Well, pretty much the same thing happened for me, except we didn't stop houseruling. Why would we? 3e had new problems to fix, but more importantly, we all had specific things that we wanted out of the game that the rules in the book didn't support. 3e was actually easier to houserule because it was so standardized. Everything scaling forward in 5% increments made it much clearer what would happen. I don't think we played for very long at all before houseruling more than we ever did with 2e.
I just don't think our group ever considered we had an agenda to put forward. Our goal was always to simulate a fantasy world in the best way possible. The rules simply facilitated that. What happened when a fighter fought a dragon? We had no idea but we had to assume the rules were the best compromise of "realism" and simplicity. We liked that there were rules for everything since our combination 1e/2e game at the time was plagued with arguments over the rules all the time since the game lacked so many rules. Constant arguments over how far people could jump, what happened when you leaped on a giants head and stabbed him in the eye, whether armor affected your ability to run for long periods of time, and so on were the order of the day during our games.
2e was written in a style that said to us "these rules are just the beginning of a vast fantasy world simulator, you'll have to make up the rest of them based on what you think is most realistic". When we read 3e, it read (to us, at least) less like a fantasy world simulator and more like an actual game. It gave rules for 95% of the situations you'd come across in a typical game so we didn't need to make up any of our own. The rules made it clear that certain actions just weren't allowed in the game, things like Called Shots. You also couldn't try actions that required a feat to perform. That was the point of feats, they unlocked options for your character.
It completely changed our mindset when playing D&D from "Try anything and hope the DM makes up a good rule to simulate what you are trying to do" to "The rules tell you what you can do, pick one of those options or have the DM tell you no."
I think there's a lot more than those two. For instance, there's the common sense group.
I doubt that anyone really uses the Knowledge rules for identifying creatures as written. By a strict interpretation, you would need a trained check to identify any creature, even an animal or a humanoid. The way the DCs scale by HD is also ridiculous; I doubt most DMs require a DC 50 check to tell you that a great wyrm red dragon is evil and breathes fire. Even in organized play, I think some common-sense interpretation of these sorts of rules is likely de rigeur.
That's correct. We played it almost precisely as written. I wouldn't tell anyone anything about a great wyrm if they didn't make the DC 50 check. Though most people didn't need it. I never say anyone in OP break this rule either. We had one DM who enforced it a little more rigorously than the others, I remember.
Most DMs allowed players to bring their own knowledge to the table because in OP you've likely played 50 adventurers, each under a different DM. The DM had no idea what your character had experienced in the past and therefore couldn't say "You've never seen this creature before". Because it was likely you HAD seen that creature before just with a different DM in a different adventure.
So, if a player showed up and said "Yeah, I fought one of these before, they are immune to fire." it never really called for a knowledge check. It's only if no one had any idea what the creature was that anyone even called for a monster check. If no one made it, we shrugged and proceeded to figure out it's powers by trial and error.
Basically, we used a "If something is common enough, you already know information about it. You couldn't have gone through life without knowing that the pointy eared guy over there is an elf. But you need to make a check to know that elves don't sleep as that's not completely common knowledge. Unless one has ever told you that, in which case your character knows it and won't ask for a knowledge check."
The same thing applies to animals and such. I assume most people know the name of a bear but if they want to know more, they'll need a check.
After all, D&D is a middle ages level world where most people don't even know how to read and the vast majority of people haven't even left their village their whole lives. We tend to assume knowledge is in short supply.
Many people also handwave things like encumbrance or travel times. Or they throw in a few extra skill ranks for backgrounds. Or they have some weird little quirk about how wands work. All without calling it a "houserule".
This has not been my experience either. We did none of these things. Some players would forget to calculate their encumbrance and it would always make the DM angry when they found out. I knew one group who gave extra skill ranks for backgrounds, though that's a house rule they developed about 5 years into the lifespan of 3e/3.5e and they explicitly called it out as a house rule(and their only one).
The same is likely true for things that charop people catch, like the bag of rats fighter or CoDzilla. There may be some revisions needed to prevent these abuses, but by and large those are things that players avoid or DMs fix, often without even thinking about it.
We all acknowledged that most of those abuses were perfectly within the rules. There's a reason Clerics and Druids were some of the most played classes in Living Greyhawk. They were overpowered. The bag of rats was considered cheesy and we all jointly agreed not to do it so we had more fun. But no one ever houseruled it away.
This is not exactly my area of expertise, but as I understand it, organized play games do make certain modifications to the published game, particularly restrictions on what you can play. For example, the
wikipedia page for Living Greyhawk lists quite a few and even calls them "houserules". Everyone may be playing under the
same set of modifications, but they are not exactly playing the game as it was originally written, because the game as written does not work for their purposes. Which is my point, it never completely does.
The "houserules" of Living Greyhawk mostly consisted of "These feats, classes, and spells aren't allowed". There were a couple that were modified in affect, but only due to the necessity of the format. For instance, the modular nature of LG adventures meant that absolutely no effect continued from adventure to adventure. So any spell that was permanent ceased to function at the end of the adventure.
I also don't really consider "We aren't allowing this feat" a house rule. Banning stuff due to power levels always happens. The only house rules I ever implemented were of the "this isn't allowed" variety.
I can't say that I ever thought to look at D&D as a whole as some kind of community. My people, the ones I learned with and/or taught to play, are my community. In fact, when my group broke after high school and went off to college, we all seemed to have the same experience. We checked out the local college gaming community, looked at it and said "what are these people doing?", and quit gaming for a while. We later reconvened when we came back from our respective colleges, and bring in a new person every now and then.
I think I had to become "part of the community" out of necessity. My very first game was played with my brothers and my next door neighbor. We played once. Then, much later, I played on a BBS in a play-by-post game. Actually 3 play-by-post games. Since we didn't even know each other's real names, we had to be very clear about the rules. Though, at that time I didn't even know the rules. I just knew that if I told the DM I was attacking the monster he used some magical process and told me what happened.
Then, when I joined my first real D&D group, our group had 13 people in it and we voted each week on what game to play amongst the 20 or so games that were running in our group. We had 2 Rifts campaigns, 2 Star Wars, 8 D&D, a GURPS, and so on. With so many people in the group and so many games(all of which had different DMs), we had to keep things standardized or we'd go insane.
Then, after only a year of being in that group, they switched to playing only every second week. So I started my own D&D group on the off weeks. I convinced a bunch more players to join my group. We also developed a list of games we'd vote on every week for that group.
We'd lose players fairly often and have to recruit new players to join us to make sure we stayed at full strength. We found this process was easier as long as we played by the rules. Too many house rules and when we'd explain our game to someone they'd throw up their arms and say "That doesn't sound like D&D to me and refuse to join".
Though, I admit, I dreaded meeting new D&D players at the time. Since it was before the internet there was nearly no standardization. I ran into one player who went to high school with me. He told me about his campaign where they regularly defeated 200 demons at once with their artifact level equipment that their DM invented, like a sword that auto killed on a 15-20 roll and also shot a 20d6 fireball that only harmed enemies every time it was swung. The idea that someone would just use the magic items listed in the book and simply fight orcs was so foreign to him that I wondered why they were even using D&D as a ruleset if they were just going to make stuff up. We may have argued over the stuff the rules DIDN'T say, but we followed most of the non-optional rules in the book.
I think I mostly wrote off the D&D community as nearly impossible to talk to since no one played the same game at all. Which is why most of our new players came from people who had never played before so we could teach them to play properly.
That's precisely why we enjoyed 3e so much when it came out. It finally had rules in it instead of a bunch of random guidelines that people would ignore. From that point onward, we noticed that when we had to replace players we could find people who already knew the rules and played the same way we did. 3e caused me to start posting on message boards since I wasn't afraid of running into other D&D players anymore. There seemed to be this sense of community that wasn't there before. This was partially fostered by the growing internet at the time as well. And places like Eric Noah's 3rd Edition News, which I followed daily and posted my excitement about the new edition.
It was after a couple of years of playing 3e that I heard about Living Greyhawk. The idea of being able to play in a campaign that spanned the whole world was super exciting to me. I love meeting new people. Especially new people who like the same things I do. The idea that I could go elsewhere and randomly join a D&D group and have instant friends was awesome.
That all came to a head when I met a girl in Australia and I visited her for a year. I went to a foreign country, not knowing anyone. Within 2 weeks, I discovered the store that ran Living Greyhawk that was listed on the WOTC website and I showed up with my character and I had a group of 20 D&D friends immediately. We all had the same adventures in common and the same rules in common so we all had stuff to talk about immediately. I'd go out to games day, play the same 2 adventures for 8 hours, then we'd go out for food and discuss the differences in how we played the same adventures and the funny anecdotes that happened: "When we fought the fire elemental, we used a spell to push him into the energy wall blocking the corridor and he took a large amount of damage" "That's awesome. We should have thought of that, it would have made it a lot easier. That elemental nearly killed all of us."
That was only possible because we used the same rules. I've tried to have those conversations with people who had a large number of house rules. They always feel like we're talking past each other:
Me: "It was so funny. A mind flayer stunned everyone except the rogue for a long time. So our rogue had to fight him solo. But luckily, the mind flayer had to wait to use its power again, so the rogue was actually beating him single handedly since he had a ring of invisibility and got in a sneak attack..."
Other person: "Our group house ruled the duration of the mind flayer's mind blast because we felt it was too long. So that would never happen at our table. Plus, we don't allow rogues to get sneak attacks simply because they are invisible because that's overpowered."
Me: "Alright....nice talking with you as well."
