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Topic: House Rules

Page: 1
  • House Rules

    On my next run-through, I'm going to try adding a couple of "House Rules."

    First, if you have multiple items with the same Combat (or Speed) Ability, you can use that ability as many times as it appears in your items. So, if you have two items with Piercing, you can use Piercing twice during a single combat. You can still only use one Combat/Speed ability at a time (so if you had two items with Rake, you couldn't Rake an opponent for 6d6 damage, but you could potentially use Rake twice, one for each items).

    Secondly, dying has an extra cost. If you die, you must either lose one Equipment Item (not gold, quest items or Backpack items) or 5 Permanent health (if you have no Items or simply don't want to lose one that you have.

    While I appreciate the idea that you don't have to restart the book from the beginning if your character dies, the idea of having infinite lives/chances kind of sucks the tension out of the adventure for me.

    As for the other rule, I like the idea that if you want to acquire multiple uses of a certain ability, you don't necessarily have to go on a synonym hunt. That said, there's still some tactical thought involved. If you somehow have five items with Piercing and you're up against an opponent that's immune to Piercing, that's five item slots that are reduced in effectiveness. And death hurts more now.

  • Re: House Rules

    Sounds really interesting John, keep us all posted on how you get on. You may not find the multiple combat abilities that OP as there are limited items with the best abilities. I suppose the only way it could become a serious problem is if you had a lot of items with replicated passive abilities (bleed, venom, disease etc.) and you were stacking each of those (so having three items with bleed would give you +3 damage at the end of a round). Would be interesting to see how that played out.

    Anyway, good luck with it!

  • Re: House Rules

    Remember the House rules only affect Combat and Speed abilities. Three items with Bleed still only do 1 point per round. The same would go for Acid/Sear/Thorns/etc. Differing Passive/Modifier abilities still stack as normal.

  • Re: House Rules

    Ah yes!

  • Re: House Rules

    After playing through Legion of Shadow with the House rules, I have to say that the duplicate ability use really doesn't make a lot of difference. As noted, their are several abilities that are already effective duplicates Webbed=Stun, etc. So, I'm going to drop that aspect of the House Rules, which tended to kind of violate the main rules anyway.

    Instead, my new modification will be that the player can use potions and item/career/etc abilities to deal with non-combat dice tests as well. So, if you a Pot of Brawn+2, you can drink it before trying to push the lid off that coffin. If you're trying to climb or swim, you can use Speed potions, Fearless/Haste/etc to help you out. That said, the only Abilities you can use are those which will modify your character. You can't use Webbed on a river to reduce your difficulty. You can, however, use Charm to reroll low dice, though that's still one time per dice per roll (so if you have Charm in four items, you can still only modify each die once).

    This means that you can use it against the Gambler in Act I. However you can only use a single Charm once in any game against him. If you have Charm once, you can use it on either the first (or, if applicable, second die roll). If you have it at least twice, you can use Charm twice per game.

    These rules might make things a little too easy, but I'll test it and might simply decide to allow for potions only against challenges.

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