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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7601953" data-attributes="member: 996">Depends on the organization of the rulebook.  (I mean, apart from fiddly technicalities, like the title, author, and copyright statements /clearly/ aren't rules.)  In 4e, mechanics and flavor text in powers, for instance, were neatly segregated from eachother, a format unique in D&D history.  In every edition there have been sections clearly presented as DMing advice (and in some cases advice to players). As ambiguous as natural language may be, it's hard not to take "you should generally ...' as a hard-and-fast rule, rather than as advice. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  There's also tons (or ounces in 4e) of flavor text.  And there's actual mechanics, if sometimes hard to tease out.  And (as usual, apart from 4e) there's a LOT of grey areas among those. Even in 5e there are sidebars clearly meant to be taken differently than the rest of the text.  Aside from that, though, in 5e, there's not a strong case to be made for excluding anything between the covers from being "part of the rules," since the rules of 5e, like the more-clearly-delineated 'advice' or 'flavah' - or for that matter, filler - of other editions, are written in natural, even conversational, language.  Yet, at the same time (or maybe as a consequence), such 'rules' carry much less force, so the lines among rule, flavor, advice, or even filler are not too important, either.  It's not like it could have anything new to say after the preceding 5 DMGs on your shelf.  No, seriously, it couldn't.  There's also been an odd trend over the editions to move rules (or, to be more prices, 'mechanics?') to the PH from the DMG.  It probably peaked in 4e, which even put magic items in the PH. In the case of 5e, it's intended to be played the way the DM wants, rules in the books notwithstanding*. There is /soooo/ much leeway (Empowerment!) given the DM in 5e, that I could run 5e nominally "by the book" and make it run like FATE.  I wouldn't, because it'd be a pita to flog bifts that hard, but I totally could.  More effortlessly, I can run it just like I did AD&D.  More often the latter. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />   But, seriously, I'm not see'n the primary problems people have as coming from ignoring the rules this time around (nor in 3.x, nor in older editions, for that matter).  In 3.x, people /didn't/ ignore the rules, it just wasn't done, or wasn't admitted to, anyway, and if you did go off the RaWservation, you were on your own.  In the TSR era changing the rules was prettymuch standard practice - even when you found DMs who insisted they were 'playing by the rules' the rule they used were a lot more different from eachother than you might expect. If 5e can be said to have a unified RaW or RaI or much consistency at all to the experience, it's not a matter of intent of the rules (which is for the DM to take responsibility for the experience, over & above the rules), but of practicality in the context of AL.* I'm feel'n my inner Gygax today.</blockquote>

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