Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
so, if there are no objectively good or bad rules, how can the amateur possibly make them worse? If it depends on your personal experience, shouldn't that be an argument in favor of houseruling, to do what works for you?
Also, the fact that the designers included so many variant rules and "the dm decides" shows that they were expecting people to adapt the game to their own preferences. in short, to houserule.
Even more to the point, if the quality of a rule is a function of the tastes of a given table or group of players, then the efforts of amateurs necessarily have a higher ceiling in how good they can be than the efforts of a professional, no matter how skilled. Because the professional must write a rule for an entire community, but an amateur can write a rule which is tuned to a specific group of 5 people.

This is more or less why I basically won't play in games where the DM isn't actively creating their own rules content. I know people who can do this well, and I'm somewhat willing to invest time into people who can't do it well yet in order to get them there, but I'm not willing to invest time into something that will never have a chance to be as good as custom stuff can be.