Hi,

Here's introduction to my house rule set - for you to use and comment on.

Download link to pdf

Some highlights:

Page 3 - Advanced Combat Maneuvers

We've had problem of surplus unused maneuvers and this list guides players to use their maneuvers with more freedom.

Pages 7 - 24 .. work under progress on skill check success and failure guidelines

Page 26 - Monster Critical Hits

Critical wounds are too lame for most monsters and opponents - they are clearly for PCs. This table allows critical hits to be really nasty to monsters, directly affecting their stats. Narrative is completely open for GM.

Page 27 - Monster A/C/E

By normal rules, stress and fatigue causes wounds to monsters and then PCs have a lot of actions causing stress or fatigue to monsters ?? A design flaw in my view and I've targeted stress and fatigue to reduce monster A/C/E pool instead making also A/C/E die usability more effective.

Page 30 - Death check

I never liked the binary death of normal rules (wounds > threshold, critical wounds count over Toughness) but wanted to have old school probability table based on how much you are over in wound threshold and what is the severity of critical wounds. Now you can also die by not having critical wounds at all (better!) and survive with high resilience even a near-death experience.

Also, a PC may need to perform several death checks based on urgency and quality of healing he receives. Death check and Healing house rules are to be used together.

Page 33 - Healing

Normal rules for healing, first aid and long-term care were awfully messy and I put mine in a chart with one skill check per category instead of original chained skill checks. Also, no recovery of wounds based on toughness - only by skill check results. This makes having wounds more long lasting (realistic) and the quality of healing more meaningful. Also, Diablo-style healing potions are not working but they are simply boosting the healing process. Long-term care is a "super-check" but requires 3 nights. This is particularly effective for less resilient characters with critical wounds or diseases.

So, these have been really good for our group and I feel I've fixed some of the flaws in the rules I did not feel comfortable with.

Arto

Page 3 - Advanced Combat Maneuvers - We've had problem of surplus unused maneuvers and this list guides players to use their maneuvers with more freedom.

* Good ideas these. I've seen this approach before and I think it's smart to have additional moves. My players tend to agree that maneuvers are pretty useless otherwise

Pages 7 - 24 .. work under progress on skill check success and failure guidelines

* I think keeping chart look up to a minimum might be a good idea once you get these developed. I would combine some of the physical and mental effects for skills : athletics and coordination for instance and if somethign doesn't fit, just have a generic 'chaos star' effect. Shrink all this down onto one page. You need effects for Advanced skills such as education and Magic Sight

Page 26 - Monster Critical Hits -- Critical wounds are too lame for most monsters anI lid opponents - they are clearly for PCs. This table allows critical hits to be really nasty to monsters, directly affecting their stats. Narrative is completely open for GM.

* Again smart, but keep the "look up" quick on your GMs screen (good idea doing landscape layout btw).

Page 27 - Monster A/C/E - By normal rules, stress and fatigue causes wounds to monsters and then PCs have a lot of actions causing stress or fatigue to monsters ?? A design flaw in my view and I've targeted stress and fatigue to reduce monster A/C/E pool instead making also A/C/E die usability more effective.

* seems an ok idea.

Page 30 - Death check I never liked the binary death of normal rules (wounds > threshold, critical wounds count over Toughness) but wanted to have old school probability table based on how much you are over in wound threshold and what is the severity of critical wounds. Now you can also die by not having critical wounds at all (better!) and survive with high resilience even a near-death experience. Also, a PC may need to perform several death checks based on urgency and quality of healing he receives. Death check and Healing house rules are to be used together.

* This looks to me more complicated than it needs to be and that maybe you're just trying to find an excuse not to kill off characters. If you want to make it harder to kill off a character just raise the threshhold of criticals required and save a couple pages of text.

Page 33 - Healing --normal rules for healing, first aid and long-term care were awfully messy and I put mine in a chart with one skill check per category instead of original chained skill checks. Also, no recovery of wounds based on toughness - only by skill check results. This makes having wounds more long lasting (realistic) and the quality of healing more meaningful. Also, Diablo-style healing potions are not working but they are simply boosting the healing process. Long-term care is a "super-check" but requires 3 nights. This is particularly effective for less resilient characters with critical wounds or diseases.

* You need another column for the medicine skill.

* I'm not in favor of making medicine/first aid more important than people healing through time and their own RESILIENCE checks (innately). The Warhammer world is supposed to be full of medicines that do more harm than good (like the real world) and medical interventions are thematically and traditionally presented in Warhammer lore as simply pure experimentation. If anything, the random effect of first aid and medicine checks (and herbs) should have a greater chance to increase fatigue/stress/insanity/disease/wounds as well as save a life. I think this could be done as is, but increase the chance of a random side-effect.

jh

Thanks Emirikol. Good feedback.

I use a laptop to run my sessions so amount of content is not a problem for me (personally). As players are not even aware of these tables I've created (including death and healing), the complexity is not presented to them but it actually appears simpler to them (go over WT=need to check if you die, get best kind of healing or deal with on your own).

Also, death is very uncommon in our games - we play for fun adventure and some for character progress. Chance of death is required to keep things interesting but I don't grind them down so that the death seem inevitable no matter what you do.

So the house rules are fitted for our style of play and should be adapted by others differently.

stanmons said:

I also think criticals are a bit wasted on monsters. E.g., in our last session a thug got 2 criticals, both adding 1 black dice to Int tests. Not really meaningful. What I've considered is to use the Omens of War serious crits (that normally happen once you've exceeded the crit threshold) right away when they are drawn for normal monsters (not for nemesis NPCs though). That would increase the chance of really harsh crits on monsters by quite a bit. If one wants to keep the difficulty level I guess one could let NPCs spend expertise to avoid a crit.

Stress and fatigue being deducted from ACE is already an optional rule in Creature's guide, so that's a very good call.

I think the rules for healing work quite fine as it is, but to avoid rolling too many dice when PCs have long periods of rest I tend to just let them autoheal criticals at times (if there is a chance that they can heal it).

I have redesigned Death and Healing to be simpler.

My house rules are here

Death check is now prevented by First Aid towards the end of the encounter making First Aid risk free and more desirable.

Death check itself is now completely linear based on wounds over threshold, severity of critical wounds and in addition, severity of diseases. Maybe having strained or fatigued condition could add one more misfortune. Also, player can save some of the fortune points to ease death check and GM may grant one or two fortune die if the player has pleased Sigmar by his actions.

Healing also got revamped and I incorporated the idea from someone else's house rules that critical wounds may result in contracting a disease. I like this connection of being critical wounded and thus more vulnerable for diseases. I also added the choice of either the healer (giving first aid or medicine support) or the target is subjected to this check per each chaos star, as chosen by the healer. This adds a nice altruistic touch to the relationship.

I also removed the 3 nights rest option and basically added a change to boost the night rest check with bed rest day giving +2 fortune die. This reflects better how resting the whole day will improve your overall recovery, checked per each night.