Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards > LW/LW in D&D.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards is a big problem with 3E D&D. And it's so big that it exacerbates almost every other major problem that 3E D&D has (number divergence, monster wonkiness, broken multiclassing) except for lack the of a campaign setting and WBL. When talking about the merits of 4E and 5E D&D -- or rather, why people should switch to these editions over 3E -- defenders will without fail lead with this complaint. Hell, the presumption of this problem is so strong that even 1E and 2E D&D grognards will lead with this complaint even though the problem was worse in those editions. How much of a problem this is is up for debate. I mean, LW/QW doesn't start to become universally intractable until around level 9 or so in 3E D&D and 95-99% of games end before them. Nonetheless, for simplicity's sake let's just accept this premise of 4E and 5E D&D edition warriors and state that LW/QW does exist and it defines the 3E D&D gameplay experience.

You know what, though? It doesn't matter. As far as the D&D franchise is concerned Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards still beats the pants off of Linear Warriors/Linear Wizards. I mean it. And I don't mean it in an Ars Magica or Captain Hobo kind of way where people find metagame workarounds, I mean that the status quo of only having a third of the classes continue to function with an average-case DM with an experienced party after level 9 or so is superior to 4E and 5E D&D's solution. I mean this even though 3E D&D's LWQW is an objective problem while LWLW is a preference issue. Why do I say this? Well...

• A low-powered fantasy setting where most of the plot power exists in the hands of the DM is literally the easiest kind of game to design. Between modern, historical, hard or soft sci-fi, horror, superhero, or even off-the-wall TTRPG concepts like Toon, the salient fact is that low-powered fantasy games are significantly easier to design than the second-easiest game genre. Now, just because such games are easy to design don't make them bad. But that does means that most completed TTRPG projects will be low-powered fantasy. Go to DriveThruRPG.com, why don't you? Even accounting for the fact that D&D is the prototype for TTRPGs, low-powered fantasy is way, waaaay overrepresented even among non-d20 games.
  
  Why? Because the biggest purpose of any setting for a traditional game is to provide a framework for characters to do things in. And it's just a brute mathematical fact that it's easier to brainstorm things for Conan to do than it is for Goku. Conan is thwarted by shit like broken bridges and smallpox epidemics and running out of trail rations; Goku is not. Yet most anything Goku is threatened or inconvenienced by also threatens or inconveniences Conan.
  
  Making things even easier is how resilient low-powered fantasy settings are to fuck-ups, elisions, and author laziness compared to other settings. For example, smartphones have so upended horror fiction to the point where many writers just throw up their hands in defeat and set things before the late 90s. If you're writing a WWI alternate history game and get the political climate of the Triple Alliance wrong, people will nail your ass to the wall. But a Game of Thrones or Conan the Barbarian ripoff? Bitch, you don't have to worry about geography, politics, economics, or any of that shit. Any inconsistency or wonkiness you can't explain away with 'it's a totally different world from ours' can be explained with 'sociopolitics are so primitive that you can't prove that bread shouldn't cost 10 silver coins' and/or 'The Empire of Gond's laws are fucked up, they fall in the next scene anyway!'. Anything you can't explain away with 'sociopolitics are so primitive that blah de blah' can be explained away with 'it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit'. Even better: if the players try to get some of that plot (-hole spackle) magic you can just snip their balls off like naughty poodles and say that the zombie apocalypse ritual or the forging of Masamune was a one-time thing, you fucking munchkins.
  
  3E D&D at the end of the day is sitting in relatively uncharted territory while 4E and 5E D&D heads down the beaten path. Even before we talk about the actual rules, 3E D&D already has a structural advantage when it comes to satisfying customers. 3E D&D is just plain competing against fewer games within its niche than 4E and 5E D&D. 4E and 5E D&D don't just have to make a case as to why we should play their implementation of low-powered fantasy over 3E D&D's -- it also has to make the same case against Fantasycraft and GURPs and Earthdawn and FATE Core and Burning Wheel/Torchbearer and etc. If I want a game that has high-powered fantasy (and I mean meaningful high-powered, see below) I and players like me pretty much have 1E-3E D&D, Exalted, and Ars Magica.
• LW/QW, and by extension 3E D&D, gives more stuff for players to do. This means that 3E D&D characters can tell more stories; this causes people to get bored of the game less quickly and encourages more off-game investment. True, this caveat only applies to the cleric, wizard, sorcerer, and druid but that's still more than the successor editions -- none of the character classes can look forward to doing anything meaningfully different. Oh, sure, 4E and 5E D&D characters grow but they don't evolve. They get more number penises and more combat maneuvers, but that's fucking it. Sometimes these editions will attempt to humor you by giving you bullshit like Hurl Through Hell or weak-ass summons, but at the end of the day you can't really do anything different with them. They're like the high-level abilities on a World of Warcraft character; you're still just shooting numbers at mobs. 3E D&D characters can replace iron industries, build castles out of thin air, put together meaningful undead and demon armies, construct interdimensional trade empires, construct businesses from scratch if you're using the DMG2 or Pathfinder crap, cultivate huge sections of land, etc. if they really try. Discussions of how PC spellcasters, using only abilities on their character sheet, can directly influence politics and the economy are some of the most popular threads on this forum.
  
  And you know what? The 4E/5E D&D refrain of having to blow the DM if you want to make a castle or found a nation is fucking horseshit. Don't get me wrong, 3E D&D's ability to do so without tonguing the DM's asshole is extremely haphazard and is more of a happy accident than anything, but the fact that it exists at all is a huge selling point. I have spent dozens of hours pouring through the PHB and mentally designing castles and trying to figure how to get the most bang for my buck with Leadership and Plant Growth and Decanters of Endless Water; this kind of effort is a priori pointless in 4E D&D and 5E D&D. The kind of wizard's tower I get and who attends and where fixtures are and even where it's located doesn't really matter because in the end I get whatever the DM says that I get. Its effect on gameplay is whatever the DM says it is. And it doesn't even really matter if I give the DM a long list of features and details about what I want to do or build in the world and they say 'yes' to every single one -- it's still not mine. The DM has veto power on whether I can staff the stables with goblins or dwarves and how skilled my librarians are. Yes, fighters and rogues and other noncasters in 3E D&D are in the same boat as their counterparts in 4E and 5E D&D; again I'll say that it's better that only a handful of classes get to do anything cool than no one getting to do anything cool.

Bottom line: Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards is a problem. And it's a big one. It's easily the most popular game design topic on these and certainly other gaming boards precisely because addressing it will completely change the rest of the game as it's played. However, the proposed 'fix' that 4E and 5E D&D had of just making everyone non-actualized and dependent on the DM sucks anus. It means that there's less shit to do in the game and there are already a fuckton of other fantasy games where LW/LW is the dominant paradigm.

PS: This is not supposed to be comparing the merits of LW/LW vs. LW/QW vs. QW/QW in abstract. LW/QW is obviously an implementation problem no matter what system you're using unless you're playing something odd like Ars Magica. And my fix for LW/QW wouldn't look anything like what Pathfinder or 4E/5E D&D did. That a game with an objective problem is more appealing than a revision that attempts to fix the problem by patching in a system that's ultimately a preference issue says more about the game designers than the underlying paradigm.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Skyrim has QW/LW, at least in terms of simple things like damage.

[name_here]

Plus warriors also get all the interesting magic stuff that's both worth using and functions reliably.

[Mask_De_H]

Lago, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and ask you a question: do you really think anybody gives a shit about the things we talk about a full caster can do? Do you think they even know? Most optimization is number penis stuff, never the Logistics and Dragons we get into. Players still stand and bang with martial characters in 3.X games, even though we have a decade of data telling them they shouldn't. The possibilities of full casting never occur to most of these people, so the fact that you can do crazy shit with full casting can't be the reason 3.X is so enduring, because most people play LW/LW. The fantasy people think of runs towards LW/LW, so people design towards that playspace. 3.X is the aberration.

4e failed due to constant errata and an acrimonious break with tradition. 5e will probably fail because it brings nothing new to the table and people got burned with 4e. Pathfinder succeded on the lie that the LW/QW problem was fixed and people bought it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and ask you a question: do you really think anybody gives a shit about the things we talk about a full caster can do? Do you think they even know?

Yes, I do think that. If you ask 3E D&D fans who aren't as big of a fan of either 4E or 5E why that is, chances are you'll hear something like 'it doesn't feel like D&D'. When you ask them to elaborate on that complaint, you'll get one or more of: casters don't feel any different from non-casters, the game is too reliant on DM fiat to do anything, magic is too weak/onerous to use, things are too video-gamey, etc.. To me, these complaints from that demographic directly and/or indirectly show a dissatisfaction with the steps D&D took to eliminate QWs. And people may not consciously realize it but fixing LW/QW with LW/LW requires you to take the steps that 4E and 5E D&D did. It's structurally impossible to implement a solution where people get to use Wall of Stone to create castles and non-weeaboo noncasters get to stay balanced with casters. Those editions have problems above and beyond LW/LW, but few people lead with or even bring up, say, 4E D&D's absolutely busted magical item system and the errata onslaught.

[Emerald]

I'm with Lago on the Logistics & Dragons appeal. I've run the first-ever campaign for four groups now (i.e. all but one or two players in each group had never played an RPG before), and of the four of them:

• The first group found out about the Stronghold Builder's Guide a few sessions into the campaign and immediately started designing (and planning missions to get funding and a crew for) a flying fortress shaped like a Blastoise, complete with swim speed and fireball-chucking cannons.
• The second group, upon capturing a githyanki Astral ship in a completely random encounter, immediately sidetracked their main quest to find someone who could awaken their ship to give it an AI, press-ganged the inhabitants of a small town they'd saved to serve as its crew, and thereafter devoted at least half of all their loot to upgrading the ship and the pirate port they'd build for it in an "asteroid" of Astral driftmetal.
• The third group, having been told that they would be starting in the one free city-state left on the continent and charged with freeing the surrounding cities from the Evil Empire, built a party consisting of a wood- and earth-crafting druid, a super-duper face paladin, a bard specced for dragonfire inspiration (he was the one veteran player), and a changeling rogue and proceeded to build fortresses, recruit armies, impersonate and frame Imperial representatives, and otherwise spend the first dozen or so sessions only entering combat when their bluffs and allies failed.

Granted, the plural of anecdote is not necessarily data and all that, but when three out of four groups (roughly 17 out of 22 people) completely new to RPGs are introduced to a game pitched as "it's the game where you kill things and take their stuff" and immediately decide to ignore the stabbing-demons-in-the-face part to play Logistics and Dragons, I'd say the possibilities of world-altering magic (and the associated subsystems giving players plot control) are more obvious and alluring than Mask gives them credit for.

[RadiantPhoenix]

If we're going to go about making a "Logistics and Dragons" thing... where would we start?

Perhaps Heroes of Might and Magic?

EDIT: Super-vague outline: "Heroes of Castles and Cocks"

Three economies:

• Turnip: Food, Wood, Iron
• Gold: {Coinmetal: Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum), normal Gems, {Chemistry: Mercury, Sulfur}
• Wish: Souls, Astral Diamonds, Exotica

Structures:

• Blingy items, because they cool. Cost resources
• Power-towers: to let you do more cool stuff. Require resource expenditures (regularly?)
• Mines: to gather resources
• Armies: to guard mines
• Towns: to make armies
• Fortresses: to protect towns

Systems required:

• Super-simple combat stats for mooks for mass combat
• Auto-battle rules for when you don't want to play out every battle
• Mining
• Construction
• Raising armies
• Logistics

[ishy]

I disagree that your progression system necessarily has any influence over how much world affecting powers your players get.

For example you can just create a game where everyone is the equivalent of a level 20 caster but with no progression (or barely any) at all.

Though I do agree that it feels amazing when you finally get spells that allow you to carve out your own niche in the game.

[BearsAreBrown]

I have a question for ya'll. This forum rails mother-may-I and MTP and DM fiat stuff all the time.

But the Logistics and Dragons is plagued by these problems!! There aren't enough rules to know what implications of your logistics, its entirely DM fiat.

What's the difference? Is it because its okay to fiat plot but not to fiat combat? Is the distinction between 'how sweet is my castle' and 'how sweet is my sword' enough that one can be fiat and the other not?

[Blicero]

I have a question for ya'll. This forum rails mother-may-I and MTP and DM fiat stuff all the time.

But the Logistics and Dragons is plagued by these problems!! There aren't enough rules to know what implications of your logistics, its entirely DM fiat.

What's the difference? Is it because its okay to fiat plot but not to fiat combat? Is the distinction between 'how sweet is my castle' and 'how sweet is my sword' enough that one can be fiat and the other not?

For me at least, it's a difference of interpolation vs extrapolation. If I want a 4E character to be able to do anything interesting, I as the MC to make things up whole cloth. There's more or less nothing in the rules to build off of except for thematic similarity. But in 3E (or even better, something like ACKS), there exist rules structures that can inform the Logistics & Dragons game style. The MC is still going to have to fiat some things, because the game world is necessarily less complex than the real world. But you have that vital basis in place.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I want to have rules for Logistics and Dragons.

[Maxus]

Seymour Froidberg, 5th level Accountant, 3rd-level Dark Clerk

"Yes, I'm using a Glove of Shocking Grasp on them because they owe us their lives and we like to keep accounts

(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)

current."

[mean_liar]

This is an early draft and I work really fucking slow, but...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_nu50 ... sp=sharing

[Insomniac]

4E recognized martial/caster disparity and decided to turn everybody into a funky gish that mechanically does everything that everybody else can do.

Can the Wizard damage somebody and slide them 3 squares? Then Ranger and Hunter can do so as well. Can the Sorcerer do good amount of damage in a 20 foot radius area? Then everybody needs to have an attack that can do damage in a 20 foot radius area. Can the Cleric Stun somebody? Then the Fighter needs to know how to do it, too.

It all felt so pointless with regards to what you had on the character sheet. This was further exacerbated by roles, where the difference between being one sort of say, Leader, instead of the other sort of Leader amounted to a warm bucket of spit. Every Leader could give attacks, make attacks against a chosen foe better for the party and better people's usage of Healing Surge. Whoopity do. The difference between Bard and Warlord on your sheet meant nothing in 4E while the difference between Bard and say, Buff/Debuff Cleric felt huge.

The biggest choice in 3.5 was class and in 4E it oftentimes was the least important thing, with equipment, feats and race being bigger deals.

[Orion]

Emerald,

How much did those stories lean on actual 3E spells and mechanics, though? I imagine the business about crewing your ship with villagers was basically fiat. I don't know what driftmetal is is if's from a book or the GM made it up. A "super face paladin" works equally well in 3 or 4 since nobody uses the 3e social rules.

Radiant,

It pains me to say this, but Phone_Lobster has put a lot of effort into the kind of kingdom management you're talking about and has several ideas worth looking at.

[OgreBattle]

I figure the solution to this that we always conclude on when this comes up is "Have level appropriate matter and defined tiers"

So levels 1-5 are Conan Tier where strangling gorillas is a tough fight, then 6-10 is Naruto tier where you summon giant flying gorillas to fight beside you.

Was there a TOME that focused on stronghold and kingdom building? Dungeonomicon talks about entering dungeons and arming dungeons:
http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Dungeono ... he_Dungeon

[Emerald]

Emerald,

How much did those stories lean on actual 3E spells and mechanics, though? I imagine the business about crewing your ship with villagers was basically fiat. I don't know what driftmetal is is if's from a book or the GM made it up. A "super face paladin" works equally well in 3 or 4 since nobody uses the 3e social rules.

It was done entirely by-the-book, with me pointing the group towards the appropriate resources and letting them run wild. The fortress and ship upgrades were all straight out of the Stronghold Builder's Guide, ongoing funding for the fortress was done through the DMG2 business rules, the Astral ship used the Eberron airship stats and aerial combat system with its AI using the intelligent item rules, the town's population was generated by the DMG demographics and hiring them was mechanically handled with Leadership (and the cleric's animate dead and Rebuke Undead to keep numbers up when crewmembers started to die in skirmishes), and Astral driftmetal is from the Planar Handbook.

We did indeed use the 3e social rules. Bluff, Intimidate, and Sense Motive (and associated feats and spells) work well enough, and the problems with Diplomacy (stupidly-high bonuses, PCs being off the RNG from either other, not having a good way to determine initial starting attitudes for random monsters) don't really come up when you have a single party face who isn't dumpster-diving for bonuses going up against NPCs with established backgrounds and loyalties (which can be and easily are fleshed out when that's the focus of the game more so than combat).

And even assuming you decide to replace the existing Diplomacy rules with a house-ruled system, which I didn't do since dumping a few pages of houserules on a completely new group can be intimidating and/or confusing, 3e provides you a heck of a lot better starting framework with its minimal guidance, plentiful "hooks" into other parts of the rules, and abusable outcomes than 4e or 5e with its fuck-all guidance, totally nonfunctional skill rules, and outcomes that boil down to "give the DM a blowjob and hope your character's argument was persuasive."

[Sakuya Izayoi]

I have a question for ya'll. This forum rails mother-may-I and MTP and DM fiat stuff all the time.

But the Logistics and Dragons is plagued by these problems!! There aren't enough rules to know what implications of your logistics, its entirely DM fiat.

What's the difference? Is it because its okay to fiat plot but not to fiat combat? Is the distinction between 'how sweet is my castle' and 'how sweet is my sword' enough that one can be fiat and the other not?

I have experience with this from Rogue Trader, which is, in the fluff, totally Logistics & Dragons. Every PC is, out of chargen, a special snowflake with a background. The premise of the setting is that you're a bridge member on a ship staffed by hundreds of redshirts. There are even metagamey luck tokens to make sure you don't die a redshirt's death, and in Warhammer 40k, almost everyone is a redshirt.

In the fluff, everyone is playing the long game. You're brokering centuries-long trade deals, supplying never-ending battles of attrition, and nuking Cthulhu from the safety of orbit. Sounds like a game which would have a detailed system for playing a face, right?

Wrong! Everything on your sheet that explicitly does something, is either used for murdering people in squad-level tactics, or something that you only care about while dungeon crawling (like being able to hover, or crowd control that's too horrifying to be useful for social scenes).

Where mother-may-I makes it lame is, every character plays pretty similarly. Make a face character who's underwhelming in a gunfight? A little GM fellatio will get him equipped with an exotic gun that can even him out. Your combat monster with a terrible Fellowship has nothing to do when there's nothing to shoot? Not to worry, a GM who's ready to improvise will make it so you get to "fail forward", turns out wearing your underwear on your head to the year's biggest, most important formal gala was exactly the right move to make. Basically there's no role protection, which is lame in a setting where the archetypes are so heavily and distinctly fluffed.

[Username17]

I have a question for ya'll. This forum rails mother-may-I and MTP and DM fiat stuff all the time.

But the Logistics and Dragons is plagued by these problems!! There aren't enough rules to know what implications of your logistics, its entirely DM fiat.

What's the difference? Is it because its okay to fiat plot but not to fiat combat? Is the distinction between 'how sweet is my castle' and 'how sweet is my sword' enough that one can be fiat and the other not?

Let's say that you have a scenario where there's a floating castle you want to get into. For the first example, let's say you're a 3e elementalist, and you have the ability to create and shape big blocks of stone. Obviously, you can make a set of stairs up to the castle and Bob's your uncle. Now you'd probably like to make those stairs hollow and supported by a column structure to use the smallest number of giant stone blocks, because as a 3e character your ability to create and shape stone blocks is probably charge limited between rests. And obviously, the exact amount of stone required to be dedicated to support structure is DM fiat. Your character probably has a "knowledge engineering" skill that will "help" in a way that's pretty much entirely mother-may-I. This minutiae could have a really quite profound effect on how long it takes to complete this project because using your powers takes seconds and recharging your powers takes hours.

But while there are a lot of places where DM fiat can speed up or slow down your construction project and you need the DM to sign off on your project before it's complete in the game, there isn't really any doubt that you can do it. Imagine if instead you were a 4e Sorcerer and you went to this project with the following "My character is magic. Can I magic this problem away somehow?"

There's just no fucking comparison when it comes to how much agency the players have in this scenario.

-Username17

[Sakuya Izayoi]

My 4e Sorcerer once asked permission to blast a door open.

[BearsAreBrown]

There's just no fucking comparison when it comes to how much agency the players have in this scenario.

-Username17

3e has more player agency than 4e. OK neato I agree.

But does 3e have enough to play L&D?

The stone stairs situation is tame compared to the shit I see people come up with about starting a business or running a kingdom

[Lago PARANOIA]

But does 3e have enough to play L&D?

To be honest, not satisfactorily. Even if you have the SBG and the DMG2 and the Miniature's Handbook and Heroes of Battle, those rules are... not very good. If you absolutely insist on playing RAW then you can cobble enough stuff together to provide the superficial feeling, but it's nonetheless A.) a pain in the neck and B.) completely breaks the WBL assumptions. 3E D&D can give some very detailed answers to surprisingly specific questions, such as what's the price increase on upgrading to a 100-commoner militia armed with leather armor and spears to a 150-level 1 fighter college armed with longswords and full-plate along with how much their salaries and R&B will cost. But it's still not quite an actual kingdom-building minigame (most damningly, there isn't such a thing as demographic or population mechanics) and the 3E D&D's game balance explodes if you intersect the economy of the adventuring phase and town simulation phases even a little.

But 4E and 5E D&D throwing up their hands and declaring that those things are haaaaaard and would henceforth just be MTP'd is not acceptable.

[Username17]

One of the driving rationales for the whole wish economy thing in Tome is that the amount of silver pieces that characters can lay claim to is way off the WBL scale once characters start monkeying with being landlords, merchant princes, or guild masters. And at 9th level you can just spend a feat for that. If 9th level characters are allowed to break the game by having a big sack of silver pieces, then the game is broken at 9th level. If instead you institute an 8 item limit and a wish economy cap on items that can be purchased with taxes and business profits, then the game works a lot better.

-Username17

[Xhieron]

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.

Stronghold Builder's, to use an example someone already mentioned, is terrific for providing rules (even if they're awful and nonsensical rules more often than not), but it doesn't actually create player agency where player agency was previously absent: can a player build a stronghold in 1e? 2e? etc.? Sure, you can build a flying castle in D&D, in the version of your choosing. Now if you're playing 3.5, for example, you might have the rules for it spelled out for you. In 5e, you're playing MTP basically all the way through (at least until they release the 5e Stronghold Builder's Guide the weekend before they bulldoze the warehouses or something), but in either edition you are absolutely at the mercy of your DM, who could at the table during the middle of your floating castle announcement declare that the rules are something other than you would like or expect. In some editions that means he's saying the rules don't apply, in others he's saying that there are no rules and so you can't do what you want, and in still others he could be saying "fuck you; suck my dick better next time." But the result is the same; the only thing that changed is the default position, that is, whether there were rules written down for what you wanted to do when you decided to do it. You can't make a definitive statement that something is off-limits, because while at many or even most tables it might be, for at least some it's not, and the deciding factor isn't the rules as written, but the DM.

Now maybe that default position is valuable, and it's not a bad argument that a default position of MORE RULES is preferable to the alternative--hell, that's why there's such a thing as AD&D in the first place--but it doesn't create agency. In Frank's example of the sorcerer with stone block stair building, the distinction between whether the sorcerer can do the task isn't a distinction based on whether the rules are codified or left to DM discretion; it's a distinction based on whether the RAW gives the power to a given class (and frankly I wouldn't know one way or the other since I only played enough 4e to decide I liked it better as kindling than as a game). But affirmation by RAW is not a bright green light for player agency. You don't gain agency because a writer stuck something in the book before it went to print. You might feel like you have--and again, that might be valuable to you--but the agency is illusory because you're never, no matter what role-playing game you're playing (with some weird experimental exceptions), escaping the hard wall of Rule 0. Maybe you feel that codified rules is empowering--which is totally legitimate--but you can't define agency in those terms because it ignores the distinction between the book in a vacuum and the table on which it's a game.

Now I don't say that to prop up 5e by Rule 0, but rather only to suggest that there are plenty enough criticisms for any edition, including anyone's pet edition, that don't involve pretending that a preference for more or less dense rule books amounts to anything other than a matter of taste. Your flying castle is never yours. It's the table's. When the other people at the table decide it doesn't exist anymore (or that they want to quit coming on Friday night), poof, your castle's gone, relegated to a wistful, nostalgic, hopefully happy corner of your memory. The fact that you could easily translate your castle from one group to the next is absolutely a worthwhile trait for your castle to have (and an exceptional argument in favor of rigid codification), but that's in no way an acceptable excuse for ignoring the fact that any DM so disposed can stick his dick in your castle for any reason or for no reason. A better DM might drape his dick in glossy paper with some charts printed on it, but you know a dick when you see one.

The bottom line is that taking measured offense at instances of MTP is ignoring the fact that the entire enterprise is a big game of pretend, and RAW actually apply in a lot fewer places than they don't. Sure, some DMs are hard-asses, but even subjectively conceding that any one of us is correct that his or her favorite version is the best version, that version's rules have giant fucking holes, great big balance hazards, and nonsense parts that absolutely don't work at all. The games can't be played without a DM making calls (at least as a practical matter; sure, technically they can, but you can also hammer nails into your eyes if you really want to). There are lots of problems with 4e and 5e (and 2e and 3.x as well), but deciding to err on the side of no rule in the book as opposed to a bad rule (which is likely judging from the track record) is a design choice--maybe a bad one, but not an unreasonable one, even if the actual reasonableness of it is accidental. 5e is definitely not Logistics and Dragons (and further from it than its most popular predecessor by a wide margin), and that definitely makes it less appealing for a lot of folks, but I don't think you could find enough people to make a table who could all agree on what D&D is supposed to feel like in the first place.

[Whipstitch]

One thing I'd like to mention is that rules aren't just there to create consensus or discourage railroading, they're also there to act as a complicating factor. Just as offside rules and equipment limitations make sports more interesting so too can having a robust rules set make Logistics & Dragons a more interesting exercise than simply asking your DM if you can have a castle and getting a yes or no answer.