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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6175370" data-attributes="member: 5143">It told you that you could change the rules a couple of times.  You pretty much quoted all of them.  I understand the rules say they can be changed.However, there was a nearly equally large section that said something similar to "You can change the rules, but keep in mind they are all there for a reason and there is lots of interconnectedness between them so changing one can have an unexpected effect on other rules.  You can change them but be very careful and make sure you know exactly what you are doing.  Don't make hasty decisions and think about whether you really NEED to change something at all."There's lots of optional rules.  However, I always got the impression that the reason they wrote out optional rules instead of just saying "change things however you want" was precisely because those optional rules were already tested to avoid having unexpected consequences on the rest of the rules.  To me those rules said "You can change things, but since it's likely anything you come up with will break your game badly...here's a list of options you might want to implement that won't break things too badly."Heck, even Monte Cook in the quote in your signature said that they had built reliance on rules right into the game.  He regretted it later, but he's made it fairly clear that 3e was designed to not only use the rules but the rely on them instead of DM judgement.That certainly came across to me when I read them.  And to the people I played with.  It was the single thing that frustrated me the most about running it.  It was our social contract that we were playing with the rules as written.  That the DM had the ability to change the rules but it should be done between sessions not in the middle of them, otherwise people wouldn't have enough time to adapt to the changes.  Plus, our social contract stated that any rules changes really should be discussed with the players so people can look for holes in the new rules and discuss exactly why those changes needed to be made and whether there was an easier way to fix the problem without changing the rules.  Most often the DM was talked out of their rules changes by the players who pointed out that the problem wasn't nearly as bad as the DM thought it was.</blockquote>

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