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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6770543" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think this is a 3e created problem, as a side effect of WotC selling their system down the river in exchange for short term profit.  The third edition era was incredibly prolific in terms of rules supplements, and each rules supplement - no matter how DM centered the content would appear to be - usually had in it a considerable amount of player centered character building options.   The reasoning is obvious.  There are a lot more players than DMs.   Back in the 1e era, the player could get away with buying only a PH and maybe an UA (and not even that if they were content to play non-spellcasters).  The rest of the books were DM tools.  Any supplemental material - say from Dragon - would need to be explicitly approved.  In the 2e edition era, the focus on the DM as the target of publications largely continued.   While there were some relatively minor nods to generic customization in the form of kit classes, most offered very little in the way of specific mechanical benefit, and were easy to brush over.  The majority of highly specific customization was specific to a setting, and so went with the setting with no expectation that it necessarily ported to any other one.  But in the 3e era, the goal appeared to be to sell as many books as possible to players by making the game rules much more player centric.  That makes economic sense in the short run, but eventually crippled the game with rules bloat, poorly thought out rules, dysfunctional rules interactions, impossible to balance CharGen, at least three versions of every archetype.   In the midst of this you had players with the quite understandable perception that since they'd bought the book, that they should be able to make use of it.   Keeping track of this insanity involved very high levels of implicit social contracts regarding exactly to what extent and how you were allowed to break the game.So now you have a lot of players out there with the experience that if it has been published, it's fair game and further that it's somewhat baffling why that wouldn't be true.</blockquote>

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