D&D General D&D, the Complete Rules, and You

[CleverNickName]

As always, there is a lot of discussion about the rules over in the ENWorld Community Forums. And for December 2022, the buzzword of the month seems to be Need. As in, "I need Wizards of the Coast to update the Wizard" or "the Wizard needs fixing" or "nobody needs to buy that book," or the evergreen question of "how many rules do you need, anyway?"

So when it comes to the Dungeons & Dragons game: do you need rules? If so, how many? and how current do they need to be? Check all that apply.

 

[iserith]

For my part, I'll take all the official rules into account then decide which of those will be used in any given adventure or campaign according to what supports the intended game experience best.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Lots of rules. Good, well thought out rules where the designers did their jobs and considered applicability and design space as well as how it would play at an actual table. All of this should be communicated clearly and concisely. These are the starting point and common language of the game.

And absolutely no hiding behind 'rulings'. I did not give you $50 for permission not to use the thing I paid $50 for.

 

[Malmuria]

Whatever is not in front of me when I play needs to be automatic in my head or I forget. Usually that means a summary of the rules needs to fit on an a4 sheet of paper (the rules can be much longer than this, but unless something on that sheet triggers my memory, I'll forget). I also have one a4 sheet of notes.

 

[schneeland]

I'm currently using a class from Tasha's (artificer), but using classes just from the PHB would have been fine for me, too. And given how poorly structured the DMG is, even that is not strictly needed. But in general, in terms of rule books, the core 3 are something I'd rank as needed.

In terms of adventure material, we're using a 3rd-party campaign(Call from the Deep), so I'd classify that as needed; especially as I haven't really been convinced by the first party adventures I read.

And I found the 2e and 3e Forgotten Realms campaign sets quite useful and occasionally use the latter as reference material. So that's something that would rank pretty high for me (probably still more "useful" than "needed", though), but is a bit out of question since it doesn't exist for 5e.

 

[Malmuria]

And absolutely no hiding behind 'rulings'. I did not give you $50 for permission not to use the thing I paid $50 for

I've been told that "GM decides" is still a rule. Which is extreme, but I do think a game can be clear about what areas require GM adjudication and what principles the GM should use to make those rulings (beyond, "just have fun")

 

[CreamCloud0]

i think we need as many rules as needed to cover as many types of situations and scenarios as possible, sometimes even multiple versions of rules to cover the same situations, so we can then choose in which combinations to use them, build off them further or make our own.

 

[the Jester]

What do you mean by "need"?

 

[Oofta]

I use most of the official rules and errata although I do have some limitations (mostly on allowed races) and a handful of house rules. By and large I don't need any 3PP stuff. Do I need anything other than the core rules? Probably not, but I have no problem with more options for the most part.

Most games we talk about this stuff in a session 0 though, it could change from game to game.

 

[DND_Reborn]