Nor are game designers necessarily more knowledgable of the type of events at your table that might be creating some of the concerns than you are.
If you were cooking a recipe and it had an ingredient you did not like or were allergic to, would you cook it and suffer thru until the cookbook guys changed their recipe?
Maybe 95 out of 101 recipes are good for you, but you dont have to cook the other six without change because they were in the book along with the others, right?
I'm not sure where to start here. What are you even arguing against? What point does your cooking reference even make? Did you read my reply to Max?
Sorry but no.
It doesnt matter how broadly applicable a rule is when it comes to my table or really anyones table. I have np problem with *them* building rules for a broad audience, thats grest but what matters to me directly is how it works at my table with our players... Not anywhere else.
Of course it matters. For people who have multiple groups for which they DM. It's 100% reasonable to not want to track a whole set of houserules for every group/game.
It is related, because unless they are running for several different groups(a rarity in my experience), they don't need a broadly applicable rule. They need one that works for their group, and the DM, possibly with the aid of the players, is the best one to come up with that rule.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who aren't willing to make simple corrections to choices that go wrong. That's a part of being DM. Nobody gets it right as soon as they buy the books, or even the first time they DM after having played. DMs make mistakes and need to be willing to correct those mistakes. Correcting a rule they make up is no different.
I don't care who you do or don't have sympathy for. I've little respect for arguments that include "I don't have a lot of sympathy for this strawman version of perfectly normal, reasonable people, that I've concocted".
Most groups I know have multiple games, each of which has a different roster of players, with some overlap. What's more, character makeup and campaign style can vary so widely that the same group can run into problems with a houserule that they didn't think about beyond the specific set of features in a specific game.
You're comfortable changing the rule again when that happens, good for you. There's no reason for groups that aren't to give a damn, and there's nothing unreasonable about someone hoping for options designed, iterated, and playtested by the design team to address common issues people have with how the game runs, or to change some of the assumptions of the game without major problems down the line, etc.
Here’s what I don’t get. Ok, so you’re confident in your ability to House rule to fit the needs of your group, and value your ability to do so. That’s great! More power to you.
Why, oh why, do you react so defensively when someone else says they’d like to see some WotC-created rules variants? The existence of such “official house rules” in no way hampers your game, and could improve the games of others who lack your surety in messing with the rules, so why would you want to deprive them of that?
Also, not everyone is that confident, or wants to work out different houserules for each of their games/groups, or just plain doesn't
like using untested houserules, which any homebrewed houserule inherently is until you've been using it for weeks or months. Those groups and DMs aren't wrong, they're just different from some others. I have no problem making houserules on my own. I'm very confident in my understanding of the system, my relative lack of any CharOp or anti-CharOp bias in regards to how the game is balanced, and my ability to adjust on the fly if I find a surprise bug.
My best friend who has been running games for over a decade longer than I have will only ever use a houserule if there is a glaring problem, and there is no fix from the makers of the game in sight. Even then, he'd rather make one based on what the designers think about the problem and how to treat it. It's a preference.
Here's the thing. He is, absolutely, better at DMing than I am. I'm pretty good. He's very, very good. He understands 5e just as well as I do, provides keen insights to help me with my houserules and homebrew, and trusts my judgement on those that stuff we make together is just under official stuff in his hierarchy of allowed material. But he simply likes to play by the book. FOr him, if we aren't using the system as intended, why aren't we just playing GURPS? (no accounting for taste)
It's not so much a desire to deprive anyone of anything, so much as a desire to see WotC make the rare books they put out contain new content, rather than house rules that people can already make up. If they were putting out even 20% of what they did for 3e and 4e, I wouldn't care at all. However, since they only put out a rules book once in a blue moon, and those books are mostly fluff anyway, rules content is at a premium.
The thread is about a hypothetical Unearthed Arcana article. Even if it was about a hypothetical book, we get at least 1 book with new player options each year, and have thousands of options. It's not a big deal if one of those books some year doesn't interest you. It also isn't likely that any one concept put forth for a book would ever be the only thing in a 5e "new options" book, because that isn't how they're running things this time. Instead, it would be part of the DM section of a book with new stuff for DMs and players, targeting multiple niches. It's...objectively not a big deal if one part of one book isn't interesting to you, or me, or whoever.
