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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6297570" data-attributes="member: 17106">I find that reading rulebooks for exact text is impractical during play, but eminently practical during prep. I end up doing most of my worldbuilding and formal prep in the form of meticulously researched NPC stats and magic items. A lot of the history of my world is embedded in flavor text for artifacts and the like.Conversely, in a game, I'm generally a proponent of getting an OK answer now rather than a perfect one later. There's a lot of roughing it, a lot of "eh, that sounds like a Diplo, so roll it" and just making up a response based on how the die roll makes me feel. I carefully allot spell slots/spell points, but frequently don't bother to track them at all for NPCs because it just isn't worth the effort. I'll frequently skip around and narrate large parts of things without bothering to engage rules. And I'm by far the most hardcore RAW DM of any gamer I've ever met; plenty of DMs are just completely making rules up as they go.If we were to accept the rules as a model for how play unfolds, this would happen:Take three cases. In one, you're rolling an attack and need an 11 to hit the target's AC. In another, you're rolling a save against a death effect and need an 11 to make the save. In the third, you're rolling a Knowledge check to produce some interesting bit of history that has no life or death implications. Assume no other rules that alter those probabilities are in play.If the rules were how actual play worked, those checks would each succeed 50% of the time. In fact, that isn't what happens at all. In fact, the players are likely to engage in a number of cheesy "it fell off the book" tactics for rerolling dice, distorting the probabilities in their favor to the extent that the DM is willing to indulge them. On the other hand, the DM is also likely to "cheat" wantonly, perhaps fudging the AC to alter the battle to his desired level of difficulty or based on how much time he has for the session. Saves vs death get fudged all the time if the DM doesn't want the character to die. And for minor things like knowledge, the DM may do anything from throw in the info for free without a check to juking the DC to meet the circumstances. Hard rules get ignored all the time in favor of players' ideas, DMs' goals, or simply because of ignorance or time constraints.So to me, what unfolds is that the offscreen reality is assumed to work the way the rules describe, even if you're only occasionally actually using the rules to determine what happened offscreen. Conversely, the in-game experience is a freeform free-for-all, in which the literal rules text is only one influence on what unfolds and in which the deviations from the rules are eminently knowable.</blockquote>

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