House rule
A House Rule is a rule that that players have created or modified for their own sagas. ArM5 encourages you to make house rules to better fit the game to your preferred style and preferences.
Sagas are not expected to employ all the rules provided in the ArM5 line, and those that don't include a certain supplement are not considered to be making a House Rule when they arbitrate issues regarding it using the core rules. However, if they go beyond the core rules or specifically alter how they treat something to not conform to a supplement they use, they are making a house rule.
Typical areas of house ruling include Magic Resistance and the system of Combat. Some sagas also do not utilize the initaition rules provided for Mysteries, ignore the Spell Guidelines, or so on. Of course, you ca play perfectly well with no house rules. House rules represent more the troupe's choice of style and emphasis than any flaw in the system.
Examples of House Rules
Some common house rules include:
- Changing Specialties
- Allowing the change of an Ability's specialty when its level is increased.
- Difficult Longbows
- Making longbows rare, exotic (Welsh), and requiring a lot of practice to use (lowering the weapon's Attack modifier).
- Effective Wards
- Wards (or: wards with a target of Circle and duration of Ring) need not penetrate to function.
- Increased Might MR
- Increasing (doubling?) the Magic Resistance granted by supernatural Might, so that supernatural creatures will be more formidable.
- Free Adventure Experience
- Allowing characters to gain experience from Adventure as well as another experience source (time allowing) in a Season.
- Low Item Penetration
- Limit the penetration of items (or: charged items) to half the Lab Total, or to the effective Spell Level, and/or require an investment of 1 pawns per +1 to Penetration. This is meant to maintain the idea that powerful magic should be emanating from magi, not from grogs wielding magic items, and to prevent abuses of high Penetration with charged items in particular.
- Drawn Circles
- RAW Indicates circle targets can be moved, drawn on a wall or on a staff or so on, and can be made of solid materials so that they can almost never be broken. Many troupes prefer to limit Circles and Rings to circles actually drawn on the ground, which can be broken if so much as a leaf falls over the drawn line.
- Arts as Abilities
- Increasing Arts using the Ability experience scale.
Web Pages Containing House Rules for Ars Magica
- Andrew Gronosky's Ars Magica site
- Includes variant rules for book quality and the unofficial Apprentice's Oath
- House Rules for the Faroe Saga
- Containing an extensive reworking of how Might works.
- Virtusaga/The Wendish Campaign House Rules
- Containing the infamous "Arts as Abilities" rule, and other rules that lower the power level of magi.
- Timothy Ferguson's house rules for Crossbows
- Variant crossbow statistics from the author of the official ArM5 Crossbow rules.