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<blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8257420" data-attributes="member: 6802765"><p>(Emphasis added.) I suspect that the original writers expected that by writing the rules casually they would make the rules easy enough to understand that there would be comparatively fewer rules ambiguities than were created by the more technical language of past editions.</p><p></p><p>Heck, for all I know they succeeded in comparative terms! Maybe 5e <em>does</em> have fewer rules ambiguities than it would have had if they had tried to write it more precisely. (Then again, even if that's true, there's no way to know if it would have been true because casual writing leads to fewer ambiguities or whether it would have been true because the designers happen to be better at casual writing than technical writing.)</p><p></p><p>Regardless of whether writing casually was the right choice, however, I think there is strong anecdotal evidence that they did not avoid as many rules ambiguities as they expected to. This is quite possibly due to the fact that despite their attempt to write casually, parts of the rules are instead written extremely technically (e.g. the infamous "melee weapon attack" vs "melee-weapon attack") but which parts are intended to be read casually and which parts are intended to be read technically are not clearly delineated for the reader.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Xetheral, post: 8257420, member: 6802765"] (Emphasis added.) I suspect that the original writers expected that by writing the rules casually they would make the rules easy enough to understand that there would be comparatively fewer rules ambiguities than were created by the more technical language of past editions. Heck, for all I know they succeeded in comparative terms! Maybe 5e [I]does[/I] have fewer rules ambiguities than it would have had if they had tried to write it more precisely. (Then again, even if that's true, there's no way to know if it would have been true because casual writing leads to fewer ambiguities or whether it would have been true because the designers happen to be better at casual writing than technical writing.) Regardless of whether writing casually was the right choice, however, I think there is strong anecdotal evidence that they did not avoid as many rules ambiguities as they expected to. This is quite possibly due to the fact that despite their attempt to write casually, parts of the rules are instead written extremely technically (e.g. the infamous "melee weapon attack" vs "melee-weapon attack") but which parts are intended to be read casually and which parts are intended to be read technically are not clearly delineated for the reader. [/QUOTE]
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