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IME it doesn't ignore the question at all. The DM hosts, and in the rare occasions where that's not true the game's either at a neutral site (e.g. university classroom or yacht club meeting room) or at someone else's house because they've specifically offered to host that session. You're...

They get to try. And I get to tell them to take off.

Perhaps Greyhawk wasn't the best example, then. My exposure to it has always been as a lower-magic somewhat gritty setting, as opposed to FR which is the higher-magic less-gritty one, which is why I put it as a contrast to magic-everywhere Eberron.

The Deck would trump the Phylactery were I ruling on it. The Phylactery can warn you of unfavourable alignment effects of intended deliberate (and maaaaaybe even unintended or accidental) actions on your part but can't warn you about something random: it has no way of knowing whether you'll...

If someone wants something that far different from what I'm already running then they can DM it. If I'm invited to play, I'll then accept or decline. Hypothetical: a player insists on Eberron as the setting but the DM has no use for the primary elements that make Eberron what it is and instead...

In my experience the DM also hosts, almost without exception other than one-offs.

Sure. A GM without players isn't going to have much of a game. But if the players collectively ask (or worse, demand) that the GM run something she flat-out doesn't want to run then IMO she's well within her rights to decline, which I think was the point being made in the post to which you...

That was a 3e thing, but may have come in late in 2e. What never made sense to me was the progression of curing spells: Cure Light at 1st, Cure Serious at 4th, Cure Critical at 5th, and Heal at 6th. Moving Cure Serious to 3rd makes it far more logical because the level gap between each tier of...

Training is one of the best ways to force characters to take some downtime - which they otherwise often would not - and interact with the setting in ways not necessarily related to adventuring. Broadens the scope of the campaign considerably.

Oh, absolutely. Just not as PC-playables, which is where the original point began.

Well, yes, because I (and, I suspect, many DMs) tend to run the game I'd like someone else to run so I could play in it. There's a bit of a difference between a one-off party (or a one-off game, for all that) and an open-ended potentially long-term campaign. For a one-off, far fewer...

My point was around your saying that adding species was not a houserule where removing them would be. For things like allowable species etc. those decisions are made and hard-locked as part of the worldbuilding and rules-building process, long before I start inviting players into the campaign...

If they sell off some of the magic items, any 1e module will have more than enough treasure to allow each PC to afford training plus some.

The way I see it, most deities should have infinite hit points anyway.

That in itself is sad, that everyone's expected to be and remain the same. You wouldn't want to play with a GM who actually made the game challenging and where the threats were real rather than paper tigers? Because 5e run by the book is just that, compared even with 3e, never mind the 0e-1e...

Whether intentionally or not, this take shows a strong bias: that it's OK to add more species but not OK to remove some of what's already there. As in, it's acceptable to add Hill Giants to the PC-playable list but is a less (or not) acceptable thing to remove Aarakocra from that list...

It depends, too, on one's definition of 'awful' and how high one sets the bar. Some might think a DM is awful just because she neutrally and fairly runs a lethal-to-the-characters game and they don't like losing their characters. Some might think a DM is awful just because he won't allow their...

What I've found over time is that the bad DMs and bad players often aren't the same people. I've seen bad players become good DMs and I've seen good players become bad DMs. My off-the-cuff theory is that there's a degree of self-confidence and maybe ego required to be a good DM but too much of...

Though there's been a few PC-invented spells over the years in my games, this hasn't been one of them. Kind of surprising, really, but there it is (or isn't).

For anything purporting or trying to be a big-tent game that covers lots of bases, yes. The more flexible a game system is, and the more open it is to supporting different playstyles and story types, the more useful it'll be to more people. Not a consideration if you're just designing for your...