D&D (2024) What Spell Sage Advice (& Descriptions) are you afraid won't be "fixed"?

[James Gasik]

I'm glad for that, personally. In practice, "rulings, not rules" often means that individual DMs have to spend time making up common things that ideally should already be in the books they've spent sizeable chunks of money on. I like homebrewing, but 5E leaves the DM to do the heavy lifting way more often than it should IMO.

Any DM who encounters a rule they don't like can change it. That's as true today as it was back in the 70's. If there's a DM outside of public play who doesn't have their own list of house rules, I'd be very surprised.

We don't need to write a rulebook with gaps to facilitate DM's into putting on their designer hats- each group has it's own needs, and if the rules don't serve those needs, they can be altered. This isn't the Hackmaster-verse where you need to pay dues to an organization to play the game, which has bylaws and enforcement, thank (insert a Power or Powers you may put your faith in here)!

What we do need, is good advice for recognizing when a rule isn't working out for our group, and how to deal with it. When I was a less experienced DM, my attempts to change rules always fell flat because I failed to account for the fact that rules aren't isolated entities- they exist in a rules system, and many rules rely on others to function.

That's an important distinction and the main reason why you can't have shoddy, open to interpretation rules laying around, because that makes the rules that interact with them equally open to interpretation, and pretty soon you don't have a game that really functions on it's own.

It's like a Bethesda release (Skyrim is the ur-example, but there are many others)- you install it and find it's buggy and somewhat lacking. Sure, you can go to Nexus Mods and load up on bug fixes and custom add-ons to your heart's content, from making the UI friendlier, to making all the women hot scantily clad babes to making the survival elements more pronounced, to replacing all dragons with The Macho Man Randy Savage if you want to- but if you have to put all that work into making a game good...how good is it, really?

It's the Ship of Theseus problem- how much can you change 5e and still have it be recognizably "D&D"? From very early on, the 1e DMG told me I could totally have adventures set in a post-apocalyptic future, the old west, or outer space (Sci Fi outer space, not Spelljammer).

Now D&D's rules systems might not be the best fit for this sort of thing, which is why many, many, many other games have spawned over the decades, but people who love D&D love modding the hell out of it, and that's a good thing- absolutely, you should do this, and I encourage you to do so!

But you don't need a bare-bones, awkwardly-worded system to facilitate such endeavors. I think a consistent system where the designers are open to explaining why the rules are the way they are, what thought processes were going on, would be the best possible starting point. If you know the assumptions, you know if those assumptions work for you.

For example, take the eternal hand wringing debate about survival exploration in D&D. The evidence shows us that with generous carrying capacity, goodberry, tiny hut, Outlander backgrounds, create food and water, purify food and drink, bags of holding, etc. etc., that the people who make the game don't think this is a serious concern and that any group should be able to nope out of it.

But then they consistently tell us that "exploration is a fundamental pillar of D&D, and we want to support it" without actually doing much more than lip service towards doing so- and when they do take steps, the instant they receive any negative feedback, they scurry back to their ivory tower and say "see? nobody wants it!".

It would be much more preferable, IMO, if the DMG section on exploration said something along these lines: "Most of us here at WotC don't care for low fantasy play where players have to carefully eke out an existence in a harsh, unforgiving land. And there are a lot of people who agree with this standpoint. So by default, our product does not support this sort of play. However, if you want this in your games, here are some suggestions, and possible pitfalls you may encounter."

 

[Micah Sweet]

Any DM who encounters a rule they don't like can change it. That's as true today as it was back in the 70's. If there's a DM outside of public play who doesn't have their own list of house rules, I'd be very surprised.

We don't need to write a rulebook with gaps to facilitate DM's into putting on their designer hats- each group has it's own needs, and if the rules don't serve those needs, they can be altered. This isn't the Hackmaster-verse where you need to pay dues to an organization to play the game, which has bylaws and enforcement, thank (insert a Power or Powers you may put your faith in here)!

What we do need, is good advice for recognizing when a rule isn't working out for our group, and how to deal with it. When I was a less experienced DM, my attempts to change rules always fell flat because I failed to account for the fact that rules aren't isolated entities- they exist in a rules system, and many rules rely on others to function.

That's an important distinction and the main reason why you can't have shoddy, open to interpretation rules laying around, because that makes the rules that interact with them equally open to interpretation, and pretty soon you don't have a game that really functions on it's own.

It's like a Bethesda release (Skyrim is the ur-example, but there are many others)- you install it and find it's buggy and somewhat lacking. Sure, you can go to Nexus Mods and load up on bug fixes and custom add-ons to your heart's content, from making the UI friendlier, to making all the women hot scantily clad babes to making the survival elements more pronounced, to replacing all dragons with The Macho Man Randy Savage if you want to- but if you have to put all that work into making a game good...how good is it, really?

It's the Ship of Theseus problem- how much can you change 5e and still have it be recognizably "D&D"? From very early on, the 1e DMG told me I could totally have adventures set in a post-apocalyptic future, the old west, or outer space (Sci Fi outer space, not Spelljammer).

Now D&D's rules systems might not be the best fit for this sort of thing, which is why many, many, many other games have spawned over the decades, but people who love D&D love modding the hell out of it, and that's a good thing- absolutely, you should do this, and I encourage you to do so!

But you don't need a bare-bones, awkwardly-worded system to facilitate such endeavors. I think a consistent system where the designers are open to explaining why the rules are the way they are, what thought processes were going on, would be the best possible starting point. If you know the assumptions, you know if those assumptions work for you.

For example, take the eternal hand wringing debate about survival exploration in D&D. The evidence shows us that with generous carrying capacity, goodberry, tiny hut, Outlander backgrounds, create food and water, purify food and drink, bags of holding, etc. etc., that the people who make the game don't think this is a serious concern and that any group should be able to nope out of it.

But then they consistently tell us that "exploration is a fundamental pillar of D&D, and we want to support it" without actually doing much more than lip service towards doing so- and when they do take steps, the instant they receive any negative feedback, they scurry back to their ivory tower and say "see? nobody wants it!".

It would be much more preferable, IMO, if the DMG section on exploration said something along these lines: "Most of us here at WotC don't care for low fantasy play where players have to carefully eke out an existence in a harsh, unforgiving land. And there are a lot of people who agree with this standpoint. So by default, our product does not support this sort of play. However, if you want this in your games, here are some suggestions, and possible pitfalls you may encounter."

This, this, a thousand times THIS!

 

[jmartkdr2]

Crawford's approach to 5e since 2015 has been empowering rules lawyers and clinging to the exact RAW instead of encouraging common sense and table rulings or clarifying design intent.

D&D2024 will double down on this approach with Crawford instead of Mearls as the primary project lead.

I sometimes wonder if he's deliberately being obtuse in order to reverse-psychology people into realizing that the designers can't or at least didn't think of everything and they should figure it out themselves.

I have never had a problem from the players declaring a silly rule silly and making up something logical. (I do tend to err in the players' favor though)

 

[Yaarel]

Maybe a Psychic damage versus an illusion of a door, should work.


I like how spells cant target an "attended" object. The idea is, the attender is actively putting out the flames, stop-drop-roll, leaping away, shielding oneself, etcetera.

Destroying objects can be combat ending, and can be cheesy, or even broken. That said.

It would be ok with me if items can be damaged once a character incurs the Bloodied condition. Then, attacks are connecting to some degree.

But I would never want to stop a game to comb thru the inventory to speculate if an item "might" or "might not" be flammable, one item at a time.


In the interest of a playable game, I am ok with "attended" objects being untouchable.

 

[Yaarel]

In my own games, the narrative description takes priority. (Yes or No.) The mechanical rules only apply if the narrative could go either way. (Maybe.)

 

[Yaarel]

Crawford's approach to 5e since 2015 has been empowering rules lawyers and clinging to the exact RAW instead of encouraging common sense and table rulings or clarifying design intent.

Referring to the RAW is a business strategy, since the RAW is what everyone who has the product refers to. What would be the point of giving a Sage Advice that contradicted the product?

Later, when a reprint comes with errata incorporated, or a new product comes out, the designers can rewrite the rules where necessary. Then there is new RAW to refer to.

 

[Staffan]

It would be ok with me if items can be damaged once a character incurs the Bloodied condition. Then, attacks are connecting to some degree.

But I would never want to stop a game to comb thru the inventory to speculate if an item "might" or "might not" be flammable, one item at a time.

The 3e rules for this were pretty good in theory, if a bit cumbersome. If you rolled a 1 on a save vs damage (might specifically have been Reflex save), one of your items got exposed. You'd then go down a list of like 10 possible items ranked according to potential exposure, and one of the first four of those which you actually possessed would take damage. It would only rarely actually destroy the item, because most energy damage was halved against objects and you then applied Hardness (which was usually in the 5-10 range for non-magical things) before the object was actually damaged. The item would also get its own save (which was usually the same as its wielder/wearer).

I say "In theory", because while this procedure offered the chance of items being damaged, the chance of doing so was pretty small. For example, let's say you get hit by an 8d6 fireball and roll a 1. That's an average of 28 damage, ouch. You're wielding a shield, wearing armor, but don't have any magic headgear, but do wield a one-handed blade and of course you have a cloak of resistance. So your shield, armor, weapon, and cloak each have a chance of taking damage, and the die falls on your +1 longsword. The sword now gets to roll its own save using either your value or its own (+2 plus half its caster level, so that would likely be a total of +3 or +4). If the sword succeeds, it has 14 damage incoming which gets halved because it's energy damage vs object, bringing it to 7. That's less than its Hardness of 12 (10 for metal +2 for being a +1 weapon), so nothing happens. If it fails, it takes 28 damage, which gets halved to 14. Subtract 12, and the sword actually takes 2 points of damage out of its 15 hp (base 5 for being a one-handed blade +10 for the +1). So that's a lot of rules and rolling for a fairly low chance of something actually happening.