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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6174683" data-attributes="member: 17106">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 think there's a lot more than those two. For instance, there's the common sense group.For example, refer to a long exchange I had recently about monster identification. I suggested that characters often know certain useful facts about monsters, whereas someone else said that this could not be the case because the <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/knowledge.htm" target="_blank">rules</a> were very specific about needing to roll a trained Knowledge check to identify a monster and its abilities. I pointed out that the RAW had a wide variety of ridiculous implications; for example needing to make a trained check to identify common animals, to which the response was "well of course there should be an exception for that". Thus, the guy who was vigorously defending the RAW argued himself into saying that they needed significant modification to make any sense.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.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".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.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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Greyhawk#Design_of_the_campaign" target="_blank">wikipedia page for Living Greyhawk</a> 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.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.That being said, even though we all were turned off by the other parts of the D&D community, it was mainly for two reasons. The first was that some seemed to be drifting more towards the cosplay/LARP hobby, which is fine for them but which is not at all what I do for fun, and then there were these kinds of hypercompetitive combat-oriented gamers, the sort who try to try to win. Conversely, when we got back, we reacted by going to a more "literary" style of D&D; less miniatures, more plot, character, and theme. I've still never seen these mysterious people who use only the RAW, who purchase and play someone else's published adventure, or who play 4e (and we left college after 4e came out).Personally, I really don't want a sense of a greater community, and I don't really care what other people do; if they're having fun with a quasi-wargame or dressing up as their characters it doesn't really affect me. I just want my game to work my way.To me, an introduction with new gamers consists largely of explaining how my game differs from the "default", and them learning about me through those changes.</blockquote>

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