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Message: <blockquote data-quote="haakon1" data-source="post: 8869547" data-attributes="member: 25619">I take the approach of telling what rules are allowed, not banning rules.In my case, it’s the 3.5e PHB. Anything beyond that needs to be requested and approved.  I’ve actually only said “no” once* in 20 years of DMing 3e/3.5e with 5 different groups, like 40 players total.Having to think why you want something special and explain why it is good for the group deters power gaming ever getting started, in my experience.* The “no“ was in a “campaign” we canceled after 2 sessions. For a 1st level party, a player who was literally a lawyer wanted a character of a reptilian humanoid species with tons of special abilities that I never heard, that had never existed in my setting (Greyhawk) and had rules only in 2e -  he couldn’t tell me exactly where the rules were but “remembered” most of them. I said no, because I don’t have rules for it and it doesn’t fit my campaig, but if he really wanted to play a reptilian humanoid, he could play a Kobold or Lizardfolk.  But if he did, there would be role playing consequences, especially until he made a name for himself, as many humans and allied species viewed Kobolds and Lizardfolk as man-eating monsters.Also, he‘d start out more powerful than the other PC’s, I believe ECL 4 (Equivalent Character Level 4), but he’d earn XP slower, as a 4th level character, and couldn’t level up until he reached XP for 5th.  So, RP challenges, early power, slightly weaker as time goes by.  Possible - as someone who’d played a lot of 2e in his first 3e campaign and first with me as DM, I’d let him try, but it wasn’t the easiest choice.He said OK, he’s in for Lizardfolk. He was strong in combat, and played like a monster, eating bodies of human NPC’s they found who had been killed by an orc ambush, getting only a little push back from his human and elf compadres.When they reached a walled human village, the villagers refused to let him in.  With Diplomacy and vouching by the others, they let him, but made him stay in a barn, and made the vouching humans and elf “guard” him.In the second session, he wanted to use captured Chainmail armor.  I said it had to be altered to fit by an armorer, to fit his different shaped body and especially tail, and they‘d need to travel to a bigger town to find an armorer.  He got mad.We didn’t have a third session, and we were, I think, all OK with that.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I think I was doing a variation on the improv “Yes and” with “not exactly and there will be logical consequences of playing an unusual character“.  I mean I was OK with his character literally being 4x as powerful as the others to start, but as a role playing choice by him, not as a “power because I want it” choice, and only under the stipulation that everything has logical consequences.</blockquote>

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