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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgoroth" data-source="post: 6079955" data-attributes="member: 6674889">Why should I read the DMG as a player...to have fun? I read parts of the DMG in some editions, not all of it. And it's pretty easy to say via the anonimity of the internet that DMs who don't allow on the fly house rules to player's powers are crappy DMs, because those same DMs were absolutely kick ass DMing other editions of the game. Quite often it wasn't the power gamers or rules lawyers getting fed up with the quirks of 4e, it was the casual gamers. Any edition that annoys both the power gamers AND the casual ones...at the same table, at different tables, over the course of three years, and many DMs with varying styles...I can only conclude the only common thing is that either a) they all sucked, b) I suck, and thus my recollection of all those arguments started over a "it would be cool to do that, but your power clearly says it does only this. if I allow that, then I need to allow X too next time. sorry" is spotty, or c) there is something that the DMG didn't get through to us, the players, OR the DMs I gamed with. You have a 6-8 page character sheet, a character builder, a rules compendium trying to codify every possible minutiae of things that can be done on the battle grid, and then you have this yes...obscure section of the DMG which nobody I gamed with ever heard of or paid any attention to ( I guess cause we all suck or were trying to follow the rules or something)..page 42 I only heard of a year after I quit. And of my gamer friends, I spent probably the most amount of time reading the forums and getting system mastery out of it. Quite possibly, our DMs might even have read the entire DMG several times and chose to ignore it. I never grilled them on their system mastery, I played the game from the player's side of the table, across from many DMs, and very rarely were we allowed to house rule on the fly our powers.If a power says "target = enemies" vs "target = creatures", can you not see that allowing the player to house rule that on the fly would be a DMing nightmare? I decide that character's my enemy for a nanosecond because I need to hit him to knock him out of his trance. I don't recall any other game forcing every action to be combed over like a lawyer before getting it approved by the supreme court of DM opinion. Having the Rules Compendium helped our groups a lot, but even after reading that a few times, I never got the idea that I could fudge my powers to do something else, because I didn't think my DM would approve it, and likely if I were DMing, I'd find house ruling stuff on the fly in such a fiddly uber balanced (in theory) system would bring the whole house crashing down.What my main beef was...is that the game simply wasn't fun aside from power gaming the combat aspect of it. It just wasn't. It was an ongoing joke that players would want to RP a lot more in other systems, but in 4e it was like...combat takes too long, but on the other hand, out of combat is 2-dimensional and boring, so...when's the next combat? 8 pages of combat-centered powers. It's hardly a surprise that power gaming the system was valued so highly. Nothing else mattered much on your character sheet, nor took up as much space.Projecting the flaws of a game system on bad DMing is kinda...meh. Those were good DMs...just not in that game system. They often spoke of the ease of creating combats, but the emphasis on combat over everything else, which made their plots and maps and worlds seem kinda...let's skip the cutscenes and get to the next battle. Same players, same DMs sometimes, different behavior. If I'd only seen it once, I'd say you have a point. But after seeing the same patterns multiple times...yes, I do blame the system and not the DMs or the players.</blockquote>

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