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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5899347" data-attributes="member: 52073">As I mentioned above, there are some concepts that can be done as modules, such as the examples in the OP and the examples I gave.  DMs and software alike can incorporate actual modules just fine if the system is designed for it.  However, there are some things you can't modularize, and there are some things you can modularize but shouldn't do to the ramifications of doing so.  That's my main point, that people are quick to say "Oh, you can just stick X in a module," without looking at the effort required to incorporate such a module or the consequences of doing so.For instance, with all due respect to Ratskinner, some of his suggestions should not be modules."Monster races as PCs" should not be a module, because if you do not build that possibility into the core it simply will not work.  Monster races weren't considered at the outset of 3.0, and that's how we got the massive, clunky mess that was the LA/ECL system.  If you want monsters to be playable as PCs, you have to build a "hook" for it into the core, at which point you may be cutting off other possible modules and you may impact the design of the rest of the core system by doing so.How much is a feat worth in 3e?  How much is a power worth in 4e?  Feats, powers, and other aspects of characters vary wildly in power and value across the system.  You cannot possibly try to retrofit a point system to an existing slot system and expect for it to be balanced.  If the designers are using a point-based system behind the scenes to balance things and simply release that publicly, that's different...but in that case, the mere fact that a point system has been incorporated from the beginning affects the system design.Likewise for simultaneous multiclassing.  3e didn't implement it at the start, so its incarnation in 3e was the gestalt system, a vague, unbalanced (albeit very popular these days) variant in the back of UA.  Using gestalt, you have to throw CR out the window--well, more so than you already do, anyway--because the designers didn't build things with the assumption of its existence, nor did they sit down to figure out relative level equivalences between gestalt and non-gestalt or the like.All of these are quite simple to implement, but have major cascading effects throughout the system.  Implementing V/W the standard way drastically changes the value of crits and therefore crit-related effects, since crits go straight to wounds.  Implementing crit locations means implementing implementing systems to deal with this, such as called shots, piecemeal armor, more common regeneration effects, and more.  Implementing a condition track changes the flow of combat, introducing a dangerous death spiral that can lead to lots of dead PCs unless mechanics are introduced to lessen or manipulate the track's effects, in which case you run into the same problem as in SWSE where you can manipulate the condition track and bypass HP entirely.All three of these would take so much space and effort to implement properly, with due thought given to all the consequences and lists of changes provided for existing mechanics, that you'd almost be better served writing a whole variant PHB by that point.As dkyle pointed out, ad hoc DM rulings are separate from the rules themselves.  Anything that requires DM modification to work at all isn't a module, it's a poorly-thought-out dubiously-balanced add-on to the game engine--and by this I don't mean houserules or deliberately blank areas of the rules, but rather anything that is supposed to be insertable without any extra effort on the DM's part but actually requires tweaking to make the game function normally.Just as the layperson might think that computers are all 1s and 0s with nothing in between while the software developer realizes that those 1s and 0s can represent anything from numbers to pictures to anything else with arbitrary precision (just a metaphor, no offense intended <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />), the initial reaction to modularize everything often misses the design ramifications of modularizing certain things.  All I wanted to point out was that you need to think about how something would be made into a module, not just "Gee, it would be cool to have a variant for X," and that many things just aren't an option without a major overhaul.</blockquote>

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