Huiyin's House Rules

General Rule Changes

Cancelling Active Defense via Skills/Class Abilities/Feats

When an action or token expenditure by one character causes another to lose their active defense (for example, Bluff/Jump/Sleight of Hand/Tumble, WM's Armed Feint, or Combat Expertise 7), the defending character retains half of his classes' base defense. Note that this is still considered "cancelling active defense" for the purposes of activating sneak attack or similar abilities, and that conditions inflicted upon the defending character (flat-footed, stunned, helpless, etc.) still deny the character their entire active defense.

Magic System Overhaul

Scrap the arcanist; there's only the Dreaded Sorcerer Villain class and people of whatever class (commonly Aristocrat, Expert, or Thief) with the Dabbler trait. This leads to a game world with more variety of hedge wizards and very few potent mages, all of whom are dangerous NPCs.

DABBLER (Background)

You have limited skills with a particular branch of magic; nevertheless your skills grant you capabilities beyond those of mere mortals. You may be sought, respected, feared, or hunted, but your gifts are never ignored.

Mechanic: Choose a single school of magic from the following list: Divination, Enchantment, Illusion (without the Veil of Trickery spell method), or Necromancy (without the Healing Hands spell method). You have mastery in that school equivalent to the secondary school an Arcanist of equal level and a mana limit of an Arcanist of half your level (round fractions up), and cast spells accordingly. You gain no other benefits or class abilities from the Arcanist class.

Limitations: Choosing the Dabbler trait costs both your initial trait selections. In addition it imposes a -2 to a single stat of the character's choice; this can represent time spent learning the arts of magic rather than training, a wound or injury incurred through magical experiments, or a sacrifice offered up in exchange for magical power.

Trait Changes

NATURAL (Mental)

You are naturally gifted with a particular kind of weapon. You intuitively understand its strengths and weaknesses and are able to take advantage of both in combat.

Mechanic: Choose an identifying descriptor from the list on p 116 under "Martial Weapon Proficiency." The character gains proficiency in all martial weapons with that identifying descriptor, or if he already had proficiency in all of those, gains proficiency in a single exotic weapon with that descriptor. He also gains a +1 to damage rolls for all attacks made with weapons of that descriptor and a +1 dodge bonus to active defense against attacks made by those weapons.

Note: When you choose a weapon group, the name of the trait changes to reflect the weapon chosen, such as Natural Swordsman or Natural Archer. No, I don't have a cool name for those naturally gifted with cudgels or flails.

Class Changes

HUNTER

• Hunter's Eye (Edit) - Hunters can now combine equivalent uses of Hunter's Eye and either Tactics of Mind / War Leader strategy pool generation OR Beast Lore / Lore Tokens (can generate Tactical + Strategy or Lore). This edit allows any use of one to fold in an equal (or faster) use of the other; for example, a Hunter could take a standard action to automatically generate 2 tactical tokens via Hunter's Eye and roll to generate strategy tokens, or a move action to generate 1 tactical token + roll for Lore tokens. If the character possessed War Leader 3 he could use a move action to generate 1 tactical token via Hunter's Eye and again roll for strategy tokens.

ARMIGER

• Consistent Defense (New Ability) - Starting at level 1, the armiger gains the ability to reroll their armor DR if the unmodified roll was less than or equal to (Armiger level/4, rounded up) - therefore at 1st level the Armiger could reroll a 1, at 13th reroll a 4 or less, and at 20th a 5 or less. If your second roll was less than your first, take the higher one.

WEAPON MASTER

• Weapon Pool (Edit) - Weapon Masters who wield two weapons sacrifice some of their focus each individual weapon, requiring more blows to set up their special attacks. Instead of their normal weapon token progression/hit, a Weapon Master fighting with two weapons gains 1 token/hit from levels 1-10 and 2 tokens/hit from levels 11-20.

New Classes

The Iron Heroes DRUID

The Iron Heroes PSYCHIC