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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6174306" data-attributes="member: 17106">The XP example, for one, has been one of ENW's most polled topics over the years. In those nonscientific but large polls, a majority invariably comes down as using something other than the RAW. There's also periodic ENW threads devoted to "tell us your own unique ability generation method". There are innumerable variations on the official ones, often subtle, but still meaningful. If I were to do a large scientific poll of those topics, I would catch a group of people who are younger and more varied than the typical ENW poll participant, and most likely the responses would be even more varied.I can only speak to what I know, and I've never seen anyone use anything like that, nor have I seen any data that would suggest that a significant fraction of the gaming population at large does. Even the people who actually purchase those things often say that they read but don't use them, or use them only indirectly as inspiration, which would be very difficult to track. Even if they did use such products, they can still modify what's written while doing so.There's some legitimacy to that, and I do remember some pretty freewheeling 2e play. However, the comprehensiveness of d20 rules also means that there are more things that one might seek to change. Unearthed Arcana (and the RC) provide tons of examples of things that the people who wrote the rules changed in their home games, often radically. Many of the explicit rules also encourage further improvisation.For example, the late-3.5 era trend was alternate class features, which encourage players to essentially design their own class. There's a lot of by the book ACFs, but I found that more and more people would say "can I trade this for that" as the game went on. The expectation became that everything on one's character sheet would be meaningful and useful, and anything subpar was designated for trading in. I cannot recall the last wizard I saw with Scribe Scroll, for example, despite the fact that it is an automatic feat at level 1 in the core rules.There was also a huge increase in rules for monster customization, and presumably a corresponding increase in practice of "kitbashing" for monsters.And to top it off, the proliferation of d20 compatible products encouraged people to mix and match rules from different sources.Sure, but that distinction isn't really relevant to the point I was making. The original point was that the game out of the box isn't-and shouldn't have to be-perfect for anyone. If you have to add elements or change elements to create your desired play experience, that isn't evidence that something is wrong, barring some additional qualifiers.That sounds like one of those shades of gray distinctions. I interpret the RAW as written very strictly. I also consciously deviate from them a lot. I think even very small deviations can be very meaningful.***And that was the original point here. I was saying that the game should not be pushed to the point where it works perfectly for one select group of (CO) people, because all of us use the rules differently and the text in the books doesn't work perfectly for any of us.</blockquote>

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