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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 2566619" data-attributes="member: 2268">Pardon me for asking, but what makes you so certain that your views of how a low-magic setting should be created is the be-all and end-all in D&D? Isn't that up to each DM's individual taste, style, preference and above all definition of the term "low-magic", which has already been trotted flat here on ENWorld? Which, as far as I checked, is not yet standardized in the SRD either? I apologize for maybe being a bit touchy on the subject, but that's exactly what a lot of DMs here are complaining about...somebody else coming in, telling them with some obscure voice of authority that they have to handle their game this or that way, demanding adherence to a set of rules that should be more a set of guidelines than hewn-in-stone commandmends, telling them it has to be done this way or it's not correct. If it's a game designer doing so in a book I bought, I can choose to ignore that. If my players suddenly start going that route, because they think I'm nothing but the number-crunching machine behind the DM's screen, there is a certain problem. If game designers and publishers actually encourage that kind of player behaviour through their supplements, it's starting to grow out of proportions.There have been a few points in this thread that I agree to...house rules being known beforehand, the players and the DM working together to create an enjoyable game together, a ruleset that should be consistent enough throughout the game for both sides. But there's also the fact that the DM is the final arbiter of how the rules apply, and when they have to be bent to make the game more enjoyable for all. It should be clear that common sense should still prevail, even in a game that thrives on the fantastic, and that all parts of the game should be on the same wavelength about how that common sense is expressed by the rules...or if it isn't. In the latter case, the DM is there to fill in those gaps.And here D&D goes way overboard by trying to present a set of rules that tries to cover all possible actions, eventualities and options, while at the same time having a very specific set of assumptions behind its rules. And I bet that more than 50% of the homebrewed or simply modified campaigns running out there are deviating from those assumptions, you only have to look at the threads here on ENWorld to get a small sample of that. Now I, as the DM of my campaign, KNOW where I deviate from it, I know how my world works (or ideally should <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ), and I don't see the sense in somebody pushing a rule on me that doesn't fit my style and taste of play, just because it's in a "WotC officially approved" D&D book. Or D20 book. Or website. Or whatever. I'm open to discussion, compromise, and I've bent the rules to my players' advantage as often as against them, to heighten the fun of the game. I make on-the-spot rulings, and if I have the choice of spending 5 minutes puzzling together a rules-conform decision from a handful of rulebooks or stitch together a rules-compatible decision on the fly, I usually go for the latter, except if it's a really deciding and important problem. What I won't tolerate is being reduced to a bean counter who is only there to add up numbers for the monsters and NPCs, and who is trumped by any obscure rules quote from some book, and is patched via printed updates every 3 or 4 years.</blockquote>

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