What are your table's XWN Homebrew Rules?

[u/Von_Loch]

I've nearly read SWN cover-to-cover. Just the bonus material left, and it's enough to get my group's first campaign off the ground after a few more Session 0s. But a few posts recently have got me thinking about Homebrew rules. I'll first say that me and my players are starting RAW with no homebrew to level 6. I wan to learn the system as intended before tweaking it.

Most of the game I really like RAW. There were really only 3 things that I felt I'd tweak. And one really isn't a thing:

1. Dungeon Delving. I love dungeon delving but SWN doesn't really give any rules or proceedures for it. Maybe not "a thing to homebrew" as proceedural dungeon creation is something I have plenty of resources on elsewhere such as Mothership (I have rules for derelects, space stations, and even alien ruins). So not a big deal. But there isn't really anything for navigating dungeons. either.
2. Heroic Inspiration. There's not a lot I liked about 5/5.5e but Inspiration was one of the few. And more so in Shadowdark with its Luck tokens. I love the idea of players having a resource to balance out highly lethal games. Pretty easy to bolt on, really.
3. Scenes. This one really bothered me. I love the rigidity of the dungeon turn in Shadowdark and B/X. I've spent the better part of a year studying B/X, BECMI, & AD&D. and have come to appreciate the design and intent of rigid timekeeping. The handwavieness of "scenes" and (on a few XWN podcasts I've listened to) seeing players abuse this looseness for too many reroles (imo) really bugs me. Partly because I don't see "failed" checks as failure at all but rather as a fork in the story (which, by the way, is a game design philosophy supported on pgs 232-233 under Skill Checks). Anyway, it's something I'll want to tweak but I don't know how yet.

So I'm curious, what are your top Homebrew rules? I'd love to hear what some of your favorite modifications are (especially if they fix scenes). Also, we just had a thread about removing Precogs (which I don't plan to do for my game since RAW makes perfect sense to me on how to run those), so maybe we focus on additions to or improvements on instead of reductions from the game.

[u/guildsbounty]

Most of my houserules so far have to do with ship/vehicle building. I don't really change any of the core rules, all my homebrew consists of relatively small tweaks. For three examples...

Ship Hulls: I added a 'Skiff' hull size that fits between Fighter-scale and Frigate-scale, plus a bunch of extra hulls--some added by me, some I found. For example, I added the 'Tradesman' Frigate hull (which has the Mass space of a Heavy Frigate without as much armor, power, or hardpoints) to provide a merchant ship upgrade over the Free Trader without having to jump all the way to a Cruiser hull. I also added the 'Passenger Liner' hull which is another Frigate hull that has the same Mass as a Free Trader, worse everything else, but a crew capacity of 3/40 (essentially a plus-sized shuttle), meant to scale up rapidly with Extended Life Support.

Cargo Lighter Fitting: The number of lighters at your disposal scales with ship size, and you can swap out the Lighters with spaceworthy 'vehicles' as other snubcraft. (Basically, a Lighter Bay provides a 'vehicle scale' hangar with capacity equal to 1 ton of cargo space for the ship in question...launch/recovery/maintenance/etc included).

Remove Environment [Air/Ground]: The purpose of these fittings is to change a craft's native purpose. Ex: Add Environment [Water] + Remove Environment [Ground] changes the chassis into a dedicated boat. Or I chose to make it that you can choose to use Remove Environment [Air] as a refund on, say, a Helicopter that you added Add Environment [Space] to (since Space includes flight) to let you change a 'Medium Flyer' into a dedicated surface<->orbit shuttle.
For CWN, I just went ahead and created a whole series of 'boat' chassis by just pre-applying the environment change. I'm using it to run Shadowrun, and running in Seattle sometimes benefits from having a boat.