Recently I've been going through my Deadlands books... my favorite being the tabbed and highlighted one I got from a used book bin a few years back.  Deadlands is one of those games that some people love and think was creative and clever, and others seem to think is chunky and awkward.

Me? I just liked playing cowboys and the long running 'duel' between two characters (mine and another) to see who would 'miss' a shot first in a fight.  He had the advantage as my character went two gunning, yet somehow we never, ever missed.... no matter how wild the shots we tried. Our unbroken string of hits.... well I digress.

The point is, I've recently realized that apparently we had been playing it all wrong.  Okay, not ALL wrong. No, the thing we missed entirely was the way disadvantages were played out.

See, Deadlands was one of the first games I ever encountered where you got 'xp' every time your disadvantage came into play.  This isn't so unique now, but at the time it would have been pretty radical...

... if the GM had even once used it.  Being familiar with disadvantages and flaws from GURPS and the old Vampire game, and not actually owning the rules myself, I had no reason to even think they should work any differently.

Would this have made much of a difference at the table?  Yes and no.

Yes, because it would have given us a great deal of fate chips when we needed them most. Our disadvantages always came to the fore at the worst possible moments.

No, because despite the horror stories we all hear about (the guy buying 'one handed' for each missing finger, and then slapping a cybernetic hand in it's place?), everyone at the table tended to honestly play their disadvantages, even playing disadvantages that didn't exist (see our interparty rivalry... some of the risks we took to one up each other in shooting were downright stupid!).  Roleplaying wise, it might have added some color scenes during otherwise slow moments, but not as much as you might think.

It occurs to me that many gamers and many games don't play by-the-book, often out of ignorance. D&D was, and is, famous for the old fumble houserule that was apparently self generating, or how often fireballs violate the rules of line of sight, despite explicit examples to the contrary. Ok, that one isn't famous.

It's not always bad, or always good, but it is a facet of our hobby.  One could talk about the role of designers in helping facilitate 'by the book' play, but really.... I don't feel up to design wonkery at the moment....

I do not think I have EVER played a game by the rules. Vampire I modded heavily to allow for more combat. Palladium I modded heavily to streamline non-combat and combat. Heck, my own system often gets modded ont he fly to allow for unexpected requests.

I know you do not want to get into the design stuff, but as a writer of a few games I expect such changes to be done. It is the nature of the hobby.

Bill

I think this started with D&D, especially 1e AD&D.  Much of the book was not well written and there were no bulletin boards or other way of checking other than the Dragon QA.  Quite often, groups of kids tried to learn purely by reading with no input from other gamers or anything else.  It'd often be a year or more before we'd reread a rule and realize "Ohhhh, that's how it works."

Variances in interpretations and house rulings were so large that changing groups/DMs was like playing a different game.

We used the weapon vs. armor rules in AD&D 1E, and you know what we were?

We were GRATEFUL.

We skipped the weapon speed, though.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityWe used the weapon vs. armor rules in AD&D 1E, and you know what we were?

We were GRATEFUL.

We skipped the weapon speed, though.

I used the weapon speed feature, then when I became more proficient at GMing I stopped using rules such a this that only hampers the flow of combat and gaming in overall.
There was a time in which I only played "by the book", but that time is no longer.

I think my D&D->AD&D campaign had more houserules than rules.

-clash

Quote from: Pierce InverarityWe used the weapon vs. armor rules in AD&D 1E, and you know what we were?

We were GRATEFUL.

I misinterpreted those rules, which first appeared in the Greyhawk supplement, as applying to weapon vs. armor CLASS, meaning that they'd be applied even when fighting non-humanoid monsters. Using the Dungeon Tac Cards from Judges Guild, they were manageable under OD&D+Greyhawk, but since there was no similar accessory for AD&D, I gave up on them. Had I realized they were only for actual armor, I'd have liked them better.

I'm forgetting, though: did they apply to just the base armor, or did the presence of a shield change your AC for purposes of doing the chart lookup? If the latter, you get kind of a weird effect that somewhat undermines the simulative benefit of using the chart.

QuoteWe skipped the weapon speed, though.

I discarded that one out of hand, but even aside from that I'm mystified by the various initiative systems quoted for OD&D, compared to what we did. I'm pretty sure we just rolled a d6 for each side, high roller goes first. Not sure if ties were simultaneous strikes or if they got rerolled. (A little googling suggests that I got this system indirectly from Chainmail via a reference in OD&D, while the "alternate combat system" had a more complex set of phases for missile vs. melee, etc.)

Quote from: Elliot WilenI misinterpreted those rules, which first appeared in the Greyhawk supplement, as applying to weapon vs. armor CLASS, meaning that they'd be applied even when fighting non-humanoid monsters.

LOL ROFL!

That said... now you mention it, you have a point, and for the ultimate in Sim the MM should have stated each monster's W vs. A modifier.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI'm forgetting, though: did they apply to just the base armor, or did the presence of a shield change your AC for purposes of doing the chart lookup? If the latter, you get kind of a weird effect that somewhat undermines the simulative benefit of using the chart.

I don't think so, but I can't remember...

Re. weapon speed: Honestly, rabbit? We didn't use it because we couldn't figure out the rules. We learned English with the DMG, you see...

BTW, in an interview (with gamespy?), Gygax said he regrets putting weapon vs. armor and weapon speed into the rules. And he's right--they're just right for a game like Rolemaster, but not for 1E.

Quote from: SpikeIt occurs to me that many gamers and many games don't play by-the-book, often out of ignorance.

Been there, done that, have the embarassing public correction scars to prove it.

Seanchai

Yes, it's true that many people play games "wrongly" simply because they don't know all the rules. That's why I always laugh when people say that house rules are evil wrong bad nasty - it's wrong the play the game differently to the way it's written. Because the fact is, few gamers ever get it perfectly right.

Here's an example:

That first Tiwesdaeg campaign I'm always going on about, it ended when one PC slew another. He didn't mean to - she threw herself in front of an NPC to save him. The campaign ended there because all the little plot points were tied up. The NPC was defeated, this was just the blow to kill him off and make sure he never came back. Most of the campaign had been about this NPC and his ambitious family, his evil sorceror father and so on. Thing was, one PC was his half-sister, and he was the only one left of her whole family. So she was saying, "you can't kill him, he's the only family I have left!" And the other PC said, "no, he must be killed - his father murdered my mother, he is a rival to my being thane," and so on. So he stepped forward, raised his axe, and brought it down - and she leapt in front of it, and was slain. The campaign had actually begun with her saving this NPC as an infant, so it seemed kind of poetic that it should end with her saving him as a young man.

But I found out last night that I got the rules wrong. See, this was GURPS, and she did a "sacrificial dodge." That's like when some Secret Serviceman throws himself in front of a bullet for the President. Her player rolled a critical success. But in fact this NPC was on the ground, so she had done a "sacrificial dodge and drop." Now, tucked away in an obscure corner of the rules is the subrule that with a regular sacrificial dodge, if you get a critical success, nothing special happens - you still take the blow. But if you succeed on a sacrificial dodge and drop by "more than 3", then neither of you get hit.

So in fact when she tried to save the NPC, she shouldn't have been hit, either. She got a critical success - she should have been able to roll them both out of the way. Had she done that, the other PC would have been shocked, and not swung a second time. And the campaign would have gone on, not ending there.

But you know, that was actually a really good way to end the campaign. We'd wanted it to end, we'd always intended it would be closed-ended, lasting for 12-24 sessions - I was aiming at 16 in all, this was the 14th. It was just a matter of how it would end. And ended that way, it ended with a moment of both triumph and tragedy - the villains were all dealt with, but the PC with divided loyalties was slain. It was a very intense and memorable moment, another player whose character wasn't involved in that moment, just watching, said it was his best rpg session ever.

Then last night on the train to another game session using GURPS, my buddy I was supposed to meet had taken the train ahead of me, so to pass the time I glanced through the rules, and found that one. Two years of playing GURPS 4e, many readings of the rules, lots of GMing it and discussing it - I missed that little rule. Woops.

But that's okay, it worked out better that way.

Jimbo: I wasn't attempting to critisize people for not knowing the rules.  In my case it was a shame I didn't play right because it was a facinating rule of it's own right... innovative etc, and it would have been nice to see it in action before I learned all about similar rules and got all jaded and such... but we had lots of fun without it, so its not like it ruined the game.

Even if I were to get all 'you must play perfectly by the book'... which would be hypocritical of me as I have long ago announced I can't be arsed to look up half the damn rules of the runequest game I'm running...or any other game.... I could hardly get preachy about GURPS, which while simple on one level has so many tiny rules variations hidding within it that I'm not sure Steve J himself could run it 'by the book'...


I don't advocate Houserules for reasons that have little to do with respecting 'Canon' and everything to do with 'communications and expectations'.  I'm a RAW geek because, damn it, I've gone through so many different game groups simply from travel that having to spoonfeed my private expectations of unpublished materials upon unsuspecting gamers I'm trying to recruit is simply too damn much.

That and so many people seem proud of houserules that seem to have less to do with 'reality emulation' and more to do with personal fetishistic behavior.... Peeves and the like.

I've got one that I don't think I've ever seen before.  I started gaming red box D&D at age 11.  At age 12 I met another kid who was running ADVANCED Dungeons and Dragons, which must have been better because it was advanced.  Anyway, all he owned was the 1E PHB and DMG, and in the back of the DMG is a text table of standard monsters, HD, powers, and XP awards.  The XP awards are written as 100 + 5/hp, which he took to mean you would gain 100 XP plus 5hp for killing that monster.  Needless to say, by the time we reached 5th level we had about 400 hp.  Fun times.  



Pete

In both first edition and 3rd edition, I have found myself going through a phase of unlearning rules. Things I had assumed were in the books turned out to be judgement calls made by the GMs I had played with first. It's odd how in some cases, I could have sworn I had actually seen the pages on which they were written, or at least known where they were, but after making an exhausting effort, I and other players could not find rules we had taken as set in stone. It's much like fundamentalism, you get used to a sort of custom and just assume the holy text supports it. Can be quite shocking when it turns out not to be the case.

The thing is once I reached that point where I knew certain rules were just judgement calls, or even mistakes, I didn't always toss them. Sometimes we decided we liked our old ways of playing, even some of the things that started as clear mistakes. But it was nice to be able to see the options more clearly.

Quote from: pspahnFun times.  



Pete

For those of you you haven't read it yet, I'll trudge out the old story of how the lair/liar typo in D&D became an actual rule in Arduin. Monte Cook remembers:

QuoteThe original D&D booklets had a typo. In the monster entries, instead of saying "%Lair" (for the percentage chance that the creature would be found in its lair), it said "%Liar." The Arduin books embraced that concept (I'm guessing without knowing it was a typo): In those books, that game stat reflected the percentage chance that, if you talked to it, the creature would lie -- apparently at any given time. It was a rule to handle the roleplaying of the creature. And along with the expected "%Liar: 45%," the Arduin books even had monster entries that said, "%Liar: too stupid." So the monster was too stupid to lie.

(Dragon columnist Ray Winninger has a hilarious story from back then. His group, who also believed that the stat determined how often a creature would lie, applied this rule to the elf henchman with the party. The PCs would ask the henchman if he had enough food, or whether he needed healing after the last battle, and the DM would roll to see if he told them the truth. You can just imagine the poor, starving, beat-up henchman, when asked if he needed any help, feeling this odd compunction to lie... shaking his head "no" with a look of profound regret and helplessness on his face.)

http://www.montecook.com/arch_lineos38.html

I have read this before and I guess I am alone in playing the game as written. I don't know what that qualifies me for in the ever growing list of gamer labels. My take is that I spent money on a product. I am assuming this is a quality product developed by creative, talented people. The rules have been playtested and modified before the release.

This is why reviews and "trusted" word of mouth is very important to me. If I read a system is clunky, lacking vital info, setting doesn't fit my taste, or is corrected in supplements, they lose me. I am not spending money to test my amateur developing skills to make it work.

Now - houserules which slightly modify a rule or two to satisfy my group's particular needs is alright. Going off the gonzo end of the pool on the setting after we have thoroughly exhausted the "as is" game is alright.