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Message: <blockquote data-quote="irdeggman" data-source="post: 2240811" data-attributes="member: 16285">I just recently quit my D&D gaming group because of issues dealing with the DM.  No, I am not the subject nor involved in the subject group that started this thread.I do not have a problem with DMs making up house-rules, in fact I think many times it adds more flavor to what they are trying to accomplish. Likewise I have no problems with them changing their house-rules or any "Official" rules being used.I do have a problem if these changes are suddenly brought on without any time for the players to adjust to the concept being implemented.  If for instance the blink spell issue came up.  If this was the first time the spell (or similar force effects) were used against the subject of a blink spell - no real problem, unless of course it resulted in a PC's death then it is hard to shake that off.If, however the "official" rules had been being followed and this was the first time that they were changed - I do have a problem with that.Back to my story. .  .Our DM (a friend, we still game together just not in his game) decided to start a new game using the 3.0 D&D rules when they came out.  Great we all thought we hadn't played D&D for sometime and wanted to try the new rules.  He wrote up some guidelines for how he wanted his game to run.  Mostly describing the individual cultures and races. His elves and dwarves were different than the standard ones.  Only one clan of dwarves could be wizards and they didn't heal well, if they took serious damage they had to be healed by dwarven healingmagic normal healing magic wouldn't do. Elves had cold iron susceptability (this was 3.0 before the amterial type rules of 3.5 came out) that caused them to take extra damage from any thing made of iron (mithral didn't give this penalty) so they couldn't wear any normal metal armor either.  2 of us played dwarves and no one played an elf at the time so we didn't see the problem with the penalties associated with the elves.  When he sent it out I made a few comments on things he forgot to include or address due to the changes he had made.  My background was that I had been working on the Birthright setting update to 3.0 (on Birthright.net) for many months already and thus had already gotten deep into rules writing.Some of my suggestions he took others he disguarded, but he read them and listened.  Good so far.When we started playing he had assigned individual characters some "special" equipment and conditions based on where they were from.  Now this only applied to 2 characters from a group of around 8-10.  One character received an entire heard of really tough and extremely well-trained horses and special armor that she never took off (also never suffered any penalties for sleeping in armor). She also received special lances.  The other character got a souped up version of the katana and waz (forget the spelling) that the DM made up.  I pointed out to him that the DMG actually had stats for these weapons (they weren't in the PHB at the time) and they were different.  He said never mind the ones in my world are different.  Again no real problem but note that "no other characters received any special equipment or conditions".  In fact the setting was taking place in a region that these 2 characters were not from.As the game progressed it became evident that these 2 characters (especially the one with the horses) were dominating every event.  The one with the horses was constantly using them as extra fighters to take out the enemy and riding (charging) and shooting arrows inside dense forests.Then came 3.5, even as the group was getting frustrated with the "power" of the horse maiden.He redesigned his setting and added more cultural balance, each culture had to use their starting skill points (human only) for a certain set of skills that were always considered class skills.  We retrofit our characters to match up with the new system.  One player whose previous character had died decided to play an elf and we discovered the huge penalties he had to suffer.  I proposed something to the DM to help balance this out - basically if you take something away then you need to give something back in order to maintain balance between players.  This elven balance was eventually redone based upon the player's comments and feedback (another good thing, IMO).The DM then started changing more rules arbitrarily.  My son was playing a wizard and was approaching 5th level and trying to figure out what feat to take.  We suggested craft wands since it basically rocks.  All of a sudden (several sessions after the player had trained up his PC) the DM decided that in order to craft a wand the character ahd to have a masterwork wand to charge.  The price of this masterwork wand was supposed to be the price of making the wand per the DMG.  I asked the DM why and he said in order to create magic items you had to have a masterwork quality item to start with and the quote from the DMG about the cost of special materials for making a wand was refereing to this.  I said what happens when the charges are used up in the wand?  If it is a masterwork wand then it can't just turn into a plain stick.  Also that masterwork items are supposed to have some special benefit to them even if they are not enchanted, tools give circumstance bonuses, armor gives a reduced Dex penalty and weapons get a +1 to hit.  He had no comment on this. I asked him what craft skill should be used to create the masterwork wand and he replied anyone you want to apply.  Very heated discussion followed where I blew up (and subsequently appologized to him for my behavior).  But I still wanted to know how to make a masterwork quality wand in the first place for which he couldn't give me an answer.Another issue arrose when the DM decided that it was possible to craft keen arrow heads and weapons. These weren't magical and had to be kept sharpened or they lost their edge.  The arrow head could be reused if even they hit their target and cost the price of a masterwork item only didn't get the +1 to hit, so for a double masterwork item you could get both the +1 to hit and the keen property.  I pointed out to him that this essentially made the keen magical property of an item relatively useless since arrows were  destroyed when they hit their target.  Didn't care this is the way it is, a magical keen weapon doesn't have to be resharpend and thus that is the balancing effect here was pretty much his reply.About those horses. . . he was constantly letting their owner give them extra tricks without any training and more then they were entitled to based on the rules for training.We also had to train to go up levels, using the optional training rules in the DMG.  Not too bad since this one was explained to us before it was enforced.  It did cause a lot of "problems" when characters advanced levels at different times and the party had to take some downtime to accomodate the training though.These were rules based issues that aggrivated me to no end but the real reason I quit was that his style of running a game was totally disorganized.  He relied on random encounters to drive the sessions. We had nights when nothing happened at all and other nights when we had to wait for 1-1/2 hours while he made up the stats for his random encounter that he had just rolled up.Talking to other GMs in my gaming group (who weren't playing in this game) they told me that is how he has always run his games - all randomly driven and no real story to them jsut a series of unrelated events.  The whole time he was raving about how the last time he ran this game he joint DMed with one of the other members of our group and the game was awsome.  Basically from what I've been told was that it was awsome despite how he ran his "side".  I believe this since the other GM is one of the best I have ever played under (even though he had killed many of my PCs) he still ran a well organized and balanced game.  He did house rule a lot of things and fudged dice rolls to make the story flow but there was always a reason for this it wasn't because he said it was so.Oh well so much for the ranting.A GAME IS NOT ABOUT THE RULES BUT IN HOW WELL PEOPLE GAME TOGETHER AND RESPECT EACH OTHER. If the game is not fun then people will not play.</blockquote>

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