How do you decide when to make a house rule? I have three criteria for judging the necessity, appropriateness, and usefulness of a house rule:

1. Does it fix something that is broken?
2. Does it add something that is missing?
3. Does it make the game more fun and/or playable?

If I can't say "Yes" to at least one of these questions, I can't justify departing from RAW.

4. Does it make the GM's head turn that special shade of red (You all know the shade of red I mean) and cause the vein near his temple to pulse like it's dancing to a hot latin rhythm?

Sometimes a rule ain't broke, but they're gonna wanna "fix" it anyways.

Does a rule just piss you off due to it's inherent stupidity? You might not be able to write a much better rule, but you can write one that isn't so obviously reeking of clulessness.

Does it turn off any of the numerous "I win" buttons? We banned the mind control magic because of that.

Both of these fall under criterion #1, IMO. Stupidity might not be exactly the same thing as brokenness, but for my money it's close enough. Anything that constitutes an "I win" button, on the other hand, is just flat broken.

If it is about as hard to kill a person as it it to mind control them then it is not broken. The problem is that as people get stronger and more resistant to other kinds of damage they might not get less difficult to mind control but that is just their weakness that they overlooked. You can't min max and then cry about it. Mind control might still be broken but I have not heard anyone else complaining about it.

Does the house rule create more problems than it fixes?

Funny how those unseen events crop up down the line.

That seems to be my experience. The most common problem is to make the game more complicated and bogged down by rules.

House rules in my experience tend to pop up to:

1)Help streamline something to make it less of a hassle to actually run without grinding the game to a stop.
2)Curb abuses of the 'spirit of the game'.

That second one varies between people. Especially when you're an exploiter who sees a threat to their super-alpha-strike-uber combo. I tend towards the conservative, with the idea that everyone should have an opportunity to participate and that when through no fault of their own 90 percent of the group is overshadowed just because someone knows how to work the system, I'd play with balance a bit. Swing the nerf-bat, as it were.

In other cases, I'll import rules from other games, so I like things like the 'take 10' on skills via DnD, and variants of such in SR such as auto-successes based on your skillpool for certain actions. Like, you'd still roll (largely to see if you glitch) otherwise you can take the better of the result dice or autosuccesses for 'non-pressure' situations.

I tend to judge (house) rules by the question "does it reduce hassle and overhead?" A houserule that causes a lot more bookkeeping might make sense, but I don't want it regardless. But simple to use house rules are harder to come up with.

House rules are something to be careful of, because they can screw with the balance of the game, and have unintended consequences.

The "fixes" that they put into SR4A, while being official rules, still illustrate this well. The rule about net hits adding to Drain actually encouraged overcasting rather than discouraging it, and penalized mages for success. Not to mention that it did nothing about mind control mages or high Force spirits. The rule to nerf social skills by using Charisma + Skill to cap hits actually makes pornomancers worse for other characters to deal with. Most practical pornomancers won't take all of those conditional modifiers with potential drawbacks (global fame, addiction to Ex, symbiosis, etc.). So with a high Charisma and skill, the caps won't actually limit them that much. But they will gimp all of the low Charisma, low skill characters, who will be even more outclassed by the face types now.

Still, nearly everyone uses some house rules, because there will always be a few loopholes to close, or power creep to beat back with a stick. Most GMs seem to disallow or nerf empathy software, which gives ludicrous bonuses to the already bloated social skill dice pools. And there is RAW vs. RAI (rules as intended) - no, you can't wear three FFBA suits and have them all stack together. No, when you multicast, you don't get to add your rating: 4 spell focus, your specialization, and your mentor spirit bonus to each individual test. No, just because they limit you to one skill of 6 or two of 5 at character generation does not mean you can take a skill of 7 with aptitude, then get another skill of 6/two at 5 on top of that. But keep in mind that RAI is still house rules (since the "intent" of the rules is far more subjective than RAW) - and all house rules should be shared with the players before the campaign starts.

I'm trying to imagine why anyone would ever add a house rule that they don't think meets #3. You really don't need #1 and #2 when #3 effectively means "because I want to".

Personally I find it easier to just invoke veto power on character creation and advancement then to get into a lot of house rules. That and a persistant effort to find common ground with my players on letting them play the characters they want to play rather then the ones they need to play have served me better then anything else. There have been some slight fixes I've made but they are mostly to correct something I see as mechanically or thematicly flawed. Pretending stick and shock doesn't exist and changing the way medkits work(under the current rules it is actually better to be an unskilled person with a rating six medkit then to sink points into first aid). Basically I spend more time fixing the way some technology and magic works to conform to a bit of consistant logic then i do outright banning things.

These are the things I house rule. Other then that I find the vast majority of things can be controlled within the setting. You use your possesion spirits sparingly(especially on yourself) because of the implications of giving a spirit control of your body etc etc. I'm not saying my system is the best but it certainly seems to work at my table.

That would be true is it were accurate. But it's not, so why even bring it up? What is the maximum damage of a force I manabolt do vs a force 1 control actions "shoot everyone in front of you with your alpha" or "shoot yourself in the head"?

I spent so long playing 2nd and 3rd, that when I started running 4th recently, I've house ruled in a few things from the previous editions that seem like they should have made it to 4th, but I can't find anywhere in the rules,such as mages applying net successes beyond the spell's force limit to drain tests.

I also brought in an old house rule we used where adepts could gain a measure of personal shielding equal to their initiate level.

QFT. I may make that criterion #4.


YMMV, but my definition of criterion #3 is pretty narrow. When I say "make the game more fun and/or playable," I mean "does it smooth over a stumbling block, an overly complex rule, eliminate needless bookkeeping, or other things of that nature." IMO, "because I want to" is not a valid reason for creating a house rule.

I think a lot of GMs are a bit too trigger-happy in declaring something "broken", without actually playing it in a game to see if it really is broken. And the result is often a nerfing that makes one of the game options all but unplayable (magic seems to be especially prone to this). A lot of the times, the true culprit is a GM not applying the rules or modifiers that normally keep something in check.

Adding any houserule can create significant problems without a solid understanding of the core mechanics of the game. I mean solid understanding, not just the mechanics of the rule being changed and the mechanics of every other rule it interacts with, but some degree of understading why the writers used those mechanics in the first place. After that comes playtesting.

Also be carefull of introducing houserules in the middle of a game, they can alter how a character was or should have been built, they can even alter what type of character was/is made entirely.

In both cases consider the least invasive houserule before doing something more drastic. The less invasive the houserule is the less likely you are to mess other rules up or make players upset with thier characters.