House Rules and You

[Neverchosen]

Hey All,

I have been interested in this subject for a while and I wanted to know what house rules do you use in your games? Do you have specific rules for siege, terrain, campaigns, naval battles, turn orders, allies or custom units? Do you have internal balancing for members of your group? Have you adopted rules from other systems to fulfill specific purposes within AOS? Finally, do Warcry or Underworlds games ever have impact on your AOS game particularly in terms of campaigns? Any other house rules within your gaming group or community? 

This is not designed to be a prescriptive thread, know that just because someone uses a house rule that does not mean they believe it should be adopted by the community at large, only that it works for themselves and their own gaming group. There was a former thread on the subject that took a prescriptive tone and sadly the thread was closed because of it. This thread is entirely dedicated to the simple question of which house rules do you personally use? This is not a thread about the merits of House Rules.

[Neverchosen]

Within my group we will often look at internal balance within our group. This is often different than the actual meta as a top tier army may be top tier due to a prohibitively expensive list build or a unit or character that we do not use. Instead it is based more around our own players builds and their individual abilities. Thus if one army is dominating we will look at specific items, subfations, battalions or command traits that may need to be worked around to better balance our games. Alternatively, we will often have more and less competitive builds to help balance out our lists. Often times this just boils down to giving the initial turn preference to our opponent as we have become more confident in our armies and they have levelled out over time in terms of balance between us. 

Mysterious Terrain effects are not randomly decided in our group but looked at as what they are. If a piece of terrain is a pit of spikes it will become deadly, meanwhile a statue of Sigmar might be inspiring for Order armies but Damned for Chaos armies and neutral for Death and Destruction. Natural features like hills or forests tend to be neutral even though I understand how and why they could fit the mysterious terrain rules. Fyreslayers might treat a fiery or magmatic terrian piece as neutral or reroll failed rolls on them.

Finally in our campaigns we often have each map broken into the different realms. If your army is fighting in their home territory/realm then they will usually get a large advantage to prevent opponents from immediately trying to take over their main base. Some examples of things we have tried were an additional gravesite for Soulblight (LON at the time), and having the ability to choose the result of the Eye of Gods table. We have not had as many campaigns as I would wish, and we need to better balance these rules but so far it has been really fun. But as stated previously we wanted to make it so that people got to retain their territory for longer. 

We have also discussed how to have Warcry interact with our games. Treating them as missions that will maybe disrupt the flow of conventional battles. We are looking at assassination missions (this will decrees choices for heroes in the AOS battle), intel missions (give you first drop when setting up), scouting missions (lets you decide which table edge you want), attacking supply lines (limits enchantments), and a few other things we are looking at.  For the most part these games just replace roll offs except for the assassination missions which might need to be toned down or removed. 

Edited December 14, 2021 by Neverchosen

[Doko]

In general we dont have house rules in our group,but many of us are playing with one house rule:the cap of +1 save is done before rend,so we avoid the stupid situation of monster with save2 invulnerable.

But is something we speak before a game and not a house rule of the store\group and if both we arent agree isnt used,but the games are funnier with this rule

[Neverchosen]

1 hour ago, Doko said:

But is something we speak before a game and not a house rule of the store\group and if both we arent agree isnt used

I think House Rules should always be discussed. Even in our group where most of the house rules I mentioned are used, they are always discussed even if it is just casually mentioned. Like oh yeah I didn't include any enchantments because with the new book I feel my army is a bit overpowered. 

[Beliman]

For random games, we usually don't use any hourserule. But for tournaments, we abuse the Impassable label for terrain and Garrisons  to try to break LoS and stop some monsters to land on a tree or a house and this kind of stuff.

For everything else, we just make it clear how are we going to play some meh rules, like disembarking from an skyvessel.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

I generally believe that it's best to play games as the rule books say for a while before trying to come up with house rules. I don't think I will ever be very likely to implement homebrew balance fixes or touch stuff like warscrolls. But I there are two areas where I don't feel bad at all about tinkering with the rules.

The first place is terrain. Anything from how it is set up to what kinds of rules it gets. I think communicating with my opponent about what kind of table we both think would be fun to play on just works better for me than going with a certain number of objects per quadrant or whatever. I also think a common sense application of "impassible" and "line of sight blocking" to terrain pieces is very beneficial. In my opinion, randomly rolling for mysterious terrain is also not super fun, especially in the past versions of the GHB when stuff like commanding terrain was still in the mix and you could just randomly end up with twice the command points you usually got. Instead, I like to coordinate with my opponent about one or two special terrain features that we want to have an effect. Maybe a big piece of deadly terrain in the center of the board would be fun. Or maybe a small, out of the way altar with mystical. Cuts down on the cognitive load, too. I always had trouble keeping track of terrain effects if literally all terrain pieces had them.

The second place where I like to house rule stuff is waiving restrictions at lower point levels in order to make more lists playable. I find it a lot more fun to do "catch" points instead of sticking to exactly 1000, for example. Maybe a list just needs 1080 or whatever to function. Then let's just all agree to add units until everyone is satisfied and just give out extra command points or triumphs to whoever comes up short. Or maybe a certain unit is over the ally points limit by a small amount. Or maybe a list doesn't technically have all the battleline it would need. That's stuff I am willing to just ignore in home games. It's not like anybody gets a huge advantage from it, anyway.

[woolf]

we haven't used actual house rules only points handicap, i.e. giving "the weaker" book an extra 250pts. That way balance can be achieved without locking anyone out of playing with whatever toys their book is providing

[MitGas]

We don't usually use (m)any, mostly it's just allowing certain things (like custom heroes) or using custom terrain rules. Rule of cool and fun trumps all others and usually we agree to look past some things that might technically be correct but at the same time seem pretty weird. We also mostly play 2v2 or 1v2 and use all 4 (or 3) allegiance abilities in those, not sure if that falls under house rules or not though. So yeah, I like house rules although like I've said, we 99% of the time just use the official ones. 

[Greyshadow]

I am planing on cutting out all the Allegiance Abilities to make introducing players to 3rd Edition simpler. Will keep all the new monster and command abilities though.