"I wanna feel special!"
I love that.
It's not enough that the game, the game world, the game universe, revolves around the PC's.
Too many players think that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING should be available to them.
"Mage of the Shining Star Desert" PrC? The players wants it, even if his PC misses the critical requirement: Must be born in the Shining Star Desert on a clear and moonless night.
Oh, wait, those kinds of PreRequisites aren't in fashion, so the GM should remove all non-mechanics PreRek's from PrC's and Feats and such.
That kind of gets on my nerves. In a lot of ways, with players claiming they should get the ability to audit NPC's, claiming that all PrC's, AdC's, EC's, spells, feats, weapons, abilities, should be within the realm of any PC, regardless of race or sex, is getting rediculious.
I use "Background Occupation" (Ripped almost whole cloth from the d20 Modern SRD) in my fantasy homebrew. Fighter with 8 ranks of spot? Players figure he's a professional who took a background occupation that gave him Spot as a free class skill.
Of course, I've also heavily modified the in-house rules, so that Spot, Move Silently, Listen and Search are human racial skills, due to thier "Intelligent Predator, not much better than monsters." background in the setting.
The rules serve my game, and both my players and I don't have a problem with a rule being tweaked or suspended during the game. They've also learned that letting something slide on my end (A LE Orc with the Arcane Archer PrC) means that I'll let something slide on thier end in the game (You guys want to take the Urban Warfare Feat out of Blood & Guts for your fantasy characters, for free, because you've spent your entire careers in the same city? Ummm, OK).
A lot of this with "Can't take it unless you're a Skywalker", "No spellfire", ect ect ect along with "It isn't fair that DM monsters have abilities I don't!" complaints I see on many different boards makes me shake my head. Like one of my players explained to a newbie who complained that it wasn't fair that my NPC's could be any level, when they had to start at level one: "Life ain't fair, and this game is supposed to emulate life."
"Do you want a challenge, or shall I just hand you experience points for shoving over bums?" is a quote from one GM, who had grown tired of players commenting it wasn't fair that they only had THREE magical weapons when a monster had four magical abilities.
"Hey, I warned you." is another quote that should be heard more often. I've seen many players complain on forums that "The local townsfolk warned it was dangerous, but the GM shouldn't have mentioned it if he didn't want us to go looking!" after they were warned, repeatedly, not to go somewhere, did anyway, and the local populance (monsters, humaniods or NPC's) chewed them up and spit them out. To me, these are the same kinds of people who drink Liquid Plumber and then sue, saying: "If they didn't want it drank, they shouldn't have made it a liquid!" despite the big warning DO NOT DRINK! WILL DISSOLVE YOUR DUMB ASS!
Hmmm, I might be getting a bit off topic here... It's late though, and electrons are cheaper than pencils...
Slavish adherence to the rules, not allowing the GM to make any tweaks, and not allowing players to make tweaks, kind of pulls the magic out of the game. A lot of people seem enamored with "Gritty Realism" in thier fantasy game.
Personally, my job and life have enough "Gritty Realism" for me. I play the game for fun, and so do my players. If my player running an elf PC asks "Since he was captured by a savage orc tribe, and raised as one of thiers as revenge (according to the savage tribes codes we have laid out, this is actually reasonable and called: "Kit Price") on the elvish tribe, can I swap my elven weapon prof's for orcish ones?" I might say yes, and if the kobold they are chasing turns out to be a 1rst level blackgaurd of Snavesk (Kobold God of Power) they aren't going to raise a hue and cry.
I guess, what I'm saying, is it should all be about give and take.
And stop whining.
