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

[KarinsDad]

BTW, can anyone think of the loophole Mearls is referring to whereby one is visible in front of an opponent but because of some loophole in the stealth rules the opponent cannot detect you?

I'm not sure. It might be that Darkvision is the equivalent of Dim light and Dim light requires Disadvantage on Perception rolls. PCs with Darkvision do not actually see that well in the dark.

 

[Dartavian]

I find it interesting how many DMs here on the boards take this hard line with (sometimes) old time friends.

Most people I've ever gamed with state that the DM is the final arbitrator and most DMs I've seen play RAW unless something unusual is going on (like the PCs are affected by the magic mushrooms).

The reason is the shared social contract. Every player at the game table (including the DM) is contributing to the game. The players rarely have a good time if the DM cannot create a decent adventure and/or treats his players in a negative way. On the other hand, the DM does not even have a game without players.

It's not a matter of players being rules lawyers, it's a matter of the DM not going so far off the deep end with his RAI that the game becomes inconsistent. With RAW, that rarely happens.

And I have been at many tables where we do not bother looking up rules until afterwards. It's ok and even sometimes expected for the DM to use RAI if nobody knows the rules, but purposely ignoring or changing the rules on the fly tends to impact the shared social contract for some players. DMs only have so much power. Cross the line too much, it might be time for the DM to move on.


I once joined a Champions group. The first 6 hour session had two 1 turn combats with little roleplaying in between. After each PC's or NPC's turn, the DM literally took a minute to a minute and a half writing stuff behind his gaming sheet. He was so excruciatingly slow. So a few days after the game on his blog site, I recommended a few things to speed it up (like dropping a minor foe if it still had 2 or 3 stun remaining, etc.). He said that nobody ever told him that it was slow and every other player suddenly chimed in and told him. The game actually disintegrated at that point because the DM took offense, but what I found interesting was that the players were willing to put up with a really painful campaign because they thought that the DM had all of the power and their perspective did not matter as much as the DM's.

No, it's a shared social contract with both players and DM. Like most things in life, both sides have to give and take a little for the benefit of all.

I was replying to the original post this:

The rules have been said to be written intentionally vague and given the amount of arguments I've seen over certain rulings and how multiple valid conclusions can be drawn from even the simplest of rules, I'm wondering if there is even any point at all to arguing RAW. It seems intentional that 5e be RAI, and that it's up to groups to determine their own interpretations.

If this was the intention and it ends up staying that way, i.e. WotC doesn't start a Sage Advice column so as to end disputes, I have to say that I think I prefer it this way. It's certainly a paradigm shift away from what I recall as having been the status quo since at least 2e, which I believe started with the Sage Advice column in Dragon magazine. The problem with RAW is that it can lead to unintentional conflicts and absurd combinations that, due to being RAW, are allowed and therefore argued by players as being legitimate choices in the game. RAI, OTOH, creates the expectation that the DM & group agree on what is going to be the interpretations used in their game.

One of the other reasons I believe this will be the new and intended methodology of 5e is that there seems to be a strong trend towards giving the DM more latitude and power to determine the scope of the game instead of putting all the power into the players hands, which is essentially a situation which a strict RAW game creates.

Anyway, that's my take and I thought it would make for an interesting discussion. So what do you think about RAW in 5e?

I am also in agreement with your comments as well.

 

[pemerton]

Interesting, how so (examples, etc)?

Examples of GM judgement calls in 4e (from my own game):

* What happens when a paladin of the Raven Queen speaks a prayer of aid while fighting a wight (answer: Religion check as minor action to infict cbt adv on a success, suffer psychic backlash on faiure);

* Can a bard who is trying to enter a fey grove haunted by a demon that makes soul-chilling screams sing a counter-song (answer: yes, spend an encounter power to gain +2 to a Diplomacy check made as part of the relevant skill challenge);

* Can a Thunderwave blast a demon in a small upper-story room with thin wooden walls through the wall in question (answer: absolutely yes, to general cheers from the table);

* Can a wizard use a possession spell to read a target's mind for a password (answer: yes, but when this happened in my game the Arcana check was a faiure, so no password was gained, and the skill challenge ended up a failure).

If you want to see more examples from actual play, here is a handful of links.

The basic principles are set out on page 42 (though this doesn't give advice on condition affliction) and in the skill challenge rules (spread out across the PHB, DMG and DMG2).

 

[pemerton]

Maybe not all of them, but most of the ones I'm familiar with do. Call of Cthulhu, Mutants and Masterminds, Traveller, GURPS, Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, Runequest, Rolemaster... basically any RPG with a variety of methods of handling character actions and/or variability in character development is going to impose a lot of technical management on a GM to enable a game to be as successful as it can be with his players.

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.

 

[pemerton]

If you have heavy obscurement, you can hide, otherwise, without an exception, you can't.

The question is not "When can you hide?" but "Are the requirements for hiding (transitioning from un-hidden to hidden) different from the requirements for staying hidden?" Since I think the answer is, "No, they are not different," I'm not going to try and argue the contrary position. But there are people who do argue the contrary, and so far as I can tell they're quite sincere about it based on their reading of the rules. Same thing with the wild elf question, which you didn't address.

What Vic Ferrari says seems to me obviously wrong, because there is the notion of "distraction", which permits a creature to remain unperceived, and therefore to remain hidden, even if not obscured.

There is also the passage in the Exploration rules that says you can remain stealthy as long as you don't come out into the open, which might be read as implying that any cover or obscurement is sufficient to remain hidden (as per the 4e stealth rules).

For me, the most natural reading of the rules is along the lines Dausuul has sketched, but I aslo agree with him 100% that those rules are poorly written and presented. (For instance, I have had posters argue that a wood elf rogue hiding behind a wall, in fog, becomes harder to detect if the wall is disintegrated because now the fog imposes Disadvantage on the relevant Perception check. It seems to me that nothing but poorly-written rules could lead to that conclusion, which surely has no grounding at all in the fiction of the situation.)

Mike Mealrs: "Our rules for stealth, which may sound like a funny example. But having worked on 3rd and 4th edition, creating a set of rules for hiding from other people and monsters that run without a DM, is crazy. You always end up with a situation where you’re standing right in front of the monster but he can’t see you, because there’s a loophole in the rules."

"So we just came out and said you know what, let the DM decide.

These are separate issues and you keep conflating them. Ambiguity is often intentional, and I gave you an example from Mearls where he explains the stealth rules are intentionally written that way.

<snip>

But take for instance the Grappler feat in 5e. The third part of it says, "Creatures that are one size larger than you don’t automatically succeed on checks to escape your grapple." But, that's referencing an old rule from the playtest which doesn't exist in the game at all anymore. It's an error (or, as you put it, a poorly written rule). It's not ambiguous, it's just erroneous.

<snip>

So you're saying it was not intended to be left to interpretation, like the stealth rule. OK. So who is saying "I can interpret it therefore it's not broken"? In my experience, that response is reserved for rules where it's intended to be up to the DM, like the stealth rule, which you complained about earlier.

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)?

The Stealth rules certainy don't come out and say "You know what, let the DM decide". In fact there are mutiple column inches of rules text, which turns on technical mechanical notions like heavy vs light obscurment, disadvantage to checks, etc.

For me, the clear contrast is with the Hermit background's insight feature, which I regard as both a good rules and a clearly-written rule. It does come out and say that a decision abou the meaning and implications of the feature have to be worked out between player and GM.

The Stealth rules could have been written that way, but weren't.

 

[pemerton]

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"?

 

[Eric V]

The Stealth rules certainy don't come out and say "You know what, let the DM decide". In fact there are mutiple column inches of rules text, which turns on technical mechanical notions like heavy vs light obscurment, disadvantage to checks, etc.


The Stealth rules could have been written that way, but weren't.

This is why we use 4e stealth rules in our 5e game. In 4 years of playing 4e, I can't remember the loophole strangeness Mearls writes about. They were pretty clear, people knew when they could try to hide, and knew how they might be discovered. I certainly wouldn't want to find out mid-game when I am trying to escape the Mind Flayer's detection "Sorry, I don't feel you meet the requirements for a stealth check, rules in the rulebook notwithstanding."

 

[Eric V]

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"?

This is funny.

 

[Iosue]

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"?

The article was written by Shannon Applelcline, administrator of RPG.net, and not WotC staff. It's not out of the realm of possibility that he prefers rules to rulings, or just prefers more rules when it comes to Backstab, regardless of what the 5e designers and/or many other people prefer.

 

[Uchawi]

RAW is one among many methods for doing this. I personally prefer discussion and understanding.

I agree. That is why I mentioned a baseline, because you have to start somewhere. But even a baseline is only as good as the people that use it. So I like rules in 5E like concentration, that picks a level of abstraction or conditions when it applies, but then it calls out other cases where the DM has to rule; like being on a ship.

Had they followed that model in other areas of the game like hiding, then DM may rule on other interpretations of when someone is seen like being distracted in battle. Then at least we have a solid baseline to follow.

I get this impression by going back to tradition, or incorporating more feel into the game versus clear rules or language, that the developers want to be excused. Whenever you develop a game for the first time there is a lot of leeway for interpretation or mistakes, but after 30 years, there is little tolerance for going back to rookie mistakes or at least the mind set. But of course, that is only my opinion.