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What happened to the punk aesthetic in D&D?
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<blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 6995559" data-attributes="member: 6750306"><p>Official material is official...</p><p></p><p>Not everyone has a home game. Many people only play at their local game store, in organized play at some other location, or with strangers online. The only way organized play or online pick-up games work is if everyone is following the same set of rules - that way, anyone can just show up and jump in without having to wonder if their character is going to work the way they think it should, or if the DM is going to allow this home-brewed class they found on somebody's blog.</p><p>On a wider note, it takes time and effort to playtest and tweak things so they work well (or at all) and WotC has a dedicated staff of professional people to do that, whereas most individuals - and even smaller companies - don't have access to that sort of resource to test their creations before unleashing them on the public. Or even just on their own home group, if they have one.</p><p>It's really easy to design something that works for one particular character, or one home play group or particular campaign world, but that one class, feat, houserule or monster that makes your game so cool could easily break someone else's...</p><p></p><p>Back in the day when <em>the only game in existence</em> was your home group, houserules and home-brewed content were the standard expectation. Because it <em>didn't matter</em> whether or not your own inventions worked for anyone else.</p><p>But the home game isn't necessarily the standard anymore, and the internet has been around for decades. Anyone with a keyboard can publish their home-brewed content online, and anyone can steal it for their own use. The corollary to this is that there is now a huge amount of useless trash or hideously broken things floating around as well as all the really good stuff. And you can't always be sure that the creators of things have actually taken the time to sufficiently playtest and quality-check their work before putting it out there. Thus, it takes time and work on the part of the DM running the game into which someone wants to bring that home-made material to vett it for quality and find a way to integrate it into their game. Time and effort they may not have - or, in organized play, <em>authority</em> they may not have.</p><p>In order to have a common community, we all need to be speaking the same language, and in order to have organized community-wide play or to find games run online we all need to follow the same rules.</p><p>The common expectation has to be that any game will follow the default rules and use the official content laid out in the published books.</p><p></p><p>Any perceived shift toward a majority preference for sticking solely to official content is simply a corollary to the factual shift in the target demographic of RPGs as a whole - D&D is no longer mostly played just by teenagers or older wargamers who have a consistent long-term group to play with and copious spare time to dedicate to creating their own home-brewed content and houserules. The official rules and official products have *always* been the necessary starting point for any branching out or replacement that a particular DM or group may do, and now that the game at large is played by a larger demographic that does not necessarily as a default conform to that "traditional" paradigm it becomes necessary for the D&D-playing community as a whole to default to the standard rules and official content being, well... Standard.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Mad_Jack, post: 6995559, member: 6750306"] Official material is official... Not everyone has a home game. Many people only play at their local game store, in organized play at some other location, or with strangers online. The only way organized play or online pick-up games work is if everyone is following the same set of rules - that way, anyone can just show up and jump in without having to wonder if their character is going to work the way they think it should, or if the DM is going to allow this home-brewed class they found on somebody's blog. On a wider note, it takes time and effort to playtest and tweak things so they work well (or at all) and WotC has a dedicated staff of professional people to do that, whereas most individuals - and even smaller companies - don't have access to that sort of resource to test their creations before unleashing them on the public. Or even just on their own home group, if they have one. It's really easy to design something that works for one particular character, or one home play group or particular campaign world, but that one class, feat, houserule or monster that makes your game so cool could easily break someone else's... Back in the day when [I]the only game in existence[/I] was your home group, houserules and home-brewed content were the standard expectation. Because it [I]didn't matter[/I] whether or not your own inventions worked for anyone else. But the home game isn't necessarily the standard anymore, and the internet has been around for decades. Anyone with a keyboard can publish their home-brewed content online, and anyone can steal it for their own use. The corollary to this is that there is now a huge amount of useless trash or hideously broken things floating around as well as all the really good stuff. And you can't always be sure that the creators of things have actually taken the time to sufficiently playtest and quality-check their work before putting it out there. Thus, it takes time and work on the part of the DM running the game into which someone wants to bring that home-made material to vett it for quality and find a way to integrate it into their game. Time and effort they may not have - or, in organized play, [I]authority[/I] they may not have. In order to have a common community, we all need to be speaking the same language, and in order to have organized community-wide play or to find games run online we all need to follow the same rules. The common expectation has to be that any game will follow the default rules and use the official content laid out in the published books. Any perceived shift toward a majority preference for sticking solely to official content is simply a corollary to the factual shift in the target demographic of RPGs as a whole - D&D is no longer mostly played just by teenagers or older wargamers who have a consistent long-term group to play with and copious spare time to dedicate to creating their own home-brewed content and houserules. The official rules and official products have *always* been the necessary starting point for any branching out or replacement that a particular DM or group may do, and now that the game at large is played by a larger demographic that does not necessarily as a default conform to that "traditional" paradigm it becomes necessary for the D&D-playing community as a whole to default to the standard rules and official content being, well... Standard. [/QUOTE]
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