House Rules

These are some house rules we’ll be using in this campaign. Please familiarize yourself with them as you stat out your characters.

Per and Will

Both Per and Will are their own attributes. They start at 10, and can be raised or lowered for 5 points/level. IQ is unchanged, at 20 points/level.

This is a big change, but an important one. As written, if you lower your character’s Per and Will, you’ll see that IQ (just IQ by itself) costs 10 points/level. Compared to the price of Talents, Magery, and even skills, that’s just too little. Now that mental skills cost more per level, it’s unbalancing to make IQ cost less.

In addition, it makes themetic sense for Will and Perception to be divorced from IQ. Intelligence certainly doesn’t affect alertness — look at any animal to see that. And your strength of will isn’t related to how smart you are, otherwise nerds would intimidate jocks, not the other way around.

This does slightly change the cost of building characters, so you’ll want to mentally add about 10-15% to the starting character points suggestions in the books.

(Note that Affliction (Attribute Penalty, IQ) no longer reduces Per and Will. Instead, the Attribute Penalty enhancement may be bought for each at +5% per level. Similarly, Steal Will and Steal Per are +100% enhancements for Leech.)

Combat Skills, Arts, and Sports

When you learn a Combat skill, Combat Art skill, or Combat Sport skill (see p. B184 for details), you may buy up the other two versions as an Average technique defaulting to your skill-3. For example, if you know Karate Art at DX+2, you know Karate at DX-1 and can buy it up to DX+2 level for 3 points.

This change is due to equal parts game-balance and realism. As the rules are written now, if you know (e.g.) Broadsword at DX+4, it costs 12 points to buy just your Broadsword Art up to the same level. That’s a game balance issue because you’re wasting points — not just due to the lack of utility, but because you’d be nuts not to just spend the 12 points on Broadsword (raising Broadsword Art and Sport by +3, from default, simultaneously). While that issue comes up with other defaults, it’s especially bad here, as many martial arts styles require you to, e.g., learn both Judo and Judo Art. And it’s a realism issue, because fighters and athletes do transition between (e.g.) tournaments and MMA fighting without spending a full year training non-stop to adapt. A technique is a fair compromise; at 3 points per skill, it costs 6 points to raise all three variants to the same level — exactly half of the 12 points mentioned above.

Iniative

Roll 2d and add your Basic Speed (plus any modifiers from Combat Reflexes, etc.). Higher numbers go first.