Well, I figure I started this mess, I might as well comment.
1) Yes, I'm aware that that monopoly has house rules and that free parking is one. However, I was not aware that it was a house rule for the longest time and might not have used it if I had known. As for other games, yes, there are some variations, I try to play the "correct" rules. With card games, this is normally impossible, I just use the ones I like the most.
2) Yes, house rules are fairly common, but I've seen the most common reason for this is a communal telling of the rules not because of a choice to make house rules. People learned how to play D&D from someone else who learned it from someone else who had house rules that he didn't know were house rules. So, due to this, everyone at the table thinks they are playing by the rules without any changes at all.
Most commonly, I've seen: critical misses on a 1, natural 20s succeeding on skill checks (and 1s failing) and natural 20s not making saves.
I've also seen (once again, without anyone knowing they were house rules): Rogues can only make 1 sneak attack per round, hitting cover in 3rd edition, spontaneous casting of all spells for clerics, various spells played their 3.0 way rather than the 3.5 way.
3) D&D grew out of a desire to role play the lives of individual characters on a battlefield in a fantasy war game. It progressed from full war game to small skirmish game to wondering what the character's did the rest of the time when they weren't on the battlefield.
The first couple of rules systems were designed around battle and had very few other rules. The rest of the rules were supposed to be invented by the DM. Nearly every rule was a house rule.
I think this is where most of the idea that expecting a house rule comes from. When I joined my first group of people and learned to play D&D, it was under a mix of 1st Ed and 2nd Ed rules plus some house rules. They were the only group I played with, but we played often. I started my own group with some new people and some people from my old group. I taught all of them to play the rules that I mistakenly thought were the 2nd edition rules. It wasn't until later when I really sat down and read the rules that I found out how many house rules we were actually using without knowing it.
It made me realize that although I was playing D&D, I wasn't playing the same game as the people out there on the internet. I switched my game over to the 2nd Ed rules without almost any changes at all in order to make sure I was playing the right game. Then I found out that there were major holes in the rules that prevented them from being used as written. It frustrated me that I had to continually come up with new rules when I figured that was the game designers job.
3rd Ed came out and changed all of that, we played using the rules exactly as written as a test before we changed anything. We found we didn't need to change anything and the couple people who tried created more problems than they solved.
I now run a weekly game of 3.5 D&D with nearly no house rules at all. I played (until very recently) in 2 more.
4) In case anyone cares, since my list of house rules is short enough, I'll list it here:
No Frenzied Berzerkers
No one can take divine metamagic(persistant spell)
The Blur spell does not allow you to hide
Close Quarter's Fighting allows you to take the AOO even if you don't threaten your enemy
The rest of my rules are campaign rules, or table rules, which don't apply to the rules, just on what choices are available based on the campaign setting I'm running. The above 2 changes are done no matter what campaign setting I'm using based on FB being too powerful and disruptive and same with DM(persistant). I will continue to patch "holes" that allow you to make overly powerful characters.
5) When D&D was created, it was fairly closely tied directly to Greyhawk. The spells in the book were created by Greyhawk wizards, the assumptions in the DMG assumed Greyhawk, almost all the adventures took place in Greyhawk.
2nd Edition ushered in the age of "D&D is whatever you'd like it to be". The rules were vague on purpose, they wouldn't want to put anything into the book that might stop someone from using D&D in their homebrew world that was nothing like Greyhawk.
3rd Edition tried to focus the game more in the direction of 1st Ed. More focus on following the rules, with Greyhawk once again the default setting for the campaign with PrC directly from groups in Greyhawk in the core books, the wealth charts assuming a default of Greyhawk, the gods being Greyhawk gods, and still the ever present Greyhawk spells. It is much harder to modify the game away to other worlds, far away from the "baseline" than it was in 2nd Edition due to the way the system is built around these.
I find a lot of people are still trapped in a 2nd Edition mindset of "I must change the rules, they will never work as written". They as well have a 2nd Edition idea of "The rules can be changed easily to my homebrew world, and they are SUPPOSED to."
I think you really have to change your view for 3E. It is really a different sort of game than 2nd Ed. It has started to take on an identity of it's own as D&D as a campaign world rather than just a set of guidelines for making up your own. It IS possible, and I'm not saying it's wrong to modify the rules. It's just hard to do it effectively without a lot of work. A lot of people out there change 3 rules and then say "Don't worry, this won't affect anything" then the entire system falls apart. It really is a house of cards in that respect.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
. Seriously though, you can get some pretty abusive combos even using WotC-only material. PHB-only for players is harder to abuse, but even then I don't think we will get far before the game breaks down due to a difference in interpretation.
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