Hmm. This is a reading comprehension issue. AFAICT Mallus is talking about a general principle. But obviously if you had understood much of what I wrote in the last couple posts you would know that I agree with you that they HAD established the conditions and thus I was able to talk about contradictions with at least some logical basis.
Yes they have, haven't they.
If you're directing the "they" thing at me, once again I think your position is just simply illogical. Your emotions may be telling you that I'm *wrong* but you've apparently forgotten what it was that I've been trying to say.
Since I'm arguing that the passage in the OP is inconsistent with other areas of the DMG, then I really have no need to "pick and choose" anything. If sentence A and sentence B are inconsistent, then the meanings of sentences C, D, E, etc. are irrelevant to that issue of consistency. A and B don't stop being inconsistent just because a poster wants to tell me about how *he* DMs. Or that A, C, and D are consistent and so B should just be ignored as "bad writing" or whatever.
A logical case could be made that I misunderstood A or B. For example, though I never really found much of an argument to support this IMO, some posters argued that the fact that A and B contradiced each other was evidence that B, somehow was the "context" for A and therefore magically over-rode it. I would be as if I said "a tomato is a fruit" and later on said "a tomato is a vegetable" and then claimed that my later statement somehow provided important context for the former so you really should just ignore the former. I never thought that argument correctly used the definition of "context". That's what I meant by picking and choosing.
