LeumasWhite/HouseRules

House Rules

XTREME Stunts (Or, How To Remove That Nasty Crunchy Texture From Your Kung-Fu)

Ex1/Ex2: Higher-rated stunts count as perfect in contested actions. Example: if Sword-Guy 1 attacks Sword-Guy 2, and he gets a +3 stunt while Sword-Guy 2 only gets a +2, his attack becomes perfect; it may still be reduced to 0 successes, but nothing short of a perfect defence will actually stop it. Applies in reverse, obviously, and in any sort of contested roll.

Reasoning

If you don't give two shits about the mechanical aspects of the game, then yeah, this is for making stunts = the awesome.

Martial Arts

Ex1/Ex2: Are expandable. The charms as written represent the core lessons, but once you reach the pinnacle, you can create charms branching off of existing ones. Keep in theme (no super-defensive charms, tiger dude). If you want to start learning an SMA Form, you only need the canon charms of a style to do so.

Reasoning

If one of my players says that his concept is Air Dragon Stylist, I don't want to watch him get Hurricane Combat Method and then have to say "haha, bitch! Start buying another low-power Celestial tree, or be prepared to pay more XP on Sidereal techniques than anyone else is spending on their charms!" It's rather mean.

Darling, You Look Wonderful (Or Hideous, Your Choice)

Ex1: Appearance may be set anywhere between 1 and 5 at character creation. Social Attributes receive one less point to be spent on them (ie, 7 if Primary, 5 if Secondary, and 3 if Tertiary).

Reasoning

Does Appearance actually matter? I don't think so. Look how you want to. The losing-dots thing is to help balance not having to spend them on Appearance.

Heroic Spirit Wanted (Realism Need Not Apply)

Ex1/Ex2: Wound penalties are no longer penalties, they're bonuses. As you get closer to dying, you fight harder. One of the benefits of Exaltation, mortals don't get it.

Reasoning

It fixes a whole lot of little things that bug me, really, and that's about it. Ox-Body would be reversed (a +2 health level, two +1s, or a +1 and two +0s).

Questions / Comments

If I may be so bold: A little question to the Heroic Spirit: if I recall rightly there are some mechanics in the game where you sacrifice health levels. How do you handle these cases? Because with Heroic Spirit the sacrifice would loose quite a bit of it's "sacrifice-iness" [[[MadFreddy]]]

Not really. Sacrificing health levels still puts you that much closer to death, even if you're now getting dice in exchange. The rule is mostly for low levels of health when you're getting +4s; +1 and +2 isn't that much of a benefit. I imagine there'll be needing to be some rebalancing of charms and whatnot anyway, but this is just here now so I don't forget it.

Oh, minor note, you don't need the brackets around your name, since MadFreddy automatically becomes a WikiWord. And minor edits don't show up in the recent changes, so you're lucky I saw this. :) - LeumasWhite

I like these, save the crunch on the appearance one. In particular, a Social character has to lose 2 attribute points to be attractive - a jock has to lose zero. Thus, you'll by nature end up with very memorable physical and mental characters, while the social characters will tend to have lower appearances. At some point, you've got to realize that you're penalizing social characters for being attractive, and not penalizing (as much) the others. Why do this? Better to have everyone lose 1 attribute point from whatever they allocate to socials, or some such. -- GreenLantern

I'm not quite sure I follow your logic here (it's early, I'm still waking up), but are you saying something along the lines of "the jock could have Str 5 and Dex 5 if he had Physical Primary, whereas the Social Primary guy is only going to be able to have Charisma 4 and Manipulation 4"? - LeumasWhite

That's how I read it and I agree. Just remove 1 or 2 from the social allocation. - Telgar

Works for me. It's an Ex1 rule, anyway, so I doubt it's going to come up that often. - LeumasWhite