House Rules

This post is growing out of the ongoing commentaries and reflections, alongside the way some things work in other THW rules or just other rulesets/milieus. I'll update this post with new rules and point to it from other posts if necessary.

Casting - first of all because of the unmitigated power of the Big Battle magic for a cabal with 20-odd REP it's going to have to be NPC spellcasters use spells normally. Big Battle magic only happens in Big Battles.

Stars don't count as part of a Group. This grows out of the nature of the game we play and a little bit of vagueness in the way the relationship between Stars and Grunts is explained. So, a star lives or dies by his own dice rolls just as the Grunts do. It makes the outcomes of reaction tests easier to interpret and it overcomes the issues where the Star chooses his reaction successes. To help mitigate the disaster for my PC's groups(!!!) I'm going to allow Stars to activate on any valid REP they want (i.e. instead of activating at 5 REP, they could go in any order on their side, thus allowing them to wait and see which groups or fellow stars need their help before having to weigh in).
On reflection this won't work, so I'll just have to find other ways to split stars from their followers. Admittedly with my lot of players that won't be easy 'cos basically the stars are frightened of being separated from their groups. I think only the Black Moon Elves have ever tried to be more tactically flexible.

Skills - I'm going to start a separate post with a list but the way we discussed it skills can be gained by giving up progression rolls. The tariff we thought might work would be to give up as many rolls as you have skills. Stars all have a skill already (Elite Trained, Healer, Caster, Thief) so to gain the first additional skill would cost two rolls, to gain a third skill would cost three rolls and so on.

Melee - not so much a house rule as a clarification. Melee should be broken down into as many individual one-to-one fights as possible, but where outnumbering exists everybody rolls the dice they are entitled to and compares the results with each opponents rolls in turn. So an elf outnumbered by two goblins would roll his dice (with the outnumbered modifier) and each of the goblins would roll their dice. The ONE set of dice rolled by the elf would be compared in turn to each of the goblins' rolls and results applied. This is how Bob says it works on the Yahoo Group and is the implication in Swordplay.
This differs considerably from Big Battle where both sides roll all their dice entitlement and the results are applied to the body.
Armour - AC 3 and 4 is practically worthless, so in order to make it worthwhile I am intending to impose additional penalties on characters wearing AC 5 and above. Foot movement for these characters will be reduced to 4" and Mounted movement reduced to 9" (effectively an additional quarter move penalty).