This is basically completely wrong and you should feel ashamed of yourself.xhieron wrote:My only objection to the original premise is essentially the same Bears raised, to wit, that whether your guidelines are good, bad, or nonexistent, you still have anything you have at the kindly mercy of your DM and the friendly agreement of your fellow players not to flip the table or laugh you out of the room.
Fundamentally in an RPG game it is possible for any player (whether they are the MC or not) to persuade the other people at the table to move the story in any direction, to include or not include any elements, and to treat any procedures at all as "the rules." But while it is demonstrably true that any conceivable procedures or story elements are possible and can be introduced by any of the people at the table, it is nonetheless true that the different positions of the players at the table matter and that the presented rules and setting of the game also matter.
When you and I are both at the table, it is entirely possible for me to persuade you to have your character do something. But despite the fact that I could use my powers of persuasion to have your character perform any action, it is fucking obviously true that you have a more meaningful and tangible control over your character's actions than I do. Similarly, I could persuade the MC to handle criticals in some manner or another, but it's still importantly true that the MC has more of a say as to what the critical hits houserules being used in our game are, and also importantly true that even though the number of potential rules we could be using is infinite it still fucking matters what the written rules actually are.
An electron can at any moment be anywhere in the universe. Its location is probabilistic and it doesn't have to move through intervening space from one instant to another. But there is still a point of space where it is most likely to be at any given point in time, and it is still useful to know and describe where that point is, even though there's literally an infinite number of other places it might possibly be.
No, you aren't likely to use the entire rules in the Stronghold Builder's Handbook as-is. But it still matters what those rules are, and it still matters that they exist. Because the rules you actually use are much more likely to be reasonably close to what's written in that book than they are to be some sort of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey hack. The fact that two possibilities are both possible doesn't mean that they are both equally likely. And if there's some god damn rules in a god damn book, possibilities that are reasonably similar to those rules are a metric ass tonne more likely than possibilities that are not.
And that is why the Stronghold Builder's Handbook is actually really good for the game. Because despite the fact that what is written is probably going to be somewhat dissimilar to what is actually used, it is almost assuredly going to be very similar in a lot of ways. And that essentially pushes a really large amount of the infinite possibilities outside the part of the probability space you are ever likely to see in your entire gaming life. While shit games like 4e and 5e don't have anything like that and don't push those things out of the probability space.
Basically, you're making a weird Oberoni-esque fallacious argument that rules don't matter at all. And you're wrong. Your idea is bad, and you should feel bad.
-Username17