Popular Game Variant

Unlike video games, tabletop games leave the players in charge of enforcing the rules. This means that they're free to create their own variations in order to balance the game, make it more fun, make it more casual- or competitive-friendly, or just mess around. Or, other times, they unintentionally create variants by forgetting rules or being taught by someone who didn't get the rules right. Either way, a Popular Variant is what you get when an unofficial ruleset becomes widespread.

Popular variants often involve Anti-Frustration Features, Obvious Rule Patches to resolve problematic situations, Balance Buffs and Nerfs to balance the game, attempts to resolve Gameplay and Story Segregation, or just something that runs on the Rule of Fun.

Occasionally, a Popular Variant will be officially recognized and become Ascended House Rules.

Can overlap with Common Knowledge if the Popular Variant is believed to be the official ruleset.

Also see Tournament Play and its related tropes, as any games where tournaments aren't held by the work's creator are up to the players to determine what's allowed, and prominent tournament rulesets tend to be popular.

See also Self-Imposed Challenge, a similar concept for video games.

Note: Please limit examples to variations that see some level of widespread use, or at least used to be popular.

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Examples

• Conway's Game of Life

Board Games

• Apples to Apples has several popular house rule addendums, including that everyone gets to submit one red card, and that once per game a judge can swap green cards during the judging phase without warning anyone.
• Boggle: Instead of using the provided grid, all dice are rolled on the table and words are made by the face-up dice regardless of positioning.
• The official rules of Candy Land have you just picking a card from the top of the deck, which you have to play. While this is suitable for very young children, many older players like to make the game more interesting by letting the players hold a hand of 3-5 cards, and choosing which one to play each turn, then drawing a replacement.
• Cards Against Humanity has many popular house rules:
  • When playing more than one card at a time, are cards read from top to bottom, or bottom to top? Better establish in advance...
  • Many groups allow players to take a pass and spend a turn discarding as many cards as they like and drawing back up to a full hand.
  • Since Murphy's Law dictates that the card you draw to replace the one you just played will always be better than the one you played, some groups let you "bet" a black card to play that card as well. If either of your cards win, you win your black card back; if someone else wins, they get your black card.
• Chess:
  • A common house rule for the base game is that when a pawn gets promoted to Queen, that Queen can be represented with an upside down rook. This can happen when the actual Queen is still on the board and no replacement is available. This house rule is actually included in the official United States Chess Federation rulebook, but not in the FIDE rules that are used in the rest of the world, and doing so under those rules will result in an arbiter coming to the table, turning the Rook back the right way up and forcing you to play on with the "Queen" becoming a Rook instead.
  • Many chess variants are popular enough to show up on major chess sites:
    • Classical time controls (at least 2 hours per player) may be the "default", but many players enjoy faster time controls like rapid (15 minutes plus 10 seconds additional time per move), blitz (3 minutes plus 2 additional seconds per move) and even bullet (less than 3 minutes total per player). Rapid and blitz have their own FIDE-sanctioned tournaments.
    • Fischer Random Chess, also known as Chess960, randomizes the opening setup in order to downplay the memorization of openings and force players to evaluate the game over the board. It's popular enough that it was acknowledged by FIDE in 2008 and got its first sanctioned tournament in 2019, with many top chess players attending.
    • Antichess is a variant where you have to capture opposing pieces if you can, and the goal is to lose all of your pieces.
    • Atomic chess adds the rule that a capture will cause an "atomic explosion" which kills all non-pawn pieces in the eight surrounding squares.
    • Bughouse is a 4-player variation where two teams of two players face each other on two boards. Teammates use opposite colours and give captured pieces to their partner.
    • Crazyhouse incorporates a variation of the drop rule in Shōgi.
    • Duck Chess on chess.com went viral in late 2022. It adds the neutral "duck" piece that is moved at the end of each player's turn, and acts as a blocker.
    • Fog of War adds a Fog of War mechanic.
    • Horde chess gives one player a normal chess army, while the other gets a bunch of pawns.
    • King of the Hill adds the rule that moving your king to a center square is an Instant-Win Condition.
    • Racing Kings changes the game to revolving around getting your king to the opposing rank.
    • Three-check chess adds the rule that if you've put in check three times, you automatically lose.
• In Chrononauts, a purely-for-flavor house rule is that whenever you change a linchpin, you have to explain how you're changing it. If someone changes it back, they need to explain how they changed what you did. This can lead to some very amusing chains of events.
• Go has a Tiebreaker Round variation where players start with two stones each placed in a square on the board, the goal being to capture an opponent's piece first to win. This has very little to do with the normal playstyle (which is about building up territory with the stones), but it is a lot faster.
• The card game Hex Hex specifically states that whoever wins the game gets to make up a house rule which applies for the rest of the session. Popular ones include not being allowed to say the word "hex" and swapping the definitions of left and right.
• When playing Jungle Speed, engaging in a tug-of-war over the totem is, according to the rules, a foul, and should result in the player who starts it collecting all the cards on the table. Many older players disregard this rule, and in fact encourage fighting over the totem.
• Mahjong, especially the Japanese variant, has many house rules. Common house rules include:
  • Yakuman stacking: A few very special hand types (known as yakuman) are automatically worth the Cap of 32,000 points (subject to the x1.5 multiplier if the player who is holding the dealer button wins, for 48,000 total). On the even rarer occasion that someone completes a hand which fulfills more than one yakuman condition, this rule allows them to win 32,000 points per yakuman condition the hand fulfills. This makes it possible, albeit extremely improbable (the odds are better of winning the lottery twice in the same month), to form a hand worth 336,000 points.
  • Wareme: When someone wins a hand, whoever is sitting behind the broken tile wall (i.e. the wall where the initial draw started) wins and loses double.
  • Doukasen: When someone wins a hand, whoever is sitting behind the tile wall the last tile was drawn from wins and loses double.
  • Open Riichi: Upon declaration of Riichi, a player can reveal their entire hand (or just the portion that's relevant to what they need as the last tile to win), so that opponents can figure out what they need to win and avoid discarding those tile(s). 1 extra han (hand point) for winning the hand after doing so. An additional house sub-rule can make it worth a yakuman (the Cap of 13 han, converts to 32,000 Scoring Points) if the Open Riichi player gets the last tile from someone else's discard, and the losing player could have legally discarded a different tile that wouldn't have let the winner win from their discard.
  • Kuitan Nashi: The Tanyao yaku only counts if the hand is closed (formed without called discards). This is an Obvious Rule Patch to prevent players from calling tiles left and right to try and finish their hand with Tanyao to fulfill the 1-yaku requirement just to claim bonus points for dora.
  • Aotenjou ("Skyrocketing"): The exponential score formula that's normally used for hands worth less than 8,000 points is used for all hands, without the 8,000-point soft Cap. This means, for example, that a hand with 13 or more han is worth over 2 million points at a bare minimum, instead of the usual 32,000 hard cap. This is usually combined with a separate house rule for dealing with yakuman stacking (as seen above), although some variants add to the absurdity: the Touhou fangame Touhou Unreal Mahjong has an Aoutenjou mode where yakuman are worth 13 han and multiple yakuman stack multiplicatively, with a hard cap of 4 billion points (without the cap, you get even more absurd results like 1.12×10⁵² points).
• Monopoly has a plethora of house rules, many of which are so ubiquitous that people are surprised when they find out that they aren't the official rules. Many of them aim to be Anti-Frustration Features, as the game has a grinding endgame; however, they tend to be insufficient as Comeback Mechanics and end up making the game longer by preventing losing players from going bankrupt. Others are just designed to spice things up or resolve disputes, especially among players who play regularly; as Victoria Wood once put it (in the context of spending Christmas with a friend's family), never play Monopoly with people who've been playing it together for decades, because everything you do will be wrong. This page lists some of the most popular over the years, but to summarize here:
  • A particularly common house rule is to put various fines and taxes (which, by strict rules, would go to the bank) in the center of the board and giving all the money to whomever lands on "Free Parking". It's not part of the official ruleset because of the Ending Fatigue it tends to cause — in fact, at least one edition actively warns you not to use it.
  • One rule is to remove the limit on houses and hotels that can be on the board. By official rules, once they're gone, they're gone unless someone decides to sell them. The house rule allows you to just keep building more and more, marking them with pennies or other random tokens. Again, while it seems like it would make the game more fun, it ends up just forcing the same few players to trade around the same few thousand dollars with no end in sight, turning the endgame into an interminable Luck-Based Mission.
  • One rule to make things more interesting is "double money for landing on GO". Like most rules that increase money in circulation, it tends to stretch out the game. It's also the source of epic debates about what happens when you draw a card that says, "Go directly to GO; collect 200 dollars": does it mean you only get $200 (because that's what the card says), or does it mean you get $400 (applying the house rule or Exact Words), or does it mean you get $600 (applying both: the card says $200, but not that the $200 comes from GO, so you get it in addition to the $400 from the house rule)? This is how friendships are destroyed, families are broken, and lives are lost.
  • One rule (or perhaps common misconception) is that when a player lands on an unclaimed property but chooses not to buy it, it's just left alone until the next person lands on it. By official rules, when a player chooses not to buy the property, it goes immediately to auction, so someone has to buy it. Most people ignore this because they can't be arsed with auctions (or perhaps because they don't know how to run one smoothly).^note (A common problem associated with auctions is that they often degenerate into +$1 pissing contests, which can be solved by instating a minimum between bids, usually $5 or $10.) This causes more expensive properties to go unowned until near the endgame, which lengthens the game.
  • A different rule is a twist on the above rule; when a player lands on an unclaimed property, it immediately goes to auction, regardless of whether the player who landed on it wants to buy it at face value. This is the sort of rule popular with more serious gamers who would otherwise turn their noses up at Monopoly.
  • One rule prevents players from buying property on their first lap around the board. It's intended to balance out the advantage gained by going first, but tends to unbalance the game more — often one player lands on Chance on their first roll and draws "Advance to GO" or "Take a ride on the Reading" while another player ends up in Jail.
  • One rule prevents players from collecting rent while in jail. It's an Obvious Rule Patch to prevent players from trying to go to jail intentionally and staying there for as long as possible, racking up rent money without the risk on landing on someone else's powerful monopoly.
  • One rule allows players to form alliances and trusts. While it's certainly in the spirit of the game, it's not part of the official rules. Similarly, the official rules prohibit players from lending money to each other; this prohibition is often lifted by house rule (or evaded by players making equivalent but separate gifts of money to each other, although this is difficult to enforce and open to abuse).
• In Pandemic, the player roles are supposed to be randomly distributed, but a large number of players prefer to let people choose their roles, or otherwise create a draft system that gives players a greater degree of control over what role they end up with. A few of the spin-offs adapt this into the official ruleset; Reign of Cthulhu for example gives the first player a choice of two roles, with the unselected role being passed to the next player alongside a new one for them to choose, repeating until everybody has selected their role.
• Being a game with countless "official" variations and even more unofficial ones, Poker is replete with house rules. Some popular ones:
  • Chase The Hammer: Only used in Texas Hold 'Em games, you win a small number of chips from every player if you win a hand having been dealt a seven and a deuce of different suits, the worst possible hand you can be dealt and nicknamed The Hammer.
  • "No check-raising" was a popular one for a while, but it's currently out of favor for making the game (especially limit games) more mechanical.
  • Bad beat jackpots: Players who suffer particularly bad beats are given a large consolation prize, often larger than the value of the hand itself. Common in casinos.
  • In home games, it's becoming popular to give each player one "Show Me" chip at the beginning of the night, which can be used once after a hand is completed to force a player to show whether they were bluffing or not.
  • The straddle bet: If you're sitting under the gun (i.e. to the left of the big blind, where you normally have to act first), you may place a bet equal to double the big blind before looking at your cards. This essentially turns you into the new big blind position (i.e. you get to act last in the first betting round) while simultaneously doubling the stakes for the first betting round. Some variations of the straddle bet rule allow the player to the left of a straddle bet to re-straddle for double the straddle bet, and some allow this doubling to continue until the player to left of the last (re-)straddle bet doesn't have enough money to re-double.
  • "The Rock": a player (either the first to deal or the winner of the first hand of the night) is given a specially-marked chip called "the rock." When the holder of the rock is in the under the gun position (left of the big blind, first to act), they must straddle as described above, and the rock is placed in the pot as well, to go to the winner of the hand, who is forced to straddle when they are next under the gun.
• SET: The official rules have the players spot three cards that form a SET, but many experienced players enjoy the unofficial "SuperSet" variation where you instead aim to spot two pairs of cards so that there exists a fifth card (not necessarily on the table) that completes a SET with each of the pairs.
• In the Finnish classic board game Star of Africa, it was possible to have a situation where nobody can win the game; players required money to move across sea, and if the Star was on an island and nobody had money, or the players were stuck on the islands without money, the game was unwinnable. After more than 50 years of various house rules to prevent this, a re-release finally fixed it by making it possible to slowly move across the sea for free.
• The rules of Tigris & Euphrates say that in an external red conflict, temples with leaders next to them aren't removed. But really, isn't that a bit lame? The obvious alternative, however, that they're all removed, is simply too powerful. One compromise is to remove as many temples as possible in such a way that each leader still has at least one temple next to him.
• Uno has three house rules so common that they have displaced the real rules to many players. Most people don't play with the official rules, to the extent that they won't even announce which house rule sets they play with when the game begins.
  • Omitting the score mechanic. In the official rules, the first player to get rid of their cards in a round receives points for all of the cards left in their opponents' hands, and the winner is the first to 500 points. Alternatively, you can score each player according to the cards they have left, with the lowest score winning once someone hits 500 points. Most players just want to shed cards, so they ignore this and just declare the first player to get rid of their cards the winner. The remaining players may or may not keep playing for 2nd, 3rd, etc.
  • Allowing a Draw Four to be played at any time. The official rules state that you can't play one if you have another card in your hand that matches the color on the discard pile, and that anyone can challenge a Draw Four play. If someone gets busted for an illegal Draw Four play, they have to draw four instead... but if the play turns out to be legal, the challenger faces a six-card penalty. Many players ignore this bluffing rule because they don't like it or aren't aware that it exists.
  • Allowing Draw Two/Draw Four cards to be stacked. In the official rules, you'd just have to eat that Draw Two/Four, while the house rule lets you stack another card on top of it, forcing the next person to draw the cumulative number of cards unless they can add to the pile.
• In the official Sorry! rules, you have to move according to the card you draw, with your only decision being which pawn to move. A popular variation gives players more options by giving them a hand of 3-5 cards, and choosing which one to play each turn, then drawing a replacement.
• Wingspan:
  • The official rule is that you draw five birds at the start of the game. However, many players think it's frustrating to get a bad opening hand that leads to a clunky early game, so they've come up with house rules to keep it from happening or at least make it less likely. Common options include drafting birds at the beginning of the game, drawing more than five birds, or offering some kind of mulligan.
  • It's common to nerf (or just remove) the Power 4, in particular the Ravens, as they're High Tier Scrappies.
  • Many dirty-minded players like to let birds like Azure Tit and American Woodcock count towards the Anatomist bonus card ("Birds with body parts in their names").
  • The Oceania Expansion introduces the popular "No Goal" end-of-round goal. It has the additional effect that you don't have to put an action cube on it, which means that you'll have more actions for the rest of the game. It's especially nice in round 1, as it gives you the most additional actions. Additionally, round 1 is when the end-of-round goal mechanic adds the least to the game because you get so little time to plan for it. This leads to house rules like always moving this "goal" to round 1 when it shows up, or simply using it for round 1 in every game.
  • Some people dislike how plentiful nectar is, and use a combination of Oceania food dice (nectar) and the base game's dice (no nectar) to make it rarer. This became an Ascended House Rule in the Asia expansion, though as a way to split one set of Oceania dice between two groups.

Collectible Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering has had all sorts of popular fanmade rules:
  • Rules taken for granted today like the limit of 4 of each card and "play or draw" (the choice between going first or being able to draw an extra card) started as house rules.
  • One particular unofficial multiplayer format that evolved for Magic is the Five Colour Format, which has massive 200 (or 500) -card decks that require all 5 colours to have at least a minor presence in the deck.
  • Elder Dragon Highlander was a particularly popular unofficial format, allowing for multiplayer and having its own official unofficial rules put together by people outside of Wizards of the Coast. It was later renamed Commander and promoted to an official WotC format that receives dedicated products.
  • Oathbreaker, a fan-made format with some parallels to Commander, was popular around 2019. Oddly enough, Wizards chose to make it Ascended House Rules in 2023.
• Pokémon: One of the most popular alternative formats is Gym Leader Challenge. In addition to using the expanded format, which includes cards from all past expansions through Black and White, Gym Leader Challenge adds three rules to the normal rules: All Poémon in a player's deck must be the same type, Pokémon with a rulebox and Ace Spec item cards are not allowed, and only one of each card other than basic energy may be in a player's deck. The format is so popular that it even sees play in side events at official competitions.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: One of the most popular alternative ways to play is Goat Format, named so for both the prevalence of the spell Scapegoat as well as being the "greatest of all time". It uses the card pool, rules, and banlist of the game in April of 2005, which was considered a standout among older players since it's when the game broke out of its Early-Installment Weirdness and had a tonne of deck variety but hadn't devolved into combo-centric Power Creep yet. Other popular formats include Reaper and Edison, based on newer but equally diverse old metas.

Sports

• Recreational golfers playing games between themselves may agree on rules just between themselves for the duration of whatever game they're playing. Common examples are that any putt less than a particular length (commonly set as the distance between one's putter head and the grip on the other end of the putter's shaft) is considered "good" and can be picked up as if one had tapped it in, you can roll your ball over in the fairway (usually to get out of divots), or "putt and pick up" (take one putt, if it doesn't go in, pick your ball up as if you had made the second putt) on recently "airified" greens.
• Rugby rules are mostly set in stone, but for "friendly" matches between usually amateur clubs, the rules regarding substitutions may be relaxed. "Rolling subs" sets no limit on the amount of substitutions one team can make, and allows players who have come off to come back on (provided they came off and weren't sent off). This will allow recreational clubs to substitute less in-shape players in and out as stoppages in play allow, let everyone get in on the play and have some fun, and possibly let clubs with "test" matches (matches whose results actually count for the purposes of a league table, tournament qualification, or the like) try out different players and schemes in advance of those test matches.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech tends to be fairly firm in its ruleset, though there are a few recurring types of house rules that turn up.
  • Relaxed restrictions on wheeled vehicles, allowing them to enter rough ground at a movement penalty rather than cutting them off entirely.
  • Ultra autocannon unjam rules similar to the rotary autocannon unjam rules.
  • Relaxed restrictions on Land-Air 'Mech construction rules. Normally the Land-Air 'Mech unit class is not permitted to use highly desirable weight-saving technologies that would permit them some relevance in 3050-onwards (ostensibly as a balancing measure, but mostly to keep the notoriously litigious Harmony Gold from honking out another lawsuit). Fans of Land-Air 'Mechs tend to ignore these restrictions so that the class is not fully relegated to obsolescence.
  • Anti-infantry rules for PPCs, which are canonically charged particle weapons with an explosive impact. This allows PPC-armed 'Mechs such as the Awesome to sweep away pesky infantry with ease rather than constantly firing its main battery at a single infantry platoon for several rounds on end just to be rid of it.
  • Headshot ejection rules. Normally headshots that decapitate a 'Mech instantly kill the pilot. Some tables permit a roll for ejection chance to save the pilot. Very common for games where pilots are actual characters in the infantry-scale Mechwarrior RPG played alongside the tabletop wargame.
  • Reactor explosions occurring if a fusion engine suffers three critical hits in one turn; normally this would cause an instant shutdown of the reactor and count as the (salvageable) destruction of the unit, but some tables use the cinematic reactor explosion option based on the Expanded Universe novels. This house rule is unique in that it has a universally accepted name: Stackpoling, based on author Michael Stackpole, who was fond of writing reactor explosions into the various battles in his novels, far more often than 'Mechs should explode normally.
  • There's also "Cinematic Battletech" which doubles all weapon damage (except for shots that strike the head) and forces all critical hit rolls to add +1 to the result (meaning greater odds for critical damage). This makes the game much more dramatic in the 3025 timeframe and frighteningly lethal in any era after 3050 (a Gauss rifle will stove in most medium 'Mechs on a single center torso hit!).
• Blood on the Clocktower has a Fabled called Bootlegger that, when put in play, allows Storytellers to use their own custom roles or rules. Some of these custom rules that have gained some popularity include:
  • On the first night, the Snake Charmer makes their pick before the Demon and Minion are told who each other is. This eliminates the rare but still possible scenario of the Snake Charmer swapping roles with the Demon on their very first night by sheer luck/unluck and having to play the entire game without any information about who's on their team.
  • The Huntsman, instead of being able to choose a player at night only once in the entire game, can choose a player every night; however, if they pick a Minion, they are permanently drunk and their ability to turn the Damsel into a Townsfolk will no longer work for the rest of the game. This is done to buff the Huntsman, a role that many players consider to be one of the weakest Townsfolk roles due to it always adding the Damsel — an Outsider that can cause the good team to instantly lose if the evil team finds them — and it being difficult to find the Damsel with a one-time-only guess.
  • The Hatter, instead of only letting the Demon change to a different Demon and the Minions to different Minions, lets the Demon change themself into a Minion and vice versa. This is a semi-official variant suggested by the game wiki as an option for playgroups who don't mind extra chaos.
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition had Loads and Loads of Rules, and it was customary for players to ignore at least a few of them. Common ones included not enforcing various Scrappy Mechanic rules, such as the racial class and level limitations or situational weapon modifiers against armor. The game actively encouraged this, and Gary Gygax admitted that even he didn't tend to use the second one in his home games. Some of these were codified in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, and even more came to pass in 3rd.
• Playing Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition without House Rules is nowadays pretty much unheard of. Popular ones include:
  • Critical hits in (A)D&D were house rule territory. A natural 20 might always hit regardless of the target's armor class, but that hit itself was still a perfectly normal one dealing standard damage with no additional effects by the rules as written. (Now, some magic items like wounding and vorpal weapons would have abilities going off on certain high to-hit rolls, but that was just part of their magic, not the overall combat rules.) Then in AD&D 2, critical hits became an "optional" rule in the book. Unfortunately, one of the suggested options for critical hits was that a natural 20 always hits and deals double damage, so anyone who could only be hit on a 20 effectively had half as many total hit points!
    • So "AD&D 2.5" (Player's Options) got two critical hits options, one of them being a reasonably detailed and unified way to use both Subsystem Damage and Hit Point systems. To handle really big critters (giants vs. zaratan sort of thing) "believably" it needed expansion of size categories, but its uniformity made this trivial.
  • "Confirming" critical hits. PO did it via victim's saving throw. D&D 3 did it via requiring a second attack roll — many players took the opportunity to house rule that part out since it slowed down play.
  • A number of late-run 3.0 books were designed to be easily adapted to 3.5, but still require certain degrees of interpretation.
  • The 3.5 book Unearthed Arcana was nothing but a collection of common house rules as official variant rules. Since it was released under the OGL license it's available as part of the SRD online.
  • Natural 1s and 20s are very frequent house rule targets across the board. Many DMs consider them automatic success/failure on almost any sort of roll, and sometimes add additional effects to be rolled on a natural 20. By default, the only normal rolls affected in any special way by a natural 1 or 20 are attack rolls, saves, and the Use Magic Device skill. (In fact, some books explicitly state that 1 and 20 are not special on skill checks, but many DMs make them special anyway) One solution made a better use of the "exploding dice" probability regression mechanics AD&D2 had for firearms. Another used extra condition "and beat the target number by X", used in PO.
  • Rather than simply an automatic hit or miss, there are numerous homebrew tables for adding extra effects to critical hits and fumbles. Opinions are divided on these, though, as while they might make a fight more colorful, they tend to disproportionately affect the martial characters who make far more rolls than the mages. Some DMs split the difference and prefer to just narratively describe the action (or encourage the player to do so) without mechanically altering the outcome.
  • The 3.x Diplomacy rules are particularly conspicuous, as, by the book, a focused character can persuade a horde of bloodthirsty enemies he does not share a language with to "take risks to aid" him in approximately six seconds. Unfortunately, some common house rules result in things like noblemen refusing to accept taxes from peasants because the deal of "I give you money for nothing" isn't rewarding enough to overcome the level difference.
  • Probably one of the most popular house rules in the 3rd Edition is adding experience points after each accomplishment (eg. defeating a monster) instead of at the end of each adventure (as suggested in Player's Handbook). Obviously the limit of one level-up per adventure is usually omitted as well.
  • The complete inverse is popular, too: ignore all of the math around tracking experience points, and everyone levels up when the GM says so. Removing that bit of accounting saves sanity for both GMs and players. It does, however, interact problematically with magic item creation, spells, and other systems that involve spending experience points. Lots of house rules, in fact, revolve around ignoring unwieldy rules or not tracking cumbersome equipment.
  • Many groups implement more generous ability score generation methods than the defaults listed in the book or allow rerolls when a character is stuck with nigh unplayable stats. This was more common in earlier editions when Honest Rolls Character was the default (six ability scores rolled in order with no rerolls). With 3rd Edition, the rules were changed to favor above average rolls (since the main characters are heroes) and to allow a complete set of rolls to be thrown out if they didn't meet certain minimum criteria. Point buy is also an official rule variant. So now, the Honest Rolls Character is a house rule.
  • Different groups have different rules on when you are allowed to reroll dice. Some say that you have to take the roll regardless of whether the die falls in the toilet, while other groups say that if the die hits something on the table (and you don't like the result) you can reroll it. Of course, the latter rule requires honest players who don't deliberately throw dice at obstacles.
• Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition has received such a plethora of House Rules that it would take a dedicated page just to list them all. All that can be said for now is that it has led to tales from players and DMs alike, and even the famous Critical Role show.
  • Fifth Edition has a rule where a Natural 20 on an attack roll always hits, regardless of the target's armor class. By the same token, a Natural 1 always misses, even if it would have met the target's armor class. However, this has led to a house rule of a Nat 20 always succeeding on a skill check or saving throw, or lowering the DC for that particular check/save, even if the DC was above the Nat 20's final roll.
  • Encumbrance is the amount of weight that a Player Character can carry at one time, which is the character's Strength score multiplied by five. Going above this lowers a character's speed by ten feet, and going way above it imposes disadvantage on multiple checks and saves until they lose some of that weight. However, weight rules are usually house-ruled to either make some objects "weightless" (like money, so PCs can carry as much coin as they want), or the rules on encumbrance are just outright ignored.
  • Spells with a price value mean the caster has to have the money or item worth said amount of money to cast it. Since this tends to make said spells either not helpful due to the tedium of having to go shopping, or always have the exact amount of gold to cast it, once a party reaches a certain amount of collective wealth, most DMs tend to rule that as long as the party has enough gold to cover the cost, you can cast the spell and just take the amount of gold out of the collective party wealth so as to not be stuck shopping or having to worry about the practicality of casting certain spells. Similarly, characters who use ranged weapons tend to be given infinite ammo, and only tend to be told to keep track of special ammo, over worrying about having to buy a ton of cheap ammo.
• Exalted second edition has had many rules issues that led to everything from minor tweaks to massive mechanical rewrites to get rid of the problems. For example, some groups issue XP at character creation instead of the normal point-buy or hand out bonus points instead of XP, since the character creation system has flat costs for attributes and abilities while XP-based advancement has each dot cost progressively more, leading to people who failed to optimise being left in the dust due to the higher cost of reaching the same levels as their more min-maxed peers. Others have engaged in enormous projects to rewrite the more catastrophically broken material, such as most of Scroll of the Monk.
• The Fantasy Trip specifies that characters die when they reach 0 hit points, no exceptions. Most players find this a bit harsh, especially since player characters start with an average of 10 hp and rarely get much above 16, and healing is pretty severely limited. So most campaigns either have an "official house rule" allowing characters to survive having their hit points reduced to 0 or below, or the GM does a lot of fudging.
• Firestorm Armada: It's incredibly common for people to play this game with custom designed ships.
• GURPS: A popular house rule that became canonical was the change to hit and fatigue points. Formerly, fatigue points (tiredness) was based on Strength, while hit points (being cut to pieces-ness) was based on Health. Compendium I suggested reversing them; after all, muscles can help stop injury, while someone who's fit should have more endurance in a marathon, right? As of 4th edition, that's official. (Also helps mages from trying to get 12 ST to help get the FP needed for their magic..)
• Kobolds Ate My Baby: Though it's technically not an official rule, it's near universally agreed for all players to hail King Tord whenever his name is mentioned.
• Mutants & Masterminds is built on this trope. In a game where it's very easy (and surprisingly affordable) to get infinite attacks in a round, the core rule book spends a great deal of time letting the GM know that they have every right to disallow certain 'legal' actions. It's also not uncommon for certain rules to be ignored if they'll slow down the game.
• Rifts, in particular, is often modified. It's intentionally created with no balance to speak of, and each power, spell, and piece of technology is written without considering how it interacts with the rest of the system. Most of the rules were initially created for other Palladium games that focused on human (or human-ish) characters: Ninjas & Superspies, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Robotech, etc. Since Rifts has everything from super-powered humans to giant mecha to demons to gods in it, there aren't any guidelines for, say, when your martial arts stop being effective. (6-foot human throwing a 7-foot insect with Judo? Not mentioned, but probably okay. 6-foot human throwing a 25-foot demon? Still not mentioned.) For bonus points, the rules are (intentionally?) just slightly vague. For extra special bonus points, the entire Palladium game system (of which Rifts is a member) is supposedly cross-compatible, but each particular game uses slightly different rules. House Rules to the rescue! Even the creator of Rifts uses house rules in his own campaign, though he refuses to put them in an update supplement, even as optional rules.
• Spirit of the Century despite being the first FATE game to hit the market had a notoriously bad stress system that was almost universally house ruled over. There are still a great many variations out there.
  • When Dresden Files came out it used one of these variations to have consequences be conditional, but mostly left things the same save for decreasing just how much stress characters could take. Well, without getting into Toughness Powers.
  • To wit, pretty much any incarnation of the Fate system post-SotC handled stress differently from it, and not all of them even did it the same way — Evil Hat's own The Dresden Files shortened the stress track as above, Cubicle 7's licensed twins Starblazer Adventures and Legends Of Anglerre kept the length but turned the tracks strictly linear so that each point of damage would take off a box...
  • In addition, pretty much every incarnation of the Fate system invites players and Game Masters to create their own stunts as needed, though earlier versions with their extensive stunt shopping lists could make this task look rather daunting. The Fate Core System released in 2013 explicitly puts the responsibility of customizing the system to their own needs more into each playing group's own hands — tweaking the skill list to taste, creating new stunts and other add-on "extras", it's all on the table, usually complete with guidelines, explanations, and examples.
• Star Wars d20 has a common house rule regarding Force Points^note Force points allow, among other things, players to roll a given number of six sided dice and add the best one to an attack roll or skill check, or fall unconscious from an attack that should kill them. Normally, players gain a certain amount every time they level up but a common house rule is to gain a smaller amount every day instead. Likewise, because Destiny Points are ludicrously overpowered (allowing things like making an attack automatically crit or an attack against the player automatically miss), a common house rule puts a cap on how many players are allowed to have at one time^note Unlike Force Points which have a set maximum equal to the amount a player gains when they level up, Destiny Points have no cap but players only get one with each level up.
• Victory in the Pacific often uses a few of these when experienced players meet, because the game's balance varies at different levels of skill (newbies tend to find the Allies easier to play, casual players with some experience tend to find it evenly-matched, and serious players tend to find the Japanese favored). Most of them revolve around changing the opening turn's surprise attack to guarantee preservation of all five US carriers — while the chance for the Japanese to take out an American carrier is realistic, it tends to make things very difficult for the Allied player.
• Actively condoned by the rulebooks of Warhammer 40,000, which generally operates by the idea that if you and your opponent agree to the house rule, why not?
  • The "snake eyes on a Leadership test means an automatic pass" rule was taken from 40K and absorbed into the Warhammer Fantasy house-rule pool so spectacularly that a) many people were convinced it was an actual rule and b) with the latest edition these people became right.
  • Fans of Warhammer Fantasy got tired of waiting for Games Workshop to publish rules for armies from the parts of the world map that approximately correspond to North Africa and Asia, and set out to create their own army books. To date, Cathay, Albion, Araby, Nippon, and Estalia have got fan-made army books.
  • Warhammer 40,000 has got an expansive group of house rules floating around on the internet, including among other things rules for fighting battles set during the Horus Heresy, a fan-made 5th edition Inquisition Codex, rules for designing your own Special Characters, rules for designing Land Raider variants, and Apocalypse formations for large numbers of Exorcist tanks.
  • These days, Mordheim has been abandoned by GW, so a variety of sources have put together a series of campaigns and variant rules for taking the system out of the ruins of the titular city.
  • By far the most ambitious attempt is Waffle Edition 40K which is trying to re-balance the WHOLE GAME after 6th edition produced little of value while screwing up the balance even more. Progress has been slow though and a lot of people have given up on it.
• The Witcher: Game of Imagination: Movement is a Dump Stat. Its only two purposes are to determine how far you can travel in battle (where you'll be at melee range soon enough anyway) and in the field (where you're usually riding a mount). Resultingly, players often derive these from another stat to save stat points.

Video Games

• Many player enjoy playing Pokémon using Smogon's rulesets on the battle simulator Pokémon Showdown!. These rules are designed to make the game more competitive by restricting/banning broken stuff and stuff that pushes the game towards Luck-Based Mission territory. To allow more Pokémon to see use, they are divided into Character Tiers, each of which have their own metagames. Also, importantly, while official VGC formats use doubles, Smogon mostly uses singles.

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