My D&D Flavour: House Rules for Badass Heroes.

Tommi made a post suggestion in my last Adventure Prep post: “How about a brief summary of the house rules you use for those who have not read everything you have ever posted”?

I’m happy to comply…. except for the brief part. 😀

The core of the rules we use is D&D 3.5 with a metric ton of sourcebooks (most of which I own, check my library here).

Some players have the full Core set, the Players Handbook II and Stef even has the Magic Item Compendium (his D&D Sears Catalog he calls it I believe) .

Of course, many, many, many changes were made to the rules:

First, we borrowed most of the system-neutral cool stuff from the Iron Heroes Core book. Mostly because that game is crammed with stuff that makes character into Badasses:

Point buy:

Abilities Scores are purchased as per the option presented in the IH Core Book (which mirrors the DMG, I think). All players have a 10 in each ability score and buys increases at the rate of 1 point per +1 increase until 15, 2 points per +1 until 17… etc. All players had 16 points to buy their character. (Except Cixi, who had 24).

Cixi :

Franky plays the only fully Iron Hero Character, a throwback from our last campaign. Iron Heroes are classes that were designed to be equivalent to all other d20 Fantasy classes but without needing to use Magic Items and Buffs. Iron Hero, as the name implies, is a low/corrupted magic game.

In order to make Iron Heroes fit in a Generic D&D world, I tweaked a lot of rules for them:

• Immune to all Spells and Spell-like abilities that allow a Fort or Will Save (prevents healing, Divination and Charms, but a fireball hurts).
• If they die, they become incorporeal spirits that can possess a body (like the Fiendish Codex I) and transform it into their original forms (over 5 days).
• No Magic Item function in their hands. (There’s a whole lot of fluff behind these 3 rules)

Skill System:

All skills made into groups of 3-4 skills. Each classes has access to specific groups (Download Yan’s excellent cheat sheet here). Each skill point spent buys one rank in each skill in a group. All other skills can be bought at 1 point per rank. (So yes everyone gets to use Use Magic Device, great for a non-cleric party like ours).

Furthermore, all skills rolls and effect are handled as Iron Heroes. This means you can, for example, take a +5 DC to Climb faster or retain your Dex Bonus while doing so. The one exception is Perform and Search/Disable device where one must be a Iron Hero class, a Bard or have Trapsmithing to use as written.

Combat Challenges and Stunts:

Players can trade Base Attack and Defense Bonuses for extras in combat. These extras are all basically watered down combat feat effects akin to Power Attack, Combat Expertise, etc.

A stunt is an improvised attack that uses a skill (or a combination of skills). For example, I allowed tumble checks to deal damage to a swarm by using one’s body as an area attack.

Self Flanking and Attacks of Opportunity:

A Character that starts his move adjacent to a foe and moves to the opposite flanking position in the same turn gets to flank the opponent.

Also, the only way to provoke an AoO is to move more than 1/4 your speed within the threatened area of the same foe.

Draining:

Level and ability drains are now temporary. Negative levels are recovered at the rate of 1 per day.

The rest of the house rules were taken here and there…

For character design and management, we use the following House Rules:

Custom Classes:

• Math plays a Mashed-Up (not multiclassed) Duskblade Arcane Archer that can cast spells through arrows and Melee weapons.
• Yan plays a Shaper, a mashup between the Pixie racial template and Monte Cook’s variant Sorcerer with a unique spell mechanic.
• Stef plays a ‘standard’ 1/2 Dragon Barbarian, boosted a bit to give him a higher breath weapon DC, and recurrent breath weapon (every 1d4 rounds like a Dragon)

Hit Points:

All players have the choice of taking average Hit Point or Rolling them. But they must chose before, not after rolling 🙂

XP:

As mentioned earlier last week, I use Clinton R. Nixon’s Keys system. I took the one from something he called Sweet20, but it seems to have been incorporated into another of his creations called Shadows of Yesterday. I am still implementing this one to reward my player’s natural tendencies to start building their character’s stories. I’ll read SoY a bit more to see if the implementation of the key system is any different than the one I cobbled up here.

Other House rules we use:

Damage Reduction:

A high enough enhancement bonus penetrates material-related DR. For example, a +2 weapon overcomes X/Slashing and a +3 weapon overcomes x/adamantine. I took this from an old Monte Cook web post.

Spell Resistance:

When you target a monster with Spell Resistance with a magical effect that is subjected to it, make an SR check as usual. If failed, you do not spend any resource (Spell Slot, Spell, Charge, etc) but you still lose your action.

Golems now have very high Spell Resistance instead of pure immunity (Sorry Yan, I forgot that one last time).

Action points:

We use the full gamut of Action Points featured in the Unearthed Arcana variant rules.

Critical Hits:

Last but not least, now that Franky and I fixed a little rules error with Cixi’s Critical Hit rate, I’m re-instating the play test of Crit Resistant creatures instead of Crit immune ones (Taken from Graham’s very 1st post here). All creatures usually immune to crits can now be, if the player confirms a crit twice with the roll of two d20s.

Well, that’s about it. Once it’s all there in one post, it does seem like I’m not playing D&D 3.5 anymore…