Was wondering if anyone has ever been able to play 100% RAW. Seems impossible to know every intricate detail, but I imagine somebody has tried before. Any success? Did it improve the gameplay in anyway?
I tried sticking as closely as I could to the core rules for the first 2 or 3 years. Over time I started to recognize situations where the core rules didn't yield satisfying results or where deviating from a written adventure would've been more fun.
At the end of the day there's no achievement for following the rules 100% and what the players will remember won't be the rulings, but the story that emerged from playing the game. The biggest advantage of tabletop RPGs is that they let you break the rules and go off-script, so I think the goal of learning the rules should be to understand why they're there so you can better put them to work for you.
Even Gygax back in the day would have told you not to play 100% RAW. DMs have always been advised to tailor the rules to suit their world, their preferred playstyle, and the situation at hand.
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Let's not pretend more freeform, rule of cool gameplay and/or homebrew was a recent invention or only popularized by CritRole or other D&D streams. Plenty of that around before WotC even bought the D&D IP from TSR. Heck, there was plenty of "the rules don't really cover this so I'll just make something up now" and "this doesn't really make sense, let's go with something else" especially in the earlier editions. Breaking the rules and coming up with your own is as old as the first rules themselves, and there's nothing intrinsicaly wrong with it.
I'm not telling anyone not to run a RAW only game. In fact, for newer players and certainly DMs is probably better not to get too crazy too soon so I typically advise them to play at least a full campaign with the rules as they are before thinking about tinkering with them, especially when it concerns core mechanics. But not doing so is just fine too (and usually has nothing to do with not knowing every last detail and intricacy of the actual ruleset), as long as it's done with some knowledge of and experience with how the regular rules work in practice.
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Even Gygax back in the day would have told you not to play 100% RAW. DMs have always been advised to tailor the rules to suit their world, their preferred playstyle, and the situation at hand.
Agree completely. I remember 1e days when my friends and I would say, “this time we’re going to play strict rules” and then the first time we had to deal with encumbrance or weapon vs. armor modifiers, there went that idea.
Also, there’s a bit of a paradox in the question, if rule 0 is DM rules beat book rules, then is it possible to play any way but RAW? Just sort of a thought experiment.
Even Gygax back in the day would have told you not to play 100% RAW. DMs have always been advised to tailor the rules to suit their world, their preferred playstyle, and the situation at hand.
Agree completely. I remember 1e days when my friends and I would say, “this time we’re going to play strict rules” and then the first time we had to deal with encumbrance or weapon vs. armor modifiers, there went that idea.
Also, there’s a bit of a paradox in the question, if rule 0 is DM rules beat book rules, then is it possible to play any way but RAW?
Why not play with encumbrance? While I agree the armour modifiers were a nightmare, that has been done away with in 5e. Encumbrance has not. I grow tired of chars that are not only carrying way over their allowable limit without penalty, bur EXPECT the DM to allow them total stealth abilities. And don't get me started on some Fighter who is carrying into a Dungeon 3 Javelins, a Two-Handed Sword, Long Sword, a Short Bow, at least one Quiver of arrows, a Shield, and a Knapsack, plus a Cloak of Protection, all the while having two hands free to climb a rope.
It been a while so my memory is hazy, but wasn’t there more to encumbrance than just weight? Like there was a size component to factor in, I think. That was the annoying part. And when gp=xp, tracking the weight of all those copper pieces was, ugh.
And don't get me started on some Fighter who is carrying into a Dungeon 3 Javelins, a Two-Handed Sword, Long Sword, a Short Bow, at least one Quiver of arrows, a Shield, and a Knapsack, plus a Cloak of Protection, all the while having two hands free to climb a rope.
I mean, if they have a two-handed sword they likely have considerable Str and the encumbrance rules aren't going to stop them.
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there's no achievement for following the rules 100% and what the players will remember won't be the rulings, but the story that emerged from playing the game.
I think this is a fantastic assessment.
I imagine most people try to stick mostly to the rules, but I’d wager that VAST majority of people don’t know ALL the rules, and/or they implement house rules.
Fun is the goal. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I struggle to imagine the table in which a group said “that game was so much fun BECAUSE we followed the rules 100% perfectly.”
Several RAW rules are imo not necessary and are there just for simplifying the rules, and sometimes not really achieving that either imo.
Can anyone for instance show me if it breaks the game to allow characters to down-convert an action to a bonus action, such that the character gets two bonus actions instead of 1 action and 1 bonus action? Does it break anything? I personally can't think of a scenario where it breaks things.
I generally try to follow the rules, but for one thing, I'm not all that familiar with them, there are quite a few of them now. For another there are always ambiguities. In some cases, it's nearly impossible to know what was meant, and even the Sage Advice Compendium doesn't cover everything. So I make a ruling, and then I tend to follow it unless is proves to be a problem. There is one thing I try hard to avoid, and that's handing out a win, or forcing a loss. If you hand people things too many times they get spoiled, and if you make people fail too many times, they get discouraged.
I have a sort of mental list of words that I dislike seeing when applied to a fantasy game; Automatic, Fail, Force, Must, and Realistic.
Most of those are pretty self-explanatory. "Realistic" and Fantasy doesn't really go together all that well, there are rules for adding just that sort of thing, but all of them slow down the game at the very least, and I am unsure what percentage of the people who play D&D enjoy that sort of thing. Those kinds of things it's vitally important to cover before character generation, and then hold a Session Zero to discuss them before the actual game begins.
And don't get me started on some Fighter who is carrying into a Dungeon 3 Javelins, a Two-Handed Sword, Long Sword, a Short Bow, at least one Quiver of arrows, a Shield, and a Knapsack, plus a Cloak of Protection, all the while having two hands free to climb a rope.
I mean, if they have a two-handed sword they likely have considerable Str and the encumbrance rules aren't going to stop them.
You are missing the point. Can they carry all that weight? Sure, no question there. That is RAW.
But further to my above comment, this is where RAW does not go far enough. There is zero chance for any Medium creature to have all that placed on their back. There is simply not enough surface area. Encumbance should cover area, as well, not just weight. But the majority of players and DM's handwave or simply ignore that. Players keep talking about roleplaying and immersion, but if it gets complicated, or they don't like the results, they ditch it in a second. Roleplaying your char does not only include interactions with sentient beings, but also the physical world.
I was simply responding to your "why not play with encumbrance?" query followed by the above example. You hadn't mentioned the RAW not going far enough yet.
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there's no achievement for following the rules 100% and what the players will remember won't be the rulings, but the story that emerged from playing the game.
I think this is a fantastic assessment.
I imagine most people try to stick mostly to the rules, but I’d wager that VAST majority of people don’t know ALL the rules, and/or they implement house rules.
Fun is the goal. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I struggle to imagine the table in which a group said “that game was so much fun BECAUSE we followed the rules 100% perfectly.”
See my previous comment. Fun = "doing whatever I want, rules be damned, because the rules are complicated and restrictive. I can't have fun with these restrictions in place."
Not really sure what your comment has to do with what I said. I agreed with what InquisitiveCoder wrote.
I play mostly RAW, with some optional or variant rules thrown in, especially when playtesting i stick to books. Some campaigns i do have houserules as well.
I generally try to follow the rules, but for one thing, I'm not all that familiar with them, there are quite a few of them now.
I think this, in particular, is a definite issue, not just for D&D, but for several RPGs that have such voluminous rules that you can't possibly keep them all in your head. The sheer number of rules and optional rules and variants and so forth preclude the vast majority of people, even those who want to, from following RAW completely.
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Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I feel like people are missing the point of this thread. The question is not should you play 100% RAW, but can you?
I don't aspire to play 100% RAW, but I do prefer to use RAW as the default. I've been DMing for around two years, yet I'm constantly learning details of RAW I didn't understand on the first read through. For example, only in the last month or two did I realize that going invisible doesn't mean enemies can't target you. That's only the case if you also use the Hide action. Most Wizards can't cast Invisibility and Hide on the same turn.
I doubt anyone has ever successfully played a campaign and never got RAW wrong. Even the hardcore people I play strategy board games with frequently have to look up errata or official interpretations of the rules, and those games, while complex, don't have near as many rules as 5e, when you count the basic rules, every race, class, and subclass across dozens of books, and the text of every spell. If no one had thought to ask about the interpretation, there's a chance the whole table would have gone on playing incorrectly. I imagine I'm unknowingly ruling wrong at least once every session I DM.
I don't think we can even all agree what RAW are. So even if you think you're playing 100% RAW, it's likely there's not one other DM on the planet who would agree with you.
Does it really matter that you might get a few things wrong, as long as your intent is to play RAW and you - to the best of your knowledge - stick with that?
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Does it really matter that you might get a few things wrong, as long as your intent is to play RAW and you - to the best of your knowledge - stick with that?
It matters a little. Not a lot, but a little bit.
Maybe your players don't know how to predict the outcome of a role-playing action, because neither you nor they know the RAW for that scenario. If you did know the ruling, then you could have a shared basic knowledge of how the world works with respect to that situation.
Maybe you've been using a clunky home-brewed ruling for a rarely-encountered condition, when the RAW way of resolving it is way more streamlined.
Does it really matter that you might get a few things wrong, as long as your intent is to play RAW and you - to the best of your knowledge - stick with that?
It matters a little. Not a lot, but a little bit.
Maybe your players don't know how to predict the outcome of a role-playing action, because neither you nor they know the RAW for that scenario. If you did know the ruling, then you could have a shared basic knowledge of how the world works with respect to that situation.
Maybe you've been using a clunky home-brewed ruling for a rarely-encountered condition, when the RAW way of resolving it is way more streamlined.
Just marginal ways you can up your game.
Sure, but the idea is that you try to figure out what the RAW say when you don't know, right? The things you get wrong would be mistakes, where you thought it worked differently than it does.
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I don't think it is possible to 100% play RAW. The rules are just not complete enough, and not internally consistent enough (and are sometimes just poorly written), to cover every possible situation that may arise in gameplay. Interpretation and rulings are always going to be needed, and with interpretation comes the chance that different interpretations arise that are both valid readings of RAW (see: just about 50% of the threads in the Rules and Game Mechanics Forum).
Even if you count those instances of interpretation above as still playing a RAW game, there are also instances where RAW and logic collide, such as two blinded creatures making attacks against each other without advantage/disadvantage (RAW per the rules, but it doesn't make any sense logically).
And finally, playing 100% of RAW creates an awful lot to either trust your players with, or for the DM to track. It would be slow and mentally exhausting to keep up over any length of time.
I play streamlined RAW (as in I omit or don't care about certain things that much), with some logical house rules (in the blind scenario, both creatures would have disadvantage) with some homebrew elements. It's more fun, logical, and easier to manage for me as DM
Was wondering if anyone has ever been able to play 100% RAW. Seems impossible to know every intricate detail, but I imagine somebody has tried before. Any success? Did it improve the gameplay in anyway?
1 shot dungeon master
I tried sticking as closely as I could to the core rules for the first 2 or 3 years. Over time I started to recognize situations where the core rules didn't yield satisfying results or where deviating from a written adventure would've been more fun.
At the end of the day there's no achievement for following the rules 100% and what the players will remember won't be the rulings, but the story that emerged from playing the game. The biggest advantage of tabletop RPGs is that they let you break the rules and go off-script, so I think the goal of learning the rules should be to understand why they're there so you can better put them to work for you.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
Even Gygax back in the day would have told you not to play 100% RAW. DMs have always been advised to tailor the rules to suit their world, their preferred playstyle, and the situation at hand.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Mostly 100% Raw
We do have some additional rules that we all discuss during session zero and agree with.
Dying by any means and coming back to life via death roll saves or magic cause 1 level of Exhaustion.
Let's not pretend more freeform, rule of cool gameplay and/or homebrew was a recent invention or only popularized by CritRole or other D&D streams. Plenty of that around before WotC even bought the D&D IP from TSR. Heck, there was plenty of "the rules don't really cover this so I'll just make something up now" and "this doesn't really make sense, let's go with something else" especially in the earlier editions. Breaking the rules and coming up with your own is as old as the first rules themselves, and there's nothing intrinsicaly wrong with it.
I'm not telling anyone not to run a RAW only game. In fact, for newer players and certainly DMs is probably better not to get too crazy too soon so I typically advise them to play at least a full campaign with the rules as they are before thinking about tinkering with them, especially when it concerns core mechanics. But not doing so is just fine too (and usually has nothing to do with not knowing every last detail and intricacy of the actual ruleset), as long as it's done with some knowledge of and experience with how the regular rules work in practice.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Agree completely.
I remember 1e days when my friends and I would say, “this time we’re going to play strict rules” and then the first time we had to deal with encumbrance or weapon vs. armor modifiers, there went that idea.
Also, there’s a bit of a paradox in the question, if rule 0 is DM rules beat book rules, then is it possible to play any way but RAW? Just sort of a thought experiment.
It been a while so my memory is hazy, but wasn’t there more to encumbrance than just weight? Like there was a size component to factor in, I think. That was the annoying part.
And when gp=xp, tracking the weight of all those copper pieces was, ugh.
I mean, if they have a two-handed sword they likely have considerable Str and the encumbrance rules aren't going to stop them.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I think this is a fantastic assessment.
I imagine most people try to stick mostly to the rules, but I’d wager that VAST majority of people don’t know ALL the rules, and/or they implement house rules.
Fun is the goal. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I struggle to imagine the table in which a group said “that game was so much fun BECAUSE we followed the rules 100% perfectly.”
Several RAW rules are imo not necessary and are there just for simplifying the rules, and sometimes not really achieving that either imo.
Can anyone for instance show me if it breaks the game to allow characters to down-convert an action to a bonus action, such that the character gets two bonus actions instead of 1 action and 1 bonus action? Does it break anything? I personally can't think of a scenario where it breaks things.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
I generally try to follow the rules, but for one thing, I'm not all that familiar with them, there are quite a few of them now. For another there are always ambiguities. In some cases, it's nearly impossible to know what was meant, and even the Sage Advice Compendium doesn't cover everything. So I make a ruling, and then I tend to follow it unless is proves to be a problem. There is one thing I try hard to avoid, and that's handing out a win, or forcing a loss. If you hand people things too many times they get spoiled, and if you make people fail too many times, they get discouraged.
I have a sort of mental list of words that I dislike seeing when applied to a fantasy game; Automatic, Fail, Force, Must, and Realistic.
Most of those are pretty self-explanatory. "Realistic" and Fantasy doesn't really go together all that well, there are rules for adding just that sort of thing, but all of them slow down the game at the very least, and I am unsure what percentage of the people who play D&D enjoy that sort of thing. Those kinds of things it's vitally important to cover before character generation, and then hold a Session Zero to discuss them before the actual game begins.
<Insert clever signature here>
I was simply responding to your "why not play with encumbrance?" query followed by the above example. You hadn't mentioned the RAW not going far enough yet.
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Not really sure what your comment has to do with what I said. I agreed with what InquisitiveCoder wrote.
I play mostly RAW, with some optional or variant rules thrown in, especially when playtesting i stick to books. Some campaigns i do have houserules as well.
I think this, in particular, is a definite issue, not just for D&D, but for several RPGs that have such voluminous rules that you can't possibly keep them all in your head. The sheer number of rules and optional rules and variants and so forth preclude the vast majority of people, even those who want to, from following RAW completely.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I feel like people are missing the point of this thread. The question is not should you play 100% RAW, but can you?
I don't aspire to play 100% RAW, but I do prefer to use RAW as the default. I've been DMing for around two years, yet I'm constantly learning details of RAW I didn't understand on the first read through. For example, only in the last month or two did I realize that going invisible doesn't mean enemies can't target you. That's only the case if you also use the Hide action. Most Wizards can't cast Invisibility and Hide on the same turn.
I doubt anyone has ever successfully played a campaign and never got RAW wrong. Even the hardcore people I play strategy board games with frequently have to look up errata or official interpretations of the rules, and those games, while complex, don't have near as many rules as 5e, when you count the basic rules, every race, class, and subclass across dozens of books, and the text of every spell. If no one had thought to ask about the interpretation, there's a chance the whole table would have gone on playing incorrectly. I imagine I'm unknowingly ruling wrong at least once every session I DM.
I don't think we can even all agree what RAW are. So even if you think you're playing 100% RAW, it's likely there's not one other DM on the planet who would agree with you.
Does it really matter that you might get a few things wrong, as long as your intent is to play RAW and you - to the best of your knowledge - stick with that?
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
It matters a little. Not a lot, but a little bit.
Maybe your players don't know how to predict the outcome of a role-playing action, because neither you nor they know the RAW for that scenario. If you did know the ruling, then you could have a shared basic knowledge of how the world works with respect to that situation.
Maybe you've been using a clunky home-brewed ruling for a rarely-encountered condition, when the RAW way of resolving it is way more streamlined.
Just marginal ways you can up your game.
Sure, but the idea is that you try to figure out what the RAW say when you don't know, right? The things you get wrong would be mistakes, where you thought it worked differently than it does.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I don't think it is possible to 100% play RAW. The rules are just not complete enough, and not internally consistent enough (and are sometimes just poorly written), to cover every possible situation that may arise in gameplay. Interpretation and rulings are always going to be needed, and with interpretation comes the chance that different interpretations arise that are both valid readings of RAW (see: just about 50% of the threads in the Rules and Game Mechanics Forum).
Even if you count those instances of interpretation above as still playing a RAW game, there are also instances where RAW and logic collide, such as two blinded creatures making attacks against each other without advantage/disadvantage (RAW per the rules, but it doesn't make any sense logically).
And finally, playing 100% of RAW creates an awful lot to either trust your players with, or for the DM to track. It would be slow and mentally exhausting to keep up over any length of time.
I play streamlined RAW (as in I omit or don't care about certain things that much), with some logical house rules (in the blind scenario, both creatures would have disadvantage) with some homebrew elements. It's more fun, logical, and easier to manage for me as DM