D&D General The Great Railroad Thread

[EzekielRaiden]

It's actually very common. If the rules aren't just suggestions, then the DM can't change any of them. Yet he can, so they are just suggested rules. Most people I've interacted with here understand that the DM can change or add rules, which makes RAW just suggested rules to follow.

That said, the overwhelming number of the "rule suggestions" are followed by DMs. There aren't many DMs who want to write a whole new game or even most of one. They just going to follow the rules 95%+ of the time and make some house rules for the remaining few percentage points.

They also are not doing it on whims or unfairly pretending to follow them.

Suggestions are cobwebs. Ephemera. They're literally less than nothing--because if it were nothing, at least the players would know that there were nothing between them and the GM's whims.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Suggestions are cobwebs. Ephemera. They're literally less than nothing--because if it were nothing, at least the players would know that there were nothing between them and the GM's whims.

No. They mean that things will usually work in certain way, with the caveat that there might be some exceptions.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No. They mean that things will usually work in certain way, with the caveat that there might be some exceptions.

That's what a rule is.

That's literally what a rule is.

It tells you how things will work.

Exceptions--if justified--always exist for anything. Always. That's the nature of playing games.

Insisting that the rules are suggestions means they mean absolutely, positively nothing at all. They are ephemera that will be cast aside whenever, for any reason or no reason at all.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That's what a rule is.

That's literally what a rule is.

It tells you how things will work.

Exceptions--if justified--always exist for anything. Always. That's the nature of playing games.

Insisting that the rules are suggestions means they mean absolutely, positively nothing at all. They are ephemera that will be cast aside whenever, for any reason or no reason at all.

One might argue that rules of a game tend to be pretty inviolable. Like we cannot just decide in chess that a bishop can this time move diagonally because they do a cool stunt. But we allow that sort of exceptions with RPG rules all the time, which makes them more like guidelines rather than hard and fast rules.

In any case, seem like this is mostly a semantic issue.