@Derp said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:
House Rules need to be written, IMO, like court opinions. You need to both announce the change to the rules, and explain the reasoning for it (which is an excellent use for MU Talk Pages). You need to offer some background to explain why this fixes a problem, so that (in the event someone has an idea that actually does it better) you can scrap the thing. Or, if it turns out you were just being needlessly reactionary after people review it, you can remove it and go back to basics.
You could, but I don't think I would put the background work on the rule on the rules page as that would make what is on many games an already difficult thing to keep up with even harder for most people to grasp in their entirety but if anyone is interested, you should definitely be able to show them.
I think the amount of house rules a game needs depends heavily on what kind of game it is. Back when I played Exalted 2nd Edition on javachats, the list of house rules tended to be absolutely gigantic because that game was near unplayable as the rules were written.
That can be contrasted with Requiem for Kingsmouth which also had an absolutely massive amount of house rules, however RfK's house rules were for the most part additional systems added to VTR2 rather then an attempt to fix anything written in the book.
Generally I rather dislike house rules that change book mechanics since that requires players to look in two places to find out how something works and that also goes for Errata. The absolute worst situation is when understanding a single mechanic requires looking in 3 or 4 places because it relies on two books, official errata to those books and the house rules.
@Warma-Sheen said in House Rules vs Rules as Written:
And does anyone really believe these people who are contributing writing to WoD books have never considered that gamers aren't going to play splats against each other? Or that there won't be players using these systems against other players? How is it we play these games over and over again, and yet people seem to give the writers so little credit for developing these games we love so much. So little.
Let's be honest here. Has White Wolf or Onyx Path ever been known to release tested and solid game mechanics*? I don't know about you, but the reason I play their games is because I love the feel of the settings and you can go a long way without actually throwing dice around.
*VTR 2 was pretty good though.