Building Bhakashal – House Rules!

Time for a hard truth.

Everybody house rules.

Even people who play strictly “BTB” and “RAW”, they house rule too.

There are several varieties of house rule, and it would save a lot of electronic ink if we got them straight.

A house rule is just that, a rule that applies in the “house”, e.g., at a particular gaming table.

For example, “on a natural 20, you do double damage”

That’s a rather famous house rule, it was and is remarkably common when I played AD&D 1e BITD, but it was not in the books, it was something that individual tables chose to do.

My argument, TLDR, is that you HAVE TO house rule to play D&D, this isn’t an empirical observation, it’s a logical claim.

Why?

Well, D&D, unlike many other games, is open ended and has a LOT of rules, you simply cannot anticipate all the different ways in which the rules will interact with the game world and the player’s actions. The rules can’t cover every eventuality, if they did they would be remarkably unwieldy, instead, you adjudicate as needed and your house rules grow.

If you have played the game for any length of time you will realize this. I would go as far as to say that almost every session I have run for the last 40 years has had an example of this, a case where I had to make an adjudication because the rules didn’t tell me what to do.

Take an example from my game this Tuesday. My players were about to raid a warlock’s tower, so the party priest cast Divination. The spell description says this,

“The spell gives information regarding the relative strength of creatures in the area…”

What does that mean?

Gygax doesn’t specify it any more than that. So how do you provide this information?

You could keep it simple, “There are foes more powerful than you in the tower”

You could give metagaming detail, “There are foes of X HD and Y level in the tower”

You could be selectively descriptive, “There are foes that have more powerful magic than you in the tower”, or “There are foes with greater fighting ability than you in the tower”

The point here is that you will decide how the spell works in your game, and when you do so, that’s a house rule at your table. Look at the DMG section on player spells, Gygax discusses how to interpret spells based on his gaming experience, they are official rules as they were put there by Gygax in the game book, but every individual DM in the world has had to make interpretations of this kind, and those are all house rules.

So, with all that in mind, here is a brief taxonomy of house rules:

House Rules that Interpret – A spell or an existing game mechanic doesn’t specific what to do in a particular situation, so the DM comes up with a ruling on the spot.

House Rules that Replace – On a natural 20 you double your damage, normally the rule is that a natural 20 is either a hit or a miss depending on the AC of the target and the attacker’s class/nature, but this house rules substitutes a different result on a natural 20

House Rules that Add – D&D doesn’t have rules for what happens when you fail to groom and feed mounts regularly, so the DM creates rules for this or imports rules from another game.

House Rules that Omit – Say a table doesn’t bother with encumbrance at all, the DM just eyeballs the amount of stuff and says no sometimes to taking more, or the Dm doesn’t like the existing unarmed combat rules, so they drop them.

These are all house rules as they will vary from table to table.

I can see someone saying that they don’t do these a lot, or they don’t do some of these, but it beggars the imagination to suggest that you could play the game for any length of time and not have to do any of them.

It would thus be far more useful to drop all the arguing about whether or not you should house rule, and instead advocate for house rules in particular, or house ruling in degree or in kind, e.g., either argue that particular house rules are better or worse (double damage on nat 20 is good), the degree of house ruling is good or bad (house rule as little as possible, house rule as much as possible), or the kind of house ruling is good or bad (interpretive house rules are good, additive house rules are bad).

Note that this isn’t an “anything goes” post, it’s a “clarify what you mean because we aren’t having a productive conversation” post.

I will also add that, IMO, understanding the rules as written is a key component to running good games, as you can’t even decide that you want to house rule until you know what the rules actually are. Ignoring the rules entirely from the get go is, IMO, not a good way to play. Trying to figure out what the rules mean, rather than ignoring them if they seem confusing or challenging, is the best course.

House ruling is something you do in addition to learning the rules of the game, not something you do instead of learning them.

Peace!