My House Rules (Pathfinder 2e Rule Reminder #100)

this video is brought to you by the battle zoo bestiary a new book featuring 100 award-winning monsters and the monster part system that allows players to harvest resources from their fallen foes and craft into custom gear the battle zoo bestiary is now available at battlezoo.com hey everybody dave here and welcome to a special 100th edition of my pathfinder rule reminder series and today i'm going to do something a little different uh instead of tackling one specific rules related question i'm going to tackle a question that i've been asked a lot over the last few years since i started this channel and that is what are my house rules and before i get into sharing these house rules with you i do think we should set some ground rules and the first of those is that we need to acknowledge that no two groups of pathwander players are going to be identical and so what i'm sharing with you is what works with me and my players and they may or may not be rules that are best for you and your players and i also want to mention that a handful of these are not so much designed to address an inherent problem with raw so much as they are just just the way that me and my my friends like to play the game right so my core group of pathfinder players we've been together for 10 years now and we bounce around we don't exclusively play pathfinder we we we play some pathfinder and then we'll play some dnd and we'll play some star wars saga edition we'll play some mutants and masterminds we'll play a number of different games that the majority of which are going to be d20 based role playing games so they all share the same foundation of ability scores and flanking concepts and stuff like that um but some of the rules like we're just used to and it's just the way we've been doing things for 10 years and even if pathfinder second edition says well by raw we are suggesting you to do it a different way well where's that's great but we're used to doing it our own way and that's what we're going to do so let me go through these house rules with you the the first of those is about moving an enemy in a direction other than a way so there currently is by raw the shove action which is part of the athletic skill where you can roll your athletic skill check and if you succeed you shove the enemy away from you five feet and if you critically succeed you move them 10 feet away that's great if you want to move your enemy away from you but if you want to move that enemy in any other direction it's up to gm interpretation and uh and for them to make their own ruling there's nothing hard coded in the rules so what i do is if a player has an enemy grabbed so they spend their first action on grapple they roll an athletic skill check they succeed on that they have that enemy grab they can then spin their second action to shove but if they succeed they don't have to move their enemy away from them they instead can move them in any direction that they choose my second house rule has to do with identifying magic items this is something that i have like a love hate relationship with i love it when players get a mysterious artifact of an item something that's really obscure that no one's ever heard of but i hate it when they get another healing potion or their fifth plus one long sword or any other real common magic item um well i like for me to get the loot don't get me wrong but i don't like to spend game time of them making skill checks to try to identify those things because it just seems to slow down the whole process so what i do is whenever my players discover a magic item if that magic item is common rarity and of their level or lower then they don't have to make a skill check as long as they're at least trained in one of the uh one of the four skills that could be used to identify a magic item if the item is a higher level or of any level but is of uncommon rarity or rare or unique then they still have to make the checks as usual and my next house rule is something that i stole from the glass cannon and it's probably worth mentioning that i think only one of these house rules is something that i actually created on my own um and it was probably something that a million other people have thought of as well and the rest of these are things that you know i've i've seen online i've read them blogs i've sat in on games and i've i've liked the way the gm handled something and i stole their idea so i don't want anybody to think that i'm uh taking credit for these house rules i'm sharing today and certainly one of those is when i i'm blatantly stealing from the glass cannon and that is the two session lemon law now the two session lemon law says that after players level up they have two complete game sessions where they can play around with their their new feats their new spells whatever they got from leveling up and at the end of that second session if they decide that you know what that feat i just took it's not as awesome as i thought it was it doesn't work the way i thought it was it's not as beneficial as i thought it was going to be then they can swap it out they can basically get a free respect they can swap it out for another feed or similar item but they have to live with it then there's no two more session uh lemon law it's just one time only at the end of the second session after a player levels up they can decide whether they want to keep the things that they took or swap it out for something similar but they swap it out they gotta live with it my next house rule is about tumble through the tumble through action allows a player to move through an enemy space and that's great but the downside of it is they still provoke attacks of opportunity even if they succeed on that tumble theory check and so my only modification is if they succeed on the acrobatics check to tumble through they also do not provoke any reactions like an attack of opportunity while doing so um i know there's some people out there who do this for only if they critically succeed on the acrobatics check i do it on a regular success um if you want to adopt it you know feel free to do whatever you want with a with the real at your table my next house rule is about aid so the way aid works is if a person wants to assist another person on an action that they're taking they can roll a check for that same action and if they get a they meet dc20 or higher than they add a bonus to the person they're trying to to aid and uh my problem with this is first level players are going to have a real hard time hitting that dc 20 and first level with brand new players is exactly when i want them experimenting with doing things other than attacking on their own i want them thinking outside the box i want them to do things that are going to aid their partners in in in other and other similar actions so what i do is if the dc for the check is lower than 20 then the dc of the check becomes the dc for aid so if your first level and a person is making a check and it's dc 15 then a person eating them doesn't have to meet dc20 they only have to meet dc 15. so that eight is only going to be is going to be the um the lower of of 20 or whatever the actual dc is for that check my next house rule is one that i've shared before in my video about identifying monsters and it is about recall knowledge and the process for getting information about a monster or other creature whenever a player encounters one and so the way it works by raw is they they make a skill check in secret and the gm gives them whatever they feel is the most commonly known piece of information about that creature and um in in my experience sometimes players can get distraught or upset because they feel like they just use an action and they just rolled really well you know you i rode really high got a natural 18 or 19. they want to feel success and then the information you give them they don't feel like even if it is the even if you feel is valuable information and it's the most commonly known information it's not what they really want um so what i do is on a success i give the creature's name type and subtype and i let the players ask me any one specific question about that monster so they could say is the monster immune to fire is the monster a weak to poison uh you know anything they want it's gotta be one specific question about the monster and i'll answer it and on top of that what i do is for every five points they beat the dc of that check by i let them ask an additional question so if they beat the dc by 10 then i give the name the type the subtype and they can ask me any three specific questions about that creature and uh for repeated attempts it works very much the same by raw it goes until they either feel a check or until they succeed on the highest level difficulty but meeting the check gets them let's ask one question in every five that they beat a buy list them ask an additional question as well the next uh house rule i use is actually just undoing a piece of errata and that deals with hero points so by raw when a person uses hero points to to hold off death and they stabilize they remain unconscious they're no longer in immediate danger of death but they're effectively out of the fight and um that's not the way it was in the original printing of pathfinder second edition in the original printing it was you spend your hero points to avoid death you become conscious with one hit point left and for me that sounds way more heroic because it at least gives you a chance to do something in the fight to do something interesting as opposed to just being unconscious and in one of my games uh this paid huge dividends because it prevented a tpk and a boss fight and it was the player with one hit point left getting back on their feet making one last swing with their sword was what it took to kill the boss and save the day so letting them have at least a chance at a truly heroic moment is worth it when they're spending hero points by my estimation now another thing that i do with hero points is i allow the players to spin them to modify the narrative so a common example might be um a player might say uh you know what can i spin one of my hero points to say that when we were back in town i remembered to buy 200 feet of rope because right now we really need 200 extra feet of rope and you know i didn't think of that back then and i'll say sure one hero point will say that when you're in town you bought that rope no problem or they might say they walk into a bar and they they say you know what um you know i i think things would work better if uh if i had an ally in this bar what if the waitress was someone i used to date and so we at least have a familiarity oh sure that'll cost you you know your one hero point now um that lets them play with the narrative have a little bit of agency in the narrative at a cost but it's not a home it's not home free because like i'm very empowered to say well you know what she doesn't remember your breakup being as smooth as you do and maybe it's not as as uh as pleasant as you're expecting and that just adds another layer to the narrative something something else that you can play with uh in that social encounter uh in certain times i might even allow the players to pull their hero points so there's something major i might say well you know what if you want that i want one hero point from everybody or me or i want three hero points from the five of you or whatever but um that's just one more idea using hero points to allow your players to have some agency however minor in the narrative to spin their hero points and bargain with the gm to to get these little things that they want now my remaining households i want to share with you are things that fall in that category i was mentioning earlier about these aren't addressing major issues that are wrong with the game it's just you know we're we're a group that's been together for 10 years we're stuck in our ways and we play a lot of different games and so we don't want to have to re learn certain rules that are different between pathfinder dnd star wars saga edition and other d20 based role playing games we just say this is the way we do and it works for us and the first of those is the five foot diagonal we treat a square on a map as five feet in all directions including diagonals instead of alternating between five and ten feet and i know right now there are people who are very passionate about this issue and they're probably right now typing their comments in so let me just acknowledge up front um i agree hexes are superior to squares but all of my maps that i've accumulated over the years are in squares so i'm sticking with squares i also understand that the distance from the center of a square to any of its four corners is 50 longer than the distance from the center of the square to the center of any of its edges i understand that and i do understand that is theoretically possible to cross from any extreme end of a map from one end to the other quicker by going diagonally than it is going uh orthotically uh especially if you don't impose a alternating 5 and 10 feet on the diagonals in my experience there's never been an issue uh moving these great distances because if your map is so wide open that that's really a threat that's probably a pretty boring map and you should think about putting some obstacles in it some difficult some terrain and some other things um so that's not really a huge issue for me now the one critical piece of the using just straight five feet that i i absolutely wholeheartedly agree with is it makes it very easy for players to move around without triggering reactions so it makes it easier for people to move into flanking to get around to escape but um first and foremost in pathfinder second edition uh takes of opportunity are not nearly as common as they are in other games and also my enemies are playing by the same rules that my players are so it makes it easier for them to get into flanking and to get out of trouble uh as well so uh we're just sitting our ways we're used to just doing five feet squares and so that's what we're sticking with in pathfinder as well so another rule that's in this area of we're just it's just the way we're used to doing things is drawing or stowing one item as part of a move action so in pathfinder first edition and i think in dandy third edition whenever you took a move action you could draw a weapon or sheath a weapon or draw an easily accessed item as part of that movement um so if you want to attack someone you could draw your sword while you're moving to them and then attack them whereas in pathfinder second position that's three different actions you spin one action to draw one action to move to the enemy and a third action to attack and um like i said we're just used to drawing or stowing as part of movement so whenever someone takes a stride action i allow them to either draw or stow one item usually a sheathed weapon and um i understand the action economy has been changed in pathfinder second edition and so they want to have things that you do with that third action beyond just attacking or moving um but for me i like i like heroic adventure i like heroic games and i want my players to do something more interesting and potentially heroic with that third action than drawing or sewing an item so that's why i stick with uh allowing them to draw or stow as part of a straight action another somewhat controversial house rule that we use that's just because the way we're used to doing things is we kind of use old-fashioned surprise rounds so if an encounter begins and you have characters involved in the fight who are aware of danger and others who are not aware of the danger then those who are aware of the danger get to take one action uh before initiative falls into his regular order and this is very similar to the uh surprise rounds we saw in older editions of these d20 role-playing games where um you got one standard action if you were aware of danger and others who are not and i understand i completely understand that this does kind of fly in the face of the philosophy of how initiative works in pathfinder second edition but we're just we're just used to letting you do something free at the start if you are aware of danger before initiative is rolled and others aren't so that's what we stick with uh currently as well and the last of these house rules i'm going to share today is about triggering reactions due to movement the way it it works in pathfinder second edition uh in most d20 role playing games is if you move out of a square that is within reach of an enemy you might provoke a reaction like an attack of opportunity from that enemy from moving out of a square that is in reach of that enemy and instead we use the rule that you find in dnd fifth edition which isn't that you trigger that reaction for moving out of a space within reach of an enemy is when you move out of the reach of the enemy so once you're in once you're within reach of an enemy you can move around them you can move adjacent to them and move around them in a circle all you want without triggering reactions it's only when you leave the reach of that enemy that you trigger that reaction and that kind of makes sense to to me and my players because if once we're within reach of that player if we're making if we're taking stride actions and staying adjacent to them then we're probably moving in a circle remaining with our facing towards them with our shield up and our sword up not turning our backs to them and moving away so it just makes sense to us to not trigger reactions when you're when you're moving within reach of that enemy um it's only triggered when you move away from that enemy and leave their reach that you trigger those reactions so those are the house rules that i use in my game and by all means if you have any house rules that you have in your game put them in the comments share them with the community like i said earlier in the video these are not things that i created myself these are things that that i read on a forum or in a blog or i went to a friend's game and sat in and thought wow that's a really great rule you're using i want to steal that for me if you've got a great household share it with the community put it in the comments and also i'm going to make sure that i leave in the description of this video links to all of my videos that are pertaining to these house rules so if you want to get more information on how things work by raw that that you can compare and contrast with my house rules you'll have those links available to you and as always i want to say thank you to everybody out there who supports me whether that's through leaving your comments your suggestion your house rules liking the videos subscribing to the patreon subscribing to this channel i really appreciate everything the community does to support me and this channel and with that thanks for watching take care and happy gaming [Music]

Channel: How It's Played

Views: 11,774

Keywords: best, top 5, top 10, Pathfinder, 2nd Edition, PF2, 2e, Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, DND, Paizo, Game, Role-playing, RPG, games, gaming, how to, guide, basic rules, rules summary, Pathfinder rules, Pathfinder rules summary, critical role, critical roll, pathfinder rpg, basics4gamers, house rules, table rules

Id: jlTXOJGBUMo

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022