House rules that make you rage?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Fumble rules can be okay, but I think you need more granularity than the 5% the d20 allows. Silhouette, for instance, has characters fumble if the highest die in their roll is a 1, with chances that vary from 1/3 (for people who don't know what the hell they're doing) to 1/7776 (for people who super know what they're doing).

Of course, it's possible to succeed and fumble at the same time, like when my buddy knocked a guy out and sprained his wrist at the same time. Very few games allow for that sort of thing.

[Starmaker]

Worst house rule I've ever been victim too: having to roll vs. SR 15+spell level or lose the spell (char level 5, and I wasn't forewarned).

[RandomCasualty2]

Or one could just not have fumble rules.

Yeah, in general I don't like fumbles. At least not stupid fumbles. The thing where your supposedly trained fighter goes and stabs himself in the foot is dumb.

There are some scenarios where I think that a fumble might make sense, similar to SR4s glitches, where you can run into complications, but every swing out of 20 shouldn't cause you to make some crazy newbie mistake which just serves to humiliate your character.

[Judging__Eagle]

Fumble rules can be okay, but I think you need more granularity than the 5% the d20 allows. Silhouette, for instance, has characters fumble if the highest die in their roll is a 1, with chances that vary from 1/3 (for people who don't know what the hell they're doing) to 1/7776 (for people who super know what they're doing).

Of course, it's possible to succeed and fumble at the same time, like when my buddy knocked a guy out and sprained his wrist at the same time. Very few games allow for that sort of thing.

That's sort of what I wanted, fumbles should exist, since just performing an action over and over is not going to give the same result. However an expert is going to not only do harder things, but they will fail less often than a newbie doing new things.

Maybe some sort of threshold, where dice rolls are a certain value or lower. The problem is that in d20, you roll only one dice for such rolls. So this works more for dice-pool games than other games.

[Beth_Naught]

You can get by with exploding d20 (where 20 = 19 + whatever you get on the second roll) and by rolling a separate fumble die (which is colored safety orange and is ignored unless it comes up 20). With both rolls at the same time it doesn't really slow the game down.

I've not seen that approach in a published system, but there's probably some out there.

That hard part is when the game system is set up so that most rolls are win/not win bivalent. Fumble rolls can't be - you still have to interpolate some off the cuff DM hosebeasting or some horrid lookup table. Rolemaster's approach was that fumbles were just some aleatoric low comedy - which is fine if you want it, I guess.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

The problem with Rolemaster's approach is that everything in the game encouraged deadly seriousness (especially when you throw in all the complicated charts and crap). Then they decided to throw in the low comedy for fumbles, which had a steady 5% chance of occurring IIRC.

So this works more for dice-pool games than other games.

Definitely. In a dice-pool system, all you have to do is declare that fumbles only happen if you roll all 1s. Fumbles instantly become virtually nonexistent for extremely competent characters. Why White Wolf never thought of this I'll never know.

[Josh_Kablack]

You can get by with exploding d20 (where 20 = 19 + whatever you get on the second roll) and by rolling a separate fumble die (which is colored safety orange and is ignored unless it comes up 20). With both rolls at the same time it doesn't really slow the game down.

I've not seen that approach in a published system, but there's probably some out there.

Feng Shui's critical failure rules are close - but that uses two dice standard.

The general mechanic is your AV +1d6 and also -1d6, both of which are open-ended (aka exploding) you then compare the result to your opponent's AV or a static target number. You only fumble in two cases: First if you end up with less than a zero - which is rare as PCs are expected to have 13 to 16 AVs for their primary shticks. Secondly, and relevant to your example, when you roll boxcars the dice do not both explode, and instead you get a special result - either a special success or a special failure depending on whether your AV+mods exceed the target number.


Also, I've never played it, but I've heard of a mid-80s Ghostbusters RPG that had a "ghost die" which functioned in a similar manner - there was apparently a 1 in 6 chance of any plan backfiring.

[Beth_Naught]

Ghostbusters RPG

It makes me happy that such a thing existed. That's a setting where you'd be expected to fumble all your sucesses.

[Josh_Kablack]

Wikipedia has details I should have known

Edit: maybe this link will work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbuste ... ying_game)

[Lago PARANOIA]

3E's ongoing obsession with the idea that divine spellcasters can raid spells from arcane spellcasters' lists but not the reverse.

You know what's especially stupid about this whole idea? It's that all things being equal divine spellcasting has a better chassis. If anything arcane spellcasters should be able to learn or cast any divine spell that they friggin' want to.

Like Koumei said in the broken WotC things threads, even though it's perfectly legal for a wizard to learn heal almost no DM will do it. Though I have been with plenty of DMs who let me have the Spell domain, play artificers, and even friggin' the Chameleon.

That's what makes this a house rule I really hate. There's no game balance reason for it, people are just being willfully ignorant because it fits their preconceptions of the game.

What the fuck, people?