these things:
- A hag used Deception to pretend to be a damsel in distress, then jumps past the fighter and tries to bite off the wizard's face. The fighter doesn't get to take an Attack of Opportunity.
- The GM is annoyed that people are always using the Search tactic, so says that the rogue can only use Nimble Dodge if she was using Scout. However, there are two rogues in the party and multiple Scouting is redundant. This is the sort of house rule I hate.
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This one is a bit of a mixed bag for me, because, while I completely understand why this can be a huge problem, I tried to run social things the way the rulebook expects you to (explain what you want to convince the person of > roll > result) and see how it goes during the Playtest, and pretty much all of my players complained that it took away from the roleplaying and the magic of the game. I guess I just have some players who really like acting. What I try to do to at least mitigate the possible issues is being lenient with "okay, their character probably said the same thing but in a better elaborated manner" if they roll high.Haven't seen it in 2E yet but one of my favs to hate...
You have to be able to talk in real life to be the party face. You can't let your dice and a quick explanation of your lie do the work nope you have to craft the lie and roll but even if you roll high if your lie had a hole you didn'trealize you fail.
I tend to go with a minimum-maximum approach.
At minimum I want to know what you're trying to convince the NPC of and what sort of evidence/incentives you're offering. Like, if the players found out the mayor is a werewolf and they're trying to convince the guard captain to let them into the mayor's house, it makes a difference for how the plot develops if they tell the captain that! (Maybe the captain is in on it, or maybe if you tell him that he gives you a silver sword - could go either way.) This doesn't have to be RPed out directly, but I do want to know your general plan for the conversation.
At maximum, you RP the whole thing directly and I get from what you're RPing which of these things you are and aren't saying.
I try to be flexible in this. If I'm running a social scene in an online game with players I don't know, I try to get a sense for how comfortable each player is, don't want to press people into playing in a way they're not comfortable with. Meanwhile, I give the other players enough room to RP without taking up all the time. I definitely don't try to put everyone to the same standard that fits nobody.
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Haven't seen it in 2E yet but one of my favs to hate...
You have to be able to talk in real life to be the party face. You can't let your dice and a quick explanation of your lie do the work nope you have to craft the lie and roll but even if you roll high if your lie had a hole you didn'trealize you fail.This one's always been weird, since it gets really bad at both ends.
On the one side "your lie was badly phrased, so you have a big penalty to the check" is terrible.
I've also seen this get bad in the other direction, with things like:
"I try to bluff past the guy."
"Alright, what are you trying to convince him of?"
"I'm just trying to use bluff skill!" *rolls dice*
Being autistic and effectively incapable of lying, I feel this one pretty hard. So to explain my point, let me ask this:
Does this also apply to the people playing a Wizard?
Wizard Player: I cast a fireball at this orc over here.
GM: OK. Let's see you produce just a little bit of flame from your hands first.
Wizard Player: Huh? I'm not able to do that. I'm just casting a spell though. The rules say that I can.
GM: Nah. If you can't do it, then neither can your character.
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I certainly don't make players say everything their character says in a situation like that, or penalize them for not being eloquent...but asking which lie you tell someone is actually necessary a lot of the time.
I mean, even if your goal is just getting past the guard, telling him you're his boss's friend has a very different effect than telling him you're a tax fraud investigator sent by the government to investigate his boss if he sees his boss while you're in there, which could easily come up.
People shouldn't need to be a good liar just because their character is, but the GM has an actual need to know what their NPCs currently believe in order to roleplay them properly.
I'm happy to suggest ideas if the player's having a hard time coming up with anything, but there needs to be a specific lie that gets told and the player and GM both need to know what it was, or the world can become really inconsistent in a really bad way.
2 book houserules aim at the wrong place to limit game system exploitation.
Book limitation as a house rule was not always targeted at limiting game exploitation. Older SRD’s didn’t always present all of the text in a spell or feat as holistically as AON does - this led some tables to limit books to avoid game disruption due to rules confusion.
For a while at our table, and still for some of our non Paizo games, we limited to only books that were physically available either in a pdf or physics format. In other games (looking at you GURPS) book limitation was necessary.
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I'm happy to suggest ideas if the player's having a hard time coming up with anything, but there needs to be a specific lie that gets told and the player and GM both need to know what it was, or the world can become really inconsistent in a really bad way.
That I could probably do. Pick between a couple or three options to go with. But coming up with something on my own doesn't work so well. Blank page problem to the extreme...
Though, it might work even better to come up with the options after the dice are rolled. That way we could come up with either a lie that is believable if the dice show a success, or something incredulous if they show failure. To me that seems more in line with how things work - make the rolls, then describe the action. You don't start describing the effects of your awesome sword routine until after you roll the attack roll.
But when I hear things like 'you can't make a bluff check (or diplomacy, or intimidate, or ...) unless you can come up with something meaningful to say' that is when it starts feeling like an unwritten houserule - and one that I really don't like.
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I think there's a problem here with some things being correlated that don't exactly correlate.
I don't need to know the exact words a character says, or a good performance or anything any more than I need details of an exact sword swing. At least not unless there are real strategic decisions in the detail (things like whether to use evidence to support your argument when it would also reveal that you did something illegal to get that evidence, etc).
But knowing what the character is trying to convince someone to believe, or knowing what kind of favor they're asking for with diplomacy is more equivalent to knowing what creature an attack is targeting. It's part of the basic information needed to resolve the attempt, because it can be essential to determining both the difficulty of the task and the effects of a success or failure.
In cases like Intimitate to demoralize, or diplomacy to make an impression, it's possible to get by with less information, but Intimidate to coerce is another example where the detail of what you're trying to bully a person into doing is an essential parameter.
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It's a complicated issue, because I have shy players with excellent optimization skills and other players with great social intuition whose brains hurt when they have to do simple math. I don't want to punish either of them, but I do want to value what each is bringing to the table.
I think it's reasonable to let a shy person have their rolls do the talking, but when I'm really impressed with someone's cleverness, to quietly set the DC a little lower. I don't think that's actually a houserule either, but a legitimate use of GM discretion.
Thoughts? Me bad GM?