It's not that everything that affects the experience of play is a rule. If all the queens in your chess game were slick with human saliva, that would affect the experience of play pretty profoundly, but it's not a rule of chess that queens not be coated in a layer of drool. It is, perhaps, a very important aesthetic.
It's that rules describe how a game is meant to be played - they create a play experience. Part of the
play of D&D is describing your character. When you say "Rath is a dwarf," that's part of the play of D&D - everyone has some idea of what Rath looks like now, because they know the rules for how a dwarf looks (no one imagines him to be a twenty-foot tall column of eerie glowing gas).
According to at least one formal definition, all rules for all games have the following characteristics:
- They limit player action.
- They are explicit.
- They are shared by all players.
- They don't change during play.
- They are an authority.
- They are portable (in that anyone can use them to play the same game).
Okay, fair enough as far as it goes. But in addition to the points brought up by @
Lanefan and @
pemerton about this definition, it's the fifth bullet that particularly muddies things for me with regards to lore. Because - and we're getting into serious Nomic territory here, as if we weren't already - can a rule be "authoritative"
if it claims itself that it isn't?
That's what we're looking at with every level of flavor text in 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Almost as soon as you encounter it, the rules text itself is at pains to tell you that you should feel free to disregard it as you please
about lore in particular. It explicitly empowers both players and DMs to do so for the spheres of the game that are under their control.
"Roll 1d20 to make an attack roll" and "Dwarves stand well under 5 feet tall" both fit that. By the rules, I can't make my dwarf six feet tall, it's clear to me and to the other players that dwarves are under 5 feet tall, the DM won't suddenly declare that dwarves are six feet tall one day and ten feet tall the next, if I try to make a six-foot-tall dwarf you can point me at the rules to show me that this is not kosher, and if I'm using these rules in Brooklyn and someone else is using these rules in Burkina Faso, neither of us will have six-foot-tall dwarves in our games (and if one of us changes the rule, as D&D encourages, maybe one of us does!).
But you don't have to change the rule to make a six-foot dwarf. The PHB tells you this before it tells you anything about dwarves at all:
Each race's description in this chapter includes information to help you roleplay a character of that race, including personality, physical appearance, features of society, and racial alignment tendencies. These details are suggestions to help you think about your character; adventurers can deviate widely from the norm for their race. It's worthwhile to consider why your character is different, as a helpful way to think about your character's background and personality.
If anyone wanted to point to "dwarves stand well under 5 feet tall" as an authoritative rule that forbids a six-foot dwarf, you could point to the equally authoritative passage above as one that overrides it. If that was the way you approached a game whose philosophy is "rulings not rules," which I would say the game itself is discouraging you to do anyway! Rules-lawyering with clobber texts is kinda-sorta possible in 5e, but it's not really what the designers seem to want you to do.
All of which suggests to me that a plain-language, commonsense, rulings-not-rules reading of "dwarves stand well under 5 feet tall" does not in any way preclude "with the notable exception of Gjarnr 'The Summit' Mithralmont, who's rumored to have an ogre somewhere in his family tree." And I would give the
serious side-eye to any DM who forbade Gjarnr as a PC based on what's in the Dwarf racial description text. That would be a textbook example of following the letter of the rules but not the spirit; it's RAW -
maybe - but not RAI.
It seems to me that those that want to make a strong distinction between "lore" and "rules" are trying to draw a line that doesn't really exist - trying to remove acts like "describing your character" from the realm of playing D&D and put it in some aesthetic category that's not relevant to actual gameplay. In the process, that distinction winds up being pretty incoherent.
It can be relevant to gameplay without having the same kind of effect as your ability scores and bonuses. I would say the distinction is certainly fuzzy, but not especially incoherent.
It still respects those that it is true for.
Absolutely, as I hope I've been at pains to say!
They invite you to change all the rules, which includes the height of dwarves as much as it includes what you add to something you're proficient in, how you account for spellcasting, how many ability scores there are, what monsters there are, how skills work, if you can "mark" enemies in combat....
The assumed immutability of the d20-to-hit is more a function of impact than of nature (it'd be akin to perhaps changing the game into a Western, from a "pure fluff" perspective - something you can do, but not something that's exactly easy or straightforward, so probably best reserved for someone who already knows enough to know what they're going to break by doing it).
They invite you, by implication as much as anything, to change all the rules, but they also by implication privilege the relative immutability of some over others. As noted above, it's lore that gets offered up as the first dial for you to adjust, at almost every level of the game, from the racial descriptions and background details in the PHB, to the monster descriptions in the MM, to the worldbuilding advice in the DMG, to the word-of-god approach to setting canon as recently discussed on DragonTalk. The designers of the game want you to feel utterly free to make the fluff your own, and make a point of saying so in ways that they don't do nearly as much or as often as inviting you to redesign the play mechanics (even if they also clearly think you should feel free to do that too). If
5e itself treats "lore" and "rules" as distinct phenomena without loss of coherence - and I think it does - I think we can too, and I'm still unclear what the community as a whole would gain from pushing back against that feature of the game as intended.
Part of how you communicate better about expectations is by making those expectations less flexible, so that they can be safe assumptions.
But, again, this privileges one approach and style of play over others. I want 5e to be, as much as possible,
everyone's game - the canon-purists and the canon-heretics alike. "We'll all get along better if everyone colors inside the lines" cuts no ice with me. No, we'll all get along better if we can agree that my coloring outside the lines isn't an act of blasphemy that is inherently harmful.
And, of course, context matters. In organized play, or in public games at the FLGS, increasing the number of safe assumptions is a good approach. Carrying that idea over as a prescriptive philosophy regarding what I do among other consenting adults in our private play is starting to feel, I'm sorry,
creepy.