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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7538869" data-attributes="member: 7006">For me, I'm always of the opinion of not bothering to put together a set of cohesive rules before the campaign begins and worrying about how this corner case has to be adjudicated if this rule is put in place, or that corner case has to be addressed if that rule is in place.  Especially when we have no idea if these corner cases will ever actually come up.To me, it begins and ends with the player telling me "I'd love for my character to be able to do X"... and then I look to see if it is normally possible by some other class or some other ability or feature.  If it is... then the basic premise is balanced and there's no reason not to give it to them. Because essentially the reason they can't currently do it is because the game made a couple of flavor decisions in order to keep all the defaults slightly different from each other.  But my game is not the default game, so I don't have to follow those established premises.  Does it really affect anything at all whatsoever to let my barbarian player use a longbow for ranged attacks and damage using STR?  No, of course it doesn't.  The barbarian does 1d8+3 damage at range.  Whoopty-do!  The exact kind of ranged damage that every other PC at the table is probably doing.  So if that player asks for it... then I'll absolutely let them, because using the longbow is essentially nothing more than a flavor choice when you get down to it.  But I'm certainly not going to waste my time trying to create an entire system of STR-based ranged weapon rules beforehand on the off-chance the barbarian player comes to me to say they'd like to have one.  A complete waste of time and energy that can easily be replaced by me just thinking at the time the question is broached "Does this PC doing 1d8+3 damage at range matter in the slightest?"But most importantly... the one thing I won't do is then begin to extrapolate all these ridiculous fantasy PCs that could be created by some other evil genius magical player that would show up at my table and take this special corner case rule I gave to the barbarian player and build some kind of extravagantly overpowered PC out of it that completely unbalances everything.  All in an effort to just convince myself that I shouldn't let the barbarian use a longbow.  I'm never going to shoot down a player's ideas just because some fantasy dickhead player that doesn't exist could take the idea and blow it up.  That's just dumb.</blockquote>

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