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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7599253" data-attributes="member: 996">Also between the /game/ being better and the experience of running it smoother.  The latter is less a claim of quality about the game itself.Though I would go right ahead and say that 5e is a better game if run the 'right' way by the right DM.  with iserith being a pretty fair example.  Just needs a bit more shameless illusionism.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Because it's just fun to type silliness like this:  no, it's by following the rules that you're working at cross purposes to the game's rules which rule that the rules should be over-ruled selectively whenever ruling with the rules would detract from the rule of the DM.  Or something like that.Yeah, I'm joking, but I'm also serious.  The brilliance of DM Empowerment is that you can't take refuge in "just play'n by the rules," you have a greater responsibility than that as DM.Well, iff you're running 5e (or TSR era D&D), and iff you're insisting on playing by natural-language rules as if they were perfectly clear unambiguous precise-jargon rules, your experience may be less smooth than it could be if you just circular-filed the book and did whatever you wanted.  Or ran something else.  Which amounts to the same thing, really. Of course the rules support many sorts of experiences - whatever sort of experiences /you/ support while ignoring the bits of the rules that don't support that experience are perforce, supported. Not a bad way to write the books when you have tons of new people entering the hobby through your flagship offering. I'd say you can safely ignore or change anything between the covers, but, really, feel free to change/ignore the covers, too. Ultimately the GM in any RPG can change/overrule/ignore the rules of the game he's running.  Even if that game /does/ try to present itself as a tense set of immutable rules.5e does not choose to so present itself.It is and it isn't. If you strictly follow the rules of a game written in natural language, that empowers the DM, /you're not following the rules at all/.  OTOH, if you constantly subordinate the rules to your own judgement, you're totally following them. I'll admit that the first few times I ran 5e, I ran it as 'by the book' as possible in every detail, and things got a lot better when I got over that impulse.Another way to look at it.  The rules of the game exist on more than one level.  The general order/philosophy of play is an over-arching rule that offers a helpful guideline to the DM.  The details - bonuses, skills, monster stat blocks, etc, etc, etc - are on another level.  Following the higher-level rule includes making judgements about and changing/ignoring/modding/over-ruling/tweaking the lower-level details.…There must be some reasonable way to state this that's obvious to folks that didn't grok DMing back in the day.</blockquote>

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