A little bit. Unlike LatwPIAT, I actually want to play using the basic Eclipse Phase rules, but I modify some things and augmentations that don't make sense and ignored the dual-wielding firearms rule because I want to run fights that are about more than who wins the initiative. EDIT: Oh, and speaking of networking rules, according to RAW, if you try to find someone with a certain skill to help you with something, the actual die roll is supposed to represent their skill. That makes no sense whatsoever. A successful roll of 02 would thus give you someone with a skill rating of 2 in the field, which is far below YOUR OWN DEFAULT RATING. How is that a good use of your networking time and how does it make sense? It doesn't, so I ignored it.

I heavily houserule any game that I run. I tend to like immersive games, so my tweaks are often oriented towards speeding up and streamlining things that are sensitive to pacing (combat). At the same time I don't mind twiddly complex rules if it serves increasing verisimilitude (but generally try to push those types of rules into parts of the game that aren't pacing sensitive). I also tend to run initiative in all my games differently than many RPGs have it by default. Basically the idea is everything is many things are happening concurrently so I allow people with lower initiatives to still react to things in a sensible way. This avoids the ridiculous "I step 5 feet back and fire my bow" stuff you get with games where essentially each character in order takes 6 seconds of actions completely independant of the others (your opponent of course would just step up with you as you stepped back making that move+action impossible). This tends to be a fairly big nerf to high initiative builds/munchkinism in my games.

thebluespectre wrote:

I'm not going to track ammo, not one bit.

Me too. Most weapons are designed to have ammo clips that contain enough ammunition for typical usage in a short firefight; this is because they've been optimized for that over centuries of military history. Assault rifles are often fired full-auto, so they have 30-100 bullets in their clip; sniper rifles fire single-shot, so they get by with 10. If you need to reload, it means that you are in a prolonged combat situation, probably entrenched and with people firing suppression fire at you. But because of that, you do have time to get into cover and reload. And frankly, at that point you should explore alternatives such as grenades or tactical re-positioning ("run awaaay!!!"). Also, it's really annoying for a player if the GM goes "no, you can't shoot the last bad guy because you've run out of your 12 bullets right now. Ha-ha. He shoots you instead.". Counting ammo is akin to nitpicking. Yes, it is realistic and yes, players should manage their resources properly so that they don't get caught unprepared, but I think there are more important things they should think about first, and I'd rather they focused on things that can influence the story as well (e.g. what morph to egocast into for a mission - it's management of credits spent vs. risk, and it also has social effects).

LatwPIAT wrote:

Unless US Army doctrine is both unique and has changed radically since the 1990s, assault rifles are not usually fired in full-auto. ... ... ... magazine size optimization has, at best, had less than 150 years to optimize, going by the first firearm widely adopted and used in a war; the Spencer rifle used in the US Civil War.)

Ehm... ok, I'm not a military expert, admittedly. :-) I should have done more research. Thinking about it, yes, if you go about Rambo-style firing full-auto with an AK in CounterStrike you get fragged pretty easily and you don't get many kills. From my experience in Eclipse Phase and other games, though, players tend to fire assault rifles full-auto (due to the big bonuses they get at short range). And in EP there probably has been at least one more century of magazine size optimization. Anyway, my point is that from a narrative point of view tracking ammunition takes time that it could be better allocated to story-significant events, so it's just easier to assume that characters can deal with ammo in combat situations. However, even from a gamist point of view, the "player vs. GM" game of "who remembers exactly how much ammo was spent" is not the most satisfactory either, there are more interesting gamist mechanics to play with. There may be an issue if player characters are poor and have to keep track of their finances when they purchase ammunition - but most of the EP characters in the games I've run had enough Rep or credits to afford it.

hhexo wrote:

From my experience in Eclipse Phase and other games, though, players tend to fire assault rifles full-auto (due to the big bonuses they get at short range). And in EP there probably has been at least one more century of magazine size optimization.

Guns in EP, because of literal [i]magic[/i], have no recoil, which makes the damage-bonuses for firing automatic fire extremely tempting.

hhexo wrote:

Anyway, my point is that from a narrative point of view tracking ammunition takes time that it could be better allocated to story-significant events, so it's just easier to assume that characters can deal with ammo in combat situations. However, even from a gamist point of view, the "player vs. GM" game of "who remembers exactly how much ammo was spent" is not the most satisfactory either, there are more interesting gamist mechanics to play with.

Personally, I find that making players have to care about such things as actually reloading and conserving ammo a) makes for more dynamic firefights, where everyone aren't just hosing down everyone with bullets, and b) reduces the level of invulnerability players have; once players have unlimited ammo, everything automatically maxes out, since things being more or less expensive suddenly stops being an issue; you have infinity bullets, so why not make them infinity Biter rounds, or infinity Homing RAP rounds, or infinity thermobarric minimissiles? Then again, I am a simulationist at heart; the hectic scenes where the protagonist struggles to conserve ammo as enemies close in should, to me, arise from the fact that I-the-Player has used a lot of ammo, not because I-the-GM arbitrarily decided that everyone running out of ammo would make for a dramatic scene right now.

The most important thing in any game is fun and my rules of thumb as a GM are "if it's cool, encourage it" and "if it's going to take ten minutes of rules lawyering to work out, it's not worth it". It's all about having fast, dramatic play which some of the math-heavier sides of the game can bog down. Scenes can also be dramatically edited with Moxie (I spend a Moxie to jump off the balcony just as a flying car speeds by below and land on it) to make the collaborative storytelling aspect of the game a bit more, well, collaborative.

I play with some House Rules. I use these right now: Eclipse Phase House Rules Reducing the Effectivity of Speed Every character may automatically act on the first Action Phase of every Combat Turn, but characters do not automatically gain the ability to act for a number of Action Phases equal to their Speed. Instead, when rolling an initiative test a character adds a number of 10 sided dice to their Initiative stat equal to their Speed stat. For example, someone with a Speed of 1 rolls their Initiative stat + 1d10; someone with a Speed of 3 rolls their Initiative stat + 3d10. This means that someone with a higher Speed is likely to move before someone with a lower Speed. Additionally, for every d10 rolled that comes up on a natural 9 or 10 a character may take actions for one additional Action Phase. (Note, that this means that someone with a Speed of 1 will sometimes get to act for 2 Action Phases, and someone with a speed of 4 can potentially, albeit very rarely, act for 5 Action Phases.) Decreasing the Effectivity of “Double Tapping” When using a semiautomatic or burst fire weapon to make two attacks in one Action Phase, you waste some of the time and concentration you could have been spending to bring the muzzle to bear on pulling the trigger twice. As a result, when attacking twice with a single Complex action you suffer a -20 modifier to both your attack skill checks. Remember to note, this penalty stacks with the penalty for attacking different targets in the same Action Phase. Decreasing the Effectivity of Wielding Two or More Weapons When wielding any two (or more) weapons, you may choose to make one extra attack per Action Phase for each weapon you wield in addition to your primary weapon. You suffer a cumulative -20 penalty to all of your attacks during an Action Phase for each extra attack made. These penalties are in addition to the normal -20 penalty for attacking with an off-hand weapon. You may never attack more than once per Action Phase with a secondary weapon. Modifying the Ambidextrous trait in Lieu of the Above Rule The Ambidextrous trait should read as follows: The character can use and manipulate objects equally well with any hands or prehensile limbs they possess (they do not suffer the off-hand modifier, as noted on p. 193). Adding Melee “Interception” If a character moves within 1 meter (+1 meter per point of reach) of an opponent, and the character attempts to pass by without attacking that opponent, the opponent may subtract 15 from their initiative roll in order to make a Melee Attack; if that subtraction would result in the opponent’s Initiative roll dropping to a value lower than 1, it cannot try and intercept. The rule also applies to characters who are attempting to move out of melee combat. If the opponent has a melee weapon ready, they use the normal melee weapon skill rating; otherwise, they use the unarmed combat skill. If the opponent hits and deals damage, after Armor reduction, equal to a character’s SOM/10, the character is intercepted and cannot continue their move. With a little room to move, coordinated characters can avoid the Interception attempts of their opponents without engaging in combat. Using a Complex action with their movement, they can make a Freerunning check to avoid provoking Interception attempts. On a successful check a character may pass by a total number of opponents equal to their skill roll/10, minimum of 1. I am also not a fan of the "zero recoil" rules. It gives people no real reason to not fire automatic unless you enforce bean-counting rounds. So, I may eventually have to touch on that. I am sure that, over-time, I will add more.

Steel Accord wrote:

I have yet to properly GM a game, but my opinion can be summed up as "style IS substance...." Character concept comes before practicality for me.

I second this. The only real rule I enforce at my table is concept, characterization, and ingenuity. I quickly squelch min-maxers and munchkins when they rear their ugly head, the cretins. I don't really agree with the whole 'heroes,' thing, since in the real world we don't have heroes, as Solid Snake put it best, and true combat is seen by reading great authors like Tim O'Brien. There's nothing beautiful about people being brutally maimed, as Breaking Bad shows. When I do run Eclipse Phase, I let the players feel capable, but not incredibly powerful. So, a few steps above CoC, but not too far from nWoD. So, relating to houserules, I follow the mechanics about 3/4s of the time, and do most of the tweaking on the fly when a dramatic moment rears its had. Rarely have I found myself wanting to keep to the rules and see the drama carry on, positively (and that time was during an intense psychotherapy session I had an antagonist perform on a former player's schizophrenic char.) So, for me, houserules are fluid, and if similar circumstances pop up again, my players and I might make it a consistent ruling.

My biggest houserule is probably just one: the rules serve story to the extent that sometimes I don't bother looking up a rule and just figure out something that makes sense on the fly and look it up later...but the EP core book recommends this as one of the infinite possible ways to run a game (and it's been the way many groups have done it since Gygax and Arneson), so I don't know how much of a houserule that is. I do collaborative storytelling with my friends. We collectively and democratically, through largely invisible creative processes, improvisationally create fiction that we enjoy. I don't let rules get in the way of that, but their framework helps people to figure out launching off points and arbitration. It's what the rules are useful for (and about [i]all[/i] they're useful for, in any setting/system), but even then, I give primacy in arbitration to excellent RP, excellent descriptions, etc.

ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:

One houserule I fully intend to use if I ever actually get a group together (seems unlikely, but what the hell) is for speed; At the beginning of each round, each character chooses the number of action phases they wish to act in. For each phase higher than their speed, they take a -20 modifier to all actions that round. So a speed 1 character could act at speed 4, but would take a -60 to all their rolls that round.

This would strongly encourage your players to almost always take several actions; once a roll hits 40, there's no reason not to take an extra Action Phase at Speed 1, and at a skill of 60 you can go all the way to taking three Action Phases per turn. Stack bonuses and skills to the point where you have skill 80, and you can go the full mile at 4 Action Phases per turn at Speed 1 and still have it be strictly optimal. With a system like this in place, there's really no reason for moderately competent characters to ever choose less than Speed 3 or 4. That may be what you intend, but it is important to keep effects like these in mind.

I've never been a fan of flat penalties to balance the action economy. They seem very artificial to me, and really kill my enjoyment of the fluff. If you're looking to round out the speed curve, I recommend checking out the way Shadowrun 5E does it (I think Transhuman proposed something similar in the alternate speed rules). Your initiative becomes something like (Speed x d10) + INIT. You get to go in any round that your initiative is still positive, and then you subtract 15 from it at the end of that round. Once everyone is negative, you roll again. This flattens out the curve on both ends. Speed 1 characters sometimes get to go twice (if they roll well), and high speed characters get more actions on average, but are much less likely to get to go 3 or 4 times. It keeps things more equal between your combat and noncombat players, while still giving a significant combat advantage to the players who sunk the cash into speed upgrades.

I've primarily cut down the skills list. There are ten separate skills for combat, so I've glossed those into three—Close, Ranged, Gunnery/Exotic. In order to keep the chargen points somewhat balanced, I make them 5 times as expensive to buy. But the balancing advantage for a player is, any ol' gun works. I've also similarly glossed the various deception/tradecraft style skills. This seems almost like a requirement, given Transhuman basically admits how worthless the Disguise skill is. So... glossed and 5 times as expensive for that cluster, too. One thing I've houseruled to keep down the fabber abuse is to assume that blueprints (and fabbers) are AI, and—at the expensive end—rather fussy and snotty tattletale AI. It's served to get players to do something else rather than see how far they can push the window with fabbers. Been playing around with the notion that Rep is not held in discrete and isolated silos, but "leaky" so that losses and gains can ripple across Reps, almost like a stock market. Made sense to me that if your g-Rep went sharply up, your c-Rep might go down a little. Similarly something awesome you did with e-Rep might boost f-Rep as well. So far this has been a little arbitrary but I'd like make it a bit more robust and systematic.

I think the philosophy behind Numenera's design is something to look into if you guys are fretting over difficulty and imposing arbitrary 'difficulty.' You have difficulty ratings of 1 to 10, and those multiplied by 3 give you target numbers. Numenera is a d20 system. Obviously, it's 'impossible' to roll a 30. What I liked about the system is that it's a game where everyone plays already competent characters, not swords and sorcery Zeros to Heroes. Difficulty is static in regards to every PC (hell, players pretty much do all the dice rolls in the game,) i.e. a good lock is Difficulty 4 for a Nano and 4 for the Jack and 4 for the Glaive. That same lock should still be Difficulty 4 five sessions later into the game. Most likely the Jack will always succeed in picking it at any point. But that's also Difficulty 4 if the Glaive wanted to kick it down, or Difficulty 4 if the Nano chose to disintegrate it. At no point, ever, should the GM scale it higher to 'match' the characters' tiers. Cause, you know, in the real world, monsters don't just get better because you added a +2 to your AC... That might be a bit confusing, but I suggest reading over Numenera yourself. It's already won an award for best RPG.