- When someone channels a virtue, I give them one auto-success and they roll the extra dice. That way it's always at least as good as just spending a willpower.
- I allow Channels and Legendary Deeds per session, not per story. This allows for some really exciting back-and-forth on contested rolls, as well as empowering the PCs to succeed whenever they set their hearts on it. It also means having one less thing to track between sessions.
- At character creation, when PCs bought an Ability that required choosing a specialty, I squared the dots and told them to split them between any number specialties. Example: someone took Science 3. I told her "You get 9 dots to split between different fields of science, but no single field can be rated higher than a 3".
- I allow Abilities and Birthrights to follow the same caps as Attributes: Greater of 5 or Legend rating. The PCs all have a 6-dot relic or creature currently. I let them upgrade old birthrights at Demigod. As a result of all this, all birthrights (even followers) have remained relevant through Legend 6.
- I have extensive house-rules for Improvised Weapons and Squishing/Pinning. That keeps Relics competitive vs skyscrapers at God-level Strength.
- Turf war system. Needs some revising.
- We roll damage vs extras, but use the reduced health levels. They go down fast.
- I award Legend by story events, not by XP.
- I make the target to hit someone be DV, (not 1+DV). This was actually a mistake, but it went unnoticed for 10 sessions, and resulted in shorter fight scenes, so we kept it.
- I make Divine Wrath cost 5 Legend instead of 1. In general, I keep Agg damage rare.
- I don't allow regeneration or health 7 to heal Agg unless your Legend equals or exceeds the Legend of the source of the damage. I don't let it restore lost limbs/parts unless your Legend exceeds the source. That way, Tyr's hand and Osiris's phallus are gone for good.
- To speed up combat, I have followers act in squads, assisting one-another for bonus dice on a single roll.
- I've revised the combat wheel a couple times, because I don't like the way everyone piles up on tick 6 if one player has massive Epic Wits. Still not completely happy with the latest version.
- I've eliminated the "spend a willpower to shrug off any mental/social power" rule, but had to tone one or two powers back a bit to make it work. This was the one change that heard any grousing from my players, as I was hammering it out amongst the chupacabra.
- I've created several new knacks, and allow most of the knacks on the wiki.
- Houseruled Untouchable Opponent to boost by Dots, not Successes. In retrospect, I wish I'd gone by Legend Rating instead of Dots, as that'd reduce some of the "need" for high Epic Dex.
- Houseruled Holy Rampage and Divine Rampage to reduce Soak as well as Hardness. As written, reducing hardness rarely did anything.
- I've tweaked a few boons and knacks to make more sense - some seemed written from the assumption that Epics wouldn't add to rolls, others from assumption they would. I brought them all (at least the ones being used currently by my group) into rough balance by level.
- I've clarified that Knacks are all 5-tick misc actions unless specified (book just says Boons, it seemed logical it should apply to knacks more)
- Overland and marathon rates rules governing long-distance travel.
- Instead of "If you don't have the ability you don't get your Epics, and it's +2 difficulty" we use "If you don't have the ability, treat your Epic as one dot lower, and it's +2 difficulty". This way a Demigod loses out on 1-6 successes, not 20. This is a really recent change. It started as a mistake, just missing the "no epics" clause. After 10 sessions or so I noticed that, and decided nothing was gained by using it. However, recently, I've begun to think a bit more of a penalty is in order, hence the "-1 to Epic" idea.
Dangerous assumptions about how gaming relates to life. Also a place for r_b_bergstrom to keep an archive of things he flung out into the gaming fora and wikis of the world.
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Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Scion House Rules
There's a forum thread asking GMs to share house-rules they've implemented in their campaign. Here's a list of my houserules...
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