Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6956135" data-attributes="member: 6701872">They did know what they were doing. They were making a base set of rules that works when played under their provided assumptions, and providing options for use by people wanting to use a different set of assumptions or to have the game work differently.The problem you describe is one of you not knowing what the designers were doing, and I will grant that their assumption of DMs realizing that when they say "...your Dungeon Master might allow..." they meant exactly that, and no more, and certainly not that any/all optional/variant rules could be engaged without further thought on the matter. And it conveyed very much to me. But that is a natural problem of language; there are too many possible meanings of each word, so any given string of them can be interpreted in multiple linguistically-correct ways.I've not condemned anyone for using optional rules. I have condemned the idea that when using optional rules, it's not your own responsibility to make whatever other adjustments are necessary for you to enjoy the result of using those rules, whether it is accepting the altered state of the game (adjusting your expectations) or altering other aspects of the game to mitigate undesired effects (adjusting the way you play).If the consequences of these optional rules were "complex and hard to fathom", I doubt there would have been as many threads as there have been in which people stated with absolute confidence what those consequences are. We'd have people posting about how their game play broke down and they have no idea why, rather than people pointing a finger directly at specific feats and calling them "broken."At the very least, I don't find the consequences of optional D&D rules to be all that complex in this edition thanks to the overall simplicity of the game rules, nor do I find it to be hard to fathom that "give the character a thing they otherwise wouldn't have" means characters having things not actually expected for them to have by the base game rules. I don't think that is the case. In my experience, inexperienced DMs have typically approached the game with caution because they are aware of their own inexperience - so they take anything listed as optional and say "I'll save that for later, when I've got a handle on the non-optional stuff." Some even look for ways to trim-back even more of the rules so that they don't, in their inexperienced state, have so much to keep track of.Yes, I have seen a few inexperienced DMs that were brimming with confidence and were planning on using all kinds of optional rules, variants, and even their own home-brewed-without-ever-playing-a-single-session-before materials... but those have, in my experience, been the sort of people that are dead-set on doing that no matter who tells them it's not a great plan or what reasons are given why they should reconsider. And then their first campaign goes up in flames, if it ever gets started in the first place, and they abandon the entire idea of DMing or come back for campaign #2 with a base-rules-only approach because they realized their error of asking too much of their as of then un-developed skill set.And really, what I think this kind of comes down to is that WotC wrote the game rules assuming their reader to be possessed of a particular degree of intelligence and self-awareness, and some people are expressing that they think that was asking/expecting too much of the reader.</blockquote>

Verification