Pandemonium Society House Rules

by Phenster

I was talking to Ivanhoe at the Game Hoard one day. I invited him and the other big kids from the store to join the Pandemonium Society and play D&D with us. He asked me, "What version do you play?" I said, "What do you mean? We play D&D," and I showed him the rulebook. He said, "Basic is for kids. We play Advanced D&D. It's more sophisticated."

I didn't know what he meant by that. Then he showed me the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks. There's three of them and they have hard covers with colored pictures on the front. The rules look more complicated than ours do, but more sophisticated I don't know about.

In the Pandemonium Society, we only have one D&D book. It has 46 pages and a soft cover. And we use some extra rules too. Hazard calls them "house rules." We make up house rules when we need them, and sometimes we write them down. That makes our game plenty sophisticated. I'll give you some examples.

The rulebook says all weapons roll a 6-sided die for damage. That's nonsense though, because some weapons are heavier than others. So, we say that the light weapons do one less damage point and the heavy weapons do one more point. Some weapons that are extra-heavy, like a two-handed sword, do TWO more points.

Another thing it says in the rulebook is that some weapons go more or less times in a round. That's hard to keep track of, and a weapon that doesn't get to attack in a round is pretty useless. So everybody wanted to fight with a dagger, except Beowulf. That's his campaign name, but we like to call him "the Bully," because he's always getting into fights. When Beowulf the Bully gets into a fight, he likes to use a two-handed sword, so we figured out another way to do it.

We play it where all the weapons only go once per round, except the heavy crossbows, which shoot every other round, so they're still pretty useless. But if your crossbow is already loaded, you can fire it fast, so you shoot first, but only for that go. Both crossbows always shoot last in the round. After bows are fired, if you don't move or do anything else, you can fire again at the end of the round.

Daggers always go last on the first round when you're fighting something. After that, they go first. Two-handed swords, et. al., always go last in the round, unless it's also a long weapon. Long weapons, like pole arms and two-handed swords, go first when closing to hand-to-hand combat, then they go last after that. So, when Beowulf is charging into a horde of orcs with his two-handed sword, he gets the first blow against the first orc that's fighting with an axe. But after that he goes last, until he wins the fight and goes to fight another orc.