Let's Talk About House Rules

My next post on the Sorcery! epic is going to be a pretty big one, and I don't have a great deal of time, so I'm going to save that for next week and write about something else instead: house rules! Yes, this isn't the first week I've skipped lately, but I'm bending my own rules in order to write a post about bending the rules.

The Fighting Fantasy rules are pretty basic, let's be honest. They have to be for a series aimed at a more casual gaming audience, and a younger one as well.  They get the job done, and for some books they're perfectly balanced, but for others they're just not quite adequate. I figure that most FF readers have tweaked the rules at one point or another, and I thought it might be fun to share some of the changes I've made.

Customising Your Stats

By the book, you have to roll one die for Skill, then two dice for Stamina, then another die for Luck. Needless to sat this can result in some fairly weak characters, and in some books can lock you out of winning entirely. To alleviate this, I sometimes roll all four dice at once, then place the results were I like. So if I rolled a 4, 5, 1 and 3, I'd put the 5 into Skill, the 4 into Luck, and the 1 and 3 into Stamina.  There's no guarantee that you'll get great stats, but there's less chance of rolling Skill 7 in a killer book like Deathtrap Dungeon. I reserve this rule for books that I've finished a few times already.

Relative Damage

Sometimes I get bored with only doing 2 points of damage per attack. Some of those fights can get a bit long in the tooth, you know? Sometimes, rather than stick with the standard, I use the difference between Attack Strengths to determine how much damage is inflicted. For example, if I score an Attack Strength of 15, and an Orc I'm fighting scores an Attack Strength of 11, I'd do four points of damage. There are some problems with this rule. It does tend to exacerbate the problem of fighting opponents that have a higher Skill than you; they don't get any easier to hit, and they hit you harder than usual. But it does make combat a bit deadlier and more unpredictable, and also makes things go a little faster. It's a lot of fun in books like Scorpion Swamp and Forest of doom, where there aren't a lot of difficult battles.

Balancing Luck

This is a simple one: instead of losing a Luck point when you're Unlucky, you gain a Luck point. So your Luck still goes down when you're Lucky, but it goes up when you're not. This is good for those books with lots of Luck tests, but very few Luck bonuses. It's probably unbalanced for characters starting with a Luck of 10-12, but I've found that it works well with characters that have a Skill of 7-9. I've even allowed my Luck to go over my Initial score with this rule, which works well; your score never goes above 12, and I've found that it tends to hover in the mid-ranges. It puts a stop to the "Luck Death Spiral", where once your Luck gets below a certain point you just can't raise it again without some sort of magic or a bonus from the book.

Campaign Play

It can be fun to play the same character from book to book, much like Sorcery! and Lone Wolf. When I do this, I sometimes start with minimum stats (Skill 7, Stamina 14, Luck 7), or sometimes just minimum Skill. With each book I complete, I raise all of those scores by 1. I tend to empty out my inventory between adventures, keeping only those items that provide a statistical boost. Here are two of the orders that I've played the books in:

• Caverns of the Snow Witch, Forest of Doom, Temple of Terror, Crypt of the Sorcerer (the Yaztromo campaign, basically. Don't start this one with a 7 Skill though! You could also throw in Return to Firetop Mountain.)
• Seas of Blood, Demons of the Deep, Trial of Champions, Armies of Death. From pirate, to undersea adventurer, to slave, to army commander.

That's it for this week, and my own house rules. If you guys have your own rules variants, please post them in the comment. Anyway, I should be back next week with more of Sorcery.