My favorite house rule is my dungeon crawling house rule set for Castles & Crusades. While C&C is great as written for most things, it does need some tightening up for extended dungeons crawls of the type I run. While I am always working on my house rules, the general gist is to get combat out of the way quick, and to have a very strict exploration round. I have talked about these rules before.
I slim down combat by using group initiative and break combat into phases, each side takes its turn before moving on to the next phase. The phases are Missile, Melee, and Magic. I extend the combat round to 1 minute so movement can mostly be abstracted. I also treat all enemies in a group as a bucket of hit points. When you kill one foe worth of hit points, I subtract one enemy from the group. Any damage dealt beyond what is required to kill an enemy is applied to the hit point bucket. This means that characters regularly mow down multiple weak enemies in a round. This makes them feel cool, and speeds up combat.
My exploration turn is just a list I go through each turn: Move, Roll Searches, Describe, Actions, Mark Time, Roll Wandering Monsters. I am considering making two small alterations to make the tun smoother. Instead of tracking turns on torches/lanterns, I would have the players roll a die with a value equal to the number of turns that light source is supposed to last, with the roll of a one indicating that it is used up. While it adds some randomness, it eliminates an often forgotten tracking step. I am also considering rolling for wandering monsters every turn, even when the table calls for a roll less often, I would just decrease the chance appropriately. This means I would take the same actions every round.
I slim down combat by using group initiative and break combat into phases, each side takes its turn before moving on to the next phase. The phases are Missile, Melee, and Magic. I extend the combat round to 1 minute so movement can mostly be abstracted. I also treat all enemies in a group as a bucket of hit points. When you kill one foe worth of hit points, I subtract one enemy from the group. Any damage dealt beyond what is required to kill an enemy is applied to the hit point bucket. This means that characters regularly mow down multiple weak enemies in a round. This makes them feel cool, and speeds up combat.
My exploration turn is just a list I go through each turn: Move, Roll Searches, Describe, Actions, Mark Time, Roll Wandering Monsters. I am considering making two small alterations to make the tun smoother. Instead of tracking turns on torches/lanterns, I would have the players roll a die with a value equal to the number of turns that light source is supposed to last, with the roll of a one indicating that it is used up. While it adds some randomness, it eliminates an often forgotten tracking step. I am also considering rolling for wandering monsters every turn, even when the table calls for a roll less often, I would just decrease the chance appropriately. This means I would take the same actions every round.
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