Aldeboran Houserules
Posted: March 21, 2012 Filed under: aldeboran house rules Leave a commentEvery once in a while I collect together some of my ‘house rules’ for Aldeboran and toss them into a word document. Some of them are tested; many of them are only semi-tested but they are all 100% good ideas that will improve your life immeasurably — for example, the perks and flaws table and the ‘Random Possessions of Small Worth” tables that were once published in either Fight On! or Knockspell (I can’t remember but I think it was Fight On!)… or my as of yet unpublished (and probably unpublishable) Zodiac rules… (still a work in progress) and custom monsters and all sorts of other shit.
When the document is ‘big’ enough, I’ll release it to the public and make a bajillion dollars so I can move to my farm out in the middle of nowhere and stock up on bullets, barbed wire, blackmarket claymore mines and canned goods.
Here are some examples:
Initiative (standard rules): At the start of each round, one dice is rolled for the players and one dice is rolled for the referee’s creatures. Ties are re-rolled. Whichever side gets the higher score goes first. The players can resolve their actions in whatever order seems appropriate (perhaps starting with the character who has the highest dexterity, then the second highest, etc.). The referee resolves the monster attacks in whatever order seems appropriate. After everyone has had a chance to perform an action, the round ends and a new round is begun.
Initiative (variant rules):At the start of each round, every player rolls a dice and the DM rolls a dice for the monsters (or rolls 1 dice for each group of monsters).Actions are resolved in order, starting with those who got 1 going first, then those who rolled 2, 3, 4, etc.
Actions are assumed to resolve themselves more-or-less simultaneously on the roll of a tie, thus if both Bruno the Fighter and a goblin roll the same on initiative, it is possible for them to stab each other to death in the same round! WHICH dice is used depends upon the relative dexterity/speed of the creature.Player characters of average dexterity (between 15 and 6) or monsters with a movement rate of 9” or 12” use a d6.Player characters with above average dexterity (15+) and monsters with higher movement rates use a d4.Player characters with lower dexterity (6 or lower) and slower monsters use a d10.
Alignments consist of only good, evil or neutral. “Good” and “Evil” are diametrically opposed. Neutral characters (aka “selfish”) seek simply to survive and prosper on their own. Alignment is fluid. You can change alignments in the course of the game due to your actions.
Each new player character gets a score ranging from -5 to +5. Evil characters start at -5, good characters start at +5 and neutrals start at 0. The DM keeps track of this and only informs the players of in game effects (i.e.: for the cleric, maybe the DM will give a 10% chance of failure when spells are cast or undead are turned for every point that a character deviates from his alignment — thus the cleric of a good god who has slid to ‘neutral’ on the scale would have a 50% chance of failure when trying to cast a spell). At the end of each game session, the DM can make an alignment judgment and adjust the score accordingly. If a character does bad things, subtract 1 or 2 or 3 (never going past -5). If a character does good things, add 1 or 2 or 3 depending on the severity/intensity of the crime/good deed. If they more or less maintained status quo, do not adjust. If the score switches from -5 or +5 to 0, they have become neutral, if it goes from 0 to -5 or +5, they have gone from neutral to evil or good, etc.