Hi guys,

here are some of our house rules - the only purpose of those is to SPEED UP THE GAME and concentrate on story telling. Let me know if you have more up the sleeve.

In general:

No location cards, no party sheet, no enemy sheet, no rally step, no miniatures,

Initiative
No roll for initiative. Player take fixed turns. GM decides when enemies fit in.

Stance
No counter movement. Players choose if they want to be either in reckless or conservative stance within the encounter. Players can freely choose how many neutral dice they want to exchange, up to the maximum of their stance meter. They can't switch between reckless or conservative within the ongoing encounter.

Hourglass
GM does not choose which action is blocked. Player can’t use any action card on his next turn. Player also looses his next maneuver if two or more hourglasses rolled. Player can still buy maneuver with stress.

Sleep
• Remove fatigue equal toughness
• Remove stress equal willpower
• Remove wounds equal toughness
• Critical wounds: perform one toughness check (average,2d). Transform one critical wound into a regular wound if success.
• Insanity: perform one willpower check (one difficulty level per token on insanity card). Remove insanity if success.
• Disease: perform one resilience check (average, hard if more than one disease, 1 K for each symptom, 1 J for each rank of medicine trained. J K for preparation, surrounding and remedies. Remove disease or symptom with severity rating equal to successes if success.

Rest
• Remove 1 fatigue • Remove 1 stress

Fortune
No daily fortune pool. Each player starts with 3 fate points.

Thats definitely a quick way to run it. We started without all the extras and have been playing without them. Now that everyone knows the basic rules, we may start putting other stuff in.

The biggest time delay is people counting out the dice. They really need to prep BEFORE their turn.

jh

Emirikol said:

I agree - it's the same with WFB and Mordheim, too, all that counting and recounting...

It's a very good thing to have the players know what they want to do and how to do it as quickly as possible.

After 3 or 4 sessions, I started to use all the rules - party sheets and all - but combat is fast enough since I encourage the players to study their character a bit at the beginning of each session.

I like to limit the time players can spend deciding what they do each turn. If there's no pressure to make quick decisions, the players start optimising their tactics in the middle of combat and this can take forever. This also gets the pulse racing and we tend to have very exciting combat sequences in our games.

I think it is just fine if the players forget to get the absolute maximum out of their dice pools every turn - In fact, I like this because it reflects the confusion and rush of the battle and makes the players more interested in developing fighting techniques before they get into a scrap.

One option is to keep the flexible rounds in a turn but instead of treating it as an opportunity for the players to plan the order, ask who has their round ready and dice pool assembled. If no one ready, start with the party tension. If you don't use party sheet then place a black die on the last player space on the initianative tracker. No will want to be last then.