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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D+1" data-source="post: 1327140" data-attributes="member: 13654">I've certainly had my opinion of the Sage's reliability and usefulness drastically reduced in the last few years.  I generally look to him LAST after first opting for my own solution or one I can glean from elsewhere on the net.The Sages problems are twofold:First, he speaks in an official capacity - his "opinion" is OFFICAL RULE.  In a sense he thus doesn't get the luxury of being wrong in the first place since the position of Official Sage exists to ELIMINATE inaccuracies and mistakes, not ADD MORE.  It's not a terribly enviable position and he deserves credit for the effort.Secondly, though you are correct that most of his rulings are fair, balanced, accurate, etc., when he is wrong he can be so OBVIOUSLY wrong and that's what really rankles.  "What the hell was he smoking?" kind of wrong.  "Did he not even READ the damn rules in the first place?" kind of wrong.It would be one thing if they said to just consider his rulings official - but to keep in mind it's still just one man's opinion.  It's MY opinion that they really don't run the position of sage as effectively as they could and should.  Once a month Skip issues a new batch of rulings in Dragon whether they're really needed or not.  Check me if I'm wrong here but that means he's got about 30 days between each issue to select a new batch of questions, look up answers, add his own opinion or fill in rules that are absent - and then bounce them off several other people or hell, even post them publicly somewhere and SOLICIT answers that he can then add with his own and collate it all into one OFFICIAL response.It's the last part that I assume is lacking.  He possibly keeps it all to himself until he actually submits his responses and apparantly nobody does more than check his spelling before his word becomes "law".  That's no way to run this kind of railroad.  The resource of player feedback on this sort of thing is going UTTERLY untapped and that's almost a crime.  Several thousand heads on the net are certainly better than one when it comes to getting EVERY question on EVERY aspect of the rules correct 100% of the time.  These sorts of questions are practically the raison d'etre for message boards like this and rgfd on Usenet.  He could redouble his reputation and accuracy scores in a month by submitting his answers for review/comment somewhere before they get graven in stone.</blockquote>

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