Celebrim
Legend
Very freely. I believe one of the coolest campaign concepts I've encountered over the years was someone at EnWorld was running "stone age D&D" where metal was rare or unknown, writing had yet to be discovered, there were no shops, and the default magic level was presumably really low. The idea of a game where Craft skills and Survival played a huge part in the parties success because the party had to be really self-reliant really appealed to me. Yet, still obviously D&D.
I was talking with my DM about the problems he was having with the Skull & Shackles game as written, and some of the lame things that the writer did to try to railroad the players. One that bothered him in particular was the party was required to survive a survival scenario where fresh water needed to be found, and the game had to deal with the fact that in Pathfinder a cleric can easily create a basically unlimited amount of drinking water. I suggested that the writer would have been much better off changing the rules of the game to suit the story, something that would have been more evocative and a lot less lame and a lot less likely to fail because the players had gotten off the path. For example, I suggested that they could have just said, "This is the Shackles. This is the Fever Sea. This is where Besmara has her throne and where the gods of the sea are in power. In the Shackles, all Create Water spells and magic items that produce water always create sea water because reasons. Everyone knows that. It's just part of the flavor of the setting." This is the sort of wise decision that was made in 5e's "Tomb of Annihilation" that wasn't made in Skull & Shackles to its loss.
Still obviously D&D, even when it is Pathfinder.
I think you can make bad house rules and have settings that aren't fun. But as long as the rules and setting are supporting some aesthetic of play that the group wants to engage in, then you are good. You can have rules that undermine an aesthetic of play, and if so those rules should be tweaked. It doesn't matter if they are house rules or rules as written. Everything should be serving the game.
One thing that really annoys me as a long time DM that has played a lot of different systems over the years is when someone starts talking about house ruling D&D to serve a particular aesthetic of play, and someone snidely says, "Well if you are going to do that, you should just play X because X does that better."
Maybe. Maybe not. But it's likely that even if X does that one thing better, it comes with its own trade offs and issues. Typically whether I'm playing X or playing D&D, I'm making tweaks to support the game that I think would be fun and which I think my players would most enjoy.
One thing that is really interesting to me as a first time Pathfinder player (yes I started playing 1e for the first time after 2e was already a thing) is that Pathfinder and my homebrew game are both slightly tweaked 3.Xe D&D. And yet the tweaks that the designer has made and that I have made are wildly different. There are ton of mostly subjective things where the Pathfinder designers took something and turned it up to 11, where I had dialed it down to a 6. And conversely there are a ton things that probably would strike the Pathfinder designers as me turning it up to 11, where they looked at it and hard nerfed it. There are a lot of things mostly minor seeming and mostly related to magic where we radically differed on what sort of tools were over the top in the hands of a player and too easily solved a problem, and I think it comes down to radically different ideas of what should be the hard challenges that drain party resources.
I was talking with my DM about the problems he was having with the Skull & Shackles game as written, and some of the lame things that the writer did to try to railroad the players. One that bothered him in particular was the party was required to survive a survival scenario where fresh water needed to be found, and the game had to deal with the fact that in Pathfinder a cleric can easily create a basically unlimited amount of drinking water. I suggested that the writer would have been much better off changing the rules of the game to suit the story, something that would have been more evocative and a lot less lame and a lot less likely to fail because the players had gotten off the path. For example, I suggested that they could have just said, "This is the Shackles. This is the Fever Sea. This is where Besmara has her throne and where the gods of the sea are in power. In the Shackles, all Create Water spells and magic items that produce water always create sea water because reasons. Everyone knows that. It's just part of the flavor of the setting." This is the sort of wise decision that was made in 5e's "Tomb of Annihilation" that wasn't made in Skull & Shackles to its loss.
Still obviously D&D, even when it is Pathfinder.
I think you can make bad house rules and have settings that aren't fun. But as long as the rules and setting are supporting some aesthetic of play that the group wants to engage in, then you are good. You can have rules that undermine an aesthetic of play, and if so those rules should be tweaked. It doesn't matter if they are house rules or rules as written. Everything should be serving the game.
One thing that really annoys me as a long time DM that has played a lot of different systems over the years is when someone starts talking about house ruling D&D to serve a particular aesthetic of play, and someone snidely says, "Well if you are going to do that, you should just play X because X does that better."
Maybe. Maybe not. But it's likely that even if X does that one thing better, it comes with its own trade offs and issues. Typically whether I'm playing X or playing D&D, I'm making tweaks to support the game that I think would be fun and which I think my players would most enjoy.
One thing that is really interesting to me as a first time Pathfinder player (yes I started playing 1e for the first time after 2e was already a thing) is that Pathfinder and my homebrew game are both slightly tweaked 3.Xe D&D. And yet the tweaks that the designer has made and that I have made are wildly different. There are ton of mostly subjective things where the Pathfinder designers took something and turned it up to 11, where I had dialed it down to a 6. And conversely there are a ton things that probably would strike the Pathfinder designers as me turning it up to 11, where they looked at it and hard nerfed it. There are a lot of things mostly minor seeming and mostly related to magic where we radically differed on what sort of tools were over the top in the hands of a player and too easily solved a problem, and I think it comes down to radically different ideas of what should be the hard challenges that drain party resources.
