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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9517707" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm not sure why you're saying this - it's neither accurate (except re: "all versions of D&D"), nor informative, nor contributes anything at all to the discussion. First off, it's not "more jargon-y", it's more specific and frankly more useful. Secondly, no, it's not how how "almost all" games are designed in any meaningful sense - obviously with any set of rules or laws, there will be instances where specific beats general, but how heavily that is a part of a game's design varies to a huge degree. There are games where the vast majority of the rules that you use to play, that vast majority of the time, fit a structure such that general rules do apply most of the time, and specific exceptions are rare to very rare. At the other end of the spectrum, you have games like D&D, where pretty much every character is in large part just a big bundle of exceptions. It's hard to think of any TTRPG which pushes "exception-based" design more harder than D&D (some card-based games and board games do go further - whereas most war games rely pretty hard on general rules with only a small number of exceptions). Not only is class design that way, the spell design is particularly that way - more so in 5E than 3E even - and it's very much intentional, with stuff like fireball not even matching expected damage progressions, but beating it.It's also part of what makes D&D relatively more accessible to players (but can give more of a headache to DMs) than similarly complex but less exception-based TTRPGs, because the end result is that any given player usually has to understand significantly fewer general rules.As this article discusses, it does open up the rules to potentially more "legal issues" as a number of exceptions can sometimes stack together to create an issue, and it asks a bit more from the DM in terms of having to deal with a large number of potentially conflicting exceptions at times. 5E, I would say, isn't as bad for this as the previous two editions of D&D as 5E simply has a smaller number of trouble-making Feats and specific abilities, and the spells in 5E tend to be a "toned down" and narrower in function than 3E.I haven't really found it to be a problem except, ironically, where Crawford has made some kind of odd, non-binding Sage Advice ruling on an exception, which is, uh, how to put this, um, obviously wrong? Obviously silly? A couple of times a player has been like "apparently it works like this when these conflicting exceptions apply" and quoted Sage Advice, and I've had to be, like, absolutely not, no it doesn't.Also, you can pretty easily find the worst possible exception stacks just by going to RPGBot and looking at the optimization guides for the class/subclasses the PCs are playing. If there is any particularly obnoxious exception stack, they will have highlighted it there, so you can anticipate it and take whatever action, if any is needed. Usually none is needed, it's just useful to know about it.I haven't found any need with 5E to actually do either of those. There have been other games with exception stacks so bad I needed a house rule (rather than just a ruling on a specific exception), but not 5E. Usually I find it's just a matter of being aware that PC X can do thing Y.This I agree with. I tend to be familiar with "potential but failed" exception-based loopholes thanks to this site and others (as such things often attract a lot of discussion), and if RPGBot and similar haven't mentioned something, usually just carefully reading the rules involved will indeed reveal that it doesn't work because of some specific clause within those rules.</blockquote>

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