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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5432270" data-attributes="member: 32740">This is because they were saying one thing and doing another. These were largely all long-time gamers who obviously had learned to play under 2E, 1E and older editions. They understood and personally embraced the principles espoused by Gygax in the 1E DMG and had no hesitation about making the game what THEY wanted and the "rules" be hanged. But the version of D&D which they had produced for WotC had little to say about such ideas if anything at all. The official line of response was ALWAYS, "If you have a question or an issue about a rule then ask us and we'll give you the official answer," rather than suggest that anyone should ever just make something up on their own.  By rights even 1E should have had that written at the top of every page of the DMG. This was WotC's approach. It may even have been a formal policy. They had books and magazines to sell and it probably seemed wrong to them as businessmen to suggest that you might EVER actually not need them to tell you how to play. But that approach was a key factor in making D&D as successful as it had been prior to 3E - ENCOURAGEMENT of active creativity right down to the level of the basic rules. WotC felt it was in their own interests to always leave people with the impression that WOTC was the source of rules - not individual gamers. And to exacerbate that they built the concept of "rules mastery" into the rules themselves. The result is a generation of RPG gamers trained as rules lawyers because they've been effectively taught that the fun of the game is to be found in manipulation of the official rules - and official rules come first from WotC. But the personnel at WotC knew better for their own games and routinely told the rules to go stuff it.</blockquote>

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