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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9595581" data-attributes="member: 6777737">No, I don't agree. I don't even agree that that's the formal intent of errata or rules changes. I think those kinds of changes happen for people that specifically demand them. I think WotC only does it to shut up that very small, extremely vocal minority of people. I don't think most DMs bother with errata. I think most DMs do what the game already tells them to do: Make a ruling, move on, figure it out later.... and then most of them never do the follow-up. The night is over and it doesn't matter anymore. The ruling made in the moment works fine.No TTRPG that's made from 900 pages of rules is going to be totally consistent. Most people understand that and don't expect it. The game costs $50-$150, not $15,000. It took a year for 12 people to make. It's not Baldur's Gate III, with over 2000 people, six years of development, and a budget of $100 million USD. TTRPGs don't pull that kind of money.[HR][/HR]Yes.I think the DM knowing the context of the moment is going to have a better idea for what should happen in the game world. Better than designers that aren't at the table. Certainly better than a rulebook.I don't think it's particularly difficult to make the easy ruling and just side with the PCs.I am someone that enjoys talking about or arguing rules. I don't think there's anything particularly sacred or virtuous in adhering to RAW. I think the rules are primarily talking about general cases, and that the game is explicitly already written and intended by the developer for you to waive or overrule them.The rules do not run the game. The DM and players do.I think DMs need to learn that TTRPGs are zebras, not horses. In most games, the objective of the game is to execute the rules prescriptively to reach the end where a winner is determined. To follow the procedure. To put your time and dice into a box, shake them up for a couple hours, and fun comes out the other side.TTRPGs aren't like that. You're told to make the game yours. You're told to change and modify the rules as you see fit. You're told that the rules secondary. They're more like guidelines than actual rules. More than that, the objective of the game is not to execute the rules and procedures in order to determine a winner. It's to keep the game going indefinitely. The only way you can lose a TTRPG is for the story of the game to end.If you don't want to play that way, that's fine. But the culture of the TTRPG hobby is not about blindly following the text, not thinking about the rules within context, or stopping games because the rules are a little confusing or contradictory. I would call learning to make the game yours an essential skill, and that means learning to make rulings, learning to be wrong, and learning to not sweat mistakes or weirdness because a die roll can't replace a conversation.Perhaps more directly, I think if a new DM were going to stop running the game because there wasn't a deterministic and objective answer to how Distintigrate interacts with an Orc's Relentless Endurance, then I don't think they're ready for this hobby at all. They should go back to fully synthetic games like Chess, Magic: The Gathering, Tetris, and Baseball, where the rules are safe, rigidly inflexible, insist that you follow them, and not remotely interested in telling a good story or creating a realistic game world.[HR][/HR]And once we have keywords it'll be way better! See, that's why the interaction of the Light weapon property, the Nick mastery property, and the Dual Wielder feat's Enhanced Dual Wielding benefit was so easy to resolve, and everyone interpreted it the same way! It was written with keywords and the fact that each one is almost willfully blind to what the others were saying made them independent and easy to parse. Why, they didn't even need to give us any examples. It was clear and straightforward and not at all confusing.And look how easy keywords made designing the Carrion Crawler. Using keywords for Paralyzed certainly didn't cause any problems there! Thank goodness it's so easy to remember rules that are not on the same page as what you're reading.Keywords just prevent confusion and design errors all over the place. There's never any need for a simple statement of what the designer's intent was. It's all crystal clear from the keywords. What an immediate improvement.</blockquote>

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