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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5749764" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'd like to posit that you functionally ignore at least half the existing rules in your own game in that way now.How many different monsters do you use? If you're 4e, and you use 5 different types for every combat, never repeating, you're looking at (5 monsters * 10 encounters / level) 50 different monsters of each level, or (30 levels) 1500 monsters over the course of an entire 30-level campaign, or (10 levels) 500 monsters over the course of the duration that most groups functionally play for. There are 4,750 monsters in the DDI. Someone with a DDI sub (the cheapest way to get into D&D) has to sort through over three times as many rules as they are using in the span of a 2-year game. It's 9 times as many for your usual 10-level campaign. That's a lot of rules that you have to decide you're not using.And that's assuming no monster is a homebrew (monster building rules make it so you can ignore 100% of those pre-made monsters), and that every encounter from 1-30 is a combat (no quest XP or skill challenge XP). Or maybe we'll look at classes. A player gets something like 35 powers over the course of 30 levels. With 5 players in a campaign, your party makes use of about 175 powers between them. There are 8,723 powers currently in the DDI (once again, the cheapest way to get into the game): nearly fifty times the actual rules you'll ever use. DDI's got a lot of options, though. Lets say our DM fails his cost/benefit analysis check (less options! more money!) and just buys the core books. He's got almost 500 monsters, so he'll get to use everything in that book, and he'll have to use some of it up to three times. That's a lot of mileage! And I hope he likes leveling up his critters, 'cuz about half of those are heroic tier. He's still got four times as many powers as his players will ever use, and an entire extra 3 classes sitting around gathering dust (probably at least one of the strikers). No matter the game you play, you are going to ignore vast swaths of the rules, either because they never come up in your game, or because they're not great rules for most groups. Ignoring the rule is trivial. I bet more than half of 4e players aren't even really aware there IS item damage. A bigger percentage have never used it anyway. Encumbrance probably gets a similar treatment. You are never going to use every race, class, monster, and house rule out there. There is an abundance.And it is up to the DM to determine what rules they need when they need 'em. I get the argument that the rules should generally be useful rules to the majority of DMs to be present in a rulebook, but having rules you never touch doesn't hurt you any more than having monsters you are never aware of. As long as it is self-contained, and doesn't bang on to a dozen different other sub-systems, it's an option you can use, that you never have to use.</blockquote>

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