The Crimson Binome
Hero
Hence why he would want to house rule those issues out before the players get to them, so they aren't put into a position where they had to defend anything. Which, tangentially, is why it doesn't matter how you argue whether HP are observable in-game, since the DM has already decided that they are; and thus, the players won't need to justify acting on that information.On the other hand, if he actually tried to impose his playstyle, and made players defend their decisions as character-knowledge-driven, I suspect his tables wouldn't stay full.
More generally, the whole "rules as physics" approach really works well to ensure that players are never forced to deal with meta-game mechanics. If your fighter was actually living in a world where they knew that they could perform Come And Get It exactly once per day, and that it would always work that one time, and everyone else in the world knew that, because that's how the world works and this experiment gives consistent results, then that absurd world could be played entirely in-character. The trade-off, of course, being that it produces an absurd narrative.
Yes, for right or wrong, house rules have a severe stigma attached to them which are likely to turn away players. That's why it's such a betrayal that they would market this game as being for everyone, and then fail to support anything but a very middle-of-the-road audience of players who don't care. Anyone with a strong opinion on any topic - the kind of player who might actually care enough to change rules that they didn't like - is left without the framework or authority to do so, because other players are likely to see those changes as illegitimate.Likewise, if he house-ruled away all the mechanics he dislikes, he might have trouble recruiting players. Not necessarily because they disagree with him philosophically, but because they just want to play the game they know. (Well, and because if you want martial powers to be at-will, you have to either trivialize them, or massively buff everybody else. I don't think most people would enjoy the result as much as they enjoy more mainstream RPGs.)