Sorry about the lack of content for the past few weeks, folks.
Updates are going to resume very shortly, I’ve been a bit preoccupied with what’s been happening in my personal life & just haven’t had the time to focus on the site (check out my blog if you want details).
Things have now quietened down enough on the home front to let me get cracking here again, so watch this space.
If I’m going to start talking about house rules, I should probably start at the beginning…
The following rules were very easy to integrate (allowing for a little adjustment time to get used to any new rule), but that’s probably because they evolved over the course of our campaign rather than being dropped onto the players all at once.
We generate these via the ‘Roll 4D6 & drop the lowest (then assign as you choose)’ method. Players who are unhappy with their stats can re-roll them (all of them, that is - not on a per-stat basis).
I know that point buy systems are definitely more fair, but I don’t think ‘fairness’ is really that important a characteristic when it comes to character generation.
I don’t think characters need to be balanced against one another; I think the amount a character contributes to a roleplaying session should be dictated who the character is rather than what his stats are (and they’re definitely not the same thing).
We’re using the AEG Stargate SG-1 rulebook (now no longer being published) as our core book; it’s an adaptation of their Spycraft ruleset, which is itself a d20 adaptation.
It’s a perfectly good ruleset; but there’s absolutely no way you can expect any group of gamers to stick to the Rules As Written for even the best ruleset - and it’s even less likely when you throw multiple GMs into the mix.
We tend to make any changes collaboratively - it’s most often Jim (the other GM) & me who come up with a provisional ruling, which is then opened up to the group. If we’re all going to be playing with some house rules, it’s nice if we all agree with them (it also helps make sure we all know what they are!)
There are generally only a few reasons why a house rule is devised in the first place (I generally like the Stargate/d20 system; I don’t want to end up playing something that’s drastically different - and nor do any of my players) :
The starting point for our campaign world was the Stargate SG-1 TV series; we’re using AEG’s Stargate ruleset, so it makes sense to use the series a rough guide. For the rest of this post, I’m going to assume you have at least a passing familiarity with the show.
The setting includes a lot of cool things from the perspective of a roleplaying group -
The basic idea of teams travelling offworld through stargates to accomplish various missions immediately creates a reason for a party to exist and go on adventures.The offworld nature of the missions means that they’re pretty much wide open for whatever the GM wants to happen, and there’s a stable of existing alien and near-human races for use as allies, antagonists and outright villains.
It’s also a modern-day setting, which is something we all wanted.
And frankly, a race of megalomaniac alien parasites who infest living human hosts in order to pose as gods (thus becoming the basis of most Earth mythology) make for brilliant campaign villains.
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