Default hosue rules

[jack]

I was recently in a position to wonder what other people's default house rules for a couple of common games were. Most of these don't make a big difference so I'd suggest adopting the host's rules rather than worrying about it, but I was curious what people thought worked best.

Robo-Rally

* Do you use life tokens? I was used to ignoring them (by inclination I much prefer Lucasarts adventures to sierra). But playing a board that isn't overly complicated showed they did have several pros I hadn't thought of: (a) if you die three times, you often don't really want to continue (the other players could let it slide if you're having bad luck and want to play anyway); (b) you can try to win by ramming too (c) it gives an extra reward to being careful.

* Do you award option cards for people 2nd, 3rd etc to a checkpoint? This seems uncontroversial, the affect is non-trivial, yet fairly obvious. It means you get to play with option cards and you can catch up more often.

Indeed, maybe you should get an option card as soon as the first (or third) player reaches a checkpoint even if you're marooned and haven't got to the first yet.

* The rules say that when you program your robot, you can choose to power down at the end of the turn. Should you be able to power down at the start of a turn? That feels fair to me, but it wouldn't allow people to be too reckless, would it?[1]

Footnote [1]

Some house rules are so obviously good they just have to be included. Some are added well-meaningly to give people a break, but render the game unloseable.

Eg. in D&D, insofar as combat is balanced, it's balanced between "chance to hit" and "damage on each hit". +20 to instant-kill with a hit to a vital spot sounds fair, but means it's not balanced at all and combatants can kill opponents at will.

Eg. in monopoly, getting a money-bonus on free parking, and having an unlimited supply of houses and hotels, and a few other rules are universally known. But I've read people say they're what can make Monopoly interminable. (I don't know of my own experience, I only played a couple of times when young.)

Munchkin

* Do you let people trade cards in hand, or trade during combat? I think these are not allowed, and that probably should be left alone, but they sound obvious. What do you think? (Munchkin has great rules resolving, it says if you disagree, just pick something and get on with it :))

* Do you have to run away from a losing combat? It never occurred to me this was an issue. The rules say "If you can't win, you have two options, ask for help, or run away" but I assumed taking that literally was just extreme pedantry and you could obviously just lose if you preferred, that would just be rare. But people disagreed. (I admit regularly dying for tactical is probably against the spirit of the game.)

* The rules say "You may ask one player to help you. If they decline, you may ask another. You will probably have to bribe them." I was taught "Hold a bidding war; You choose which bid to accept," was part of the fun :) I think that makes sense -- wars are over quickly, and I don't see any advantage to the other. Also, they're actually equivalent[2]. But can anyone see any drawback to not using the rules-as-written?

Footnote [2]

As a pedantic geek, I have a lot of buy in to "do something that's equivalent". If I wanted to resolve hacking-through-something according to D&D rules, I'd just say "it takes between X hundred and Y hundred turns, and in that time you meet 1-2 monsters", rather than roll for each blow.

On the other hand, sometimes making people play it out is a useful check-and-balance. For instance, before computers, you could easily break copyright on books, but it was impractical to do so on a large scale.

In Munchkin, I'd assume the obvious end case of "ask players in turn" was "players make offers in advance, you decide which offer, and then officially ask that player to help", which is almost exactly the same as "hold a bidding war". But I haven't been led astray by my love of optimization, have I?

Relatedly

I always assume instantaneous trades are binding, but long-term trades are not (and should normally be followed, but can be broken at key moments). This is another example of the "equivalence" philosophy. It's possible to make instantaneous trades binding by use of a trusted third party, or with a "lay them in the open and run from one to the other" strategy.

Thus if you played them non-binding, you can either (a) take the time to make them binding every time or (b) hand a small advantage to any player willing to prolong the most boring bookkeeping parts of the game. I think both of those are non-fun, so you might as well pretend everyone always took the effort to use a third party, and rule that they're binding.

On the other hand, sometimes I think of part of a game as superfluous, when someone else thinks it's an integral part of the fun. I don't think that's the case here, but I need to watch out for it. (Especially when conflicting assumptions come up at a crucial point in the game :))

Comments

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

1) RoboRally. Our house rules tend to ignore deaths, as they can really spoil the game. We do obey the shut-down rules, though, as otherwise you have no reason to take care. (There's a minor tweak in what we do with the Abort Switch, but that doesn't affect the base case.)
We always award cards for arrival at checkpoints - for a 5-player game, 0,1,1,2,2 in order of arrival. That way you do get a chance to catch up.

2) Trades. Immediate trades should certainly be binding. There's also a strong incentive to make long-term trades binding; if you break them, we won't trade with you. Simple. I've never played Munchkin, but this also applies to several trading games.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, there's several games I've played with sci-fi geeks (at CUSFS) and social geeks (at Alex Churchill's) and non-geeks (with Trinity friends), but not with maths geeks (which you'd think would be my natural home :) )

2) Trades. Immediate trades should certainly be binding.

That's my argument. But I felt sure some people would disagree. Possibly even delight in surprising people by breaking that...

There's also a strong incentive to make long-term trades binding;

Agreed. It's obviously best to keep and enforce all (or at least almost all) agreements, else no-one can make any agreements at all. (cf. Real life ;))

OTOH, there is an amount of "how much is this social contract within this particular game, and how much is outside"? I think it's normally implicit which. Reneging over a trade for a small item is just petty. Stabbing an ally in the back at the last minute has advantages (cf. prisoner's dilemma) -- it's generally clear in advance if that's part of the game or not.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Interesting post.

I don't like the Free Parking rule in Monopoly, not because it prolongs the game, but because it's too swingy. Whoever wins it first is almost certain to win the game, because they get a huge disproportionate wad of money early on.

GamesEvening veterans from before my time tend to play Settlers without the robber. I'm a bit dubious about this too: the robber is good for providing extra leverage in trades ("if you give me a brick, I'll give you a corn *and* a promise not to rob you"). They also have a rule where you get a token if you don't produce anything, and you can exchange max(4, #VP) tokens for a good. That's quite nice (although I can see that it might annoy very serious players).

If you play with the same group of people all the time, it's easy to forget what house rules you have, because you're so used to them. Someone new to GamesEvening asked if we have any house rules for Puerto Rico, and we said no. Halfway through the game we remembered that we do: the University applies to itself and comes into play manned, otherwise it's too underpowered for its price.

I can't remember what other house rules we have in other games, but generally I think they're there to improve balance.

There are also "house rules" which are actually just emergent consequences of the real rules, which you can spot if you're a pedant, but it's polite to explain them to newcomers. Like in Barbarossa, you're trying to guess the identity of an object, and you can ask for one letter of its name, privately; or any number of yes/no questions until you get a no, publicly. Therefore you can ask for a letter publicly (Is the first letter between A and Y? Is it between A and X? ...)

[simont]

the University applies to itself and comes into play manned, otherwise it's too underpowered for its price

That sounds familiar! We do that too, and we also swap round the prices of the Factory and University. Even with both of those changes, almost nobody ever builds the University (except, like any other building, as a last-minute way to exchange surplus money for VPs).

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

we also swap round the prices of the Factory and University.
That is a good idea. Certainly the University is still underpowered, even when houseruled to apply to itself; and the Factory is probably overpowered.

And you say even then no one builds it. That kind of thing makes me wonder whether they just made a big mistake with it, or whether we're all missing the subtlety of its intended use (like the Gate in Caylus, which looks underpowered at first but actually isn't).

I think the intended use is to get your big building manned when no one else does, but that requires that you have the cash to buy the university as well as a big building (and it not be worth buying a further big building instead), and you're confident no one's going to snaffle your favourite big building in between you buying the university and the big building, and you're reasonably sure another mayor phase isn't going to happen - which is an almost prohibitively rare combination of circumstances.

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

Yes; I have occasionally tried building it early on, in order to benefit from it for longer, but I've rarely been particularly successful. (I've managed not to lose, but I don't recall winning with this strategy.) The problem is really that you can either be building something that will get you money and/or shipping points (e.g. factory, harbour, coffee roaster, etc.), which are far more valuable in game terms than people.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

There are also "house rules" which are actually just emergent consequences of the real rules,

Oh yes, I was thinking of Barbarossa too (though I couldn't remember the name). That's a lovely example -- it's like a house clarification, more like a house rule than anything else, but not quite a rule.

I think I was there when we played it for nearly the first time, (and then I forgot about it), but I think there was a trade off: asking for a letter was enshrined as an alternative, on the condition that no-one asked "Is it between Aardwolf and Zxy? Is it between Aardvark and Zxy?" ...

The current rules seem to work just fine, but perhaps a more elegant fix would be to ask any number of yes/no questions until a "no", or to get one answer from a scale of thirty -- particularly useful would be quickly ask for the size (to nearest order of magnitude).

which you can spot if you're a pedant, but it's polite to explain them to newcomers

Yes, that's an interesting balance. I was leaning towards it in the last part of my post. I think our Barbarossa rules are the only possible interpretation of the written rules.

Though someone else might prefer a fix that you can ask any algorithm you like, but making you sit through it. I disagree but I'm not objective here -- I wouldn't think that was desirable even if it did work because it's not elegant :)

For instance, any games that involve memory, I always think "bah, why should you have to remember all that stuff, if it was public once, just keep it public". And I think sometimes that's fair -- some games just hide information for the sake of it, not because it makes the game more interesting. Other games like bridge, hiding information definitely correlates with play skill, but isn't necessary[1]. Other games it's actually one of the main points of the game.

[1] You could argue if you could look at tricks played it would slow the game down, but I don't think it would -- if you keep checking, you'll soon start remembering, and if you're any good, you can remember nearly everything off the top of your head anyway.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Therefore you can ask for a letter publicly (Is the first letter between A and Y? Is it between A and X? ...)

I thought of another bug, as bad as the dictionary attack:

Q. Is either the first letter between B and Z or the object more vorpal than a tea-kettle?
A. Yes.
Q. Is either the first letter between C and Z or the object more vorpal than a tea-kettle?
A. Yes.
Q. Is either the first letter between D and Z or the object more vorpal than a tea-kettle?
A. Answer undefined.
Q. OK, so it starts with C. Is it larger than...

:) I think I'll just ignore this hack and hope no-one else thinks of it. The intent of the rules is perfectly clear, they're just not watertight against geeks who like rule-pedantry and game-exploit hacks :)

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

We houserule Twilight Imperium to not have its turn order determined by option cards (because if we try to do it that way everybody always forgets and we play a strange hybrid of the intended rules and "go clockwise"), if that counts as a GamesEvening one...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I don't like the Free Parking rule in Monopoly, not because it prolongs the game, but because it's too swingy.

Yeah, that was generally said in the same breath. It sounded convincing to me (though I don't recall playing monopoly).

(There's always a guess between "Did the designer of this game spend ages playtesting and all the quirks are there for a reason" and "Did the designer of this game have a good idea and slap a few standard rules on it." I've heard a heartbreaking complaint from authors in the first category, but it's always hard to tell for sure beforehand)

If you play with the same group of people all the time, it's easy to forget what house rules you have

Oh yes.

Even more so with house clarifications. I'm sufficiently trained to communicate mathematically that if a rule says "do BLAH to determine who goes first" I hear "decide randomly with these probabilities". Which works great between mathematitions:

Simont: he told me "you have to write the byte five to address one bazillion and cee", which I effortlessly and correctly translated as 0x1000000C on the grounds that I couldn't imagine him using the word "bazillion" for anything less than the largest number of zeroes which could possibly fit in the (32-bit) address field in question. I was left in awe of his communication skills.

but occasionally causes a double-take if someone doesn't assume all rules are synonymously replaceable with equivalent ones :)

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

he told me "you have to write the byte five to address one bazillion and cee", which I effortlessly and correctly translated as 0x1000000C on the grounds that I couldn't imagine him using the word "bazillion" for anything less than the largest number of zeroes which could possibly fit in the (32-bit) address field in question. I was left in awe of his communication skills.


:)) I approve.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:) And I love that playing around with language turns out to be actually useful. If no-one had ever used "bazillion" to mean "an arbitrary really big number in the given context", or if people weren't used to interpreting meanings pedantically, it wouldn't be available for this use.

[simont]

*blinks* Where did you get that quotation of mine from?! I can remember writing it, but I can't remember where. Did I post it on your LJ or something like that?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

Yep, that's it. http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/198157.html.

I remembered it, it seemed appropriate, I couldn't recall where you said it, but was pleased to discover I only needed two email-archive-search tries to bring it up: "simont gazillion" and "simont bazillion". If I hadn't been able to spell "bazillion" in the same way by then I would have given up :)

[simont]

RoboRally: the Gallery's house rules do ignore life tokens and do award options for pinging a checkpoint that's been pung by other people already (typically 0,1,1,2,2,3 for successive players reaching the checkpoint, or some prefix of that).

(a): conversely, without life tokens you can always just choose not to resurrect if you like. (b): our general emphasis is more on the game being a race with occasional chaotic interaction than on a deliberate attempt to win by bumping off the opposition. (Though there are differences in emphasis between us; some are more willing to wilfully attack people than others.) (c): it does make a difference to the gameplay that you can occasionally commit deliberate suicide to leave yourself in a better position (e.g. if you're massively damaged and heading in the wrong direction, hurling yourself into a pit so that you come back with only two damage points and in a better location), but to some extent one is inclined to take pity on people in that situation on the grounds that they've Suffered Enough™.

Choosing to power down at the start of a turn: we don't do that. But we do play a non-standard form of the Circuit Breaker option, which is that rather than its stated behaviour of automatically powering you down it instead gives you the ability to choose to power down this turn rather than next.

We also have a lot of other house-rule baggage, a lot of which isn't rule changes as such but just clarifies the various ambiguous interactions between all the silly option rules so that we can do them consistently. I expect Ben could be persuaded to let you have a copy of the current state of our (in theory) continuously evolving house-rules document if you were really interested...

eta: ah, hilarityallen got here first with most of that. Ah well.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

a non-standard form of the Circuit Breaker option

Which would be an obvious simplification of making its current use optional? (If it were optional, the amount of damage you'd taken wouldn't matter, and the end of this turn and the beginning of the next turn are almost the same.)

When we tried powering down at the start of the game I immediately lobbied for peter to be able to discard the circuit breaker, since it was strictly worse. (Apparently you can discard an option card, preventing one point of damage, which I'd forgotten at the time, since normally options are always worth it.)

[angoel.livejournal.com]

The rules say that when you program your robot, you can choose to power down at the end of the turn. Should you be able to power down at the start of a turn? That feels fair to me, but it wouldn't allow people to be too reckless, would it?

Your modification softens damage drawn considerably. You can guarantee that you're in a safe place before powering down, you don't have to ever run with locked registers if that's bad for you. In doing so, you will remove some of the (potentially funny) consequences of messing up.

I would instead suggest the option of 'running repairs' as a house-rule. At the beginning of your turn, you can choose to do 'running repairs'. You immediately increase your health (as in power-down), but deal yourself a random set of cards as your actions. Movement takes place, but without the benefit of any options.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's an interesting idea. You're right, that would keep it chancy. I wonder what the chance of a random set of cards just killing you is, on different boards?

Powering down at the end of a deterministic program has a high chance of leaving you where you want, and a small chance of leaving you somewhere deadly. Running repairs has a higher chance of just killing you, but at least if you end up somewhere dangerous, you could try again, rather than just sit still and be shot to death for a turn.

Your modification softens damage drawn considerably.

That's the thing, it's always hard to tell what's too much. Initially, no-one will take advantage of it because they're used to playing in a certain way (that's why you can get away with trying it); but if they will learn to abuse it over time, you can't add it as a permanent change.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

No - powering down at the end of a deterministic program has a high chance of leaving you where you programmed yourself to be. With locked registers, this is quite possibly *not* where you want ;).

Initially, no-one will take advantage of it because they're used to playing in a certain way.

Mmm. I suspect that I'd start to abuse it right away. But I have a tendency to do that with games. Otherwise how would ensure I always[1] win.

[1] For a value of always meaning 'as often as I can arrange it.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, good point, I'd forgotten that. I guess it's that it feels like bad luck, but in fact getting locked down and driving into danger is the limiting factor that makes taking damage kill you. I think most people I see play (generally better than me) don't really balance it very much, but just power down at the last possible moment and hope for the best...