AL DMs get no sympathy from me on this issue. They chose to both participate in AL and DM for it knowing it is organized play. Organized play tries to provide as uniform an experience as possible so that people know what to expect going from on table to another. It is why Gygax switched tune back with AD&D and began telling people that, if they changed certain things about AD&D, then they were not playing AD&D- he was laying the ground work for organized play/RPGA and knew it needed conformity.
As for sharing DMing for the same campaign, again no sympathy to DMs that choose to do it. If a DM and the co-DMs cannot agree, they are better off not doing it. I agreed to try it once back in AD&D. I will never do it again. After one adventure, I told the co-DM to create his own setting and the players to ignore the adventure. SInce then every D&D/rpg group with whom I have played/GM'd has had multiple DMs each switching off to run their own campaign when I need a break. The individual campaigns allow people to play different characters and experience different campaign settings.
Not looking for sympathy. The statement was made, "Don't like an option? Don't use it, but it doesn't harm you if the option is in the game for other tables who do like it". It does though. If I want to DM AL, and have been doing so for more than a year, and then an option comes out that I really dislike, I have no choice. Same with co-DMing. In both scenarios I am being told if I don't like an option I need to not play, because I have no choice but to allow it, even though it's something that never existed when I decided to DM those games. Maybe you don't see that as a harm, but I do, and I think it's pretty rationale to not like being forced to either accept an "option" or else not DM a game I've been DMing for years. These are scenarios where in a very real sense it's not an option at all.
This one I have more sympathy toward. However, the designers are not design experts for individual groups. DMs need to make consider if something will fit in their campaign. If not, don't allow it. If so, the DM needs to be willing to make alterations if something does not work- there are also places on the internet (e.g., ENWorld and RPG.net) to get help.
It's more work - a lot more in some instances. That's a harm from the new material to my game, agreed? I mean, if it's not, I could say "Well you can just create a PRC on your own" if time spent altering material is inconsequential. So, it's a harm from an option existing.
Meh. The designers don't know individual groups. I believe 3e had it right in the DMG when it told DMs they may need to make adjustments to published adventures to account for the people and party make up at their table.
Again, making adjustments is additional work, sometimes a lot of it. And again, I could say the same to you - just make your own PRC rules and adjust adventures to include them. At the point where a PRC is part of an adventure and I have to change it to use the adventure without it, that's not really an option anymore as it has the same effect as a non-optional rule I need to houserule. Any way you look at it, the existence of the option impacts those who don't want to use the option. It's not a matter of simply, "Don't like it, then don't use it, but it doesn't harm you that it exists for those who do like it". There is a harm from it - I have to change stuff to adjust around it. That's a harm.
The Adventurer's League has this handled nicely. Each PC has a story origin that unlocks certain books for use. So there's less room for overlap. If they take a prestige class from Book A they can't take options from Book B or C.
Sure, but the way it works any PC can choose any one book, so if they choose the book with the PRCs, and I don't like PRCs, I can't do anything about it. And if more and more future adventures use PRCs (as I suspect they will) it will become more and more common, and likely the adventures themselves will use PRCs in them, and then I have to decide to I even want to continue DMing AL or do I have to suck it up and be forced to use this "option" I don't like?
DMs don't choose to prohibit options they choose to allow them.
Except all the examples I gave involve having no choice. That's my entire point. I have no choice with AL, or with round-robin DMing, or with having to change material added in Adventures or future splats (and also the opportunity cost of them not publishing something with those pages I do like), or with dealing with the unintended consequences of an option that looked good for my campaign but turned out to not be good for it. The more options WOTC publishes, the greater the cumulative harm to those who don't like those options. So the claim that "Don't like an option, then simply don't use it, it has no impact to you" remains false. It absolutely impacts people who don't like those options, in all the ways I just spelled out.
Now maybe it's worth it. Maybe an option is so helpful, for so many people, that it's worth them creating it anyway. I just don't like the claim that new options don't harm those who don't like them because they can just choose to not use them. It's not a good argument - new options have negative consequences for those who don't like them in a variety of ways.
