Rystil Arden
First Post
Personally, I believe that the common sense approach is an extraordinarily dangerous basis to use for interpretation of the rules, as it serves no purpose except to allow Rules Lawyers to have room to manoeuvre. After all, everyone has their own idea of what common sense is. If you want to use common sense, my opinion is that you should first admit that the mechanistic argument is the way that the rules intend, and then announce that you are creating a house rule to help the rules fit in better with your idea of common sense.Pielorinho said:Heh, I disagree (let's see if we can get this engine going again!)
While the last SRD quote makes part of the issue clear, I think that jgbrowning was approaching this from a different perspective from Hypersmurf. The latter seems to be arguing from a highly technical reading of the rules, in which it's appropriate to build arguments by cross-referencing passages and assuming that every word is written the way it is for a precise, almost programmatic reason.
The former seems to be arguing from a common-sense approach: reading the rules as a whole, and trying to figure out what the gist of them ought to be, and not worrying so much about whether the adjective on page 67 combined with the footnote on page 312 lead to a certain conclusion.
I far prefer the common-sense approach to rules. It makes sense to me thata giant isn't affected by dominate person, so that's how I'll rule it. Whether the word "humanoid" is repeated in paragraph 2 is immaterial: the gist of the spell is that giants aren't affected by it.
Either approach to the rules is appropriate, I think: programmatic readings are fine, as long as everyone in the group likes them, and the same caveat applies to common-sense rulings. But I like the common-sense approach much more.
Daniel
I'm guessing that the way to avoid arguments over the common sense approach (since its subjective) is to say "whatever the DM's common sense says is right," but this could cause some serious upsetting of players. I know that if I was playing a wizard who cast magic missile against a wall and the DM ruled that common sense dictated that I would take equal and opposite damage to the force I created from slamming into the wall, or made other weird rulings that weakened my character ad hoc, I would become upset and probably find another campaign. That's the problem with common sense rulings: you have to determine them on the fly, since you have already admitted that the codified rules are not what should be the basis, and so you may come across as arbitrary, and even if you don't it could still seem very unfair.