This rule has been in the book ever since the PHB first released. If this was something you didn’t use, you either missed it or played a different edition.

Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic. However, I do think trying too hard on "martials should be like real life" easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It's not always intentional. But when someone says "I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm" some people get all "you can't do that! I can barely jump five feet and I'm athletic (they're not)" and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah. It's much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience. Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.

It's nearly their entire fucking power budget, and they're not even a great class!

Personally I prefer the "classes should feel comparably powerful/capable" model to simulationism. Since we aren't going full locked tomb and saying that mages are all basically chronically ill, I extend it to martials are folk hero strength. A mid level rogue should be capable of Robin Hood level bullshit.

I mean, imagine your some hired goon guarding the door to some culty bullshit. You get jumped by a group of do-gooders and as your about to get up to a bit of the old ultra-violence you notice one of these punks has a damned rat sticking out of a pocket, and it's not even dead! That'd be a little distracting at least. Did they train the rat? Is it a magic rat? Is the rat going to jump out and join the fight? Do they have to clean rat droppings out of the pocket every night? Do they keep the rat in a cage when it's not in the pocket? So many unanswered questio.... Fuck I just got stabbed.

I know you did. Not saying you didn’t. I just wanted to mention it. And generally I think you’re right.

Halfling racial ability specifically calls out their ability to Hide behind allies. Once Hidden you can't be targeted with ranged attacks. At lower levels that seems *very* powerful. Over time it would probably have been fine, but once my character was an Elf there was no going back. I already had INT as my second highest score since I was an Arcane Trickster, and I did a 2 level dip into Bladesinger to get some additional spell slots and Blade dance for INT to AC, Shield spell, Find Familiar, and a few more fun spells. Elven Accuracy meant Flanking (or any Advantage) was a 14.26% chance to crit, up from 9.75% My DM realized that I was going to blow up his enemies and started adding at least one additional beefy enemy to each fight. This was fine with everyone involved as we wanted a challenge to overcome, without nerfs to base class features.

"I rage and beat the shit out of him." "Dude, again?" "I'm a barbarian! What else am I supposed to do? Get *happy* and *talk* them out of being evil?"

While that is correct, it’s not like your allies are indestructible cover, so I'd say it’s fair. But I don’t really have to tell you I guess. So when he realised that your last build would have been more balanced then the current one, he just decided to do what he could have done from the start by adding more enemies?

I wasn't always hiding behind allies, but I was always hiding unless there was zero cover or concealment. If that was the case I just ran to max range which was also fairly effective at keeping my character from taking damage while still giving the enemy trouble. At lower levels most enemies are using weapon attacks or spell attacks that require a target you can see, and are in range, and I did my part to not be a valid target. My DM tried adding more enemies, switching their weapons, and a few other tactics which made fights harder on pretty much everyone except me. It became clear that all this wouldn't impact how I decided to play a ranged rogue. There was an additional issue too ... The previously mentioned sacrificed elven ranged weapon was one my DM had homebrewed to be able to scale with our power level. He had designed the weapon in such a way that it could gain new abilities if we had a component from a slain monster and were able to figure out the trick. He had me roll Arcana to determine if a given monster had a component, and I passed on a vampire we defeated. On a hunch I was able to touch the fangs of the slain vamp to the weapon and spoke the elven word for "vampire" which I was told by another party member. This unlocked an ability that allowed the ranged attacks to do +10 damage on a crit and heal my character for the damage dealt on the strike. With Uncanny Dodge I was able to minimize incoming damage and then heal myself on a big crit for pretty much whatever slipped through. Other party members had mentioned how powerful they saw my common turn of *ranged attack with advantage, move, hide as bonus*, and the weapon was just making it that much more apparent. I agreed that this was a balance issue, and we started talking about ways to mitigate it. We decided this would probably involve getting rid of this awesome ranged weapon. I said if he wanted me to appear to have more at risk he needed to give some incentives for me to get into melee combat. I already had Booming Blade as a cantrip from Arcane Trickster so I was looking at picking up Green Flame Blade as well as a way to generate consistent advantage outside of Flanking such as Find Familiar. I pitched the idea of the DM allowing non elven Bladesingers (now allowed by default) and he countered by saying I could just play an elf. I said if we could find a way to keep my current character (for the narrative) and have him become an elf then I would be on board. The rest was just DM hand waving to make it happen at the expense of my ranged weapon, but it played out very well at the table. He allowed me to make my new race the Shadow marked elf subrace as acknowledgement that the vampiric weapon was the catalyst.

Unless you only had one d6 that sounds like a player problem.

Sounds like the real problem was not your strategy but the fact that this weapon was very much not scaling with you powerlevel and really unbalanced.

I think you overestimate how many people are gonna care about that kind of things when their lives are at stake. Rats are not that rare or unusual.