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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mxyzplk" data-source="post: 5198620" data-attributes="member: 16450">Back on topic...  I also used to house rule a lot in 1e and especially 2e.  In 2e I had a pretty big set of standard loadout house rules.When 3e came out, I didn't houserule initially because the game itself fixed some of the things I had been houseruling (Perception stat, multiclassing).  But as time went on it was more because the game was too complex and intricate to houserule well.The new paradigm in 3e quickly became different than that in the older days.  In 1e/2e, anything outside the core book was understood to be purely at the DM's discretion, and the ruleset in general as well.  In 3e, though initially things like prestige classes gave lip service to that, as the splatbooks poured out the paradigm quickly became "players can pick whatever they want out of them and DMs really shouldn't say much about that."  Houseruling became too much about DM empowerment in an age of player empowerment, and also the ruleset had become complex enough that a single houserule could totally unbalance some new option in Complete Whatnot - and the culture against the DM limiting player options made that hard to fix.  Also, there were so many third party addons you could use one of those without it really counting as house ruling in  most peoples' minds.Then 4e made militant balance a baked-in design goal, enhancing all of these tendencies, and houseruling was basically killed (heck, even generating third party content tapered off).  Some of this is inevitable in the more 'connected' world - with organized play and Insider, it encourages a standard ruleset and discourages DMs from making any group specific rulings.Essentially, more of the choice has been removed from the DM and placed into the rules, which somewhat grants that choice to the players instead.  I'm not going to opine on whether that's good or bad, but I think it's clearly what's happened.  So less houseruling in later versions of D&D is a natural result.</blockquote>

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