-I'll never understand how people say "well that's not really 5E you're talking about" when they notice several differences in my play. So far as I'm aware all the editions have explicitly encouraged home brewing.
No, you never needed that permission, that's something you always had permission to do. You have that permission for any game you ever play. I mean, if you went to a restaurant and ordered food but it didn't come with any sides and you were told to just make your own, would you credit those sides to the restaurant? Why do you do it with D&D?
-It's plenty relevant. I gave an example of an encounter resolved through social means and another encounter resolved by using the environment. Both of these things often happen regardless of how legalistic you are about following the published rules, or what you consider "actually 5E" or not.
Eh, you provided examples of freeplay, not really social resolution. And ad hoc GM rulings for what happens. You could have used the same approach to resolve anything. And there were rules that addressed this.
-No of course I don't use every little noodly rule. No one could or should be expected to remember how everything works, or slavishly follow everything the PHB, DMG, etc. proscribes.
I know, when I play Monopoly I tell other people that they're just silly for not understanding that I can use 8d6 pick 2 for going around the board!
You're absolutely welcome to play however you want. It comes down to when you're discussing the game with other people a common understanding is important. If you're trying to add to a conversation about how 5e works, then your personal take isn't part of that shared understanding. The rules in the book, however, are. If you're diverging, that's great, but it doesn't mean that your points hold equal or greater weight when discussing the game in general.
But, yeah, my point was that you were ignoring the systems already there to handle these things, and that's going off the path into homebrew.
I mean you're really asking me whether I used something in the DMG when the players are only expected to need the PHB anyways? That entire book is optional. It's just another splat book like the rest of the stuff not in the core PHB. The same is true of the MM.
No, the DMG isn't optional. Nor is the MM. You have to make a specific house rule to treat it as such. Which you can do, but that's no longer discussing 5e but rather a game you play with pieces of 5e.
Were people who played 5E before the other literature not playing 5E?
Yes, people playing a game they thought was 5e prior to the release of the 5e rulebooks were not actually playing 5e. Even when only the PHB was out, games played then were using incomplete rules for 5e, so claiming they were fully playing 5e is not a thing.
-When did I credit my homebrew back to 5E? How am I "not playing 5E"? It literally says in most editions of the game that you're fully encouraged to view it as guidelines. Homebrewing always has been and always will be just another part of the game, and the literature acknowledges this.
You just did it, again. You said that homebrew was allowed under 5e (it's really just something you could do anyway) and implying that therefore homebrewing is still playing 5e. This is crediting your homebrew back to 5e.
Look at Greyhawk, the first supplement. There's a section where Gary talks about players riding a T-Rex, and trying all kinds of other stuff. He says that's awesome, that he's the same way, and that the core rules were only guidelines.
5e is not the same edition as that. D&D is not a continuous string of the same game with various optional rules added from time to time. Each edition is, in fact, a separate game, a separate RPG. One of the biggest hurdles to clear discussion about how 5e works are people that assume that they already know how to play D&D and so don't need to read or abide by the full set of rules. That's just people playing their own game and borrowing from 5e when they want to.
I mean, I've played some heavily modified 5e in the past (I don't bother much with modding these days, my campaign rulesheet is almost always less than half a page). I'm not against doing this. I do not claim or think that modding 5e is bad, or wrong. It's hella fun! It's just also not conducive to any discussion if we're all running on our home game assumptions when discussing with people we don't play with.
Now if you want to say "5E makes it hard to find social solutions instead of combat" you could have said that. But you just nitpicked how I figured out this or that little element, and missed the forest for the trees telling me I'm not playing 5E and shouldn't be on here talking like that was 5E, even though it was very much 5E.
The only way 5e makes it hard is that it thoroughly incentives combat as an always present solution with rewards for engaging in it. The social interaction mechanics in the DMG are both pretty decent and pretty easy to implement and should already follow in general shape what people claim to do with freeplay.
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