PF2 went one step further and made the skill system followPathfinder was horrid for having feats do that (with over a 1000)...
Me: My PC (an alchemist) collects the troll's blood/monster venom/etc so we can use it to make healing potions/poison/etc later
DM: Sorry, you need a feat to do that.
I bolded some of the things I take issue with here.
There is definitely at the very least a potential difference between rules and rulings. Even a fair and impartial DM might not always (if ever) be able come up with a waterproof and definitive rule to cover a situation that comes up that the rules as we understand them (or can find in the moment ) do not cover on the fly.
It is much more common, in my experience, for a DM to say, "Let's say it works like this for now and move on, and then revisit it when we have time to think it through in more detail beyond this specific instance." This is because a ruling to cover a specific instance of a situation that comes up may not be good enough to handle the same situation in a different instance because of a bunch of variables we don't have time or ability to account for at the table.
Later when that ruling is returned to between sessions (for example), the table and DM can decide, if they are going to make this ruling into an actual a rule, if another rule or house rule exists that might cover it better, of if the "good enough for now" rule will stay in place until further examples come in.
None of that has to do with whim or tyranny or even an increasingly codified game.
Mother May I. A derogatory term for referee authority.I got as far as the first sentence of the first post... What's MMI?
A Creation Myth
Once upon a time there was a giant, sleeping afloat in a vast and empty sea. As he slept, he dreamed of fruit-filled gardens and yellow flowers, and he dreamed for so long and with such love that his body hollowed away entirely, until he was nothing but a skeleton among the waves.
One day, a traveling woman docked her boat and set foot among the bones of the sleeping giant, and found the last vestiges of the dream inside his skull. That night, as she slept inside his ribcage, she dreamed the giant’s dream — although it was not exactly his, for the fruits were different and the flowers were blue.
When the woman awoke she took the giant’s dream and her own dream, and used them to plant many flowers nestled among the giant’s bones. And as more people arrived, they brought their own dreams, until what was once a skeleton was filled with countless blooming fruit trees and many flowers of every color there is.
And they called the giant Game Text, and the garden the Game, and these people understood that the process of game design is simply constructing skeletons for dreams.
Among a certain group of people, there is a driven need to use a mocking term (we'll call it "MMI") to refer to playing D&D and other types of games.