If it ain't broke...

'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

A useful aphorism in many situations, but such a pain when playing around with game design.

You can pick even the most incomplete or obviously broken rule in an entire game, and if you post a suggested modification on a forum a great many people will still angrily defend it.

Granted, some house rules are just bad, but even those often fail to get a real discussion, with the actual forum threads buried under the combined cries of heresy (after all, a house-rules poster isn't a paid game designer and is thus inferior), elitist rules conservatism ('the rule as it is worked great for me, and I've been playing for 72 years!'), GM fiat ('you don't need rules for that, the GM should just make stuff up'), or even a sort of vague confusion on what house rules are ('but if you change that, things won't be the same!').

Oddly, it's worse the more broken the rule is. I posted a suggestion on making the Link +10% enhancement in GURPS cheaper, on the SJ Games forum and got a few people mildly upset but no real discussion on the rule. On the other hand, the threads on modifying some of the most obviously broken rules I've seen in gaming result in massive flame wars and arguments (Scion is the one that comes to mind most easily, with its haphazard nightmare of bad rules built into an otherwise great game.)

The best I can tell, this happens because if you say something is really broken, everyone that's used the broken rules (slogged through it, carefully avoided breaking it, or even just happily went along with the weirder results) feels threatened if you point out how broken it is, because you're in some sense telling them their game was 'wrong'.

I suppose that's a problem with any form of constructive criticism.