D&D 5E On rulings, rules, and Twitter, or: How Sage Advice Changed

[overgeeked]

What if I told you that the point of 5e's rules being written in natural language was to allow for ambiguity / multiple interpretations, and people's insistence on trying to get an "official" interpretation of the rules was completely missing the point of the rules being written that way to begin with?

I’d tell you that either the designers missed the point of writing a rulebook for a game in that game rules shouldn’t be ambiguous or they missed the point of their own stance on letting DMs decide by putting out something like Sage Advice.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

What if I told you that the point of 5e's rules being written in natural language was to allow for ambiguity / multiple interpretations, and people's insistence on trying to get an "official" interpretation of the rules was completely missing the point of the rules being written that way to begin with?

My response would have been that the rules should have been a lot lighter if that was their design goal. Like, Whitehack levels of light.

 

[Campbell]

What if I told you that it is possible to write rules in a way that allows for GM judgement while still having clear and concise rules? You just specifically call out areas where GMs are expected to exercise their judgment.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

Crawford's tweets haven't been official rulings for ages


Over two years

 

[pukunui]

What gets me is how they weren’t going to use errata to change the rules ... but they’ve now done that a number of times, like with the beast master ranger (not that it didn’t need it).

 

[Charlaquin]

Crawford's tweets haven't been official rulings for ages


Over two years

No they haven’t, but that hasn’t stopped people from treating them as official, sometimes in the same breath as they say “I know this isn’t ‘official’ but...”

My broader point was that it seems the approach has shifted over time from clearing up ambiguities and giving insight on developer intent, to pure technical readings of RAW.

 

[tetrasodium]

Remind me, how much combat breaks a long rest?

I believe that PHB16pegs the lowest possible number of rounds at

Spoiler: no joke, six hundred

10 rounds per minute, 60 minutes per hour

in order to basically immediately recover all spent hit points spell slots & class abilities expended over the last umpteen many sessions

 

[Charlaquin]

What gets me is how they weren’t going to use errata to change the rules ... but they’ve now done that a number of times, like with the beast master ranger (not that it didn’t need it).

Yeah, I threw that bit in at the end cause it was kind of orthogonal to my thesis, but it is really interesting to read “It would be inappropriate for the design team to use errata as a way to redesign the game,” and then see the way they’ve done exactly that with the ranger, and with several races. And like you said, it isn’t as if those changes weren’t merited. But I can’t help but think there’d be a 6e by now if they had stuck to this approach to errata.

 

[Parmandur]

What if I told you that the point of 5e's rules being written in natural language was to allow for ambiguity / multiple interpretations, and people's insistence on trying to get an "official" interpretation of the rules was completely missing the point of the rules being written that way to begin with?

Exactly this.

 

[cbwjm]

Crawford's tweets haven't been official rulings for ages


Over two years

This is largely the reason why I ignore the ruling on magic missile where you roll once for each missile. Well, that, and the fact that we've always rolled for each missile. Even if it showed up in the sage advice compendium I'd ignore it.