My house rules

[Hellebore]

I've just finished compiling my house rules if anyone is interested. You can find a pdf here.

Whilst I like the rules lite system and the original gamebooks, I think it's a little too rules lite for me. Thus I've differentiated weapons and armour and am using a slightly different method of test mechanics.

I'm also getting ready to turn the entire LW series up to book 20 into an epic alternate storyline campaign where the players take the place of lone wolf. I've included my notes on how I'm going about that (although it's just generalities no specific book breakdowns sorry).

As part of that I created a modified Sommerswerd that incrementally boosts your stats as you rank up rather than giving you autowin at the beginning. I plan on using this version in my playthroughs of the gamebooks from now on as well.

Hellebore

 

[Random Code]

Erm, this is effing excellent stuff - very nicely done!

Just had a VERY QUICK skim through but it looks like you've been influenced by A Song of Ice and Fire RPG with regards to the weapon qualities and combat moves, which was something I was going to do but it looks like you've done a job here for me.

Yep, really well done. I'll have to have a closer look later tonight.

And, it looks good too - very nicely presented. Kudos to you, fella!

 

[Random Code]

Okay, I've had a further read...

I really like what you've done with the streamlining of difficulty numbers and tasks... It feels like a unified mechanic across all the tiers of play which seems to have a lot more consistency than the official rules. I was going to adopt the discipline usage rules as referred to in the sample adventure within the main rulebook (ie, the +1 or +3 depending on the applicability of the discipline rather than the bonus at half your PC's rank) but I prefer yours as it expands into higher ranks of competence more logically.

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I'm going to work on house rules for many of the disciplines for the classes as I don't like how they've been set up going from levels 1 to 10 and then into 11 to 20 - I'll post those in a couple of weeks as well as some combat rules regarding actions and movement and the like.

I may try and adopt the format of your pdf so if people like them they can print them out and mine will look like a sister document to yours, assuming you're okay with that?

Again, well done. This is a great piece of work.

 

[Hellebore]

No worries. This is just the stuff that I personally prefer and I like design and layout so...

The document is A5 and uses Times New Roman at 10point. I used indesign to lay it out.

EDIT: I haven't played the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. Currently we're playing the Dragon Age RPG where I also did up some houserules on weapons.


Hellebore

 

[Hellebore]

Just an update. I've changed jobs and so the pdf for my house rules can't be found at the location given in the original post.

I've uploaded it to my dropbox account public folder so that hopefully anyone can access it if they wish: https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Public/LW%20Magnamund%20Miscellania.pdf?w=fae78fd0

Any comments/criticisms are most welcome. If anyone is interested in the Dragon Age RPG I worked on some house rules for that as well which can be found here: http://dragonageoracle.com/2012/02/23/esoterica-of-thedas/. You might recognise the origin of the Miscellania leather cover in the graphics I did for those...



Hellebore

 

[August1]

I must agree with Random again, good sir. Excellent work on these, both the Lone Wolf and the Dragon Age rule supplements. I like the thought process behind these and while I might not use them, I could certainly recommend them to people looking to get a little more from their gaming.

Good job!

-August

 

[Hellebore]

No worries.

Unfortunately I've not yet managed to put my LW gamebook adventure into practice yet, otherwise i would have added any notes and modifications I made during play to this.

Hellebore

 

[phantomdoodler]

This sounds interesting, although I cannot access the dropbox account

 

[Hellebore]

This sounds interesting, although I cannot access the dropbox account

Apologies. This is the second time I've mucked up a dropbox link.

this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25653752/LW%20Magnamund%20Miscellania.pdf

Should be a publically accessible link that anyone regardless of dropbox membership should be able to download.

Hellebore

 

[phantomdoodler]

Nicely put together sir! Although I will use my own house rules regarding weapons and armour (like a fixed Armour bonus to reduced damage each hit), it has given me plenty of food for thought. I do like the idea of weapon qualities, as found in other games, so i will work on those myself.The offical layout look also helps. Guess I need to work on my own version of this....

 

[Hellebore]

Nicely put together sir! Although I will use my own house rules regarding weapons and armour (like a fixed Armour bonus to reduced damage each hit), it has given me plenty of food for thought. I do like the idea of weapon qualities, as found in other games, so i will work on those myself.The offical layout look also helps. Guess I need to work on my own version of this....

I did consider a fixed armour value, but it would mean a major restriction on the amount of pts of armour you could wear. If I was doing that I wouldn't allow more than 3 pts of armour, so 1=light, 2=medium, 3=heavy armour. The game allows a maximum of 8 damage to a player/Lone Wolf, with the majority at 4/5 (but only if the enemy has a higher CS than you). If you out CS them then the average damage you receive is ~2.

So wearing 3 pts of armour will reduce your damage intake massively. Any more than that and you're going to be immune to most damage taken from the majority of opponents. Thus I went with absorption per encounter rather than simply boosting Endurance. That way you can have a wider range of armour values making PCs even harder to kill.

Even if you used damage modification through weapons (like I have) the amount of damage is going to be really low on a player.

It also stays closer to the way it works in the core rules, which is something I wanted to stick to (although how much is a bit subjective).

Hellebore

 

[phantomdoodler]

Personally, I am not really taken on the gamebook treatment of armour at all, however you modify it. Your system does tend to make armour very powerful, but then if attacks are all doing 2 points more on average, i guess that would balance things a little. I may, however, be inclined to treat armour and damage much like The One Ring does:
Against most blows, armour doesnt effect how much damage you take - with fatigue and bruising accounting for most EP loss (The EP bonus doesnt actually add to EP but see below) . When you drop to 0 Eps though, you are not actually dead - just unconscious, bleeding and extremely vulnerable. Serious wounds are what will kill you though. If you roll a 10 to hit, you may have inflicted a serious injury to the target, or on a 1, they may have done that to you. Pick another random number, adding the weapons Injury rating, a number similar to your damage bonus - if the result is greater than the number of points of EPs from armour you are wearing (so 8 for Full plate, 2 for just a helmet etc) you or the target are wounded. For mooks, thats enough to drop them unconscious immediately, and if the attack also reduces them to 0 EPs, they die. Named npcs and players can take a wound and still remain conscious, provided they have at least 1 EP. If you take a second Wound, but are not reduced to zero EPs, then you are reduced to zero EP, are knocked unconscious and are treated as dying - unless treated soon, you will die. If you take a second wound, which reduces your EPs to zero, you are killed instantly by the blow.

 

[Hellebore]

Are you not using the combat table then? It all looks good, but it does seem to stray from the core game quite a lot.

I generally work from the perspective of trying to stay within the core game as much as possible - if I find there are more house rules and add ons than original content ... well perhaps it's not the right set of rules for me. I'd swap to a different set that met my needs.

Hellebore

 

[ReaperWolf]

Hellebore,

Kudos sir, that's a tremendous amount of work. Judging by the way you stayed close to the core mechanics in the rulebook It's clear Lone Wolf is dear to your heart.

A few ideas about flails: the damage seems a little high even though you tagged it as cumbersome (3) as a balancing factor. I suggest maybe DB 4 or 5, give it Cumbersome 2 and give it the flailing quality. Flails were notoriously difficult to parry with shields so I suggest reducing shield bonus by 1 to account for the flailing quality.

You saved me a lot of work, cheers mate!

>>ReaperWolf

 

[Hellebore]

I'm trying to remember why I wrote it the way I did. From what I can see, my conclusion was that as Shields give CS and the only role CS plays is increasing the damage you do whilst decreasing the amount your opponent does, that granting a higher damage bonus would effectively do the same thing as CS without being as good.

You've got to remember that +/-1CS is better than +/-1 Damage, which is why I stayed away from weapons modifying CS (except iirc the quality which imo makes sense). A flail reducing the CS of the target would do more damage/reduce damage taken more than simply granting an additional point of damage.

So because the basic rules are more abstract than most systems, I look at it from the perspective that the additional damage reflects the weapon getting over the enemy's shield and hitting more.

Hellebore

 

[ReaperWolf]

Fair enough, thanks for sharing your insights Hellebore.

While I have your ear, could you elaborate on your experiences with dual-weapon fighting? More to the point, why multiply the damage? It seems to me that adding DB then multiplying makes any kind of fighting other than dual-wielding weapons with DB 2 or 3 pointless.

>>ReaperWolf

 

[Hellebore]

Fair enough, thanks for sharing your insights Hellebore.

While I have your ear, could you elaborate on your experiences with dual-weapon fighting? More to the point, why multiply the damage? It seems to me that adding DB then multiplying makes any kind of fighting other than dual-wielding weapons with DB 2 or 3 pointless.

>>ReaperWolf

The catch is that you must subtract the combined DB of the weapons from your CS. That will reduce the amount of damage that you do. You only double the combat results table number.

So you could be CS 24 and dual wield 2 axes. You do 6 extra damage (3 from each axe), but are only attacking at CS 18 (-6 to your CS). If you do 3 damage to the target on the combat results table it is doubled to 6. Total damage dealt is 12.

Basically this does two things: it encourages 'rogue' like dual wielding as the less damage done by the weapon the less your CS is penalised (so dual wielding daggers is easier than dual wielding axes) and it allows people who don't have dual wielding disciplines to dual wield, albiet not as well as someone with that ability. It was more for flavour to give a way to dual wield that didn't require you be a buccaneer of Shadaki etc, whilst not necessarily being superior to disciple dual wielding.

The Buccaneer's Blood Tempest just lets them make two attack rolls. So if they were carrying two axes they could make two +3 damage attacks with no penalties, or dual wield and suffer -6 to their attack roll.

If you compare it to the above, my 'untrained' dual wielding is basically identical to blood tempest except you suffer a bigger CS penalty the larger and nastier the weapons you use. This IMO makes sense, two daggers are easier to manage than two axes or warhammers.

Hellebore

 

[ReaperWolf]

So you could be CS 24 and dual wield 2 axes. You do 6 extra damage (3 from each axe), but are only attacking at CS 18 (-6 to your CS). If you do 3 damage to the target on the combat results table it is doubled to 6. Total damage dealt is 12.Hellebore

Hellebore, using your example, isn't the damage done 18? If the Combat Results Table result is a 3, adding the axes (3 each) and then doubled = 18?

Unless I'm misunderstanding your home rules.

>>ReaperWolf

 

[Hellebore]

You only double the damage from the combat results table. It reflects the fact they you've hit them with two weapons.

Hellebore

 

[ReaperWolf]

You only double the damage from the combat results table. It reflects the fact they you've hit them with two weapons.

Then add the DB?

>>ReaperWolf