Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barolo" data-source="post: 7205491" data-attributes="member: 61932">Not at all. As I have stated, we practice even more restrictive rulings regarding what goes in our gaming table around here. Nothing unfair or badwrongfun in that.The thing is, the same way a DM can decide that feats and multiclassing are in or out, or that in their campaign only a handful of feats are available, or that some specific multiclass combination is out, they can also decide that access to the raise dead spell is restricted to clerics of life and death deities, or that elves don't exist in their homebrew, or whatever. That there is no labeling on these other game options hasn't prevented gaming tables around from doing just that.It seems to me more of a marketing strategy (which, of course, is part of game designing) decision than a "system engine" design decision to label some non-essential elements of the game as optional but not others. And I point Adventurers League as evidence, as there, the optional and unassumed feats are actually legal. I could even say that getting rid of racial penalties to ability scores, or that the average range of ability scores giving positive modifiers are a marketing strategy too.Let me clarify my position. If a set of (non-essential) rules are likely to turn off a part of the gaming community, but suppressing these rules could upset other part of this same community, just label them as optional. Folks who like these options will add them and never care about the label, but folks who dislike don't need to do anything in the game. This is exactly the same, to me at least, as to present these same rules without any label, and letting the folks who dislike them to ban these options (as I already do with a lot of other options in the game), but for somebody else, the first scenario might feel more comfortable, as it avoids the negative of subtracting something from the game.Similarly with ability scores, if PCs had smaller numbers (from, say, smaller racial bonuses or even because of racial penalties, and resulting in overall smaller modifiers that go deeper into negative territory) and monsters had proportionally smaller numbers, the game could be exactly the same. After all, the difference between a -2 modifier and a -1 modifier is the same as the difference between a +1 and a +2. But negatives seem to upset people, so just adjusting the whole baseline mathematics of the game up (by making positive modifiers more common but also inflating monster HPs, for instance) seems to make everybody happier.Oh, and I am not criticizing any of those design decisions, it seems they work quite cleverly from a marketing standpoint while not really affecting gaming experience in any significant way.</blockquote>

Verification