Special Attacks when you hit exact AC

Special Attacks

Attack an enemy and if you exactly hit their AC, you do a special attack!

The special attack depends on the type of weapon you're wielding.

Choppy: eg. axe, cleaver.
Hew: Deal 1d6 damage to same or adjacent foe.

Smashy: eg. hammer, club.
Bonk: Enemy Dazed until the end of their next turn.

Stabby: eg. sword, spear.
Skewer: Deal max damage.

Shanky: eg. dagger, stake.
Combo: Take another Action.

Unarmed/Improvised: eg. fists, a chair.
Pugilism: Free Wrestling move (Brawl, Hold, Kick Away).

What's that again?

For those without my rules on hand, here's some extra clarifications -

Dazed: -4 to hit and -4 to AC.

Wrestling Move: What you do if you win a Wrestle.
- Brawl: Deal damage with a small or natural weapon
- Hold: Allies get +4 to hit foe and won't hit you firing into melee.
- Kick Away: Kick foe back 20', dealing 1d6 damage if they hit a wall.

Cleave

When a Fighter kills a creature, they may make a free Cleave attack against another creature in melee range. If they kill that too, keep going!

Cleave gains a different bonus based on weapon type -

Choppy: Cleave gains +1 to damage per enemy you killed this round.

Smashy: Cleave instead blasts all in melee range 20’ - if they hit a wall it’s 1d6 damage.

Stabby: Cleave gains +1 to hit per enemy you killed this round.

Shanky: Cleave gains +1 to crit range per enemy you killed this round.

Unarmed/Improvised: Cleave has two attacks.

Discussion

Special Attacks:

I've had very similar weapon type rules for over a decade (wow!) with very little actual impact on the game (less wow..)

I've liked the idea ever since I read that one Last Gasp post all those years ago, and they've been fiddled with and adjusted over time, but the key issue has always been that they're just too persnickety.
Sure it's neat from a mechanics standpoint that axes get +1 die size vs lightly armoured foes (or whatever), but in practice it just gets a bit forgotten because players mostly pick weapons based on cool factor.

Thus I've settled on making the cool factor the main thing. The attack roll is always the gold standard for Important Roll Everyone Looks At, so this adds a third interesting result besides crits and fumbles to look out for.

Plus it keeps me honest because I've got to state the enemy AC and explain if/why it changes at any point. No eyeballing the result and going "uhhhh nah that uhhh doesn't hit" at my table!

Oh and of course, this applies to enemies too. I'm mostly excited to give ye olde "teeth and claws" some extra potential to throw PCs off ledges and into walls. They always can do that sort of thing of course, but it's nice to have the reminder to engage with environmental hazards.

Why not just replace the crit table entirely with these special moves? Good question!
If I was starting over I might consider it, but my crit table has been around in some form since my early 20s so I'm keeping it for old times sake.
However if you don't have a crit table, consider adapting these special moves so that your players get something extra when they crit!

Cleave:

Similarly, Fighters had an extra layer of persnickety rules like "choppy weapons reroll results of 1 or 2" which similarly weren't really used.
Cleave, however, is infamously powerful at my table. To that effect I've just rolled weapon types into Cleave bonuses.

In the same way that the attack roll is the gold standard for Important Dice Roll, defeating an enemy is the gold standard for things to cheer about! Hitting and defeating enemies is the Fighter's main role, so they're the perfect events to hang triggers on.

Fighters are also best as a barebones class to me. Good for newcomers, simple mechanics, enough HP to make mistakes. Anyone who wants a frontliner with special abilities can be a Barbarian or Dwarf or even Muscle Wizard.

I also wanted to keep Fighters thematically neutral. An unarmed Fighter could be some big brawny bouncer type who throws people around and knocks heads together, or a skilful martial artist doing some wuxia stunts.

Cleave also means that a Fighter tends to roll more attacks, making them more likely to trigger the Special Attacks at the top.
As an aside, in order to counteract the ol' "if a Fighter gets more attacks per round they get more fumbles" issue, I've added this simple rule:
If a Fighter rolls a 1 to hit or damage, roll again and keep the new result.

Crits and Fumbles 2018

Crits and Fumbles document is here.

If you roll a natural 20 on an attack, roll 1d20 on the Critical Hit table.
If you roll a natural 1 on an attack, roll 1d20 on the Fumble table.
I know, revolutionary.

click to embiggen

click to embiggen

Notches

If you've read my house rule doc or saw one of the previous versions this will be familiar.
For those who haven't, here's an explanation!

Notch Weapon
A weapon that takes a Notch drops a die size for damage. 1d10 > 1d8 > 1d6 > 1d4 > 1

When you hit with an attack, you can sacrifice your weapon to roll its original un-notched damage die. If you do this it falls apart and is irreparable.

This is generally more worthwhile when your weapon is so badly Notched it’s not worth using.

Notch Armour
Armour that takes a Notch gives the wearer -1 AC.
If your armour takes so many Notches it’s worthless, it falls apart and is irreparable.

Repairs
Repairs cost 10% of the cost of the weapon per Notch.

Dwarves can fully repair an item given a day and simple tools.
The Mending spell fully repairs an item.

he's just a high level fighter whose DM thinks HP is Meat Points

Ongoing Effects

Hopefully these are self-explanatory.

If you're affected by something, save at the start of the round to end the effect.
Remember that your Wisdom Modifier applies to saves vs mundane effects!

If you want a guideline to the mechanical impacts I'd apply -

Blinded: Can't see (obviously). Melee attacks at -4, ranged attacks don't work.
Helpless: Melee attacks automatically hit a helpless target for max damage.
Prone: +4 to hit prone target in melee, -4 to hit prone target at range. It takes a move to stand up.
Slowed: Moving requires an Action instead of being a free move. (ie. you can either move or do something)
Stunned: Can't do anything on your turn.
Surprised: AC is 10+Armour only. Attackers can roll Backstab for potential extra damage.

textbook gambit, I should have saved this for a combat post

Changes

This isn't so different from the tables I've used for years, it's just those were four years old and needed a bit of a redo.
As before I've kept the effects fairly generic so you can describe them in a way that fits the fictional situation.
Crits and fumbles are a fun time to let the player narrate what just happened too! Mix it up a bit!

Choices for the common case of inhuman foes
Several crits now have a choice. eg. Sunderer gives a choice between shattering target's weapon or disabling a natural attack until they Save vs Stun.
This is because I fell into the classic trap of considering only armed person on armed person combat, when much of the fighting in this game is against monsters.
Fighting a knight? Shatter their sword. Fighting a giant snake? Disable its bite.

Theatre-of-the-Mind Slowed Condition
Movement-based effects were kinda lame because it's been nearly a decade since I last used a battle mat, nowadays anybody can move anywhere (within reason) and the biggest limitation on movement is Opportunity Attacks a la 5e.
Instead of the worthless-in-context "halved movement", being Slowed means you've got to use an action to move.
Cute mechanical impact - this means you can't Parry and Move to disengage. If you want to get away you'll have to take a hit, or maybe gambit.

No Quality
I used to have a Quality rule where better weapons would notch less often, but in practice people just paid the cash for the best weapon and/or just plain forgot.
Weapon/armour damage on crits and fumbles comes up enough to be interesting without being a real drag.

there's a bit in this scene where a guard's laser knife mysteriously disappears which I was going to call a fumble

To all the haters out there

Some people will tell you that crits and fumbles (usually just fumbles) are bad for the game because a Fighter will roll more fumbles than a Wizard just because they're rolling more attacks or some shit.

Those people are boring and haven't discovered the rad as hell solution called "Fighters get a +1 bonus to crit and fumble rolls per level".
Wow would you look at that, now Fighters recover from fumbles and do multi-overcrit instant kills a whole lot more. Wild!

Now this is just for Fighters, other classes in the melee combat niche like Barbarians will still roll a bad fumble every so often, but that's because Barbarians are sloppy and Fighters are OP.

House Rules Update! 2018 edition

Another year, another metamorphosis!

PDF here

The main impetus this time around is basically to trim off as much fat and fiddly bits as possible, especially in the combat rules. If there's something in the rules that never gets used or I always forget about, it's gone.
It's become increasingly obvious that the Gambit is the only combat option anyone really needs. It's simple, has an obvious risk-reward angle, and has the exciting partial success possibility.
I've trimmed off anything that's not covered by a Gambit and simplified the rest.

The other thing is that Sneak Attack has always been a sticking point in the game. It's a weird outlier in terms of how skills work and is useless without a high Stealth to back it up.
Probably the biggest change in this update is reworking Sneak Attack and Stealth so they're not so tightly linked. Sneak Attack has been reworked into Backstab which is primarily for ganging up on the same enemy, but also still effective for traditional shanks from the shadows.
I'll go into it more when I get to that section below.

On the less rules-tweak side of things, I've added a few more bits to make the rules a bit more standalone, like putting basics about HP and AC and stats in the doc. It's not exactly a Ten Foot Polemic standalone game (yet?), but it's in here so you don't have to cross-reference with the LotFP rulebook so much. This is important if you are, for instance, one of my own players trying to use my rules to run your own session.

I've pulled out the relevant sections of the rules for ease of use, but do feel free to follow along in the house rules document.
So here we go, a change log with explanations and stuff as we go.

Char Gen

- Removed Ammo Dice
- Ammunition isn't tracked unless something happens to make ammo tracking important.

I'll talk about this here - the death of the Ammo Die.

Oh wow the site I originally got it from seems to be dead! My house rules are old!
Archive copy of the ammo die post here.

Anyway, the idea behind the cascading Ammo Die made its way into the Black Hack as the Usage Die. Seemed like a great way to track arrows etc in the abstract, but man I can't remember the last time someone fired enough arrows for it to matter. When the bulk of the game is dungeons and firing into melee is dangerous, you just don't fire that many arrows.

I've left the door open for resource management if people are in the middle of a desert or something, but in the main we're not going to be tracking ammo any more.

The Basic Basics

- Added this whole section

 Just making things a bit more clear because there are some minor changes from LotFP.

Most notably, making it clear that HP is your luck-shield not your life points per se.
Also, Surprised AC in the LotFP rulebook is surprisingly hard to find, so that's here now.
Armour rules also gathered into one place, which means there's a teaser for the new sword rules in here too.

Stats

- Added this whole section

Explanation of stats because it's subtly different from LotFP, mostly by accident over time.
Clearly the lore/reasoning is more or less transposed directly from the LotFP rulebook.

Most importantly - something I never realised was that Int/Wis were supposed to influence the Saves of people targeted by Magic-User/Cleric spells! I've never done that, so it's gone. In its place is being a better caster via recovered from Interrupted Casting and Spell Swaps. Works for me.
Oh and did you know that Charisma doesn't affect Reaction Rolls by the LotFP rules? I sure didn't! So that's called out as affecting Reaction Rolls now.

Hazards

- Moved Falling here
- Added Fire rules for ease of reference
- Added Drowning

Original falling rules make falls very dangerous, and means anything that makes your fall count as 10' less could potentially save you from massive amounts of damage.
Fire rules in LotFP are nice. I like them, but added a few extra bits from rulings we've had in the past.

Drowning has claimed the life of several adventurers in my game, would you believe. The ruling at the time turned out to be surprisingly functional - 5 rounds of activity (+/- Con) before you start taking damage.

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Rations

- Added temporary shelter ruling

All the same as before, except that it's possible to set up a makeshift shelter in the wilderness if you spend a day and roll Bushcraft.
Requiring a tent and rations to heal quickly in the wilderness works well, but what do you do if you forgot to buy a tent and/or your tent got destroyed by an angry bear?
You can build a semi-permanent shelter in the wilderness with a day and a successful Bushcraft roll.
Tents are a shortcut that you can pack up and move easily every day, so they're much better for travel than spending a day scratch-building a shelter every time someone needs to heal quickly.

Magical Healing

- Tweaks to Cleric spells that deal with poison

This has been in the poison rules post for a couple years now, but this is the first time I've stuck it in the house rules doc.

Delay Poison means you'll likely have processed the poison before it kills you.
Neutralise Poison... neutralises poison.

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Basic Combat

- Added Magic to this section

This is in the Classes section too, but it really should have been here all along.
Declare casting at the start of the round, you need to be protected until it goes off at the end of the round. Standard in my game since forever.

Fancy Combat Options

- Removed Bumrush
- Removed gimmicky Parry rules, rolled Disengage into Parry
- Replaced Sneak Attack with Backstab
- Added Evade
- Clarified Wrestling

- Moved setting spears to Reach weapon section

Here we go! Some big changes.

Bumrush/Charge is easily a gambit. I'm surprised it lasted so long really.

Parry and Disengage were two similarly defensive but separate actions before. Now Parry is just the overall defensive "please don't hurt me" action, boosting AC and avoiding Opportunity Attacks.

The new Backstab will come up lots more. It's primarily a bonus for flanking enemies now, with a secondary use for killing surprised enemies. Flanking is a 5e-style thing, multiple people attacking one target in melee. Optimally you'll have a tank distracting the enemy while you come in with the Backstab. Conveniently this can be used to make pack-hunting enemies more dangerous by giving them good Backstab scores.

Evade appeared in this skills post as "Combat Stealth" but it's in the house rules now. Takes an action and a successful skill roll, so only useful if you have reliable Stealth.
Great for setting up a Backstab since it gives you +4 to hit and they can't target you on their next turn, guaranteeing Flanking.

Together, Aim, Evade and Parry form a sort of combat boost trifecta.

Aim is use an action, boost ranged attack.
Evade is use an action, boost melee attack.
Parry is use an action, boost AC.

Maybe the almighty Gambit will eat them all next time round, but I like the balance for now.

Wrestling is great. Adding some clarity for multiple wrestlers, and how wrestling rolls happen on both sides of the round.
+/- 1000 for natural 1s and 20s is for the silliness of it, but also neatly describes "a natural 20 automatically wins a wrestle, unless both people roll a natural 20 in which case it's still down to modifiers".

Spears in a bit.

Melee Weapon Types

- Choppy weapons changed: deal improved damage die against light armour or less
- Stabby weapons changed: +1 to melee AC and +1 to melee attack bonus

I still enjoy differentiating the weapons like this, even if it bumps up the complexity a little. With a general lack of magical weapons in a low magic game, weapon choice takes up some of the slack.
They used to trigger effects depending on whether you rolled evens or won initiative or whatever, but that's really too fiddly and complicated. It might maybe be fine if you're a player, but for poor old me rolling for a bunch of enemies at once that's too much overhead.

So now this should all be much easier for someone rolling a bunch of dice at once, and hopefully easier for the players.

Choppy axes deal improved die of damage against low armour targets. This means a greataxe vs a generic peasant rolls 1d12!

Smashy hammers are the same as before, piercing high armour targets.
Stabby swords are a straightforward upgrade against any target. +1 to hit, +1 to melee AC. Pair with a shield and you've got +2 AC against both melee and ranged attacks. Heavy armour, sword, and shield gives you a tip top 20 AC which is the effective maximum.
I might rename "Stabby" to "Versatile" to make it clear that they're good for offense and defence, but I'm keeping it for now.
Shanky is unchanged, deal bonus damage in a Wrestle if your roll beats their AC. Knife fights get messy.
Whippy is also unchanged. Ranged wrestle.

Noted here too: the Fighter gets extra bonuses on top of these. They're better than anyone else with any weapon, which is as it should be I think.

Melee Weapon Options

- Reach Weapons allow you to make an Opportunity Attack against enemies moving into melee.

Not actually a change, just not highlighted like this before. Was previously under the overcomplicated Parry action.
Opportunity Attack against approaching enemies makes the spear a superior defensive weapon, and good for defending your friends.

Also interacts with the new disengaging Parry. You can close in on a spear wielder by using Parry to avoid the Opportunity Attack, at the expense of not being able to attack them when you get in close enough.
Dropping Charge/Bumrush means that I can just drop setting spears against a charge. Spears are set against anything moving into range automatically, but no bonus to damage.

Ranged Weapon Options

- Firearms are all counted as flintlocks now.

- Rifled barrel improves Aim, instead of making up for range penalties
- Firearms ignore all armour at close range (all ranges for musket)

In a game where all of the various weapons have been cut down to several damage categories, it's a wonder I stuck with the Matchlock/Wheellock/Flintlock thing for so long. Who cares?
Everything is now counted as a flintlock, and if you want to have a rad wheellock on your pistol I'm not going to penalise you for it.

Range penalties literally never come up. I'm not going to measure ranges, and most if not all combat in this game is at short enough range that you don't need to worry about it.
Getting a rifled barrel means you double the Aim bonus to a big +8, at the expense of doubled reload time on a firearm you'd never manage to use more than once a fight anyway.
Finally, a reason to buy an Arquebus over a Pistol.
This should be an improvement even if you do measure ranges, since the Aim bonus makes up for the range penalties. Get your snipe on.
I was also doing the by-the-book firearms thing where guns pierce 5 points of AC, but piercing all armour is easier to adjudicate even if it's not entirely realistic.

Death and Dismemberment

- Updated for the modern era. 

This is all in pamphlet form now. Go see that post for an explanation of my game's most fiddly subsystem.
The main thing is to call them "Death Tokens" instead of "Death Dice", and add a bit more clarity. I think it's fine now.

This is a big wodge of complexity in the middle of an otherwise fairly rules light game, but it leads to a lot of fun gameplay for me. I swear.


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Wear and Tear

- Removed weapon/armour Quality
- Removed sacrificing armour to reduce damage

- Added England Upturn'd misfire table for Notched firearms

- Dwarfs can completely fix a single item per day, up from one Notch per day.

Having different weapon Qualities which gave different chances of taking Notches was a good idea in theory but definitely very easy to forget about in the heat of battle.
You know what's not easy to forget in the heat of battle? Crits and fumbles! Any time a natural 1 or 20 comes up, people notice. So now weapon/armour damage is triggered by those exclusively.

Part of the impetus was having high quality weapons and armour to replace magic weapons and armour, but that was a nice idea that never worked out great. Just make it extra fancy or something. Hell, make it unbreakable. That's as good as magic.

There was a rule here last time where you could sacrifice armour to reduce an attack's damage to 1, but that's gone now. I kept forgetting and so did the players.

England Upturn'd has cool a firearm-exclusive misfire table that it wold be a shame not to use, so I'm using it.

Dwarf repairs are better now, just because it makes it easier. Give a Dwarf a day and he can fix an item. Solid. A Mending spell always fixed an item completely, but I'm calling it out here to make it clear.

Skills

- Called out skill-boosting equipment and skills that get boosted by Intelligence
- Backstab is a reworked Sneak Attack

- First Aid reworked - forces patient to Tempt Fate on a 6 instead of dealing damage, no longer heals HP
- Added Rapid Reload to Sleight of Hand
- Added Evade to Stealth

- Added Invention to Tinkering

A few changes around here.

Intelligence modifies Arcana and Languages. Nothing new there.
Specialist's Tools give a +1 to Tinkering and First Aid, that's not been in these rules before.
Same with Crampons granting a +1 to Climbing, which needs calling out really.

Backstab is a big change. See Fancy Combat Options above. Upgrade hits against surprised or flanked enemies to crits.

First Aid is now focused directly on field medicine, healing up a person who's reached 0HP and is dying from Death Tokens. The combat medic skill to bring the dying back from the brink!

Failing on a 6 used to deal 1 damage to the patient, but now it makes the patient Tempt Fate which fits the Death Token angle better.

Healing HP with First Aid has been scrapped, eating to heal works better and more reliably.

Rapid Reload skill was sort of in the rules before, but it's here now.
Roll Sleight of Hand to get a free Reload action. This means you can Reload twice in one round, or even Reload while fighting. Potentially fire a gun every 3 rounds if you've got good Sleight of Hand and focus on reloading, which almost makes it worth it.

Evade, again, see Fancy Combat Options above. Dodge and weave to gain an advantage against an enemy.

Invention has been in the game for a while, because players looove coming up with bullshit mechanical things like breathing apparatus or complicated traps.
Only change is that if a device works successfully it gets a +1 to Invention rolls in future, so you slowly build it up until it works consistently. Previously this had it working after three successful uses, but I think this is mechanically neater.

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Rune Magic

- Minor tweaks

Due to mystery campaign reasons (and mild balance woes) the Repel rune doesn't generate stuff any more, only pushes it away. Breath weapons are too easy I guess!

There are a few other bits, but that's the main one.

Classes

- Added everything for each class, not just the things that are tweaked from baseline LotFP. You can run a class out of this document now.

Just makes it easier for people who aren't running LotFP to figure out everything a class has.

Onto actual changes that matter.

The Fighter

- Added Weapon Mastery

Fighters are simple. This is mostly on purpose, it's a straightforward class with a straightforward focus on straightforward murder.
People who want to be a fighter type tend to roll Barbarian nowadays. But I have a condition where any time we haven't had a Fighter in a while, I want to make Fighters better.

So here we are. Weapon Mastery. As seen in the Melee Weapon Types section, different kinds of weapons get different kinds of bonuses.
Fighters get those and more, with the bonuses intended to synergise with the base perks.
Having a Fighter that carries one of each weapon around sounds great.

The Choppy upgrade is suspiciously similar to 5e's great weapon thing, from which I took it.
The Smashy upgrade replaces the old "shiver armour on evens" thing. Hammer attack to make the enemy easier for your allies to hit. Combo with the new Backstab to good effect.
The Stabby upgrade means swords are very much the defensive weapon - use an action to Parry and hopefully you'll trigger one or more counterattacks. Amazing for a fully armoured and shielded Fighter.
The Shanky upgrade makes Fighters even more brutal wrestlers, seeing as their attack bonus means they'll win wrestles a lot.
The Whippy upgrade is to do some Indiana Jones shit and trip people up.

The Magic-User

- Altered Spell Interruption to make Chaos Mages more possible
- Made Spell Swap more lenient

Spell Interruption used to mean you could prevent a Spell Collapse with a Save vs Chaos.

Now a Save vs Chaos means you get to see what the Spell Collapse will do first, then choose whether you negate it. A small but significant change.
Shout out again to Aura Twilight's chaos magic table which I can't link enough.

Spell Swap now only has a penalty if you're swapping a higher level spell to a lower one, due to the potential magical leakage. You're forcing a larger amount of energy into a less complex spell and the magic might start leaking in around the sides.
Previously you had a penalty equal to the sum of the spell levels, so this is more lenient.
I want it to be slightly risky to swap a spell, but not so risky that I hear people going "nonono!" to a spell swap like the wizard's about to cast a Summon spell.

These Spell Swap rules carry over to other casters.


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The Extras

- Added this class

My Extras class is so similar to Manola's original Extras class that it's not worth a class blog post.

The only minor difference is that the "Magic for the Masses" rule applies to all items.
If you've got less than 10 of an item, it can be used once per scene and each takes up a separate Encumbrance slot.
If you've got 10 of an item, it can be used every round and all 10 items take up a single Encumbrance slot.

Two bows means you can fire arrows twice per scene.
Ten bows means you can fire arrows every round.

Two suits of chain armour means you can get Chain AC twice a scene.
Ten suits of chain armour means you have Chain AC at all times.

It's very strange and meta, but that's the Extras in a nutshell!

The Inheritor

- Added this class

Recently detailed in the Inheritor class post.
Eat monsters to steal their abilities and use them against your foes.
Enough of a niche that it doesn't step on other class's toes, and the game's first Inheritor so far has ended up being really interesting!


So that's that. A whole lot of incremental changes that I hopefully won't have a need to fiddle with for a while. Enjoy!

Unified House Rule Document Update AND Handy Linked PDF

Mid-year update whaaaat.

Mostly this is because I'm always a little bit "oh no!" when I discover someone's been reading the house rule doc and it's NOT UP TO DATE OH NO.

Occasionally I get a comment that's like "hey could you put all the Lorebonds and elf powers and stuff into the one pdf?" so that it can basically be played out of the box.
The answer is - kinda!

You can now find a Linked PDF Version here. Intended to be used/perused digitally, everything you need an external resource should have a handy-dandy link.

You can find the non-Linked PDF Version here. Intended to be printed out for table use.

Linked Version

Unlinked Version

For context for some of these changes, at the beginning of the year we had the campaign's first ever TPK! So we skipped the timeframe forward half a century so people could see what's happened in the interrim.
How exciting!

Change Log:

Religion:

- Added Zeanism, based on the teachings of one of the player characters who took the Termaxian "do whatever you want, the gods aren't watching!" thing to heart.
Basically this is the drug religion now, and the Cleric spell allows you to take drugs with no downsides!
- Termaxianism has changed in the last 50 years, mostly because they're pretty sure that God lost the final war for all creation. Now it's up to them to finish the fight. No change besides their general lore.
- Nonanism is now accepting of the Undead and Necromancy in general. Pragmatism or corruption? Who can say? Another lore change, they're mechanically the same. 

Char Gen:

- Removed the Cartographer equipment pack because it contained paper and pens and I can't be fucked to enforce the need for paper in order to draw a map any more. It was a boring idea anyway.

Experience Points:

- Added Party Roles as directly inspired by John Bell at the Retired Adventurer. This has been real useful for keeping track of stuff and keeping players engaged even if they're not directly involved in the action.

Living Standards:

- Originally you needed to get to Comfortable conditions in order to heal from 0HP to 1HP, no longer! Otherwise it interacts weirdly with the "Take a Break" option where you eat a ration to heal 1d6 HP.

- Comfortable conditions now give you an extra 1d6 bump if you're already at full health! You'd imagine everyone would prefer comfy sleeps, but if you get nothing extra at max health you may as well save your money and live in a bin.
- Splendid conditions grant 1d6+level extra temp HP, since Comfortable conditions stole that thunder.

Big Purple d30 Rule

- Now upgrades a single die roll to the next die size when used. Previously you could replace any single roll with the Big Purple d30, which had the surprisingly underwhelming effect of making it an "I Win" button. This compounded by the large number of d30s players would accrue through buying me beer...

Downtime Activities

- Magical Research went through a few changes to make it slightly more interesting.

Fancy Combat Actions

- Changes to Sneak Attack. Now you roll when attacking from surprise to find your extra attack bonus, and enemies with high Awareness (renamed Search) have a chance of avoiding the damage multiplier.

Fancy Combat Reactions

- Split these off into their own heading.

- Parry covers all defensive melee actions. Smaller weapons can counter, larger weapons can disarm, and setting spears against charge is now covered under the Parry banner.

Melee Weapon Types

- One day I'll probably either remove these or make them Fighter-only, but for now I'm simplifying further. I've got lots of players and don't want things to stay as fiddly as they were.
- Axes remain the same - double damage on evens vs low armour.

- Hammers get +2 vs Chain or better. Straight up.
- Swords get +1 to hit across the board. Versatile, never a bad choice, a little boring.

- Knives give bonus damage if you beat their AC with your Wrestle Roll because you're shanking the shit out of them.
- Whips remain.

Ranged Weapon Options

- Flintlocks are in the game post-timeskip! Hurrah! That's basically it.

Death & Dismemberment

- Rewritten for the millionth time. This remains one of my favourite subsystems but boy is it hard to explain when you're not just passing out dice around a table.

Running Away

- Added a section on this very important aspect of not dying.

- More on running away here.

New Skills

- Search renamed to Awareness.

- Sneak Attack: When attacking from Surprise, roll Sneak Attack. On success, gain the result as a bonus to hit. If the enemy fails an Awareness check, multiply damage by your whole Sneak Attack score. Even your standard 1-in-6 character gets a little benefit maybe.

Saving Throws

- Hey what I renamed them! Makes it easier, and I don't think I ever called a save vs device.

- Stun, Doom, Blast, Law, Chaos.

- All as per usual, except Law is your save vs Lawful magic. Makes that more of a divide I guess!

Also one of my players made a rad new character sheet. Hurrah!

The Ten Foot Polemic Unified House Rule Document - 2017 Update

Jesus, it's been a year and a half since my last house rule update!
It's actually not changed that much since, they're in a really nice place and I'm pretty comfy using them now.
The only real changes involve switching up a few things that were a bit too fiddly to use consistently (like weapon breakage), adding excuses for stuff we were sort of doing anyway (like spell swapping), and adding the new subsystems I've added since (like poison).

Also in the time since I published the updated house rule doc it looks like people have uploaded it on a bunch of mirrors?!
I'll count that as a success.

My house rule page has been updated and the house rule document along with it.

New one here

Change log because that worked well last time:

Char Gen:

• New! Added Religion, albeit the actual options are in a separate Religious Pamphlet which I just realised I still need to upload. Opens up Clerical options and makes religion more of a thing. Also, Cleric spell grid is a good at-a-glance guide to the different sects' attitudes towards one another.

Retroactive Backstory:

• New! Added Retroactive Backstory table to be rolled on each time you level up. One of the most successful additions to the game!

Combat Options:

• Minor tweak - the defensive actions (spears vs enemies closing in, take cover, parry) can be declared in reaction to an attack by giving up your next action.
• If you Aim you count as surprised. Tunnel vision's a real thing, I've got the paintball welts to prove it.
• Removed Fighters/Elves/etc getting special combat manouevres. Gambits are more fun, and my Elves and Dwarves have weirder powers now.
• Disengage and Opportunity Attacks swiped from 5th ed. Elegant solution to the stop-people-getting-through-the-front-lines problem without needing a grid. Opportunity attacks stop people from moving further if they hit, naturally.
• Parry changed, I thiiiink these parry rules are from Delving Deeper. +4 to AC across the board, but with additional effects based on weapon size. Heavier weapons have a chance to disarm, lighter weapons have a chance to riposte.
  Obliquely favours high dexterity characters because they get an AC bonus, gives another layer of choice to size of weapon to those interested.
  Pretty cool. But needless to say, these extra effects only work on enemies with weapons.
• Take Cover put down as an action rather than a passive thing, because I like the idea of diving into cover in response to gunfire.
  Plus it reminds people "oh yea I get an AC bonus from cover" which I often forget myself and means that firing at someone behind cover keeps their head down. Suppressing fire, yo.

Ranged Weapons:

• Quietly shelved the Fighter firearm reload bonus. Nobody reloads in combat anyway.
• Instead, successful Sleight of Hand halves reload time. Four round reload time if you've got good Dex and Sleight of Hand! Guns seem more of a Specialist weapon anyway.

Fall Damage:

• Gygaxian original 1d6/10ft/10ft makes falls quickly deadly. Added a 10ft discount if it's a prepared fall, by way of compensation for this new deadly reality.
  Unwritten, but each 10ft counts as a separate attack for the purposes of Shields Shall Be Splintered and other damage-mitigation purposes like armour breakage. One time a guy jumped off a cliff and landed on his shield to survive like Captain America which was awesome but clearly absurd.

Death and Dismemberment:

• Bleed now deals 1 damage per die at the end of the round, rather than simply increasing. This mostly because I always forgot to increase, and also because Bleed dice felt the least dangerous in play because you're not affected if nobody's hitting you.
  There's a special Bleed damage table here, which only makes sense as an addition to Courtney's table here. You'll notice most of the results end up with more Bleed, preserving the idea behind the previous bleed-builds-over-time mechanic.
  Conveniently this change ties in neatly to...
• New Poison rules! Deadly over time without instant death, and allows me to give Ghouls stun poison and Spiders death poison and have it all be part of the same general system.
• As stated in the Poison post, Delay Poison now makes you immune to the effects of poison for 24 hours. Hopefully you will have saved away all the poison by then. Neutralise Poison neutralises all poison dice.

Wear and Tear

• Change to weapon notches - each notch reduces the damage of a weapon by one die size. This represents it getting battered and blunted and damaged over time. The more damaged the weapon, the less effective it is.
  This also mirrors armour which gives you -1 AC per notch.
  It's hard to get players to remember something that fucks them over if it's rarely engaged with, so this is an easy "oh no your sword's damaged in an obvious way because you're doing less damage" fix.
• Willingly break your weapon to roll its original un-notched damage die. Your shitty rusty longsword gets a last 1d8 hurrah before bursting into fragments.
  Putting the choice to break a weapon in the hands of the players means they've got some more agency over it, and also means I don't have to think about it.
  Again, mirrors armour where it's the player's choice to actually break it. In that case breaking your armour reduces damage from an attack to 1. In both cases it's more worthwhile to break something that's heavily damaged and thus otherwise a bit useless.
• Firearms use the England Upturn'd firearm mishap table in England Upturn'd when they take a notch. Because it's great. Replaces regular fumble table.

Class Tweaks

• Clerics have 5 religious variants to choose from, each with a unique spell that acts differently depending on the religion of the target. Religion pamphlet here.
• Spell swapping across all casting classes! Shock! Horror! Clerics had this already so other casters were not-so-subtly just casting whatever they wanted with their spell slots.
  I was going to yank 5e's spell slot system until I realised this is a good opportunity to use a favourite Last Gasp table I'd never been able to use before.
  Encourages bringing spellbooks into dungeons, penalises not thinking ahead, means the more situational or ridiculous spells like Speak With Dad are actually used.
• Magic Users, Elves, Muscle Wizards - roll on the Cast the Bones table with a penalty equal to the sum of the spell levels being swapped.
  So swapping a level 1 spell for a level 1 spell is a -2 penalty.
  Swapping a level 5 spell for a level 2 spell is a -7 penalty.
  Sacrifice HP for a +1 bonus per point, because you're draining your own energy. I'd allow this even at 0HP and have it roll over to Death and Dismemberment.
• Necromancers simply deal damage to themselves and everyone around them when swapping spells, equal to the sum of the spell levels being swapped.
  Swapping a level 1 spell for a level 1 spell is 2 damage.
  Swapping a level 5 spell for a level 2 spell is 7 damage.
  Heals undead though and damages all around, so I can see this being used tactically.
  Also rolls over onto Death and Dismemberment, likely the Cold Damage table.
• New! Ratman class for the ability score impaired. Can't have any positive ability score modifiers, beloved of rats, actually surprisingly powerful at higher levels. 36 obedient rats at a time is nothing to sniff at!

Rune Magic

• All direct damage glyphs do 1d6 damage, modified by vulnerability/resistance. Beams previously did 2d6, but it was complicated and also too good.
• New scatter mechanic for firing beams from hands and shields and stuff - if you miss, roll the Warhammer Scatter Die (pictured below). A target means you miss safely and it just scorches up a wall or whatever. An arrow means it fires in that direction, hitting the first thing in its way.
  Using an Aim action beforehand means missed beams only ever miss safely.
  In-world explanation is that powering a glyph involves a brief moment of unconsciousness as your VERY SOUL is redirected to power it, which means accuracy is an issue with beams.

Turns out that was a longer list of tweaks than I thought!

Quick Class Breakdowns

Here they are, all the tweaked/new classes in one package.
And it's a PDF so you know I'm a class act. Get it. Hohoho.

 

Click here to download

To make it easier for people, particularly newbies, to pick a class I created these handouts. 
Each has a quick summary, a larger bit of inspirational text to get them in the groove, and then the special rules they have. It's nice for people to have a sheet of paper next to their character sheet for them to look over at their leisure, and it insulates people from learning all the rules at once.
If you're a fighter you don't need to know how magic works mechanically, and it can be a nice surprise when somebody does something like Cleave and everybody else goes "woah you can do that?" because they haven't seen those rules yet. 

For explanations as to why I made the changes I did, look to the posts I've done on classes this past couple of months.

In more detail,
Cleric
Fighter
Magic-User
Specialist 
Dwarf
Elf
Goblin
Halfling
Muscle Wizard
Necromancer
Barbarian
Ratman

Dwarven Lorebonds. 
Elven heartspell stuff (updated when necessary - ie. a player's elf gets near that level)

Also necessary, the Chaos Burst tables. I use Excel roll a d20000 and look up the result!
Chaos Burst 1
Chaos Burst 2
Both Elves and Magic Users are affected by Chaos Bursts (Muscle Wizards never get interrupted, Necromancers just blast out uncontrolled death)

Tweaking the Fighter

Up next on the freewheeling house rule extravaganza - the Fighter.
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Critical bonus: A fighter adds their level to crit/fumble rolls.

Cleave: When a fighter kills something they can immediately cleave through and attack something next to it with a +1 bonus to hit and damage for every enemy they cleaved through that round.

Martial bearing: The fighter gains a +2 bonus to morale checks and reaction rolls when dealing with the military and law-abiding citizenry.

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LotFP does a great job of making the fighter special and also making the fighter the best at fighting.
So why does nobody pick a fighter in my games?
No idea, but after I added Cleave they started getting picked more so that was a relief.

So I make people confirm crits and fumbles to do cooler things than just max damage or guaranteed miss.
If you roll a nat 20 you roll on the crit table, if you get a nat 1 you roll on the fumble table.
Not any more! See next post for new crit tables.
Fighters get a bonus, which means they get better crits and less awful fumbles. Cool.

Cleave is because I like the thing where fighters get multiple attacks against low level enemies, and I hope that one day a fighter will butcher a ton of dudes in one swing.
Plus lucky die rolls letting you murder your way through a horde of enemies to one-shot the leader sounds equally excellent.

The morale bonus is because I wanted to play up the difference between the fighter (master of arms due to his battlefield experience in an army) and the barbarian (which I will detail soon but is an angry indestructible ball of rage and magic-hatred from a far off land).
Fighters demanding respect due to their experience or arrogance or whatever is fine by me, and means fighters are naturally charismatic leaders which fits with my mental image of the class.