Comment on “Fracturing”

"Every experienced player I enter into my campaign becomes a 'troublesome' hodgepodge of necessary clarifications, negotiations, detailing, training, lines in the sand and potential argumentative blow-outs because the company could not agree on the game's fundamentals."

I blame DMs, too. You said the other day that the company has been selling us a bill of bullshit goods for decades. YES, undoubtedly. But who buys those bullshit goods, and why do they keep buying them?

Some guesses:

(A) People who don't take D&D that seriously and will buy whatever as long as it strings their campaign out another couple sessions.
(B) People who treat the official rules as ineffable wisdom, as gospel, instead of as a starting point for developing their own game.

What is it that causes people not to work purely from their own imagination (or real research) once they've gotten through a few splatbooks? Do they not realize how little is on offer? Maybe people still buy these things for the same reason people still read shitty 10-part fantasy series: they just don't know anything else. Getting the latest splat is all the "game design" they can conceive of.

I started with 3.5, and back then I pored over shitloads of splatbooks. As a noob DM, I thought they were the beginning and end of what ought to be put into the game -- but I borrowed those books, or I downloaded pirate PDFs, because even then I could tell they weren't worth the sticker price. And I was always, nearly from the beginning, a zealous defender of the "judicial precedent" aspect of DMing, where rules and rulings accumulated and were built upon, because otherwise what the hell was the point of making rulings? That attitude led to making my own rules documents, remixes of official materials, lists of clarifications and rulings -- and all that eventually snowballed into not needing the books because I'd reinvented enough of the game in my own style [and later in yours ;P] to run without them.

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