QUOTE (Falconer @ Aug 30 2012, 10:47 PM)

Because Pax. When you have people going on and on about how dysfunctional the rules are when they don't even use their discretion within the rules as a GM. And don't even TRY to use the rules... but immediately go about house ruling things left right and center like you do. Then they see fit to pontificate about how bad they are when they don't even give them half a chance.
... "left right and center" ... for a grand total of sixteen houserules. Wait, no,
fifteen ... because custom content isn't really
changing anything.
Furthermore ... making house rules
IS exactly and precisely "[using] their discretion within the rules as a GM". Most of my houserules document is, in fact, just saying "This is how I do X, and this is how I do Y".
QUOTE
I've playtested enough stuff both under and outside of NDA to know that quite a few times my initial impressions of how bad things would be or to see how my 'superior' ideas played out to have a bit of humility on the issue.
As have I. Indeed, I spent several years as part of (and occasionally leading) a team of IMO very intelligent and creative people, running a play-by-post, player-versus-player "arena" with the D&D 3.5E rules at an extremely high level (meaning, at the end of hte power spectrum least playtested by the publisher) ... and let me tell you, we found a whole hell of a lot of holes in THAT system. Found them, and patched them over. I'd say any one f us had plenty of experience in "RPG design" after the half-decade-plus we spent on that project. Some things we fixed to work far better than the RAW version; some things we realised the RAW was better than we'd thought. A couple things we decided simply couldn't be fixed at all (Shapechange, how I loathe thee still).
And in the end, after all that ... so what?
Who fecking cares?? What someone who is not you, not one of your players, and not one of your GMs does or doesn't do with the rules is
none of your damned business - and noen of mine either. It's neither your nor my place to judge someone for how many or how few houserules they might care to use, until and unless one of us is playing in their game.
Someone can have one page of houserules, or none, or five hundred.
It doesn't matter. The
only thing that matters at the end of the day, is this: DID THE PEOPLE IN THAT GROUP HAVE FUN?
If the answer is yes, then whatever the GM did or didn't do was
the right thing, period, no exceptions. BEcaue everything they did either (a) created fun, or (b) stayed out of the way of creating fun.
Period.