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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 5745145" data-attributes="member: 20323">I felt this article missed the mark. The answer to the question Monte poses ("is DM adjudication plan A or plan B?") is obviously "it depends on the group and the DM."What I was more interested with was this statement:IMO too often D&D rules are presented without sufficient explanation; this is endemic to 4e but not exclusive to it. I've had enough instances on both sides of the screen that I no longer assume printed material is balanced and consistent just because it's in print. Often print material lacks cohesion or playtesting with other rules. To pick a small example out of many: minion demons with variable resistance as a free action (i.e. it does nothing). Why? Because variable resistance rules changed after minion demons were printed.What Monte calls "teaching DMs to make fair, intelligent, and consistent rulings" strikes me as a call to justify what's printed based on underlying principles; this would allow homebrew material/rules decisions to remain comparable to printed material (not to mention printed material to each other). I don't know if that kind of underlying system can be designed to facilitate improisatjonal play in D&D, but it reminds me of when folks on the Net were clamoring for WotC to release 4e power design guidelines.</blockquote>