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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9086774" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have no view about how others should play 5e D&D. I have reported what I would expect as a player, given the text of the rules. And I have related that expectation to my more general preference about player agency.As to the issue of the overall consistency of the 5e rules: there is a doctrine, in the Australian law of statutory interpretation, that it is impermissible to read one part of a statute, to construct a rationale or purpose from that, and then to use that constructed rationale or purpose as a constraint or limit or gloss on other parts of the statute. Rather, the statute has to be read in its entirety, and only then can its rationale or purpose be identified and potentially deployed as an aid to interpretation of particular provisions.It is even more impermissible to construct a rationale or purpose from some source external to the statute, and use that as a constraint or limit or gloss on the text of the statute itself.In this thread, the approach to the interpretation of the 5e rules by [USER=6747251]@Micah Sweet[/USER], [USER=23751]@Maxperson[/USER] and [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER] - which identifies a rationale or approach from a certain component of the rulebooks (eg text in the DMG) or from something external to the rulebooks (a sense of "how D&D is meant to work"), and then reads that back into the text of the Noble background to derive some implicit "unless the GM says otherwise" that is not there in the text - seems to fall foul of the stricture I've just described.I think there are more consistent ways of reading the rules, which reconcile the express text of the feature with other elements of the text. I think [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] has outlined them in this thread.But the issue of the best interpretation of the 5e rules is ultimately orthogonal to the topic of this thread, which is player agency.</blockquote>

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