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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3760058" data-attributes="member: 4937">Mine are. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Let me tell you why I create house rules.  I create house rules either because I think the current rules prevent players from doing something I would want to do as a player, quite often because a player asks me if he can do something and I don't want to just say 'no'.I create house rules because I think the current rules are badly abusable, such that if I turned them against my PC's and abused the limitations of the rules, it wouldn't be fair to them.  Sometimes I discover this problem because my player's power gamed, and sometimes I discover this problem because I power gamed, but when I find it I consider it a hole in the rules that needs plugging.I create house rules because I want concrete resolution subsystems for things that the RAW doesn't cover: casting spells of a higher level than you can normally cast(!), creating a potion without being a spell-caster, using astrology, visiting someone else's dreams, meditating, making a sacrifice, engaging in a prolonged cinematic chase, asking for divine intervention, fighting a case in court, having children, etc. I tell you what I think the problem is here.  Just as there are alot of bad DM's out there, there are an awful lot of bad rulesmiths out there.  Just go to the house rules forums and glance through 95% of the threads.   Most DMs, even some really good ones, have no business trying to smith rules because they just don't have the skill.  It so happens not surprisingly that alot of bad DMs are also bad rulesmiths.  But frankly, I'm a better rulesmith than I am a DM, so I don't think the two really are directly related.  I've made alot of mistakes over the years, and I'm just not witty or original and creative enough IMO enough to be a truly great DM, but none of my problems have ever stemmed from my rules.  Likewise, I've had some problems over the years with other DMs but never principally with thier house rules per se.  (One was a satanist that wanted to bring his personal beliefs into the game experience, another was just boring, a third was monte hall, two were too extemporaneous and there attempts to ad hoc were just an uninteresting mess, another played a game that would have been fun for me only when I was 10 years younger, and several simply lost interest in thier campaigns because it was too much work.)  Just because your personal experience has been - DMs that add/adjust/copy rules tend to be prats, doesn't make house rules the problems any more than ehren27's bad experiences with 1st edition DM's makes 1st edition the problem.</blockquote>

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