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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6308371" data-attributes="member: 17106">No, rule naught certainly isn't a bad thing.But there's also the DM cheating idea, which is also potentially not a bad thing. As the DM cheating text I quoted above suggested, sometimes you want your players to believe that one thing is happening, even if what's actually happening is very different. In some campaigns, you want you players to believe that PCs might die, even if you've already decided that this simply won't happen, for example. Or, when you run the old classic "PCs get captured and then escape" storyline, you might want them to believe they had a chance at resisting capture, but in reality you might be setting the DC at their check result +1 because you just want to railroad them into that story. Certainly things that can be overdone, but I suspect most DMs do some of this stuff some of the time.One thing about the rules is that the players are aware of them. I had one DM who asked us not to read the DMG for that reason, but in truth, most experienced players have either tried DMing or at least know what's in there. If you want to create genuine uncertainty or manipulate the players in certain ways, sometimes you need to go off the book even if there's nothing wrong with the book in and of itself.***And then there's houseruling. Sometimes it's done to fix problems, other times it's just about creating a specific nonstandard dynamic, changing or fleshing something out to fit a specific campaign or setting. It may or may not be indicative of problems with the original rules, but again it's probably something that most DMs do to some extent, and it's such a key part of a DM taking ownership of his own game that it's hard to say the existence of houserules speaks poorly of the published game.</blockquote>

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