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Hey everyone!

So I was talking with a friend of mine recently about various house rules we're considering for our gaming group. As well, I've been reading a few threads on here about a variety of issues that end up in discussions of "well you can house rule this, but RAW is...". All this has got me thinking about house rules more generally. So I thought I'd start a broader chat.


House rules. The variations on the official set of rules for our beloved game, we create these things for any number of reasons: perhaps to deal with a finicky, rare situation not even covered by the rules; perhaps as a way of simplifying a situation that is obfuscated by the RAW; or maybe just to make our games more flavourful and give ourselves more freedom and flexibility to experiment with the game system in the spirit of a fun and exciting gaming environment.

Whatever our reasons for creating them, house rules are subjective interpretations of rules, and for that reason represent a truly dynamic aspect of our hobby. I often see references to "in my group, we'll house rule this.." but I thought collecting common alterations could be an interesting endeavour. I saw no post explicitly for this purpose, but if one exists, please correct me/direct me.

So essentially, I wanted to ask a few broad, general questions:

1) Do you primarily play in your own, closed gaming group, or do you play with multiple groups of people (e.g. with strangers at a store, or common gamers at a regular league night, or just with your own circle of gaming friends in a private setting like a home)?

2) What are some of the more prominent/common House Rules you and/or your gaming group have developed, that you find particularly useful? What are ones you use frequently? Which ones represent very specific situations?

3) When creating/designing a House Rule, do you/your gaming group find it important to stick as close as possible to RAW, or do you use RAW as more of a guideline to develop a rule that more specifically caters to your group's needs?

4) What is/has been your favourite House Rule?

5) What is/has been your least favourite House Rule?

6) Have you found that continued and prolonged use of House Rules have 'corrupted' your own personal play style? Meaning, does playing with 'too many' house rules affect your understanding of the rules/cause you to forget the RAW when you're playing outside of your own gaming group?

7) Have you found using House Rules changes your overall understanding of the game in any way? If so, how?

Anyway, I was just interested in what others' experiences with this topic is/has been historically. Hopefully this will be of some interest to you all, and will lead to a fun conversation!

1) I play primarily in my own circle of gaming friends.

2) The only 2 house rules I can think of are, we play alternating first blood. This means when a player scores first blood, the opponent has till the end of the game turn to also score first blood. The other is when playing maelstrom missions, we place each objective in the center of the 2x2 section of the board and then scatter them.

3) I guess in our scenario, we do what's best for the group.

4) Alternating first blood

5) the other one I guess, though I like it as well.

6) no, because we don't mess around with house rules that much

7) we don't use house rules enough for it to impact my overall enjoyment of the game.

When me and my Friends all worked midnights and had time off. Every single day off we would play 40k from 5pm to 6am. made our own table, terrain, ect. anyway some of our house rules we really liked.
1) Head Hunters, lose a match, lose a head from your bits box to give to your opponent to put on one of his bases as a trophy.
2) knocked over a model, one of your models died. Number of models was equal to what you would lose. Made us be more careful and roll safer
3) Beerhammer, drink a beer, place it on the table, it is now impassible terrain, chain drink, make a wall and trap a unit in place (had to modify this rule many, many times to get it so we could actually finish a match)

For store play we usually play where no mysterious terrain. and Approval of ITC faq's

Geez, that's alot of quesitons. As to our club's approach to houseruling.

I game mostly with the same 5 or so people every other week. We play alot of less common and "indie" rulesets, so we fairly frequently house rule.
-Sometimes this is to cover an area not fully described in the rules.
-Sometimes it's to accommodate our style of play.
-Somtimes it's to take the rules in a direction they might not have originally been intended to go (new rules or new units, new settings etc)
-Since we play alot of rules with unit creation mechanics sometimes it's limitations on stats, upgrades, etc in order to curb the inherent ability of such rulesets to be min-maxed or "Broken".

None of the games we play has alot of house rules and we rarely codify them unless we're going to do a campaign. There are so many great rulesets around that if one game looks like it will take a huge amount of house-ruling then it's likely that we simply won't play that game anymore.

I think we generally tend to accept house-ruling as an inevitable part of wargaming, so it doesn't affect our enjoyment of the hobby overall.