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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 4768774" data-attributes="member: 12377">What happened to Rule 0?The rules create a set of shared expectations.  People expect D&D to contain, for example, elves, encounter powers, and Erathis, because they spent $30 on a book that told them that was what to expect.  Obviously the DM can ban things, but at the risk of alienating players -- and that's where the problem arises.There used to be the idea of "core" rules -- things you could reasonably rely on, like the PHB races and classes and spells and such.  DMs had to specifically ban these, or else you could expect to see them.  Then there were "optional" rules -- variant races, classes, and splatbooks, that required the DM's permission.  This is how they managed the shared expectations:  core stuff was quintessentially D&D so you could probably count on it, and optional stuff might be available, but might not, so check with the DM.4E has done away with this distinction.  They are trying to position everything as core, which is the equivalent of saying, nothing is optional.  The most blatant example of this is the chapter on character creation.  You may recall from 3E that step 0 of creating a character was to check with the DM to see if he had any setting-specific do's and don't's.  Looking through the 4E chapter on creating a character, it doesn't even mention the idea of consulting with the DM on anything other than alignment.  (I'm not trying to start a 3E vs 4E edition war -- I'm just criticizing a particular WotC policy of 4E.)I am all in favor of plant-people as an explicitly optional race.  I guess my complaint is really not with the wilden but with the 4E "everything is core" policy, because it gives players an expectation that the DM might not want to fulfill.  I'm not sure I want to figure out how to work wilden into my setting (it was hard enough squeezing goliaths and devas in there last month), but I also don't want to say "no" to the player who bought PHB3 and expects to play one.  It's much easier to say "no" when the races is labeled as optional, because the player's expectations were not as strong. -- 77IM</blockquote>

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