Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 5197312" data-attributes="member: 8863">I never did a lot of serious houseruling.  The closest I came was compiling NWPs and kits in the late 2e days, and adapting all the NWPs in non-PHB/Skills and Powers sources to the Player's option rules.  I thought the PO NWP system was superior to the standard one, and I wanted to use it instead.  Also, I wanted to complile all those kits from the complete series and Dragon and such, merge the redundant ones (like all the Noble/Peasant/Pirate/Swashbuckler/etc. variations that were all basically the same), and adapt them to the PO approach.I dropped that when 3e came out.  First, I switched completely to 3e, and secondly, 3e's skill system was a lot like what I wanted to do, but much more streamlined and easier for me to work with.  You know those Knowledge/Craft/Profession/etc skills in 3e?  In 2e they were all seperate, individual proficiencies.  The skills in 3e kept things simpler and less complex, and as a result I never finished what I was working on and threw the notes out.  Sounds good to me.  I could have been the first to post to Ari's blog yesterday, but I didn't because I felt the forums would give me a bigger audience.  Well, 1e was also house ruled because players/DM liked some of the rules but not all of it.  So they went in and fixed what they didn't like.  Same went for 2e.  Part of that was because some of the rules were added without thinking about how they affected other rules, so the system at times felt clunky.  I remember the term for the late 2e rules was "kludgy". The design philosophy for the original 3e rules was basically to go into the system and hammer out the various systems and tweak them to work together more smoothly. This is where balance first came in, but from my observations, people house ruled AD&D because they felt that system was unbalanced and they wanted to fix it.  So balance may have been far more central to game design from 3e on, but it seems to have long been a concern with players anyway.Different issue IMO.  When WotC labels something "official" or "core", some DMs probably feel it makes it harder for them to control what new material gets used in a campaign.  Especially with the "core" label, because sometimes there's a connotation to that that says, "This isn't optional".   Early 3e rules didn't feel like that to me, since there was an approach which said, "here's a bunch of stuff a DM can pick from to add to his campaign".  However, when 4e releases a whole series of Core Rulebooks, it feels like there's an expectation to some people that the DM will make room for whatever the players want to use in their campaigns, and they don't like that.</blockquote>

Verification