House Ruling: Addition vs. Subtraction

House ruling has been a major part of D&D since the very beginning. However, while discussing the announcement of a Lord of the Rings game based on 5E with some friends, something struck me: Our discussions on how one might house-rule a 5E game to fit Middle-earth all involved subtracting options, whereas if we were having this discussion in the early days of the game, we would be talking about how to add the right elements.

Let's take the addition of the ranger as a class, for example. The ranger began life in The Strategic Review (Vol. 1, No. 2) as someone's attempt to house-rule in the ability to basically play Aragorn, hence, for example, the ranger's strange ability to use magical scrying devices (ala the palantir). Thus, the ranger began as an addition to the base rules.

By the time AD&D rolls around, a lot of these house rules and classes became codified into the base rules. However, my experience was that while there were certain sub-systems that we rarely used (like weapon-vs-AC modifiers) that when it came to world-building, we were far more likely to add custom classes, races, skills systems, and special abilities than to rule out what was already in the main rulebooks.

Fifth edition feels almost more like a toolset that you can pick and choose from than a base set of rules that you expect to add to. Take the races for example: In AD&D, the demi-human races were severely limited in their upward growth, so humans tended to dominate. If you wanted to play elves as the Middle-earth archetype (generally superior to mortals), you could increase those level caps if you wanted to, but the base game encouraged a human-centric world. To get a human-centric campaign in 5E, you'd have to either insist that all characters must be human or otherwise remove options and advantages.

AD&D envisioned a world of fairly gritty sword-and-sorcery, where physical characters (especially fighters) were the most common and magic isn't a substitute for technology. Yes, rangers had a few spells, but you didn't get them at 2nd level. Only a few of the very best rangers learned that arcane art. Wizards were rare, simply because they died so easily at low levels and there were hints that they preyed on one another for their spellbooks--the game itself had a good filter to explain why you didn't have high-level wizards all over the place. You could certainly add guilds of powerful wizards who lit the streets with continual light spells if you wanted to, but the rules didn't push you in that direction. In 5E, for all that the fluff says that the common person rarely sees real magic or demi-human creatures, the array of classes and races would tend to push you towards a high-fantasy campaign. To really get the players to play the more mundane options (most of which have magical builds that become available at very low levels), you would have to eliminate some of the magical ones.

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, or wouldn't be if 5E's core rules were being marketed as a GURPS-style toolset in which you expected the DM to narrow down the possible options. And among my experienced players, we've kicked around the possibility of making a game in which everyone starts as human and only certain classes are available--but in which more options "open up" as you make allies out of other races or discover other bits of lore.

None of this takes away from my enjoyment of 5E "as is." I just wish that the game designers had put as much effort into making humans sound as cool as elves (including creating "sub-races" of humans) and into creating lots of non-magical classes to choose from. It would be a very different D&D, but I think it would overall be a better D&D.