I am curious on what other clubs and groups have for house rules. Since my club is fairly new to the game itself, we are playing by BRB rules, but wonder what other more established clubs/groups play. Also if you can explain why your club has those set of house rules would also help. Thank you and look forward to hear how everyone else plays!
We play by the BRB. No real house rules per se. We do play loosely though. There is some flexibility in points levels and other rules. We're there to have fun first and formost.
No random terrain rules. No 6th level spells. Thats pretty much it. The former is because having only a 16% chance of a piece of terrain being 'normal' seems ridiculous, the latter is because we found they were making games less fun.
Well the tourneys around here are ETC so those are common for practising, but in friendly games we just use the BRB, random terrain nuke spells and all the other randomness that results in hillarious situations we talk about for days after
I'd describe it more as house 'customs' than house rules. Basically its 'don't be a dick' and make the game fun but there are a few things that are traditional. Customs range from cocked dice are always rerolled, if an elf play is taking the book of hoeth he has to buy the food and if the context permits you must shout "the axe is too powerful!"... Its a long story.
I like that 'no 6th level spells' rules, i absolutely HATE the chaos spell, Infernal Gateway. The amount of times it's got me... :'( I tend to use a large unit of 12kroxigors, and with one spell... they are all gone
Re-roll cocked dice - This really helps with stopping arguments over scatter die and all that Random terrain rules - More fun! No purple sun - This spell seems to not hold favor with anybody, least of all me. But pretty much everybody hates it. We play BRB rules with some loose play on them too. Again with 5-10 points plus or minus the bracket.
If we play 1k battles, each army gets 2D3 PD in the magic phase instead of 2D6. It prevents magic from wiping one of the 3 units you have at that point value and make it less likely for a level 2 mage to be able to cast a level 6 spell unless you throw everything you have at it.
No named or special characters, We find them broken even if they cost a lot of points they are insane and ruin the game. But that`s my opinion and most tourney in the netherlands don`t allow them anyway.
How we play: No named characters, no magic items over 25 points, allow look out sir roll for template spells, no lord level characters, 25VP penalty for any unpainted units.
No Book of Hoheth. No Cupped Hands. No Teclis. No Tetto'eko. No Deamon Named Characters. Special Terrain Rules: Terrain is randomly generated but after it is all placed players roll scatter dice for each piece and moves the terrain according, if a HIT is rolled it stays put, if a MISFIRE is rolled it is removed from play.
We don't have many. Neutral party sets up terrain. As many or as few pieces as they want. Odds its special terrain, evens its not. All rules arguments are investigated for no more than 5 minutes. If the appropriate ruling cannot be found or an agreement cannot be made dice off and figure it out later. A battle report must be written by the winner. In our large games this is just a turn by turn. We also have a warbands campaign going on. This report has to be more fluff based. Thats pretty much it. For the most part we stick as close to the BRB as we can.
Terrain is setup by the players and after the setup scattered. Misfire means remove, hit means it stays put. Special terrain makes it harder for everybody, and you tend to forget it anyway (we do ). So, no special terrain. If you setup a unit to make sure it doesn't get clipped, you don't wiggle around for 5 minutes. You just say to your opponent, look: that unit isn't going to touch this one on the overrun. "Okay" These prevent a lot of debates between; 'he can't see me' (state that is was your intention to hide him) or just in general 'you can't do this or that'. Keeps the game friendly and flowing. Victory points: fleeing units do give up their VP Half-VP's for a unit are also counted, basically we use the 7th edition VP system. We all don't like the 8th edition setup. I would prefer no named characters, but my High Elf opponent does not agree. Since I can still beat him, it's fine. Don't play like a coward->castling up and not moving. You will get mocked! The Hunted
Forgot to add, we also roll artillery and scatter dice for each terrain piece (misfire=remove, hit=stays where originally placed) and only roll a 1 in 6 chance for terrain being special.
It's just easier to disallow all of them than to argue about which ones aren't OP or OT. However, I should add that while we do not allow any special characters or Lords, we are playing in a campaign system where, based on accumulated VP, if you can keep a character alive from game to game you can advance him up to Lord level and even give him special abilities (although they are fairly balanced abilities, e.g. something like hatred that will only work in one combat phase per game). It adds a nice dimension to the game. In the last campaign I started with a Skaven Chieftain and by the end of the campaign he was a lord and riding a Bonebreaker right through the front gate of the Orc stronghold after a massive unit of slaves battered down the doors! Battle report: http://s6.zetaboards.com/The_UnderEmpire/topic/1173334/1/
Yeah I know it is dumb as well, but the reasoning is no character or item that can cast with IF and not have a chance of suffering a miscast. I argued to disallow that one special ability (having 250pt Lore Master of Heavens is still sweet0 because he has other rules that are appealing, but 2 of the 3 league judges said no. lame.
How do VC even function without having a lord level character? I'm also assuming the Look out Sir ruling implies you give it even if the character is not the same unit type as the unit it is in or near, as templates already allow them. We tend to play by the BRB and have a neutral party set up the terrain.
We allow any character to function as general in the VC army. With Look out sir, as I understand it, you don't normally get it for spells like Dwellers, but only for warmachines. In any event, we do both.