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That's not true; even in a gamist RPG, the GM still has the fundamental duty of all GMs: "Ensure everyone has a good time." Now, when people pick "gamist" play, they're having fun facing down challenges presented by the GM, granting it a semblance of adversarial play. But the "everyone has...

D&D was never all that simulationist.

This is why I like Reign so much. It offers a mechanical reward for losing your money in-between adventures for whatever reason, simulating the "eternally poor" band of traveling adventurers in fiction.

Yeah, there seems to be competing camps. Some people are shouting about how 4e grants too much power to the DM. Others are shouting how it lobotomizes the DM. Some are happy or unhappy about one or the other. It's odd.

It's possible there's a section in the MM or DMG that talks about monster customization; granting rituals, non-combat abilities, etc. If they're really intent on only balancing out the critters for combat and leaving everything else up to the DM, I find it likely there'll be some support for...

Oh, certainly, I can't dispute that. I just find both lines of argument so...irrelevant? Pointless? Futile? Bad player? Don't game with them. Bad GM? Don't game with them. These are the only solutions that work.

Eh. If being against players who read the Monster's Manual and then complain if they face a Hobgoblin that deviates from it is wrong, I don't want to be right.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to have noticed it.

The other thing is the philosophical dispute over game style. The hard simulationists view anything not represented mechanically as something that can not, by definition, occur in game, and anything introducing it counts as a "house rule." Some of us, however, think that not everything- or even...

Part of the problem is that "house rule" has a completely different definition here on ENWorld than in any other region of gaming I've encountered. Customizing a monster is not house ruling. Creating new monsters- not house ruling. These things are expected, but here modifying an "official"...

And here I was saying that same thing about 3rd... Plus, it seems like the overwhelming consensus here is that this is a good thing, as GM's can't be trusted.

It hasn't stood up to scrutiny since the dawn of gaming, though. Hit point debates are as old as the mountains. And yet, the game is played- most groups just seem to shrug and not care about it.

Is there really? I didn't know that.

By reading the sentence that comes next? I mean, you're really just being disingenuous here. It's not honest. You should stop. EDIT: I should mention that a divided stat block is a perfectly acceptable compromise, as above.

That wouldn't be what he said at all, and clearly a deliberate misreading on your part.

I was under the impression you weren't supposed to think about it too much in any edition of D&D.

If anywhere in the 4th edition rules there is a statement like: "Monsters cannot use rituals." I will not buy the game either. And if I had already bought the game, I'd ignore that rule so aggressively it would retroactively vanish from the printing through the sheer force of my will. But I...

(emphasis mine) Do you really need one? The design attitude seems to be that the only thing they have to do for DMs is balance the combat stats of a monster. Everything else can be safely left to the DM's imagination. As someone who is entirely comfortable figuring out all sorts of non-combat...

What I'm hoping is that the DMG has their expectations explicit on these things. Like a chart of "By this level, we expect magic items of this much power" so it'd be pretty easy for me to just have the handful of magic items they'll get upgrade themselves at the appropriate times.

I was really hoping to see something like the Earthdown system of keeping the same item, but having it improve over time. I hate this "chuck your obsolete items, time for new ones!" system. Magical items should be rare and precious. I'd much rather have that +1 Longsword grow into a +3...