House rule

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House rules are rules applying only in a certain location or organization. Bars and pubs in which games take place frequently have house rules posted. For example, it is a house rule in United States Air Force officers' clubs that if an officer enters the club wearing headgear and is officially noticed (i.e., the bell near the bar is rung), the entering officer must buy a round of drinks for the bar.

[edit] Gaming

A common use of the term is in role-playing games to signify a deviation of game play from the official rules. The usage of house rules is encouraged in a number of official game materials, as a way to personalize the game. Many other games do not explicitly encourage house rules, although house rules are commonly used in casual settings. Games that are played in tournaments typically have very explicit official tournament rules that obviate the need for house rules. The anime-based RPG Mekton refers to house rules as "changing the laws of physics."

House rules can range from the tiniest of changes or additions to substantial deviations that alter the entire game play, depending on the imagination of the players. Most groups have house rules to some extent. In miniature wargaming, house rules may be used to represent equally unofficial miniature conversions, or can be used as scenario specific rules. House rules date back to the earliest days of role-playing; the original RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, was originally written as an add-on rules set for the Chainmail historical wargame and as such required the Chainmail rules set to be fully complete; many players who purchased D&D did not own a copy of Chainmail, and simply made up rules to cover the holes in D&D; many of these house rules became the basis for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Even more confusingly, it also required the Avalon Hill game, Outdoor Survival (at the time, Avalon Hill was a huge company and competitor to the tiny Guidon Games, later Avalon Hill and Guidon's successor, TSR, Inc., would both be absorbed by Wizards of the Coast)

Most house rules are made up by the members of a particular group of players, and are never published. Generally, the companies that produce wargames allow their use alongside official rulesets as long as it is non-commercial, as is the case with Games Workshop.^[1] Nevertheless countless of them have been posted on the web or published via other channels, such as the Games Workshop Online Community. In fact, any rule book which is not a part of the core rule books, even if it ultimately comes from the original publishers of the game, could be seen as being house rules.

House rules are sometimes used in board games such as Monopoly as well.

[edit] Footnotes and References