Post by foster1941 on Feb 15, 2005 1:28:24 GMT -5
Here's an interesting thread (at least for the first couple pages) from Ron Edwards' site regarding people's naive mistakes in their early days of playing and the solutions they improvised, a follow up of sorts to the essay A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons. I don't particularly agree with the 'agenda' of this article and thread -- marginalizing the create effort of Gygax and Arneson, claiming that people's efforts born of misunderstanding the rules are just as good and worthy as the actual rules -- but am intrigued by the idea of it. What sorts of stories do folks here have about "unintentional house rules" from their early roleplaying days? Are there any such rules borne of misunderstandings that you ended up liking enough that you stuck with them even after realizing that they were "incorrect"?
Personally, I started playing with the Mentzer-edited Basic Set which does such a good job of explaining the rules that I never really had any of the sorts of major misunderstandings described in the above thread (though I do remember having some trouble figuring out how to read a 4-sided die -- I finally hit on the correct-in-its-wrongness method of picking up the die and figuring out which number wasn't on the bottom face), but my best friend (the person who inspired me to pick up the game) had a doozy -- in combat characters rolled a d20 and a d12 and read the results like d% as the amount of damage done (so if you rolled an 8 on the d12 and a 13 on the d20 your damage inflicted would be 813 hp). Needless to say monsters were invariably slain on the first round, but on those rare occasions when the result actually wasn't enough to slay the opponent (say rolling a 1 on the d12 and a 3 on the d20 -- 13) then it would get to roll a d12 + d20 and very likely kill you!
My friend had played a few times previously with his older brother (or perhaps had just watched his brother playing?) but I can only assume made this system up himself based on a vague memory of how d% worked. We only played this way a couple times before I finally pointed out that this wasn't anything like what the rules I had read said and we finally started playing the "right" way.
So, anybody else have any cases of interesting or amusing "uninentional house rules" you want to share?
Personally, I started playing with the Mentzer-edited Basic Set which does such a good job of explaining the rules that I never really had any of the sorts of major misunderstandings described in the above thread (though I do remember having some trouble figuring out how to read a 4-sided die -- I finally hit on the correct-in-its-wrongness method of picking up the die and figuring out which number wasn't on the bottom face), but my best friend (the person who inspired me to pick up the game) had a doozy -- in combat characters rolled a d20 and a d12 and read the results like d% as the amount of damage done (so if you rolled an 8 on the d12 and a 13 on the d20 your damage inflicted would be 813 hp). Needless to say monsters were invariably slain on the first round, but on those rare occasions when the result actually wasn't enough to slay the opponent (say rolling a 1 on the d12 and a 3 on the d20 -- 13) then it would get to roll a d12 + d20 and very likely kill you!
My friend had played a few times previously with his older brother (or perhaps had just watched his brother playing?) but I can only assume made this system up himself based on a vague memory of how d% worked. We only played this way a couple times before I finally pointed out that this wasn't anything like what the rules I had read said and we finally started playing the "right" way.
So, anybody else have any cases of interesting or amusing "uninentional house rules" you want to share?
