What Was the Best House Rule You’ve Used?

Back in the days of our third edition D&D games, Paul ran a campaign in which he introduced karma. Karma, as he ran it, functioned similarly to bennies in Savage Worlds. They regenerated every session and allowed for useful things such as re-rolling and such. The manner in which we earned karma was slightly more complicated.

Basically, karma came in two flavors: karma points and karma pool. Karma points were given out at various points in the game for achieving plot objectives and generally being a bad-ass. These were good for purchasing permanent skill points, base attack, save bonuses, and, best of all, ability increases. These were, of course, appropriately expensive, but I had trouble justifying spending them on anything else, being the little dex-whore that I am. Paul finally had to put a cap on the number of times this was allowed, as my un-enhanced dexterity was creeping up on thirty.

So that part was really cool, but in addition to being able to buy character abilities, for every ten karma points we earned, we received one karma pool. Even if we spent all of our points, we still kept the pool. As I mentioned, karma pool worked a lot like bennies, though typically we had much more than three. These were good for re-rolling bad rolls, adding +10 to any one roll, adding a +5 to all defenses for a round, or making called shots. If the dice really hated you that day, or you were feeling particularly dramatic, you could always burn a point permanently to invoke an automatic natural twenty with max damage or to avoid certain death. I was always in the habit of saving a point for just such an occasion, as such dire circumstances were not exactly uncommon.

My favorite use of the avoid-certain-death feature wasn’t by me, but by a fellow player.  His illusionist mage had perished in particularly nasty fight in which the church we were in was destroyed down to the bedrock. He burned his karma point and was allowed to live. Eventually. Now, just because you survived didn’t mean you would come back unscathed. As far as we knew, he had been in the building when it was destroyed, but about a week later he shows back up at the home-base, looking none the worst for wear. Ok, he had a tendency to fade back into the shadows, but he had always been kind of quiet. So what if he sometimes passed through a door instead of opening it.  He was a wizard; that’s what they do. It was understandable that he couldn’t tell us where he’d been.  It had been a traumatic experience. We learned much later how true that was; he had in fact willed himself back into existence from the shadow plane and was now ten-percent shadow. If he wasn’t paying attention, he ran the risk of becoming incorporeal. Eventually he was able to control and enhance this power, which led to some serious shenanigans. Best karma ever spent.

Now Your Turn:  What was the Best House Rule You’ve Used?

Leave your story in the comments, and next week we’ll post the best story.  If you have any questions you’d like us to answer in a future Behind the Bar, let us know.

Last Weeks Winner is:  UTSquishy

The Question was “What was Your Most Anti-Climatic Fight?”, to which he wrote:

The End of Zombie Run. I had Minifigs all over my Kitchen Table (Both Leaves In). I had a Wall constructed, and some towers, and 100 Zombies, a little scenery, my paper Buses.

This was my first attempt to use the Savage Worlds Mass Combat Rules. I attempted to modify the rules a bit, since they seemed to point toward an anti-climatic ending. I had a way of placing some PC action between rounds.

First the Buses full of zombies attempted to Ram the gates, and were taken out by the PCs’ clever use of tactical nuke mines—only a hand full of the zombies survived, and they were on the outside of the gate where the “villainous” NPCs were located. Then the first mass combat roll, after 15 minutes of discussion about how the rule worked, I forgot to let each of the PCs take an action as I had planned and rolled the second round of Mass Combat.

Multiple Aces from the PCs decimated the opposing force and triggered the one action that would cause them to turn tail.

I chose to ignore the turning of tail and moved from mass combat rules to standard combat rules and it was still over in the next round.

So Much for an explosive action packed evening as planned—wanna play some Guitar Hero or Rock Band?