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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 8267127" data-attributes="member: 2205">No. Categorically do not accept. This is—quite literally—the definition of catering to and enabling snowflaking. Communication is a joint responsibility, and anyone demanding that the other party accept all responsibility for potential miscommunications is absurd.In any case, to the greater question at hand, I've often noted that although D&D is frequently called "generic fantasy" it isn't really. It's broad but it is not generic and the two traits may seem to be somewhat overlapping, but should not be confused. D&D fantasy doesn't even resemble the very source material that it supposedly is a pastiche of, at least when you get right down to it. When I was a youngster back in the 80s, I was already noting that I couldn't really successfully play the types of settings that I wanted to play in the system, and back then the types of settings I wanted to play were extruded fantasy product of a post-Tolkien/Lloyd Alexander type. Not exactly anything super esoteric or weird... and yet D&D was a supremely poor emulator of it.Luckily for me, maybe, I came into the hobby at a time when DIY based on minimal formal structure was the standard—and even when AD&D started replacing D&D, my experience is that most people had a strange mulish hybrid of BD&D, B/X and AD&D rules all sprinkled in somewhat at random depending on how well the DM remembered them. AD&D and subsequent editions, like 3rd, 4th and 5th seem to have not specifically encouraged that paradigm, but since I started out that way, it never really occurred to me not to hack the rules to get what I needed out of them the entire time. I think D&D from 3e on was eminently hackable as well, because the core mechanics was consistent and fairly simple. Plus, the OGL meant that you had all kinds of models of how other people could do it. Heck, WotC themselves really pushed d20 as the one system to rule them all by releasing d20 Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu and Wheel of Time all within a couple of years of 3e. Almost immediately, I started seeing alternative magic systems, classes, alternatives to hit points, to armor class, etc. popping around, and it became obvious that if you wanted a game to do something that it didn't already do well, then it wasn't that big a deal to come up with some houserules. I never once ran a game without multiple houserules, as well as my standard "tools, not rules" "rulings preferred to detailed rules" and fast and loose style.Heck, I've run games where I disallowed any of the standard races besides human, made a bunch of alterate races available instead, and disallowed any class that had a spellcasting progression of any kind (although I did allow psionics to replace magic. Although nobody really picked an overtly psionic class anyway; the closest I got was a slightly house-ruled soul knife.) D&D as written, using RAW (if anyone still uses that acronym) doesn't do some kinds of games well at all, but it's not at all difficult to get D&D, or at least something that's very similar to D&D, to do just about anything you need it to at the same time.UPDATE: I will state that my fast and loose style specifically makes it so that system matters less than it might to other gamers, though. Even so, system does matter. But the experience at the table with the people interpreting the system matters more.</blockquote>

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