D&D 5E Does RAW have a place in 5e?

[Thaumaturge]

If the player brings a PC who can "afflict", the onus is one the DM to define "affict" before play.

The second I show the DM that I prepared Contagion, he or she should have before or right then explain his adjudication.


Adjudication upon casting should be for improvised actions, crazy stuff, and the things the game never intended to cover.

I game with my adult friends. I DM. I don't pour over their spell lists before we play, because I don't take the time. I generally trust them. My adult friends. I don't know what the crap they have prepared until they cast it, so I don't have my adjudications all prepped and ready to go.

But I do my best, and we all have a good time anyway.

Somehow.

Thaumaturge.

I also have a hairy beard.

 

[billd91]

Neither RQ, nor RM, nor Traveller requires the GM to identify contentious interpretations out of the gate and settle them all for his/her table as a prerequisite of playing the game - which is what the poster I was replying to had described as a necessary condition of GMing D&D.

Nobody can find any ambiguous or often house-rules rules in any of those games that experienced GMs might know have been contentious? I find that hard to believe.

 

[Thank Dog]

How am I meant to know which rules are deliberately ambiguous, which are errors (like Grappler) and which are just poorly written (like the Magic Missile example)?

What's wrong with the Grappler feat?

I also have a hairy beard.

You ah... you wouldn't happen to be ah... a single dwarven woman by any chance, would you?

 

[pemerton]

What's wrong with the Grappler feat?

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION] explained it upthread.

 

[pemerton]

I game with my adult friends. I DM. I don't pour over their spell lists before we play, because I don't take the time. I generally trust them. My adult friends. I don't know what the crap they have prepared until they cast it, so I don't have my adjudications all prepped and ready to go.

But I do my best, and we all have a good time anyway.

Somehow.

A few weeks ago my D&D group wasn't quorate, and so those of us who could turn up played a session of Burning Wheel instead.

I had built a PC for one of the players, a necromancer-assassin with Stealth skill. During the course of the session, the character in question tried to hide from a wizard's familiar in the course of breaking into said wizard's tower. The player declared, as his PC's action, that he wanted to hide in a dark corner of the laboratory, behind some benches. I took the view that neither the PC nor the famiiar had any situational advantage, and so the player rolled his PC's Stealth, I rolled the Observation check for the familiar (which, per the rules, for a character like the familiar with no Observation training is a raw Perception check with every success by the Stealth character counting as two for purposes of the opposed check).

This was easy enough to do. But the rules for Stealth skill in Burning Wheel don't take up any more column space than the rules for Carpentry skill or Chess-playing skill. And becoming hidden and the consequences of being hidden are both simple matters of fictional positioning. Here are the relevant rules (Revised Character Burner, p 262):

Steathy is the ability to use camouflage, natural surrounding, shadow, light and a quiet step to move undetected. . . .

[T]he sneaking character gain advantage dice for darkness, rain or covering noise - and increased obstacles for bright light, absolute quiet or impediments like dead leaves.​

And the core rules for the system state, without ambiguity, that while players may lobby for advantage dice the ultimate decision about advantages and disadvantages is in the hands of the GM (as adjudicator of the details and consequences of the various characters' fictional positioning).

5e is different. It draws a mechanical distinction between "hidden" and "invisibible" - whereas BW doesn't (it's version of invisibility, called Chameleon, simply grants bonus dice to Stealth checks). It distinguishes different degrees of obscurement and makes those differences relevant to hiding (eg via that Wood Elf racial ability). It establishes mechanical consequences for being hidden that go beyond the fictional state of affairs that those who are looking around for you can't see you or hear you (eg advantage on attacks, which activates a key rogue class feature).

If Stealth in 5e was simply a matter of adjudicating whether the hiding character is sufficiently obscured to make the check, it would be very simple. But so many other mechanical elements, spelled out in great detail across various pages of the rulebook, are intended both to feed into that determination, and to follow from it.

For me, at least, this is when a system for action resolution goes beyond just making it work among a group of adult friends. It implies to me that the designers had something in mind, that they thought (for instance) that it was significant to distinguish between different degrees of obscurement, and to give Wood Elves a racial advantage for hiding in conditions that normal people can't hide in. This is when I prefer that the designers be clear about what they had in mind.

 

[dd.stevenson]

On the WotC website, discussing the old thief backstab ability:

Unfortunately, when a thief got to strike “from behind” was left fairly vague in those days, which meant that DMs always had to arbitrate the power’s usage.​

Whither the enthusiasm for "rulings not rules"?

What are you talking about? Applecline has never been a rulings evangelist.

 

[Hussar]

Nobody can find any ambiguous or often house-rules rules in any of those games that experienced GMs might know have been contentious? I find that hard to believe.

Let's be honest here and every game will have poorly written rules. That's a given. Some are better or worse, but, no game is perfect. Of course.

The problem here is that some people try to defend poorly written rules on the basis that vague rules are always preferable and even poorly written rules aren't a problem if the DM knows how to run a game.

I've seen people try to defend 1e's initiative rules. If those aren't poorly written, vague, and baroque, I don't know what is. The idea that there is no such thing as "poor game design" but that everything is 100% subjective and thus we cannot judge a game element as good or bad is, to me, poisonous to any discussion of game mechanics.

And, there's the other issue - people start playing at being incredibly obtuse when discussing rules as well. "Well, it doesn't say that this fire spell will actually light fires, so, it can't light fires". The people who, for whatever reason, take RAW to ridiculous extremes in order and ignore any and all common sense approaches. These folks are every bit as problematic as the ones who feel that since no rule is ever perfect, any rule is good enough and it's a failure of the DM/GM if the game has problems.

 

[Sailor Moon]

I would like to take a moment to hopefully clear up the RAW and RAI mistakes I am seeing. RAW "is" RAI. When rules are written their intent is there anyway. What we get is a rule that is written poorly using the english language and we are sitting there having to figure out the author's original intent for that rule.

 

[Emerikol]

There's a range of issues. I believe that rules clear as written should generally be followed as written, and long-standing ambiguities should be worked out with the players. DMs should be most quick and autocratic when it's a one-time situation and it's most important just to keep the game going.

Where possible the DM should be clear as to the rules approach in his campaign. He should clearly spell out when his own ruling will differ from RAW. I do not though believe that players expectations in such regard should go beyond what their own characters can reasonably do. No player should ever say that this monster cannot do X. The monster manual is the DMs book. If a player reads it, he makes assumptions at his own peril.

Who has this idea? I only hear about these people from people who oppose them, so I'd like to read their own words, if they really exist.

And yet you repeatedly give examples of evil DMs so I can only suppose you don't know what you are talking about on this matter.

As opposed to what?

As opposed to the game being ran by committee. The day a group of players would try to overrule me as DM by majority vote would be the day those players were looking for a new DM. And just to be clear, I live by my standards both as a player and as a DM.

 

[Emerikol]

I would like to take a moment to hopefully clear up the RAW and RAI mistakes I am seeing. RAW "is" RAI. When rules are written their intent is there anyway. What we get is a rule that is written poorly using the english language and we are sitting there having to figure out the author's original intent for that rule.

If only this were true for everyone or even most people. A lot of people are trying to deliberately find loopholes in the rules and turn them to their advantage in the game. They are inevitably frustrated by me as a DM. Which is good because I really don't care to have those types of players in my game anyway.