Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9759824" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Yeah, I know, I remember a lot of people in the past griping that "WotC took away the DM's authority" and "players are too entitled" back when the rules didn't have the consistency of quicksand.  Not that any DM lost their ability to make rulings, mind, but because they had less justification to do so.  Especially when making changes could upset the balance of the game, or create a chain reaction when their change impacts other rules down the line.Just deciding to be too generous or too stingy with treasure could have a serious impact on 3e and 4e games, and for DM's used to AD&D's approach to treasure, this was really annoying.  I'm sure some DM's started to think of the game's rules as a "black box" that shouldn't be tampered with, lest disaster occur.  And it wasn't like clearer rules didn't still spawn edge cases or bad rules- I'd be lying if I said otherwise!  But some of the 5e rules debates I've seen truly take the cake.  You can't follow the RAW because it doesn't make sense, but you sometimes can't even tell what the RAI is to even start to make a ruling!I'm reminded of an argument from a few years back about the Thunder Step spell and everyone was arguing about what the word "immediately" means in the context of the spell and whether or not the caster would be hit by their own spell effect if they didn't teleport far enough away from it.  Does the damage happen the instant I vanish?  After the teleport resolves?  Both?  Some people were reading the spell like a computer program to parse it's effect, others were like "the game doesn't use atomic time, this isn't Magic: the Gathering!".  In the end, nothing was resolved, and to this day I have to ask DM's before I even look at the spell just on the off chance I'm playing with some madman who wants to see me blow myself up with my own spell!</blockquote>

Verification