Dave Arneson's House Rules

[Havard]

In this thread over at Finarvyn's Forum there was some mention of which House Rules Arneson may have used. It could be interesting to see if we can find examples of Arneson's house rules when running D&D.

Historically, Dave and Gary didn't always use the same rules as each other. They also didn't stay with the same rules for themsevles. Both liked to "wing it" rather than being restricted by the rulebook. Gary's house rules linked above, for example, don't date back to the 1970's at all but instead go back maybe a decade or so. Heck, Gary spent a lot of time running non-OD&D for many of his later years.

Source: http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?bo ... hread=7726

Although Dave did use the "roll double your normal number of damage dice" if you rolled a natural 20.

Source:http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=7726

1) THAC0 is about rolling UNDER not equal or over. So if you had a THAC0 13, you needed to roll 13 or less to hit. 1s are crits and 20s are fumbles. Attacking corresponded to your other ability / skill rolls.

2) Saving Throws did not exist. Instead of rolling the die, you had to defend to the other player via a short story WHY your character would survive what was coming at him. The player's voted and the DM was the tie-breaker.

3) SciFi / Fantasy blending was the genre. As one player put it, it was D&D meets Naked Lunch.

4) It was SO not Tolkein and not the pseudo-medieval Greyhawk. The world was odd and tweaked where magic was used to emulate technology in many aspects, but unlike the "logic" of steampunk science, this was a world were you could just cast spells to do stuff where nobody really understands the magic they wield.

5) Alignments changed DURING play based on actions. It was Lawful, Chaotic or Neutral which Dave called Selfish...

6) The +X on a magic sword represents the amount of positive magical energy in that weapon. When you meet a AC -3 creature, you need to make your THAC0 roll and you must have a +3 weapon because you need that much "positive" magic to counter the "negative" magic that protects that creature - thereby allowing your physical weapon to hurt things like ghosts and stuff. Part of going into dungeons was to retreive these things and most monsters would not weild magic items because they were "positive" magic.

7) Here's XP. If you survive an adventure, you gain a level. BAM. The world is strange, random and dangerous so power was there for those who dared, but so was death.

8 ) Roleplaying was just that. You were judged based how well you played your role of elf, dwarf, cleric, mage, fighter or thief. It was like, we all know about Hamlet so show us your Hamlet interpretation. The goal was to work within the cliche.

9) Everyone has Cleave. If you kill a monster, you get a free attack. And this was Melee or Ranged as long as you had the ammo.

10) We had a Caller / Leader. Yeah, we had a Leader who made large scale party decisions / story decisions and sometimes even allowed us to vote on stuff. It was ODD, but Dave says this is our character's leader regardless of our player thoughts.

It was based on Charisma...so we followed a Wis 8, Int 10, Cha 14 Thief. Talk about NOT a dump stat.

BTW, Dave gives out "roleplaying points" in game that you can trade in for re-rolls.

Source: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?286 ... oor-and-Me


Anyone know of more things?

-Havard