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Message: <blockquote data-quote="epithet" data-source="post: 7775962" data-attributes="member: 6796566">The distinction is significant: the rules are fact, rulings are opinion. Among games following the "rules as written," the rules are the same, while the rulings are different.The Sage Advice has evolved in format over the life of the 5th Edition. At first, Jeremy, Mike, and sometimes (if I remember correctly) Chris would answer questions about how to interpret the rules when someone asked, most often on Twitter. Then, Jeremy began to write articles for the D&D web site that were compilations of the advice he had given and the questions he had answered on Twitter. These were called "Sage Advice" like the old series of articles from Dragon magazine. Around this time, a website sprang up that indexed the questions and answers, mostly from Twitter, from Mike, Jeremy, and Chris. This website also called these responses "sage advice."The next step was for the WotC staff to decide that no one but Jeremy would answer rules questions, because the webpage showed that conflicting answers were being given. Everyone else would refer people who asked questions to Jeremy.As time went on, Jeremy began to compile the articles themselves into a pdf that he would update every time he published a new Sage Advice article. This was the genesis of the Sage Advice Compendium. While it originally was just a compilation of answers Jeremy had given, his recent reversals on certain previous rulings created the problem of answers from Jeremy that conflicted with one another. Jeremy's solution was to declare that the answers in the Sage Advice Compendium pdf were the "official" rulings, meaning that they superseded any advice from a tweet or from a previous Sage Advice article on the D&D website. Presumably it is also intended to mean that if he tweets any conflicting answers in the future, they won't be "official" until the pdf is updated.It seems as though Jeremy might not have thought this through, though, because what he's done (as shown here in this thread) by describing the advice in his pdf as "official" is to cause some people to confuse his suggested rulings with actual updates to the rules, which they are not. As I've pointed out before, updates to rules are only made via errata, not in the Sage Advice articles or the Compendium pdf.It seems remarkable to me that people who argue so vigorously about the meaning of the words "if" and "with" (and get deep into the semantic weeds arguing that a conditional must also be a timing requirement because "if" should be read to include "and only if") would be quite dismissive of the difference between rules and rulings, and would blur the line between changes to the rules via errata and suggested interpretations of the rules. I would have thought that anyone who argues that a character can only do what a rule expressly and specifically says the character can do would also apply that "what it says on the tin" standard to the Sage Advice Compendium, which has the word "advice" in the bloody title of the thing. "Advice" is literally what it says "on the tin."</blockquote>

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