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<blockquote data-quote="DumbPaladin" data-source="post: 5458748" data-attributes="member: 90770"><p>It's funny, because this applies not only to RPGs, but also board games & card games. House rules in Uno pretty much make the game never end; Free Parking in Monopoly makes an already poorly-designed game possibly never-ending ... and the people who suggest house rules NEVER have any understanding of game theory, nor do they seem to even attempt to ponder what might go wrong. That bugs me.</p><p></p><p>I'm fine with a house rule if some thought was put into it. I used to host a monthly board game night, and one of the regular attendees seemed to be obsessed with changing the rules (or IGNORING rules!) of nearly every game we played, but NOT in any way that made the game </p><p>a) more enjoyable</p><p>b) equitable for all players</p><p>or c) do anything but completely break down</p><p></p><p>After having a couple of different games get derailed by her "ideas", I politely pointed out that game theory was a field that, despite my interest in it, is still fully beyond my grasp ... and completely beyond hers. And we almost never instituted her "ideas" into future board game nights. (By derailed, I mean: in one game, her suggested "house rule", which was blindly agreed to by half of the people at the table, actually made it impossible for anyone to win the game, or for the game to ever end.)</p><p></p><p>A DM that treats a house rule as a sacred cow, especially in light of evidence and data suggesting it IS broken or CAN BE broken, is a definite liability to a group.</p><p></p><p>There are some house rules that are so innocuous that they cannot possibly mess anything up -- changing magic missile to instead shoot out little yellow stars with sound effects, but not changing any other stats of teh spell, for example. Some house rules are designed to benefit the players and their characters equally, which should always be within the DM's purview -- like allowing characters to choose half the value of their hit die rather than rolling, or automatically ensuring they cannot receive less than half.</p><p></p><p>But when you start doing things like radically altering classes, adding powerful feats, changing combat rules, and the like without any playtesting whatsoever ... recipe for disaster, given how few people even bother to think of all of the potential ramifications. Heck, even RPG system designers don't seem to be able to come up with all of the potential ramifications ...</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DumbPaladin, post: 5458748, member: 90770"] It's funny, because this applies not only to RPGs, but also board games & card games. House rules in Uno pretty much make the game never end; Free Parking in Monopoly makes an already poorly-designed game possibly never-ending ... and the people who suggest house rules NEVER have any understanding of game theory, nor do they seem to even attempt to ponder what might go wrong. That bugs me. I'm fine with a house rule if some thought was put into it. I used to host a monthly board game night, and one of the regular attendees seemed to be obsessed with changing the rules (or IGNORING rules!) of nearly every game we played, but NOT in any way that made the game a) more enjoyable b) equitable for all players or c) do anything but completely break down After having a couple of different games get derailed by her "ideas", I politely pointed out that game theory was a field that, despite my interest in it, is still fully beyond my grasp ... and completely beyond hers. And we almost never instituted her "ideas" into future board game nights. (By derailed, I mean: in one game, her suggested "house rule", which was blindly agreed to by half of the people at the table, actually made it impossible for anyone to win the game, or for the game to ever end.) A DM that treats a house rule as a sacred cow, especially in light of evidence and data suggesting it IS broken or CAN BE broken, is a definite liability to a group. There are some house rules that are so innocuous that they cannot possibly mess anything up -- changing magic missile to instead shoot out little yellow stars with sound effects, but not changing any other stats of teh spell, for example. Some house rules are designed to benefit the players and their characters equally, which should always be within the DM's purview -- like allowing characters to choose half the value of their hit die rather than rolling, or automatically ensuring they cannot receive less than half. But when you start doing things like radically altering classes, adding powerful feats, changing combat rules, and the like without any playtesting whatsoever ... recipe for disaster, given how few people even bother to think of all of the potential ramifications. Heck, even RPG system designers don't seem to be able to come up with all of the potential ramifications ... [/QUOTE]
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