Skirmisher House Rules

October 18, 2014 Michael Varhola

Every gaming group has got its own house rules for whatever game it plays! Following are some of the house rules that apply to official Skirmisher Publishing LLC and Skirmisher Game Development Group OGL/d20 games and playtest sessions. Comments on our house rules and sharing of your own are both welcome!

Skills

* Enhancement bonuses that boost attacks, including those bestowed by spells, can be applied to skill checks unless this is specifically precluded.

* Characters with the feat Magical Aptitude can use the skill Craft (Alchemy) to create alchemical substances even if they are not actually spellcasters.

* The skill Survival can be used to select firewood that will not smoke or spark and to know when and how to best do fires that will not be noticed. Otherwise, it is 50% likely that randomly collected wood will throw off dark smoke that might be spotted by monsters in the area or provoke a random encounter.

Critical Hits

* Rogue sneak attacks can affect corporeal undead if such attack would normally bypass the monster’s damage resistance. For example, a Rogue using a club could successfully sneak attack a skeleton, which has a damage resistance bypassed by bludgeoning weapons.

* Would-be critical hits against creatures not subject to critical hits instead inflict maximum damage (subject to other conditions applying to specific creatures).

Weapons

* A size Medium creature using a two-handed Bludgeoning or Slashing weapon in a 5-foot wide area suffers a -4 penalty on its attacks. This penalty does not apply to Piercing weapons.

* Using a melee weapon in two hands adds either +1 to the damage or 1.5 times normal Str bonus, whichever is greater.

* A spear can be used as a one-handed weapon but is treated as if off-hand for purposes of Str bonuses (i.e., half normal).

* For an item with only an enhancement bonus and no other abilities, the caster level is three times the enhancement bonus +2 (i.e., 5^th for +1, 8^th for +2, 11^th for +3, 14^th for +4, 17^th for +5).

Saving Throws

* We have Luck saving throws for cases when a Fortitude, Reflex, or Will save is not quite right or in cases where chance, possibly modified by the smiling face of Fortune, is being determined. Luck saving throws are modified by a character's Cha bonus. No character class has good Luck saving throw bonuses and they start out as +0 at 1st level and improve by +1 at every level divisible by three (i.e., +1 at 3rd level, +2 at 6th level, +3 at 9th level, +4 at 12th level, +5 at 15th level, +6 at 18th level).