House Rules, do you use them?

I hate house rules. I find Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit to be way more fun than when they are played using popular house rules (free parking, etc). I find house rules dramatically alter the balance of a play-tested game. If I have to use house rules to make a game fun, i simply would rather play a different game.

I think a lot of the tendency to house-rule boardgames came from things that aren't really in effect anymore.

1. Scarcity of games. When you've only got a couple of games, and they sort of suck, you do what you can to make them playable. When you've got 30 or 400 or 6000 games, it's a lot easier to just say "let's play something else".

2. Lack of input. When you can go to BGG or CSW and ask the designer what the hell they were thinking, it makes getting the *right* answer much easier. In the bad old days of snail mail, you didn't wait for clarifications, you house ruled it.

3. RPGs are born to be house-ruled, and when I was growing up with them, they constantly were. As RPG folks migrated into board games, old habits die hard.

Games are just tighter now, and anything that does crop up is either patched very quickly, or the game flops and no one cares. There's another coming out next week anyway.

I can't think of any particular house rule I use, except leaving out cards that are troublesome from certain games.

I prefer to play Trivial Pursuit with the "Not Sure's modified house rule drinking game" ruleset.

1. Put the board and the pieces back in box. Keep the die and the question cards out.
2. Nominate someone to be the first drinker. Any method will do.
3. The person to the drinker's right is the asker.
4. The drinker rolls the die. The result is their target number of correct answers.
5. The asker asks all 6 questions on the card. The drinker must attempt to answer them all.
6. If the target number is not reached, the drinker must make up the difference in drinks.
7. If the target number is exceeded, the drinker now has surplus drinks to demand that other players take.
8. Rotate to the left, until you determine that you can no longer answer questions, or see straight.

All the fun, and self-balancing. If one player is too sober or trivially inclined, sandbag him/her with the extra drinks.

Those are some great points, Not Sure...

We're not exactly in the days where you had to send a self-addressed, stamped enveloped to Avalon Hill to get a rules question answered anymore!

Michael Barnes wrote:

Somebody I know, a Very Famous Game Designer, house rules EVERYTHING. He'll buy a game, and instead of saying "this is what worked and what didn't", he'll compose a whole set of house rules, going so far as to rewrite the whole rulebook and effectively make it a different game. That's his business, but I can't help but think that it's just a waste of effort. Just play something else for pete's sake.

How is that different than using game pieces for a prototype? I was thinking of making my own pirate game once and was going to use at least half the pieces from Pirate's Cove to do it, including the board. Is that considered house-ruling Pirate's Cove?

No no no, you don't get it...what I'm talking about is that the guy will take a game like MARVEL HEROES, and literally rewrite the rulebook to his liking, often adding a couple of homemade cards or player boards to it. It's still MARVEL HEROES, but it's his 'version' of it.

You should see the way my group plays Space Hulk. They're maniacs with this thing. They've made up rules for Tyranids, Orcs, Dreadnaughts, walking patriarchs with mind-control powers, throwable power axes, random events, and a bunch of other crazy shit. They also came up with this idea of "phasing" between a fake and real hulk. You set up two identical boards, but only one of them has the objective on it, and the marines randomly teleport between them. That, and they've tried mixing the boards from the game with Advanced Space Crusade and Heroscape boards too. It's friggin' ridiculous.

Other than that, we almost never use house rules. Mostly because they played this game a lot when...

1. Scarcity of games. When you've only got a couple of games, and they sort of suck, you do what you can to make them playable. When you've got 30 or 400 or 6000 games, it's a lot easier to just say "let's play something else".

Bingo. Though I'm not sure it's a good thing that this is no longer the case. Many classic games were developed over the years by people house ruling them. Where do you think those hidden objectives in Nexus Ops came from? Probably from the secret mission Risk variant, which was more than likely a house rule from way back that made its way into the published versions.

Having such a wide variety of games to choose from is great, but it also makes us really jaded. If I'm a publisher, and I know my rough-around-the-edges game isn't going to see more than one play for many people because of this ADD-ish mentality, I'm going to develop the living shit out of it and make the safest game possible. I know that's not a good thing.

mjl1783 wrote:

Having such a wide variety of games to choose from is great, but it also makes us really jaded. If I'm a publisher, and I know my rough-around-the-edges game isn't going to see more than one play for many people because of this ADD-ish mentality, I'm going to develop the living shit out of it and make the safest game possible. I know that's not a good thing.

Yeah, I really question the theory that the answer to "This game seems broken." is "Buy another game." That just seems wrong to me.

Not Sure, you hit it on the nailhead. 20-some years ago, there weren't as many games around, and some of the ones that were around had flaws. And I didn't nobody anybody who owned a lot of boardgames back then. So when there were problems with a game that had decent components and a good theme, we made house rules to adjust them. For example, that Asteroid game that I reviewed last week is good, and was great back in the day, except that the game was definitely imbalanced in favor of the good guys. So we simply adjusted the balance back by using some of the components for the variant scenario in the main scenario. It was an easy fix that made the game great for us.

Since then, games have improved in many ways. Designers have built upon previous efforts, resulting in better games, on average. So nowadays, I am very resistant to most house rules, and actively hostile to ones that radically change the game. For example, at a recent convention, there was a group playing Arkham Horror with 3 Great Old Ones in the same game. They had convoluted and annoying rules about doom token placement, environmental effects and when and how final battle might take place. They gave up after a few hours of sub-par AH gaming. The house rules were stupid, made the game worse and ridiculously long, and should have been laughed away during setup.

However, there are still times when I like a house rule:

1. Drinking rules are often fun.
2. Minor adjustments during setup to make for a variant scenario are sometimes okay.
3. Minor house rules that enhance the theme slightly without significantly affecting game balance are okay... like we play the Launius rule for Arkahm where you leave the gates face down until entered.

Sure, I'll use house rules, although I tend to use very few, and mostly for thematic reasons. If a house rule fits better with the theme, I don't really care what effect it has on game balance. And anyway, the effect of rules I use are generally so small that the effect is slight.

I still don't understand the difference between house rules and variants. Isn't this just semantics? I mean, unless the designers made the variant, it's just house rules, right?

Michael Barnes wrote:

I don't really like to use them at all, because I do think games are an "authored" medium and you really ought to play it as written, so to speak.

I find this strange. Surely the game exists to entertain me, not the other way around? Besides, I doubt that most modern games are the work of one man, and not a committee.

House rules = mods are a pretty solid tradition in PC gaming. Mods are awesome--although I do tend to use smaller mods that only affect one or two aspects of the game, not the complete overhaul ones.

And yes, I'd house rule other forms of entertainment if I could. Absolutely. Long-running shows like ST:TNG are practically begging for it. Imagine house ruling Deanna Troi into an interesting character. Or house ruling out Worf's kid. Fuck yes.

blarknob wrote:

I find house rules to be annoying, if the game doesn't work without them don't play it, otherwise it just leads to a fractured community.

House rules are the fan fiction of board gaming.

To me, the concept of "fractured community" assumes a certain degree of rotation of people around the game group. For folks like me who don't game with more than 1 other person most of the time, or for those where the group is the same half-dozen folks nearly all the time, I have no problems with changing whatever rules to best suit the fun-quotient of the crowd. [And wasn't it Clearclaw who said "anyone who plays a game in any fashion other than exactly as written isn't actually playing that game?" I believe Barnes just quoted the man nearly verbatim above. Is it time to dust off that Clearclaw award for Michael "I just don't get the idea of "fixing" games. Play as published!" Barnes? I hope not...]

On the variant issue, I guess I just don't see a damn bit of difference between a variant and a house-rule. Again, maybe it's just the wargamer in me, but to my mind, every variant in the world started as a house rule somewhere. Just because it was Mark Simonitch's house where the new rules were devised doesn't mean it's any different than your house. [There's a great exchange between Simonitch and Mark Herman in a recent issue of C3i with Simonitch's "variants" (aka How He Likes to Play the Game) for Herman's Empire of the Sun.] Play[test] it at your house, post it on the web somewhere and get a few more people outside your house to play it that way and, voila!, your house rule is now a variant!

I guess I'm just really a mod type of guy. I download the old Oscuro mod for Oblivion back in the day that changed it into a completely different game.

We don't really have problems with fractured communities here. If you think boardgaming is a niche hobby over there, here it's way way more niche. I doubt if anybody who plays with me will play with anyone else ever. Of course I make sure to tell them we're playing with house rules, and why. If they ask to play with the real rules, they are never refused.

Semantics-wise, I guess we aren't really house ruling, we're making variants. I suppose to most of you house-rule is a temporary band-aid to plug a difficult to interpret rule/situation. When we use house rules, it's exclusively to add something we think could be cool.

If I own a game, and I've played it more than a handful of times, odds are I've started houseruling it.
I don't really get this whole "Just play another game" mentality going on in this thread. So because I don't like the offical Ally rules in Arkham Horror I should just stop playing and get something else? Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't really care about a 'fractured community'. I'm more interested in actually playing descent in person then just rules lawering it online. If I'm the only person in the world playing descent in this particular way (and I bet I am) why is that any concern of mine.

Frankly I find variants and houserules a ton of fun. I like developing solo rules for games and new monsters and stuff. I also enjoy reading about them, more so then the more highbrow 'game theory' stuff people on here like to talk about. Each to his own.

ubarose wrote:

The speed at which you can get rule clarifications and the availability of errata, variants, extra scenarios, etc, has significantly reduced the need to house rule games. Recently we were playing a game, and a disagreement arose over whether or not something was allowed. I boldly shot off an e-mail to the designer, expecting that we would have to temporarily house rule it to continue the game. However, before I could get back to the table, my laptop beeped. It was a response from the game designer.

It also vastly increases the speed at which one can look like a complete doofus too. I recently couldn't figure out the potential consequences of a particular action in a PBEM game of Here I Stand. I consulted the resident Rules Cop [not really a Rules Lawyer, but certainly the guy in the game who knows 'em the best], who didn't know offhand either. He forwarded his "not sure" response to the designer, Ed Beach, who had a response back to me in 15 seconds that started with...

"On page 18, bullet 4 under xxx, the text says..."

And, there it was...exactly the situation I was asking about...with a bullet in front of it...in bold black and white....

I surely couldn't have felt like a bigger dope...