by Vandervecken
Scott, with all due respect, I find that your basic position bugs me a great deal. Let me see if I can lay out why (warning, rant may follow).In general, I take issue with two aspects of the "I don't play with house rules" crowd. The first is that it comes off as sanctimonious. No matter what the case, the reaction is "the all-knowing creators surely knew what they were doing", or "I see no problem here". The second is the implication that once we open the door for modification, sheer anarchy is bound to erupt.
I agree that consensus is not unanimous agreement, and I agree that even if there was unanimous agreement on any given problem that this would not imply unanimous agreement on the solution.
However, whenever I have these sorts of discussions with people, it bugs me if their response to a point that I've given a great deal of thought into is "I don't see a problem here", or "if it ain't broke don't fix it". I've put a great deal of thought into figuring out why I think something is broken, and generally I feel these questions are worth discussing in more depth than the apparently knee-jerk reaction of "I think it's fine".
An example, one of the most generally agreed-upon that I know of: Drawing a single Secret Objective after accomplishing you Preliminary objective is blatantly un-fun. First of all, some POs are much harder to accomplish than others (compare Traitor or Antagonist to 5 dreadnoughts). As a result, you can have someone who receives their SO at the end of turn 2, and someone else who receives theirs as lately as at the end of turn 6 (5 dreadnoughts in a poor region of the map). The second person has been handed a death sentence here, there's no way they will be able to be competitive. The solution for this is simple and unambiguous - hand people their secret at the start of the game too. Many many groups play some variation on this. When I have this discussion with someone, I think it's reasonable to discuss the issue on the merits, it's quite upsetting to get a blanket 'take-it-or-leave-it' sort of response.