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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6175419" data-attributes="member: 17106">Well, that's not surprising. But it is my experience, as I'm sure yours is yoursTo some extent, yes.That's why I see so much homebrewing. Races are such a small part of a D&D character (mechanically) that they don't seem worth it, and it's hard to create new and meaningfully different ones, but I've seen many a DM who tried. I've also seen DMs try to make classes that look nothing like anything in the D&D books. I've seen them try to remove fantasy tropes like castles and knights. I've seen people change basic mechanical tenets of the game. Everything's up for grabs.Personally, I piloted several very different (in my eyes) full classes, races, monsters, and other mechanical elements back in those ten-years-ago days. These days, I'm still writing them to some extent (though the proliferation of published material has made it easier to find things that are unexpected/original but in print). It's just harder to get a good discussion going about them. My setting is also somewhat in the whole magic-as-technology vein and does not have much in the way of fantasy tropes like castles, and contains a variety of basic assumptions that are very different than what you'd find in Greyhawk or FR (or any fantasy setting that I'm aware of).Again, my view of the use of official D&D rules and other elements is that it's easier to start with examples than start with nothing. It's easier to read a bunch of rules and say "I'll keep this and redo that" then it is to write a complete game, and it's easier to read a bunch of Greyhawk infused books and then make your own setting than it is to read a bunch of generic mechanics and make your own setting. Just because Greyhawk is the default presented in the 3e books doesn't mean you actually play the game in Greyhawk. Some do, most don't.There are no original ideas. Everyone gets theirs from somewhere; usually from novels, film, and TV, but sometimes from other sources.There is a large difference between saying "I *ran* an adventure path" and "I read one and stole some ideas", just as there's a difference between writing an academic paper with quotes and cited references as opposed to simply copying another paper. If you're taking ideas from multiple sources and then running your own game based on them then you're just as original as the rest of us, even if some of those ideas were taken from D&D-specific sources that you paid for. That isn't the kind of behavior that inspires these debates.I do find it odd that someone would pay for those ideas in that format. I do own one published adventure (which was bought for me as a gift by someone who didn't know anything about D&D). It doesn't strike me as having anything useful in it.And that's fair. The article quoted on the first page of this thread suggested that WotC would kill creativity or take the human element out of the game. Sometimes, it seems like they're trying, but I don't think they could ever fully succeed.It's not like a published adventure or even a bad ruleset can prevent an individual group from running an enjoyable game. It doesn't exactly help, but I'm sure it's possible to have a good time in a variety of different ways.Can't say I'm really all that interested in that whole approach no. Somewhat intellectually interested, but it's not practically applicable to my games or my players. Again, that's something that IME is a non-starter; I don't know anyone who would play an rpg without having the sense of a shared objective reality and the idea of some kind of ingame physical laws, or who would be willing to learn and engage a highly metagame system.Even if those discussions are happening, in my eyes it's less common to talk substantively about the game at all these days.Yep, I'll file that under unsurprising.</blockquote>

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