RE-SKINNING: Who needs rules to customize?

I can completely respect that, and I completely concur that neither you nor I are attempting to reach the "my way is better than yours" conclusion.

However, does it not seem to you that some of the rules such as the feats that "skin" magic should be ignored? It certainly seems to me a waste of a feat just to TELL me how to imagine something. It's not like the mechanics are changing in any way when reskinning your magic. I'm sure the feats that theme also change mechanics, but I'm discussing, in this thread, only changing the way something looks to suit the player's self image and self concept of his character.

Take Big Eyes, Small Mouth, for example. Special Attack is a basic, ranged, energy attack that does 15pts of damage (fireball, blast, laser, whatever). There are ways of modifying how the attack behaves and its damage, but it is still up to the player to decide what the attack actually looks like.

Now let's apply that to Magic Missile.

A missile of magical energy darts forth from your fingertip and strikes its target, dealing 1d4+1 points of force damage.

Click to expand...

Nothing in it actually describes the missile. Once upon a time, the rules DID describe it as a golden arrow that floated by the caster until fired. And even if it did, I don't see how the game would be affected other than the player's self image. It may even be interesting for a player to be recognized by how he "colors" his spells:

"I only know of one mage who colors his magic missiles as angry birds. Lothar, is that you my old friend?"

Sekhmet said:

With weapons, it's tough. There is some evidence in history of men wearing non-standard, or altered armor into combat, and it's absolutely fine. If you want to wear "leather armor" that is really just several dozen cured and stiffened leather belts, that's just fine.
However, weapons have been truly designed to be effective in only such a manner as their presented. A wrench is not a combat weapon - it's improvised, and for a reason. It has neither the reach, the balance, or the heft required to be an effective combat tool.
Now, I'm not saying it wouldn't hurt to get hit in the head with a wrench (I know that one first hand), but I'm also saying that it shouldn't be the first thing you go for when you need to defend yourself.

I'm all for slight reskinning of weapons (winged axes instead of bearded axes, spears without metal tips, longknives being used in place of daggers (the difference of 3" and a single edge instead of a double sided blade). It doesn't change the use of the weapon, just the appearance.

With the case of the fantastic throwing weapons, if we examine the caber from Beastmaster, we can find it's really just a discus, which we can equate to a shuriken. Thats fine. Same type of damage, same style of combat, just slightly different look.

Click to expand...

On an unrelated note, yes a wrench is the first thing that many people reach for in a survival situation Ex. Bioshock, Team Fortress 2 Engineer