Rulings Not Rules

About a week ago, I was involved in a discussion concerning Sage Advice - the semi-official rules-clarification service performed on Twitter by a WotC rep. One of the comments that was made was from someone who said they would require their DM to follow Sage Advice, a position that I found to be... odd.

My position on Sage Advice is largely forged by decades of reading the column in Dragon magazine, and then online. In that time, I saw more than a few cases where the Sage got things wrong. That should hardly be surprising, given the sheer volume of rules and the sheer length of time involved. The upshot, then, is that I describe Sage Advice as having "a long and glorious history of getting things wrong". It's not that the Sage is always wrong, or even wrong the majority of the time. But traditionally he's been wrong often enough for me to take his rulings with a hefty pinch of salt.

Besides, there's the small issue that the Sage isn't running my game, I am. If a player wants to insist on a DM following Sage Advice, he's welcome to go and lobby the Sage for a position at his table!

All of that is largely meaningless introduction, though. What I mostly want to talk about is how I handle rules ambiguities at the table.

The scenario in question is this: we're playing the game, and something comes up where I'm not immediately certain how the rules should operate. How to proceed?

Well, firstly, I might go look up the relevant bit of the rules. However, I'll only do this if I have a fairly solid idea where to find the relevant text. Unfortunately, most RPG books are pretty badly organised, and 5e is no different in that regard. And although 5e is better than most in that it has an index, unfortunately that index is almost entirely useless - to the point where I consider it wasted pages. So I won't go hunting for rules - I can either find them quickly or we move on.

If I don't have a handy rules reference, or if I do but the rules still aren't clear, then I'll make a ruling and we'll move on. I'll always try to err on the side of the PCs in this regard - the game can generally bounce back from rulings that are over-generous; it's harder to come back from a TPK! But my over-riding principle is that it's better to keep the game moving than to get it absolutely spot-on.

Of course, that means there is the real possibility that a player might not agree with my ruling. So, what happens then?

Well, it depends.

If the player just feels it should have been ruled otherwise, he can state his case... quickly. But it's unlikely to change my mind, and I expect him to accept the eventual ruling in good grace.

If the player comes armed with a reference to the RAW, especially if I haven't bothered to look for that rule, or if I looked but didn't find it, then he certainly gets a hearing. And under that circumstance it's much more likely I'll reconsider. But it's not certain that I'll do so. Again, though, the DM's eventual ruling is final.

(Tweets from Sage Advice aren't references to RAW, so see the first case above. As I noted, the Sage isn't running my game.)

Of course, once the game is done, I'm quite happy to discuss the matter much further. And if I made the wrong ruling, I'm not overly averse to admitting as much (and will endeavour to rule correctly if that scenario comes up again). The point is not to enforce some sort of tyrannical "my way or the high way" style of game - it's purely that experience has taught me that it's usually better for the game to flow quickly than to proceed with 100% rules accuracy. I'm not sure that latter case is even possible anyway.