Unearthed Arcana An Unearthed Arcana I would like to see - mechanical fixes

[doctorbadwolf]

It may be a skill, but it's simply not possible for them to know my game better than I do, so I'm the one who should be creating the house rules for it, not them. My skill at my game exceeds their skill at general game creation.

I don't like the one reaction a round, but I'm giving it more time before I change it. I MAY(I'm mulling it over) decide to give 2 reactions, no two of which can be the same kind of reaction, so not two opportunity attacks or no two spell reactions. I don't need a designer to come up with that. Nor do I need their expertise or playtesting to see how it affects my game.

Okay. That isn’t related to what I said, though.

They’re probably better at making broadly applicable rules changes than you are. Many people want a single houserule per “problem” that they can confidently apply to all their 5e games, regardless of what characters are being played.

Others aren’t as confident as you are in their ability to foresee unintended consequences of a rules change, or simply don’t want to have to change their houserule down the line. The dev team is better at that than most DMs.

It’s not a question of who knows a specific table better. It’s a question of who is more skilled at making rules that won’t create surprise problems down the line, and will work as intended most of the time, efficiently and without needing extra rules to manage the house rules.

 

[Immoralkickass]

A UA fixing mechanical issues would be like Wotc admitting they were wrong, and they can't have that! That's why there was the UA Fighter: Brute, instead of them coming out and fix the Champion.

If I were them, I too would never admit I am wrong, and if you disagree with me, you probably didnt read it close enough, or interpret it wrongly. But its ok, 2 years later I will probably release another ruling on twitter, but I am still right.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It may be a skill, but it's simply not possible for them to know my game better than I do, so I'm the one who should be creating the house rules for it, not them. My skill at my game exceeds their skill at general game creation.

That's exactly the advice I was going to give.

Even for someone with no history of homebrewing, you are the only one who knows what needs to be fixed in order to achieve your own goals, which makes you the one best suited toward fixing it. If you understand the rules well enough to find fault with them, then you understand them well enough to fix them.

 

[5ekyu]

"Quote Originally Posted by clearstream View Post
I value their expertise as designers specialising in D&D-style RPGs, and their access to design resources such as salient data sets, time and playtesting. That's an important part of why I part with money for their game rulebooks"



Sigh....
Re-quoted for the umpteenth time is the best advice to ever to be given by the game designers. It's from page B3, Part 1: Introduction, 2nd column 3rd paragraph, of my copy of the 1981 BASIC rulebook. I assume it's written by Tom Moldvay.
Bolded parts theirs, not mine.

"While the material in this booklet is referred to as rules, that is not really correct. Anything in this booklet (and other D&D booklets) should be thought of as changeable - anything, that is, that the Dungeon Master or referee thinks should be changed. This is not to say that everything in this booklet should be discarded! All of this material has been carefully thought out and playtested. However, if, after playing the rules as written for a while, you or your referee (the Dungeon Master) think something should be changed, first think about how the changes will affect the game, and then go ahead. The purpose of these "rules" is to provide guidelines that enable you to play and have fun, so don't feel absolutely bound by them."

Gygax wrote similar advice in the 1e books.

For those of you wanting WoTC to address your very minor problems, you should take into account that:
1) These things might be working exactly as they intended.... Didn't think of that, did you?
2) These things don't register as being important enough to waste their time tweaking.
3) Despite the vast quantity & quality of material that's come along since I first opened that BASIC book nearly 40 years ago, you're STILL involved in a very "do it yourself hobby". So get busy & modify those rules in whatever way your games need.
4) Stop trying to claim your too busy to change a rule you don't like.
You've already thought about it - in the shower, during your commute, while you're slacking off at work/school, during that block of time you've already set aside to play the game....
You've also wasted time posting about what you dislike & how you wish WoTC would spoon feed you alt rules. In some cases you've even posted exactly WHAT you want them to feed you.
You've already invested the time, so go implement your ideas in the only environment that matters - your game.
5) Stop thinking the designers are better at this than you are.

All i will say is these two things (hah, fat chance)

I have been making up home rules for my table longer than some of them have been alive for thos game and others. For more systems too.

I know more about our table, our players, our campaign than *they* do and whatever rules *they* developed for their *standard party in a typical game* are very much aimed at a different target and a wider audience - so - taking a good set of rpg rules and then house ruling it is as natural a thing to me as cooking from a recipe and adjusting seasoning, ingredients, quantities and cooking times to "taste" to better fit my table and my guests.

 

[5ekyu]

They do... in the DMG... under Variant Rules.
Which is dumb.

PHB right?

 

[5ekyu]

Most DMs aren’t a team of game designers who literally do this for a living, all day, every day, with a couple dozen or more playtesters for any idea they want to put out.

Nor are game designers necessarily more knowledgable of the type of events at your table that might be creating some of the concerns than you are.

If you were cooking a recipe and it had an ingredient you did not like or were allergic to, would you cook it and suffer thru until the cookbook guys changed their recipe?

Maybe 95 out of 101 recipes are good for you, but you dont have to cook the other six without change because they were in the book along with the others, right?

 

[5ekyu]

THIS.

I actually think a lot of the "problems" people have with the 5e rules are really "things that bug them personally" and not actually problems during play. When 5e came out, I house-ruled a bunch of stuff. But after playing and DMing a semi-open table at a gaming store for a few years, I found that explaining the house rules to new players actually sucked a lot more than just following the RAW and dealing with the "problems." Because it turns out that most of the "problems" just didn't matter in game play; the game worked just fine and people had plenty of fun. So over time, my house-rules list has shrunk to the point where now I have just one house-rule, a variant Inspiration system. (To be fair, many of my house rules were involved downtime activities, which got a substantial revision in Xanathar's -- so maybe there was a real problem there.) That's just my experience, and it's possible that I'm projecting my own flaws onto others, but I think I'm not alone in mistaking perceived "problems" for actual ones.

Yes, house rules to **fix problems* imo should start at *what are the problems they have caused in play?* or in a few rare cases *will it cause* if its grossly out of whack.

These are however different from house rules to help reflect a given setting better than the core rules *generic setting.*

 

[5ekyu]

Okay. That isn’t related to what I said, though.

They’re probably better at making broadly applicable rules changes than you are. Many people want a single houserule per “problem” that they can confidently apply to all their 5e games, regardless of what characters are being played.

Others aren’t as confident as you are in their ability to foresee unintended consequences of a rules change, or simply don’t want to have to change their houserule down the line. The dev team is better at that than most DMs.

It’s not a question of who knows a specific table better. It’s a question of who is more skilled at making rules that won’t create surprise problems down the line, and will work as intended most of the time, efficiently and without needing extra rules to manage the house rules.

Sorry but no.

It doesnt matter how broadly applicable a rule is when it comes to my table or really anyones table. I have np problem with *them* building rules for a broad audience, thats grest but what matters to me directly is how it works at my table with our players... Not anywhere else.

 

[Maxperson]

Okay. That isn’t related to what I said, though.

They’re probably better at making broadly applicable rules changes than you are. Many people want a single houserule per “problem” that they can confidently apply to all their 5e games, regardless of what characters are being played.

It is related, because unless they are running for several different groups(a rarity in my experience), they don't need a broadly applicable rule. They need one that works for their group, and the DM, possibly with the aid of the players, is the best one to come up with that rule.

Others aren’t as confident as you are in their ability to foresee unintended consequences of a rules change, or simply don’t want to have to change their houserule down the line. The dev team is better at that than most DMs.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who aren't willing to make simple corrections to choices that go wrong. That's a part of being DM. Nobody gets it right as soon as they buy the books, or even the first time they DM after having played. DMs make mistakes and need to be willing to correct those mistakes. Correcting a rule they make up is no different.

 

[Charlaquin]

Here’s what I don’t get. Ok, so you’re confident in your ability to House rule to fit the needs of your group, and value your ability to do so. That’s great! More power to you.

Why, oh why, do you react so defensively when someone else says they’d like to see some WotC-created rules variants? The existence of such “official house rules” in no way hampers your game, and could improve the games of others who lack your surety in messing with the rules, so why would you want to deprive them of that?