Houserules?

Everyone has they're own home brew way of playing, one way or another. Just curious as to what changes you guys have made to make your games more enjoyable?  Just to share ideas and possibly improve other peoples gaming experiences 

For me, every game is it's own unique experience.  I've learned to start off with an understanding that there *will* be rules conflicts, questions and misunderstandings.  I play that when situations like this arise, the GM makes a decisive rules call for that session to end the possibility of hours long rules arguments, then between games it's discussed in detail, hashed out and a potential for compromise is allowed.  Whatever is agreed to is written down in a book of "house rules" going forward.  I've had games where all we needed is a single sheet of paper, and others where it was a set of spiral notebooks.  Every game is special and unique depending on the group you play with and the differing perspectives.

I wing it in sessions. I've got google, and a calculator, if we need to make damage rules for throwing random debris, or for TW inventions. Then, like Drekkin said above, afterwards we can hash out a detailed ruling, and write it down in a book for just that campaign. 

Was mostly looking for examples for things that (in your opinions) make the game run smoother. Because let's be honest, palladium is far, far from perfect.  Like in the games I run actions are not done one-by-one from person to person. Players can use half of their actions per rotation. So a character with 6 attacks can use 3 before I'll move onto whoever is next in initiative.  This stops magic from being so horribly slow, power attacks, called shots, and whatever debuffs someone might be afflicted with. If you're blinded for 5 rounds, that's at least 20 character rotations you have to sit and suffer through.

oh, like that. we divide the initiative roll equally by the number of actions, and you take your actions on those numbers. for instance, if you had 4 actions and a 20 initiative, you would go on 20, 15, 10, and 5. Dodging is taken from your next action. No real "rotation", everyone acts in whatever order their actions come out on. That's what we do. it makes everything seem a lot faster. 

yeah there is no one right way to do things. Thats actually explicitly said in ever palladium main book. do whats right fro your group. That being said i always focus on what the group is doing and just let my dice and common sense worry about noc's and sch are doing though i always stick to initiative (highest goes first) And go down the initiative list for whos doing what next as few combats last more then a melee anyways when your using more high level players never mind spells like fleet feet and such lol.(the old mother f'er thats 64 attacks in a melee (yes that has happened when on character had prep time speed weapon fleet feet and 15th plus level martial arts lol).((in that instance we played out everyone elses attacks  and i made my desisoin after seeing what they did that the opponents were swiss cheese lol.)). 

I compressed the skill list tremendously.  Many game systems like to have 6 different skills for something like 'sneaking around' or such.  I think my final list was about 25-30 skills.  Hand wave combats when it's clear the PCs have overwhelming advantage.  Average dice rolls.  If someone is going to roll 100d6...take the average (not such a big deal when a computer does the math though).  Limit splatbooks (like say 3 or 4). If each player wants to use 3 or 4...times say 6 players then it's more of a burden on the GM to learn all  (can be 20 some odd books) of them.  I also require that the player give me the rules excerpt (quote, book, page#) for each custom thing he wants to use/do. I keep them attached to the character sheets so I don't have to fumble around looking for it when the time comes.   When tracking initiative it's obvious who is next.  So they should be thinking of what they are going to do before  it's their turn.  If they spend more than 30 seconds going "ummmm" then they go into delay and act after everyone else. 

"When tracking initiative it's obvious who is next.  So they should be thinking of what they are going to do  before  it's their turn.  If they spend more than 30 seconds going "ummmm" then they go into delay and act after everyone else. "  -  Rerednaw  I love this rule.  I also tend to put in a rule for overly creative players who play Techno wizards or "crafting" type classes who's main ability comes from building stuff to submit designs and builds between games to avoid spending half an hour or more in game each session going over whatever cool new thing they want to slap together (had to put this in place the first time a player wanted to build an industrial grade TW 3d printer that used create wood and create metal to 3d print entire neighborhoods for refugees)

Generally speaking, I remove limitations on character creation and magic selection.

One adjustment I made and has been kept by many GMs is segmented combat. Roll for initiative counts for the whole 15 seconds combat. But the 15 seconds is broken down to 3x 5 second segments. This helps spread the action. I will give examples for a few attacks per melee in this format Seg1/Seg2/Seg3. 1 attack per melee 0/1/0, 2 per melee1/0/1, 3 per melee 1/1/1, 4 per melee 1/2/1 and so on. I used to run large groups and some players would get board when 2-3 players still had 2-3 attacks each. Once implemented it smoothed out the combat and allowed more realistic reactions to the combat.

Doesn't that make combat a lot longer though?  We recently ran a 4 hour game that comprised a total of 12 melee rounds.  If we sectioned that into 5 second incriments to allow for more realistic actions I can only imagine it going up to 6 hours or more to resolve a 3 minute sequence.

Dhrekkin said: Doesn't that make combat a lot longer though?  We recently ran a 4 hour game that comprised a total of 12 melee rounds.  If we sectioned that into 5 second incriments to allow for more realistic actions I can only imagine it going up to 6 hours or more to resolve a 3 minute sequence. No, because I suddenly had less board players that were actually paying attention. But as always it depends on the group. I was running a campaign for Land of the Damned with 6 noob players and an NPC we averaged 5-10 minutes per segment at first. But once the players got in tune to there characters abilities we could do a segment in a few minutes depending on the enemy.