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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 7484520" data-attributes="member: 2525">Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford spoke most about "Rulings, Not Rules" as a theme for what was then "D&D Next" and became D&D 5e in late May 2012 (and it had previously been a phrase most commonly heard in reference to the Old School Renaissance movement). They did a lot of interviews and at least one podcast around that time, introducing the playtests for D&D Next, and mentioned it repeatedly as a major theme for the new edition. You can find some quotes <a href="https://www.wired.com/2012/05/d-d-update-mike-mearls/" target="_blank">here</a>. For example, " The biggest hurdle has been trying to make sure that we can encourage more creativity, immersion, and flexibility in DMs and players. We want to have a solid set of rules, but at the same time I think D&D is at its best when the game is about the DM's rulings rather than the actual rules. The rules are a tool that a DM uses to keep the game moving and inform decisions. The rules don't make decisions for the DM, unless that's how the DM wants the game to work."You can also hear a podcast <a href="http://podbay.fm/show/189053885/e/1337877000?autostart=1" target="_blank">here</a> starting around the 10 minute mark. Here is an excerpt in part, but it's worth listening to as Crawford also chimes in, and then Mearls expands on the concepts further and describes how this approach will differ from organized play approach where there will be much more canonical rules:Q: What part of the playtest are you most looking forward to?A: [Mearls] I am really curious to see how people react to the way we’ve approached DM’ing. Because we really tried to take a different tack on things. One of my personal things with D&D is I think the rules are there as a tool for the DM to use as the DM wants. The rules aren’t just this canonical thing that the DM must obey. The DM obeys the rules when the DM feels like yes these rules make sense for my campaign. And so we’re really emphasizing this idea of instead of saying hey here’s this hard and fast rule, it’s here’s a rule you can use, but really we’re going to rely more on the DM to make rulings based on the situation. One of the things we focused on in the DM’ing packet was giving the DM a really clear sense of ‘here is how checks work’ and different die rolling conventions or whatever, but here’s how you use these things. And what I imagine is, in a lot of adventures we write, I want to just be able to describe a room and not give any DC’s. And the DM just judges and is like ‘Hey a character wants to try and do this, here’s what I think the DC should be.’ Or ‘here’s the kind of tweak I want to make to this check, OK you can that but if he fails by more than 5, or whatever, something bad is going to happen to you.’ So instead of giving you this full page rules on climbing that covers all these different cases, we need to say well hey if a character wants to climb well here’s how fast you can climb, and usually it’s a strength check and here are some sample DC’s, and here’s some other tweaks you might want to make to the check, but it’s really up to the DM. And the goal is to make those guidelines and rules simple enough that the DM is using them on the fly. You know it’s the kind of thing where it takes 5 minutes to learn it and then a lifetime to master.</blockquote>

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