"The House Rule" Topic

"inking about a post on the Palouse Wargaming Blog – about a very important and rather different subject – got me on to thinking about house rules. I have been working on some house rules currently, both in historical tactical games and in role-playing games. House rules seem to be quite common in wargaming, perhaps more than in any other game. Why should this be?

I don't think my intuitions on this would be that different from most other gamers. The 1mm-deep answer is: to make a better game. But that doesn't get us very far – what would constitute better. Some potential top-level descriptions…"

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Armand

We spent a lot of time modding Stargrunt II to "improve" it. Some of the systems were the best I had seen, some to us were gimmiky (swapping die standards) and some were far too random (close combat results). These undobtedly for us made it a better game.

However in the end It became obvious that it would never achieve it all. Hence we embarked on the oddssy of writing our own. 15 years on we have published an issue 2 even of them. Our knowledge of the real world improves and with years of experience on the rules we decided some things needed minor ajusrments and of course as has been stated improving the clarity of the rules.

We have our own "house rules" even for our set, these are often scenario specific and allow us to do more complex maneouvres/plans but at a high price in terms of game time usage and very precise definitions of what will happen. These are unsuitable for many players as they don't want the effort of a high level of pre-planning and definition of what is to happen on a given command, neither do they like it if it goes wrong and have no rapid recourse.

Do such things count as house rules, to be honest I'm not sure.

Thanks…

Armand