Up On A Soapbox: House (non)-Rules

One of the regular hyperbolic statements those of us who enjoy sci-fi and fantasy miniature games have to endure while perusing the web is "I'm never playing ___________ again!  The new __________ rule totally ruins the game!"

Sinister motives are frequently attributed to rules changes, things like selling more of a certain type of model, bringing balance back to a broken tournament system, etc, etc but the truth (I believe) is that more often than not game designers or game companies are worried about either some notion of game balance or game length.

Back in the youth of sci-fi and fantasy war gaming there really was no play-testing.  If somebody had an idea for a game they published it, if they were really organised the tried a few games out with their personal gaming group and then they published it.  In those days it was not at all uncommon to adopt or invent house-rules to reconcile things that didn't work when you were gaming those systems at home.  Somehow with the growth of both the on line community and various tournament communities there seems to have developed a belief that games must be played as written at all times so that groups of strangers can war game without getting bogged down in endless disputes.  But honestly; how many of us game regularly with strangers?

As war games have grown up I've found that rather than lacking for rules that cover specific situations most of them have far more rules than you will actually use during the playing of your average game.  So here's a thought; what if we ignored the rules we don't like?

I recently had a debate with a gaming friend about a game we both claim to like but we seldom actually play because every time we're done rolling dice and packing away our miniatures we realise we don't actually like that game as much as we thought....but I'm going to end on that one.

Flashing back to my relatively recent past the prime example that came to mind was back when Apocalypse and the Baneblade originally got released for 40K.  I had a friend who really wanted to play with his new shiny plastic Baneblade but he didn't really have an Apocalypse sized force.  We pondered this problem for what in hindsight was an embarrassingly long time before I finally just said "screw it, let's use your Baneblade in a regular 40K game".  I took a few more anti-armour weapons than I would in a normal game and it all more or less balanced out.  in addition no game designers showed up at my house to beat me up for misusing their precious rules and then Internet was completely silent on the issue of how two people played a game amongst themselves.

I also remember more recently there being a big blow back against GW for not initially releasing their flyer rules to independent retailers and therefore a lot of independent retailers banning the use of flyers from their shop events.  Putting aside all the industry-politics and negative feelings of the time what if a group just decided 'no flyers' because they don't like how they impact the game?  Wouldn't that be a valid decision for a group of players to make if they thought it would make their own personal games more fun?

I guess what I'm really trying to say is that when you buy a game; it's YOUR game.  It's not the internet's game, it's not the tournament circuit's game, and it's not the publisher's game so play it the way YOU want to play it.  And you if you have a like-minded group of friends you might find that some games you had soured on or passed over are in fact really fun to play.

So on that note; who says losing your warcaster should immediately end a game of Warmachine?

-Jay