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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8983784" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I don't think you will find any rules in any edition that will really agree with this. I think you'll find a lot of people who do, but that's different.Using only the rules in the books as a guide, how do you tell the difference between an alteration of a rule, a replacement of a rule, and a supplement? When new rules are released, they often directly replace or contradict equivalent old rules. In that case, they often tell you that some rules are not meant to be compatible, and then it's entirely natural to replace those rules. Not doing so would result in a contradiction. Teleport can't be a 5th-level spell and a 7th-level spell in 5e. Teleport mishaps can't cause both 1d10 and 3d10 damage.However, they do not always cause contradictions, and there is nothing inherently atomic about rules. Even spell descriptions. I don't think you can make a decision without making choices as a DM makes choices. I don't think the rules tell you how to make that decision because the authors expected that to be a DM's decision. I don't think any edition of the rules even considers it a point worth touching on. After all, they pretty regularly tell you to alter any of the rules to fit your purposes.3e tried very hard to comprehensively restate every rule, but that proved to be an unsustainable design limitation. It takes a huge amount of design effort, and the results are... not always great. 4e and 5e did not try to emulate that. Neither will One D&D. That means those editions are often mute on things that 3e or prior editions were not. There's no inherent reason to discard those older rules if they still work. After all, 5e D&D is not a new game. It is a new edition of an existing game. I mean, it's right there in the name, isn't it?In any event, there has never been a rule that says, "Here is how you identify fluff, which is mutable and can be ignored. Here is how you identify hard mechanics, which are hard rules that should not be altered without careful consideration." That's an assumption that people took from 3e's design. Which is to say, beginning with 3e the game was no longer so arcane and obtuse that it was impossible to identify the design, so they actually felt confident enough to make alterations themselves. However, the fact that you can separate the two does not mean that the fluff is any less of a rule than hard mechanics are. After all, D&D is not a dice-rolling game or even a war game. It's a role-playing game. The story matters just as much if not more than everything else, so shouldn't lore be a first-order rule alongside any mechanics?In fact, I think the argument you're making is one that is only credible to make when an edition of the game has been in print for many years. The game obviously didn't have enough content to feel complete in 2014, and you wouldn't assume that a rule being missing was itself an indication of a rules change. It's only quite late in the life cycle of the game that it makes sense to start saying, "Well, they haven't released this rule again so they must want it eliminated." Early on you'd say, "Hey, does anyone know if they intend this to work the same way? It doesn't say anymore."The DM might just as easily say, "I don't remember how spellcasting works. I'll have to look that up and it'll take a few minutes." The fact that you don't know a rule doesn't mean it's not a rule. Like the problem you're describing isn't that the rule is non-functional. It's that you don't know the rule. That happens all the time already in games that have only one edition!</blockquote>

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