Good One, Wizards...

Okay, so I've weakened, and purchased a set of the "Complete..." books for D&D. I've been reading through these books over the past week or so, marvelling at the over-abundance of prestige classes, wincing at the over-powered nature of some of the spells and effects, and generally being quite surprised at the fact that they're a lot less unbalanced than I'd expected. Actually, they're pretty decent, for the most part. (But no, Roger, you can't use them in my game :-)

However, the following passage caused me to collapse to the floor, my eyes burning:

For "Complete Arcane", p.173: Your [The Dm's] own sense of how the magic of the campaign works should never be forced on player characters, for while many players will naturally want to create characters who fit well in the worlkd of the campaign, any character a player imagines is by its very nature exceptional. Players have the privilege of creating unique and hard-to-explain characters. For example, if the human Telziijka tribesfolk are the only known warlocks in your campaign, and a player wants to play a dwarf warlock, you and the player should be able to come up with a means to accomodate that desire...

So now every player in a D&D game can introduce any character they want into the setting, regardless of how it might fit with the DM's carefully crafted campaign (world and adventures). And if the DM questions it, the player can now show the DM this passage, and state that "it's the rules".

Thanks a bundle, Wizards.

For the record, my take on this matter (and it's something I've stated before) is this: the DM can place whatever restrictions on character creation he wants. A player who doesn't like it has three choices: (1) Just accept it and move on, (2) try to persuade the DM otherwise, or (3) choose to play something else.

To me, the notion that a player has the right to introduce a Half-dragon Ninja/Warlock into any game of the appropriate level, and that the DM just has to put up with it, is laughable.

Or am I just being silly?