I must be a grognard…
whatever the hell that is. See, I was poking around rpgbloggers.com earlier this morning when I stumbled upon The Core Mechanic. Over in the sidebar I noticed a link to an article titled 10 House Rules to Make Grognards Like 4th Edition D&D. As soon as “grumpy dwarves” were mentioned, I knew he was talking to me. Honestly, if many of these changes were present in the core rulebook, I’d probably enjoy the game.
I freaking loved every one of these, with exception to numbers 3, 5 and 10. Miniatures have become too great a convenience (or crutch?) for me, and rules 3 and 5 looked to be rather pointless. Freedom to play away from a game-table has its allure, though.
Rules 1 and 2 remind me of how much I just don’t like the way HP is handled in 4e. I’d go a step farther and set a characters starting HP equal to their CON score; on leveling they would gain HP equal to one-half their CON modifier (rounded down, minimum 1), regardless of their class.
I like rule 4 simply because the multitude of fantasy races in D&D settings has simply gotten out of hand. Rule 6 is something more of a “duh” thing, really. The levels of monsters as they are written in the 4e MM are deceptively high — if you lowered the level of each monster (excluding dragons, those seemed to be OK) in the MM by 2 or 3 then the book would feel a lot more honest.
Rule 7… I read the Gygaxian Naturalism link and damn near cried. This dude makes it sounds like AD&D was nearly a Dwarf Fortress RPG. D&D 3.5 was the first pen-and-paper RPG I ever played, and I really only enjoyed it because I had what my friends would refer to as “a sadistic DM that was stingy with magic items.” Do keep in mind that I really don’t like the overabundance of magic in D&D. Once I started playing in games DMed by my friends, where they would hand out magic items in accordance with the DMG’s guidelines, I began to realize that D&D 3.5 was a bit silly and hoped that the forthcoming 4e would fix some things. We can dream, right?
Rules 8 and 9… I could live with those rules in a game. They’d up the difficulty a bit and demand a bit more resourcefulness from the players.
I’ve really gotta sit down with the WFRP rulebook one of these days and give it a shot. I need a fantasy fix.
One Comment
While I like 4e the “way it is” (one could note that I tend to play with houserules anyway, but the ones I use tend to make 4e more ridiculous, not less) I think it would be a good change of pace to play it that way.