Jeremy Crawford's New Sage Advice Column

Thanks. I hadn't seen it.

 

[pemerton]

If they had a page and a half of modifiers, of yes/no situations where stealth was used and what the base DC's were, etc.... then my game (and I'd bet that most others) would be halting FAR more often then once, that's for dang sure!

The point is that they do have half-a-page of modifiers and yes/no situations - the rules for halfings and elves (who are clearly meant to get a racial benefit with Stealth but it is not expressed in terms of auto-proficiency or auto-advantage), and the rules where degrees of obscurement impose penalties to certain Perception checks.

If they didn't have those rules then Stealth would be much easier: just test Stealth vs Perception, as in plenty of other RPGs.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

And what if he comes back with "Our design intent when we wrote the Stealth rules was to leave it up to individual DM's to decide how easy or hard, how specific or broad, being able to Hide and/or otherwise 'Stealth around' in their own games. There are a million and one different factors that would go into a complete break down of how/when/where someone could use Stealth; we didn't want to do that, so we left it open to interpretation by individual DM's".

I'm perfectly fine with that...except that there are several specific examples and rules statements which cannot be reconciled. In other words: they said too much already to say, "however you do it is fine," because however I do it is going to be contradicting something that is already written about it.

The problem is likely that they had a basic concept of how they wanted it to work, and didn't realize they weren't all on the same page with each other (or even consistent individually!) when actually writing up and referring to the rules. Hence: mess.

If he comes back with that answer, then I and a lot of other folks will be rightly annoyed. The designers are being paid out of our pockets--all that money we spend on rulebooks--and we don't pay them to play Zen master. We pay them because they have the time and the expertise to design a better system than we could build for ourselves.

Agreed.

I love 5e, but I don't see why people disagree with this point. It sells as a game, not as "an inspirational product for enhancing your own storytelling fun." I buy a game, I want it to work right out of the box.

If the rules are going to leave a certain decision up to the DM, then they should be up front about it: "This is up to the DM to decide." Otherwise, they should be clear and straightforward. As the stealth rules exist right now, it's quite easy for a player to read them and conclude one thing, while the DM concludes something else, and neither of us knows that the other one has different ideas (because we don't spend a month going over the entire rulebook together line by line). Then someone tries to use Stealth at the table, and the session crashes to a halt. As DM, I make a ruling on the fly, and explain it so my players understand how it works, and then I have to come back after the session and review the ruling to be sure it's how I want things to work in future, and explain that to my players, and it's a waste of all of our time.

I am perfectly prepared to adjust the rules if they don't serve the needs of my table. But I want to know what the rules are, so I know if I have to inform my players that they're being adjusted.

This. Absolutely.

As a DM, I'm going to be coming up with a coherent set of rules regarding Stealth, Surprise, detecting threats while traveling, etc; and I'll be making it available to my players in order for them to understand how it's going to work in my game.

As it is now, if I were making any character where Stealth is intended to be a big part of the character, I would have to talk to the DM first and see how he is going to run it. Otherwise I would risk ending up with a character who can't even do what I thought he could after thoroughly reading all three core books.

If finding out that DM interpretation of a critical system is so different from yours that the character you created is no longer fun for you to play isn't a reflection of ineffective rules presentation, I'm not sure what is.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I tweeted Jeremy Crawford about the meaning of RAF:

Jeremy Crawford [MENTION=4036]Jeremy[/MENTION]ECrawford
[MENTION=73782]Psikerlord[/MENTION] "by RAF do you mean alternate rules that better suit different playstyles/approaches?"
That's an excellent way to describe it.

Sweet!

 

[Sailor Moon]

I see the 5th edition ruleset as something that can go from being simple to something very complex depending on a DM's interpretation or expantion.

 

[Uchawi]

I hope they address consistency of rules to help prevent sub-systems from creating their own rules, and also standardize terminology and concepts across rules even when providing exceptions or examples.

Rules as fun is so subjective, that it is really is implied if you play the game, versus trying to determine what is fun for any given player or DM. Some players enjoy a fast and lose style of play (ad hoc), where others want more structure.

But the thing they should move away from is obscure rules to grant the DM more latitude. I believe obscure rules make it harder for everyone at the table. I don't see it as a design feature, similar to the concept of system mastery being baked into 3E as a design choice. It appeared to me just to be an excuse when the rules were too complex, or there were too many sub-systems of rules than necessary for a given concept.

 

[Manbearcat]

But the thing they should move away from is obscure rules to grant the DM more latitude.

I'm 100 % in agreement with you (as a GM, not as a player...I don't want that latitude....nor the responsibility and conflicts of interest that come with it). However, you'll find plenty of posters on this very thread and regularly on this board that cite such rules which require rulings (due to their embedded lack of clarity or odd interactions with another part of the system - specific PC build rules, magic items, or other subsystems) as a rallying cry for GM empowerment; a ruleset feature and not a bug.

I believe obscure rules make it harder for everyone at the table.

They'll also disagree with this in that they'll say opaque rules don't inherently lead to more play-stopping rules discussions.

I've been aggressively admonished for making such statements (backed by what seems clearly intuitive to me and empirically true after a long history of GMing triple digit players under the auspices of such rules) and accused of exclusionary badwrongfun.

 

[kenmarable]

Glad to see RAF getting the recognition it deserves! I have been a proponent of it for years (although I think I used the more awkward RAMF - Rules as Most Fun). The way I see it with my games, the entire purpose is to have fun, so when there needs to be a rules interpretation, the ultimate arbiter is "what is the most fun for everyone?" with the understanding that we are considering not just this instant but months or even years to come as well (so something that would be fun in the moment, but would be overpowered and annoying in the long run, doesn't fly).

RAW helps us all agree on a common base, and when available, I suppose RAI can offer another perspective (especially if RAW has an apparently unintended consequence), but ultimately RAF rules our games.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Both approaches have merits. I like rules as clear as possible. But I know, that every clearly written rule has a loophole, someone canexploit. So if every rule has the addendum: "A DM may rule differently if the situation requires" it is ok.
Also rare corner cases should no be accounted in the usual text. If a rule is written in a way that it becomes unintelligible because it tries to encompass too many corner cases, it is useless at the table.

Stealth rules may need a little work.

RaF however seems like a good approach. A DM usually should rule in favour of the players, because this usually results in more fun. You don´t want to risk a TPK because of a rules misunderstanding...

 

[fjw70]

I think the stealth rules are fine just the way they are. Giving just enough to be a workable system.

 

[I'm A Banana]

RAI is hand and hand with RAW and been around just as long, RAF I have never seen before and hope to not see again, it makes no sense. The intent behind the rules should be fun to begin with. Intent is hard enough to figure out unless it is something like Sage Advice where the designers are answering the questions, Fun is so subjective from person to person and group to group as be something no one could answer to the satisfaction of most people.

The....er...intent of RAF seems to be approaching it in terms of "what would happen if you broke this rule, and might some people enjoy that?"

Like, if RAW for XP/day and XP/level says you level halfway through Day 4, but the RAI was that you actually only level at the end of adventuring days (when logical break points occur), the RAF might be something like "You could turn that mid-day encounter into a doozy to represent the effort of gaining a level, or you could institute training rules to ensure that PC's don't level in the middle of the day, or you could just give up XP altogether and level up at the end of major quests, using XP/day only as a guidepost for how many challenges a party can face."

I suppose we'll see more of what he actually means in a month, though.