While perusing the Wizards of the Coast D&D forums, I came across a thread titled, “Need help for devising system for adjusting monsters.” Something about that title made me cringe and sneer. I had to take a second to think about why, and it didn’t take long for me to come to a conclusion. After years of playing 3.5 and Pathfinder, which have rules and tables and systems for, it seems, nearly everything, I think I’m burned out on “devising systems.”

I’ve spent and enjoyed countless hours building things that I hoped I would some day use in a campaign. This ranges from cosmologies to character sheets to Python scripts for generating character and monster stats. With the one exception of the character sheet I linked, these have all had minimal yields. They were fun mental exercises, but, at least these days, when I sit down to play or run a D&D session, the only things I find I need, and often the only things I really want at the table, are enumerated simply on one of my favorite t-shirts: pencil & paper & dice & friends. Notice that a rulebook isn’t even on that list, because if I can avoid it, I’d really rather not have to look through tables of systems that anyone has devised to figure out what should happen in my dungeon that I’m probably making up as I go along anyway.

I’ve increasingly favor ad hoc rulings and decisions. Every D&D group has a unique dynamic, unique wants, and unique situations they end up in as a result. Trying to create a universal system is a fool’s errand. Even though it seems sometimes like 3.5 and Pathfinder have rules for almost everything, who says those rules are even any good? I regard the Player’s Handbook as guidelines, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual even more so, because I don’t expect that Wizards of the Coast knows me or my friends well enough to know exactly how I like to play D&D, nor do I want to make sure I’m conforming to their vision of how the game should be played.

So when I see someone fretting over “devising a system” to the point that they go to the WotC forums, a medium where consensus is hard to come by, I remember all the hours and days I spent creating my own systems that didn’t ultimately lead to a much better experience playing the game. The entire game rests on the judgment calls of the DM—every trap, monster, treasure, and NPC are the result of judgment calls—and every DM has to develop that judgment. I could be wrong, but I doubt there’s too much science to how WotC balanced D&D. They did a great deal of playtesting for 5th Edition (under the name “D&D Next”) before releasing the final product, as did Paizo with Pathfinder, because no amount of theory and system building will get you the quality of feedback you get from just playing your game—the thing you’re supposed to do with it.

You’ll probably get it wrong a lot before you get good. A friend of mine, whom I respect very highly as a DM, ran a Pathfinder one-shot last weekend that was something pretty new. In preparation, we pored through the rules provided by Paizo in the Pathfinder books for various situations normally uncommon to a Pathfinder or D&D game, and we calculated probabilities for different outcomes, but when it came time to play, we ended up pivoting on those rules several times, because we didn’t quite like how they were playing out. (It turns out the cold weather rules aren’t any fun at all.) The rules were decent guidelines, but the advantage of playing with people instead of a machine is that you aren’t as a group at all beholden to the system.

It’s fine to create systems, but you have to be okay with throwing it all out whenever you don’t like what it’s telling you, or whenever it doesn’t fit, and just go ad hoc. Since an ad hoc ruling is, by definition, designed for the situation in question, it’s so much more likely to be correct.

As a post-scriptum, I have just realized the irony that I almost never play with house rules in any other board game, preferring instead to stick to the letter of the rulebook. Maybe that’s just because these games are more self-contained, so I trust in their design more to be complete. But that’s probably another discussion entirely.