West Marches: 3.5 House Rules

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 5:10 pm

I'm currently in the planning phase of a West Marches-style campaign. Since part of the nature of this type of campaign is that you set the challenges beforehand rather than adjusting them on the fly, it's important to know what kind of challenges to set. That means knowing what characters are going to look like and be able to do, and that means knowing what the rules are.

One of the first decisions I made was that I wanted to use a D&D rules set, that being sort of the archetype for this sort of gaming. As tempting as it was to go full old-school and use AD&D rules, there are enough things that I prefer about 3.x to lead me to go with that instead. But there are enough things I don't like about 3.x to make me feel that some heavy house-ruling is damn near a necessity.

The goals in developing a set of house rules include:

* Put classes on a more even footing, somewhere in between the current endpoints.

* Rein in high-level craziness without stopping characters from affecting the world around them.

Basics: characters start at level 1 (or, in some special cases, as level 1 commoners who replace that with a PC level after their first adventure), and the game is expected to go roughly up until about level 12, possibly with some epilogues that could extend PC life to level 14. That's high enough to allow the characters to do some pretty impressive things and fight some major monsters, but not so far into completely off the rails territory that I need to start houseruling absolutely everything.

Setting: The fact that the whole point of the campaign is that it's in the middle of nowhere means that the benefits of using an existing setting are somewhat minimal. Also, since I expect to do heavy houseruling of the spellcasting classes, a setting where there are a bajillion 30th level wizards may not be ideal. On the other hand, I do need a large selection of gods. I'm thinking either just using one of the mythoi in Deities & Demigods in a homebrew world, or the next best thing, i.e., Greyhawk.

Allowed material: 3.5 core books, feats from CW. Even this much is going to wind up heavily re-written.

I need to write up sections on races, classes, skills, feats, spells, and various general rules changes. This could take a while.

Edit: Mad props to JigokuBosatsu for posting a link to the West Marches page in the first place.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 5:34 pm

At this point in the 3.x lifecycle, I find it far far easier from the MC side to avoid rewriting the entire game and to fix a large number of balance issues by removing the problematic classes from the available class list and pulling in substitute options other people have already written

The last game I ran, I removed the Fighter and instead allowed the Races of War Knight and Samurai. I removed the Wizard and instead allowed Koumei's Warmage and some similar things. I dropped Druid and told people who wanted a nature caster that they could pick from Spirit Shaman, Totemist, or Witch

This did take a fair bit of deciding what to cut, searching for alternatives which had both similar flavor and a power level in my target range and a fair amount of vetoing suggestions for various reasons. But it was still a hell of a lot easier than rewriting Fighter, Cleric, Druid, Wizard and Sorcerer.
And since I had a game without Clerics, Wizards or Druids, I had a game with a far far smaller number of the truly problematic spells available, which saved me even more revision work.

Now, you will likely be going for a different balance point than I was, so those linked classes may not be helpful to you -- but my general point is that it's often easier to find acceptable classes or versions of classes other people have already written than it is to write them yourself.

DruchiiConversion · Post by **DruchiiConversion** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 5:35 pm

I'm interested to see how this pans out, since I did a very similar campaign not too long ago myself. That said, my houseruling was much more limited than yours will be! Though I just rebuilt all the classes for my d20 Modern west marches game, so hey...

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 5:42 pm

How big is the pool of players you're going to draw from?

Are you going to fudge the rules for getting lost, like the original West Marches guy did?

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 6:04 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote: Now, you will likely be going for a different balance point than I was, so those linked classes may not be helpful to you -- but my general point is that it's often easier to find acceptable classes or versions of classes other people have already written than it is to write them yourself.

Part of my plan is to flat ban classes that are either too far out of balance or too tricky to rewrite. I don't anticipate having the Druid or Monk available, for instance. It is tempting to go fishing for rewritten classes, if there're some that fit the balance points.

I want to try and keep class modifications relatively simple, where possible. Rewriting an entire class is a lot of work. For this reason, there will probably be more nerfing than buffing.

hogarth wrote: How big is the pool of players you're going to draw from?

Are you going to fudge the rules for getting lost, like the original West Marches guy did?

So far this is still very much in the planning phase. There's probably 8-10 people expressing interest and that's about the number I've said "hey, I'm thinking of doing this, does it sound like fun?" to.

I don't intend to do rules fudging if I can avoid it, but we'll see what happens. I might do it if, for instance, I have a brainfart and prepare the Haunted Tower adventure instead of the Haunted Fort that the players are actually trying to get to. But as a matter of course, no, not planning to.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 6:13 pm

One of the problems I have with races in 3.x is that they're pretty damned deterministic. You are not going to play a Dwarf Sorcerer or a Half-Orc Wizard unless you either don't realize what a massive kick in the groin that that constitutes, or else don't care. That's not a game balance problem necessarily, it's just a Things I Don't Like problem, but whatever.

Proposed House Rule: Ignore racial ability score adjustments. While yes, as a race, dwarfs may have a higher average Constitution than humans, the toughest humans are just as tough as the toughest dwarfs.

Impact: This makes humans and half-elves relatively stronger, vis-a-vis the other races, since they didn't get ability score adjustments in the first place. It also makes the half-orc very slightly stronger, since they got boned on the ability mods. The half-elf and half-orc both direly needed improvement, so that part is fine, but I'm wondering whether the humans (already a very popular choice) would be too good under this rule. Then again, they get the bonus feat, the extra skill points, and very little else, which is still kind of a raw deal compared to the dwarf or the elf, even if they do get an actual option.

Half-elves and Half-orcs could probably still use a little more improvement, and Dwarfs still probably need to be knocked back a peg.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 6:19 pm

Honestly, using ToB + PHB - (the classes that ToB implicitly replaces) - (classes that get 9th level spells) works pretty well for mid-ish power 3.5 games. You just need to be liberal but careful with scrolls and other magic items, and things work pretty well. You can add in the Warlock if you want, because they're fun and popular.

This configuration requires very few actual houserulings, which is nice. And I would definitely recommend ditching racial ability bonuses. They're butts.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 6:42 pm

Honestly, using ToB + PHB - (the classes that ToB implicitly replaces) - (classes that get 9th level spells) works pretty well for mid-ish power 3.5 games. You just need to be liberal but careful with scrolls and other magic items, and things work pretty well.

I'd worry a little about some of the intentionally hosey long-duration conditions monsters can inflict without access to some of the more obscure clerical healing spells. Sure, PC parties can deal with HP damage via Cure wands and handle ability damage via downtime or Lesser Restoration scrolls, but the game has things like

Sea Hag's daze for 3 days is rough without Remove Fear,
Spider Eater's Paralze for 9-14 weeks is unfair without Neutralize Posion,
Gynosphinx's Symbol of Insantiy results in permanent Confusion which can only be cured by Greater restoration, heal, limited wish, miracle, or wish

And unless you want those to be sit-out-multiple sessions on one failed save effects, you need the PCs to have better access to those spells than Rangers with wands or Bards with limited spell selection will have.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 6:46 pm

As mentioned above, I do not plan to have druids or monks available as classes per se. I'm also leaning toward eliminating the Bard as a separate class.

Proposed House Rule: A character's caster level (but not spells per day or spells known) is always considered to be his character level, rather than his class level. A Wizard 1/Fighter 4 has the spell selection of a Wizard 1, but his caster level is 5; a Cleric 5/Fighter 5 has the spell selection of a Cleric 5 and a caster level of 10.

Impact: Multiclassing spellcasters becomes slightly less like hammering nails into your junk. It's still not great, since most low-level spell effects do not scale up into usefulness at high level, but it's not as bad.

I'm still working out exact details for modifications to the primary caster classes:

Clerics in core are very strong spellcasters vis a vis wizards, and get a lot of benefits that wizards don't. Some of their fighting prowess goes away without non-core spells, and I plan to take more away via removing most buff spells, but I think that they still need a power down. I'm thinking of making the spell lists for individual clerics consist of only the spells on the domain lists for all of their deity's domains; this would make clerics very narrowly focused in spellcasting. As partial compensation, they may get extra domain granted powers as they advance in level.

Wizards may also have their focus narrow. Rather than have access to all 8 schools of magic by default, and be able to sacrifice one for greater prowess with another, wizards might get access to only a limited number of schools (2-3?) to start with, and possibly more as they advance.

Sorcerers have generally been inferior to the wizard in practice. If wizards get their spell selection narrowed down, then keeping the sorcerer's strict limits on spells known but allowing them to select spells from any school might put them on a more equal footing. That might make them too strong, so their spells/day or spells known numbers may get toned down.

A large number of spells are likely to get banned: the attribute buff spells, Magic Vestment and GMW, Keen Edge, most of the other teleport ambush spells, essentially. Planar Ally/Binding will be either banned or rewritten. Major/Minor Creation and Fabricate, likewise. Polymorph will need to get redone from the ground up. Spells that get banned will require some re-writing of the domain lists.

Josh's comments re: obscure party-hosing monster effects are well taken. There probably will need to be a "universal" domain for some spells that are available to all clerics, in order to handle those effects more gracefully.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 6:51 pm

talozin wrote:I don't intend to do rules fudging if I can avoid it, but we'll see what happens. I might do it if, for instance, I have a brainfart and prepare the Haunted Tower adventure instead of the Haunted Fort that the players are actually trying to get to. But as a matter of course, no, not planning to.

The reason I ask is that in the rules, it's a relatively easy check to avoid getting lost (DC 15 Survival check at worst), but judging from the comments on the West Marches articles it sounds like a good part of the charm (such as it is) of the original campaign came from getting lost, getting into situations over their heads, stumbling over things, etc.

If the characters in your party are too optimized, you'll miss out on that. On the other hand, I'd probably dislike a campaign that involved stumbling through the forest and falling into random TPK situations. I'm also less interested in campaigns where the GM creates an elaborate back story and the players are supposed to give a shit about figuring out what it is.

For a typical sandbox game, I'd probably just go with Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path, but YMMV obviously.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 6:55 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote:
I'd worry a little about some of the intentionally hosey long-duration conditions monsters can inflict without access to some of the more obscure clerical healing spells.

True. However, my assumption would be that, in a West Marches style game, the PCs have a fair bit of control over where they're going and (by extension) what they're fighting. So, if they hear that the swamps are infested with sea hags, they'll go, "Fuck! Sea hags can cause fear!" and be prepared if/when they ever venture into the swamps.

I was also assuming a large degree of UMD use, which you seem to not be considering. This will give rogues, bards, and warlocks be able to heal most of the more esoteric conditions and problems out there. Hell, you could even just let rangers and paladins use any sort of divine scroll, or write a feat or two that gives them access. The main question becomes "Well, if there aren't any clerics around, who's making all these scrolls of neutralize poison?" The obvious answers are:
1) handwave it away, dealing damage to verisimilitude but not that much
2) say that full caster used to be around, and now they've disappeared because the gods limited magic or whatever
3) say that full casters have it really nice in some more civilized region of the world, and so there's no need for them to go mucking about in the frontier.

Now, clearly, UMD is the most first or second most broken skill in 3.5. So you as the MC will still need to make sure that you don't put in scrolls that horrifically unbalance the game. But that isn't all that much extra work.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 7:04 pm

hogarth wrote: The reason I ask is that in the rules, it's a relatively easy check to avoid getting lost (DC 15 Survival check at worst), but judging from the comments on the West Marches articles it sounds like a good part of the charm (such as it is) of the original campaign came from getting lost, getting into situations over their heads, stumbling over things, etc.

From my reading of the articles, it wasn't so much that people were getting lost as that they didn't know where everything was. That is, maybe they had a map to the Old Owl Well, but several of the hexes along the way from town to the Well contained things like Barrow Mounds or the Haunted Tower or the lair of the White Worm or whatever. I'm okay with people making easy survival checks to keep on course to where they're going, but they'll still have to pass through intervening hexes. Even stuff that they know the location of may not be where they think it is (e.g., Old Owl Well is actually 15 miles east of where rumor says -- if they go to the "right" spot they won't find it, and have to wander around looking).

Something like a Find The Path spell might be more of a concern in this context.

I'm also less interested in campaigns where the GM creates an elaborate back story and the players are supposed to give a shit about figuring out what it is.

I don't really plan to have a backstory. Obviously there'll be some history to explain why there's a walled town in the ass end of nowhere, but there's no overarching plot or anything like that. The idea is to give the players freedom to give a shit about whatever they want -- if they decide that the Orcs of the Dismal Swamp need to be exterminated, then it's tough luck for the orcs.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 7:13 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote:
Honestly, using ToB + PHB - (the classes that ToB implicitly replaces) - (classes that get 9th level spells) works pretty well for mid-ish power 3.5 games. You just need to be liberal but careful with scrolls and other magic items, and things work pretty well.
I'd worry a little about some of the intentionally hosey long-duration conditions monsters can inflict without access to some of the more obscure clerical healing spells. Sure, PC parties can deal with HP damage via Cure wands and handle ability damage via downtime or Lesser Restoration scrolls, but the game has things like

Sea Hag's daze for 3 days is rough without Remove Fear,

Spider Eater's Paralze for 9-14 weeks is unfair without Neutralize Posion,

Gynosphinx's Symbol of Insantiy results in permanent Confusion which can only be cured by Greater restoration, heal, limited wish, miracle, or wish

And unless you want those to be sit-out-multiple sessions on one failed save effects, you need the PCs to have better access to those spells than Rangers with wands or Bards with limited spell selection will have.

Most of those are available as potions. Having a local potion seller with regular but frustratingly limited / expensive access to these would be a way to ensure the players have access to them for emergencies only.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 7:38 pm

talozin wrote:
hogarth wrote: The reason I ask is that in the rules, it's a relatively easy check to avoid getting lost (DC 15 Survival check at worst), but judging from the comments on the West Marches articles it sounds like a good part of the charm (such as it is) of the original campaign came from getting lost, getting into situations over their heads, stumbling over things, etc.
From my reading of the articles, it wasn't so much that people were getting lost as that they didn't know where everything was.

If you're just reading the articles, you're only getting part of the story, I think. You might want to take a look through the (250+) comments on the last article; there's a lot of Q&A.

Here's what one of the players said:
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/9 ... ment-12364

> How often did the PCs get lost?

We got lost _all the time_.
Unless we had been somewhere several times before (or it was an easily visible landmark) we would usually expect to spend time finding it and/or lost on the way. One of the things I really enjoyed was navigating with landmarks and not always taking a the direct route (you’ll get lost unless you follow the stream/cliffs/coast/ridgeline/etc!).
Getting lost is also a great way to explore. Fun quote from one game:
Ranger: To get there I think we need to go about an hour north, then an hour east, then an hour south, then about an hour west…..

hogarth wrote:I'm also less interested in campaigns where the GM creates an elaborate back story and the players are supposed to give a shit about figuring out what it is.

talozin wrote:I don't really plan to have a backstory. Obviously there'll be some history to explain why there's a walled town in the ass end of nowhere, but there's no overarching plot or anything like that.

Gotcha. I think the original West Marches guy spent at least some time on figuring out timelines and whatever, though. E.g. he had different waves of historical expansion and contraction so that there were ruins of different ages present.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 8:17 pm

hogarth wrote: Here's what one of the players said:
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/9 ... ment-12364
> How often did the PCs get lost?

We got lost _all the time_.

Interesting. I might have to think about having circumstance penalties for terrain that's logically difficult to find your way through -- e.g., if you're in the woods or the swamps.

I don't want to fudge stuff in actual play. But if I have to jack up the difficulty for finding your way around in order to make it more interesting to explore, I'm okay with that. There may also be a question of map size here, e.g., he talks about the farthest stuff explored in the campaign being 5 days' walk away -- that's about 70, 80 miles at standard movement rates, assuming that most of the time there are no trails to follow. The larger the map is, the more stuff there has to be on it in order for exploring to be worthwhile.

hogarth wrote: Gotcha. I think the original West Marches guy spent at least some time on figuring out timelines and whatever, though. E.g. he had different waves of historical expansion and contraction so that there were ruins of different ages present.

Yeah. The setting needs to be logical -- it needs to have, to use a word much abused in these discussions, verisimilitude. But I don't care if the players give a shit about the history of the Dwarf Wars or whatever I may have cooked up to explain the presence of dungeons.

K · Post by K » Thu Jul 19, 2012 9:20 pm

The problem with powering down clerics is that no one wants to be just the heal-bot. There is a good chance that someone will be forced into the role and then they'll not show up that often.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 9:32 pm

K wrote:The problem with powering down clerics is that no one wants to be just the heal-bot. There is a good chance that someone will be forced into the role and then they'll not show up that often.

The cleric class needs to be interesting to play. I can't imagine that the only way to make the cleric interesting is to make it more powerful than all the other classes.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 9:40 pm

Turning Clerics into Wizards with a Healzors! Does not make them more interesting.

If you limit their spell choices, AND get rid of their ability to be an effective combatant. You're left with a Gimp Wizard who uses Wis instead of Int or Cha.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 10:11 pm

I'm pretty okay with having clerics be superpowered just to get people to play them, as long as teams expect you to do any healing at all.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 12:30 am

sabs wrote: If you limit their spell choices, AND get rid of their ability to be an effective combatant. You're left with a Gimp Wizard who uses Wis instead of Int or Cha.

The nature of the cleric is that he's both a spellcaster AND a combatant. Fundamentally, if he's either as good a spellcaster as the wizard, or as good a combatant as the fighter, then either of the other two is obsolete. The 3.5 cleric is as good a spellcaster as the wizard and a better combatant than the fighter. Since we're also nerfing the wizard, that means he's going to have lose quite a bit (though he'll lose less relative to the wizard than to the fighter).

I get that you think I'm going too far in nerfing the cleric, but I need some feedback other than "LOL OMG GIMPZ0R". What do you think he should lose instead of, essentially, Divine Favor, Divine Power, Righteous Might, and a significant amount of flexibility in spell selection?

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 2:21 am

I just think you really actually should able to be the cleric of "Mars" or "Ogun" and be as badass as any melee. I mean thats the real argument for clerics being able to be almost anything. Making, or trying to make them healbots hurts the game, and creates a scenario in which very few people will play them.
Thusly you could replace the damn class with something like crusador all together, with healing strikes if you feel that you have to have that, but very little combat healing actually occurs, its a weird thing that I've only seen really happen full time in MMO's.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 2:48 am

Midnight_v wrote:I just think you really actually should able to be the cleric of "Mars" or "Ogun" and be as badass as any melee.

Maybe part of the problem here is that the domain granted powers just suck ass. I mean, the War domain seriously gives you Weapon Focus, a feat so bad we actually use it as the archetypal shitty feat. I could maybe get behind the idea that taking War bumps your BAB up to full, for instance, and maybe some other war-god domain could bump you up to an effective d10 hit die (which really just +1 hit point per die, unless you're always maxing hit points).

At that point, you're a cleric who has actually sacrificed something meaningful to be good in a fight, versus the cleric who just gets up in the morning, decides he wants to be good in a fight today, and tomorrow decides he'd rather be a necromancer instead. So yeah. You could be pretty close to a fighter if you do that. They'll get more feats, but you'll get spells, and I think we could make that a fair trade.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 3:16 am

Midnight_v wrote:I just think you really actually should able to be the cleric of "Mars" or "Ogun" and be as badass as any melee. I mean thats the real argument for clerics being able to be almost anything. Making, or trying to make them healbots hurts the game, and creates a scenario in which very few people will play them.
Thusly you could replace the damn class with something like crusador all together, with healing strikes if you feel that you have to have that, but very little combat healing actually occurs, its a weird thing that I've only seen really happen full time in MMO's.

Expecting a single 'religious person' class to work is absurd. Religiousness isn't a role or a power; it's a trait. There's no reason that a priest of Mars should have the same class as a priest of Aphrodite, or a different class than an atheist warrior.

If you need a healer class, then fine, make a healer class. But don't force the healer to be religious or force every priest to be a healer.

K · Post by K » Fri Jul 20, 2012 6:53 am

You can strip healing out of the game, but then it plays a lot more like Shadowrun.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 9:09 am

@ Allowed material: 3.5 core books, feats from CW. Max level ~13.

You want to ban Natural Spell and meta-magic rods, and you've already banned Divine Metamagic. That basically fixes Clerics & Druids (leaves them *good*, but not stupidly so, aside from some adventure bypassing stuff near the top). Ideally both would have shorter spell lists, but don't write your own RPG.

Bonus spells for high stats can go die in a fire, especially for Wizards and high level slots. Throw out Wizard Bonus feats, or give everyone else more (or both).

All wands are CL 6 and limited to 3rd level spells. 5x the cost/hp for healing sticks makes the spells a better proposition, which drains the cleric's power a little. Or just ban healing sticks, whatever. Class-based healing works pretty well in 3e, item-based doesn't so much.

Ban the purchase of magic items. Making items requires quests for rare components. Then you can give out huge numbers of items and not break much because they're not convertible.