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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 5810239" data-attributes="member: 8461">It's not contradictory because my hope for this is realistic; I don't want the rules to have lacking areas, but I recognize that there's no way for any game system to cover everything - that's simply impossible.I see a difference between my original statement of "I don't want them to have lacking areas" and "I want nothing excluded." It's certainly possible for rules to act as guidelines without having to necessarily expound upon everything (I didn't play 4E, but from what I hear the "page 42" rule was a lot like this).I'm not sure what you mean by "disqualify it as a valid area of concern." If there's something I want the game to do, it should ideally provide a framework for how to do it, or they'll cover a given idea to the extent that any gaps are so small that they can be covered by flavor text alone (e.g. there's no "solder" class specifically, but the fighter is so close that you can just say your fighter is a soldier - if there's no class that lets you possess other people's bodies, that's harder to fill with a reskinned existing class).Now, the latter example there is a fairly extreme one, but I've had players ask to play a sentient couch before, so these things come up. I'm not saying these aren't understandable gaps, but gaps do happen (which is another reason why I want 5E to be under the OGL - so someone can cover these odd corner-cases).A lot of them are fairly specific issues. This was just the most relevant to the topic at hand because it'd been mentioned before.That's true, but given that we don't know how various things will interact, it's harder to judge how a house rule will go over in terms of its impact on the wider game. Simply assigning "at-will spellcasting" feats to a spellcasting character that doesn't want feats but wants at-will spellcasting could very well carry its own set of problems. Hence why I'd prefer the rules to cover that, so they'll be ahead of any potential problems.Depends on who you ask. A 1E-style wizards is pretty basic to me, but I play Pathfinder, so take that with a grain of salt.I don't think this is necessarily true. While there is a connection between rules and playstyle, I think that an expansive playstyle doesn't necessarily "lock down" the system from smaller changes or additions. Now, if you want "significant deviation" then I'll grant you that it is harder to do so under an expansive system...but if I wanted significant deviation, I don't think I'd be playing that game to begin with.Of course, that was another benefit to the OGL, in that it let other companies deal with those problems and resolve them when they offered a significant deviation of the game.I didn't feel that it was there, at least not very much, in 3.5. That said, we seem to be talking about slightly different things...you're talking about adding house rules because you want to (e.g. you feel you can do X better), whereas I'm talking about adding house rules because I (perceive a) need to (e.g. because X is broken, or simply absent altogether).See, I don't see this as falling under the purview of house rules at all, however, but rather as a question of playstyle - one that's completely divorced from the rules.To run with the "are casters better than fighters (at higher levels)?" example, I found that regardless of the system, this was solved by adding <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/wandering-monster.html" target="_blank">more encounters</a> during a play session. No new rules were needed, but rather one simply had to adjust how they were structuring game-play. By contrast, a house rule would likely have either tried to de-power casters or crank up the power of fighters...both of which would likely have had unintended consequences.</blockquote>

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