NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8111781" data-attributes="member: 18">Well to my mind it's slightly more complicated than that.Obviously, you're right on a basic level - rules change each edition. But because they cloaked the rules on surprise in frankly confusing natural language, a lot of people, perhaps not reading carefully enough, perhaps just not understanding, seemed to think that there was a surprise round, or came to very different understandings of how surprise worked. Particularly common was the (mis)understanding that it basically worked the same way as before.And that matters because when you change a rule significantly from how it functioned in previous editions, I think you need to make it really obvious both that it has been changed in a significant way, and how it functions now. This is particularly true for games which have gone for multiple editions with more similar rules on a subject. I don't remember surprise ever really confusing people in previous editions. In 5E though thousand+ reply reddit threads with some very dramatic up and down voting show that is no longer the case.I've run and played a lot of 5E. Most of the rules, I could give you correct from the top of my head (or really close). Surprise? I wouldn't even try. And the debates are all about both the language used and what is actually supposed to happen. And clear language would have resolved this.As an aside, I'd add that I think this is partly a designer problem. Like, I love Jeremy Crawford as a designer generally, and he also seems cool, but man he does enjoy writing cryptic answers to things. Even some of this Sage Advice is barely less cryptic than the rules he's asking about. And given his good-natured-ness, I doubt this is him trying to be difficult, or present riddles, but rather the meaning is obvious to him, and not to others. Which is more of a danger with natural language than more mechanistic language.</blockquote>

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