One of the first columns I wrote under the heading of Spherical Goblins was on the subject of how to read the rules. This one is, I suppose, a bit of a sequel to that. I’m writing it to address one specific source of confusion for many players, and to use that example to discuss a general case that causes confusion.

This is fitting, as “specific” and “general” are watchwords for rule interpretation in 5th Edition, as in “specific beats general”. These three little rules are meant to be a key that unlocks the rules, or a razor that cuts through confusion, but the problem that some people have is figuring out what is specific and what is general.

There is a whole series of Frequently Asked Questions in 5th Edition that are all founded on the same misconception about a general rule. It’s really just one question, phrased in different ways. Two of the most common:

• “When I make a bonus attack using Crossbow Expert, do I get to add my ability modifier to the damage?”
• “If my monk uses Martial Arts or Flurry of Blows, can I still add my ability modifier to the damage of the extra attacks?”

Now, in that column I linked to in my opening, I spoke about how the rules for a special ability like Martial Arts or Crossbow Expert are largely self-contained, how there aren’t more detailed rules governing them somewhere else, only the general rules with which they interact. An attack you make using one of your special abilities follows the general rules for attacking, except where th ability itself lists an exception.

In the case of these abilities, the exception is that you can use a bonus action to do it. None of these abilities say anything about adding an ability modifier to your damage or not, which means you follow the general case. The general case is yes.

Yet enough people are unsure about this that they feel the need to ask, and whenever there’s that much uncertainty about a thing, there are most assuredly going to be people who are certainly wrong about it. There are tables out there where players are shorting themselves damage in every round of every combat. Why? Because instead of following the general rules for attacks, they are inferring the existence of a general rule that governs bonus action attacks in particular, and they are applying it to any ability that grants one.

The existence of this rule is intuited from the specific rules governing what 5E calls “two-weapon fighting”. When you are wielding a light melee weapon in each hand and you use one of them to attack using the Attack action on your turn, you can spend a bonus action to attack with the other one, at the cost of not adding your ability modifier to the damage. So if you’re a rogue and you’ve got Dexterity of 16 and you’re wielding two short swords, you’ll do 1d6+3 with one and 1d6 with the other.

This specific rule is meant to be a quick-and-dirty representation of the ability to make a slightly wild swing or stab with your off hand, though in keeping with 5E’s general economy and simplicity, the words “off hand” and “main hand” never appear in the text. If the weapons you’re using are identical, then it doesn’t matter at all which one is in which hand; if they’re not, then it hardly matters, to whatever extent that it does, you’re subtly encouraged to envision the hand holding the bigger or better weapon as your main one. Any actual mechanical difference comes out in the wash.

The key thing here is that the fact that you don’t do as much damage with a bonus action attack when it’s delivered in this fashion is not a general rule, though, but a specific one that represents a specific thing; the off-hand nature of the strike.

How is this specific rule mistaken for a general one?

Because it seems to be the closest thing to a general case for bonus action attacks. It doesn’t require a feat. You don’t have to be a particular class or choose a particular option. Anyone who can hold a couple of small axes, swords, or daggers can do it.

And because to someone who has not yet grasped the underlying logic and structure of 5th Edition’s rules it feels like there must be a general case to defer to, it feels like this must be it.

As I said at the outset, this is a specific example of a general problem. This tendency to turn towards specific rules for clues to some hidden general one permeates the way new people tend to approach the game.

For instance, another common question is if poison resistance confers advantage on saving throws against poison. Dwarves have both, and it’s hard to get poison resistance as a PC without being a dwarf, which leads many people to conclude that yes, they are inextricably linked.

But the key here is that dwarves specifically get both. As in, the rules specify that they do. If poison resistance—resistance to poison damage, following the general rules for damage resistance—was the same thing as advantage on saves against poison, the description of the dwarves’ particular hardiness against poison wouldn’t need to mention both.

This is counterintuitive to most people, even veterans of most roleplaying games. A lot of rules texts include more clarifying elaborations than 5E does, reminders of general rules that are useful in context but ultimately redundant within the larger system the text represents. In such a rule book, the entry for dwarves would mention advantage on saving throws alongside the damage resistance as a reminder, a reference to a general rule officially spelled out elsewhere. The rule about two-weapon fighting would likewise be repeating a general case, if not establishing it.

5th Edition eschews these redundancies almost to a fault. None of the spells that inflict the charmed condition spell out the effects of that condition, for instance. They merely reference it and add their own specific effects. In another game system, the text for charm person might include language like, “The creature is charmed by you, becoming unable to attack you and granting you advantage on Charisma checks while the condition lasts.”

But that would be repeating information that is general to a condition shared by multiple spells and other effects, so they don’t. Instead they only mention things that are peculiar to the spell charm person in particular, like the fact that the charmed creature regards you the caster as a friendly acquaintance, or becomes hostile to you when the condition ends.

And so, almost predictably, this creates a new source of confusion among people who feel the charmed condition itself must be more than the two bullet points listed under the heading of “charmed” in the appendix on conditions. They look to charm person as being the nearest thing to a general case, in the same way that dwarves are seen as the general case for poison resistance and two-weapon fighting is seen as the general case for bonus action attacks, and so they conclude that the charmed condition intrinsically includes the notion that it changes how the target sees you, or induces hostility afterwards.

In other words, they operate under the assumption that being under the charmed condition basically means “being under the effects of charm person“.

Categorizing these errors and picking apart the thinking behind them might seem mildly interesting to someone who knows better, and pointing out that they are errors might be useful to someone who’s confused, but my purpose here is to do more than that. My purpose in writing this blog post is to help everyone who plays 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons to better understand how the rules work and why they work, so that specific corrections or clarifications about the rules become less necessary.

In my post about procedural logic, I talked about how to read a rule as a process. Now I’m going to zoom out one level and talk about the same thing on a more macro level, how to fit rules into a hierarchy.

Applying procedural logic to a rule is a bit easier if you have any kind of a background in computer programming. The same is true of this skill, particularly if you’ve ever studied any kind of object-oriented programming language or made use of typed data structures.

Basically, it comes down to inheritance.

Imagine the rules of the game as a chart that looks like a family tree, or rather, a forest of related trees. At the top of one tree, we have top-level rules, like “Roll a d20, add modifiers, compare to a Difficulty Class”. That one would have three branches, for attack rolls, saving throws, and checks, and each of those would have their own branches, which would branch further.

Any rule that occurs at any level of any tree is going to be passed down to the branches below it. This includes rules that modify or even negate higher-level rules. For instance, the rules for attacking include rules for damage rolls, which specify that you add an ability modifier to your damage roll. The rule for two-weapon fighting branches off that, and it includes a rule that removes that ability modifier. One branch below that you can find the Two-Weapon Fighting style available to warriors, which puts the ability modifier back on.

The Dual-Wielding Feat, which (among other things) removes the limitation that the weapons be light could be found either branching from the general case of two-weapon fighting or the style of that name, and would inherit whichever damage modifier rule was being followed by its parent.

So when you have a case and you’re not sure what rules it’s inheriting, you just need to figure out what it’s branching off from. This sounds more complicated than it is. In practical terms, it’s just a matter of following references.

The geas spell inflicts the charmed condition. Its text references the charmed condition. So if you’re not sure if you should be looking at the charm person spell or the charmed condition, you just follow the reference to the condition. The charmed condition does not reference any spell; spells reference the condition. So geas and charm person are both just branches hanging below the condition in the inheritance tree. No matter how much it intuitively feels like a spell that charms a person should refer to the spell called charm person, no such reference exists.

Similarly, the rules for Crossbow Expert might read a bit like the rules for two-weapon fighting, but at no point does it say “you can make an attack as a bonus action, as you would if you were using two-weapon fighting”. The reference is simply to making an attack, so the next thing up the tree would be the general rules for attacking.

It’s just an extension of applying procedural thinking: follow the reference, follow the rules that cover that reference, and you’re done. There’s nothing else to do.

Would it be tedious to run through this process each and every time someone wants to cast a spell or use a special ability? Obviously. But it’s also not necessary. For most people, there will only be a small handful of areas where this kind of confusion arises. Once you’ve used this technique to acquire a basic understanding of where a rule fits into the structure of the rules, you don’t really need to do it again for that rule. And the more you do it, the better an understanding of the overall shape of the system you’ll have, which means you’ll have a better ability to intuitively understand how it hangs together when you encounter a new ability, a new rule.

Perhaps the best skill for avoiding this confusion, though, is simply the ability to recognize when you’re making an undue inference in the first place. Once you understand how self-contained the rules that govern a spell or feature are, and you understand how rare redundant elaborations or reminders are within the text, it gets a bit easier.

Then you can read a spell like shocking grasp and realize that the fact that metal armor gives you advantage on the attack roll is not stating a general rule for all spells that do lightning damage, or it wouldn’t be listed in this specific spell.

You can see that wizards and some druids have an ability that lets them regain a few spell slots in the middle of the day and realize that if this were something that all casters could do, it wouldn’t be listed for these two specific cases.

And while sometimes this means you’ll wind up nerfing some great idea you had, in general, this kind of clarity benefits players, both by allowing you to have a better idea of what exactly your character is capable of while also preventing you from applying limitations from multiple unrelated sources.

Alexandra Erin has been playing roleplaying games since 1989, and has been experimenting with game design and related theory since about one week after that. If you enjoy her writing, you can find her original D&D content on the DMs Guild, or support her directly.

In past columns, I’ve spoken about the issue of Dungeon Masters nerfing player characters on the fly because they can’t make sense of what the game allows the PC to do. The flipside of the DM nerfing a PC “because it doesn’t make sense” is a player thinking it’s only fair that they be allowed to do something with their character “because it makes sense”.

Now, generally, if we’re talking about something that comes up in play and isn’t covered by the rules, I’ll side with the player who reasons that they should maybe be able to at least try this cool thing they thought of. Back in 4th Edition, I would let players cash in an encounter power or daily power use to do something that did not meet the strict mechanical definition of what that power did, but which was clearly related. Example? The ranger power “Hunter’s Bear Trap” lets you pin someone with an arrow to the leg. If someone saw an ally or civilian topple off a wall and wanted to save them, I’d let them make an attack roll and use that power to try to save them by pinning their cloak.

That kind of improvisation was necessitated by the rigid powers structure of 4E, but it comes up in every edition. The rules can’t cover everything. If you feel like your Acrobatics proficiency should let you do something that’s not explicitly covered by it and which isn’t covered by another skill, I’m game. If you’ve got a slightly tweaked use for a spell that doesn’t replicate another spell, I’ll listen.

Where this gets to be a problem, though, is when we’re talking about adding base level capabilities to a character that exceed what is otherwise available. Often these capabilities are explained as being logical outgrowths or even requirements of the character’s backstory or nature, which both can make the player feel like they’re not being unreasonable (they don’t want it to be more powerful, they want it because it makes sense) and like the DM who says no is being unreasonable (they’re ruining your character!)

As an example, imagine a player whose character concept is this: blessed by a goddess of nature, this character has a profound connection with the natural world and an almost empathic ability to relate to animals.

If I hear a concept like that in D&D, I’ll think, great! That one’s easy. Be a ranger, druid, nature cleric, or totem warrior barbarian, or just take a background that gives you animal handling.

But a player who comes up with a concept like that might have a dot dot dot rather than a period at the end of that, and the next part is “so my character should have double proficiency bonus on Animal Handling and Survival, and be able to cast speak with animals at-will.”

Because of the connection with nature and the empathic ability to relate to animals.

The first time I ran up against this kind of thinking, I wasn’t playing D&D. I was trying to put together a superhero themed campaign in GURPS, and I had one player who kept arguing about the point buy system on principle. She wanted her character to have the ability to step out of phase with reality, becoming not just intangible but also invisible every time she did so.

That was fine. GURPS can handle that kind of thing really well. Basically, you pay the cost for both abilities and give yourself a discount for invisibility only working while you are intangible.

Her issue was, “But the invisibility is a natural side effect of her phasing, so it should be automatic. Why do I have to pay for something that happens naturally?”

The answer I gave her is the same one I give to players who feel that the mechanical options in D&D should be supplemented by benefits from their backstory: game balance doesn’t care where your capabilities come from, only what they are.

Being able to turn invisible and intangible at the same time is just as valuable a pair of abilities no matter what explanation you give for them, so it costs the same amount of points.

Dungeons & Dragons does not use such an intricate and comprehensive point system for anything, though it does offer point buy as an option for setting your ability scores (i.e., basic attributes), so let’s take this as an example. For simplicity, I’m going to be dealing with scores before racial modifiers throughout this next bit, just so I don’t have to keep clarifying that the 15 I’m referring to might be a 16 or 17.

Say there’s a player whose character, as a lad, would eat four dozen eggs every day to help him get large. Now that he’s grown, he eats five dozen eggs, so he’s roughly the size of a barge.

Now, the player has done the point buy and put 15 points into Strength, the maximum the system will allow him to buy. But he comes to his DM and says, “I think my Strength should be 18. My character has performed an exhaustive strength-gaining regimen ever since he was a child, and that should be reflected in his stats. It’s just not realistic that I have the same strength score as anyone else would have, given how completely my character’s life has been dedicated to gaining muscle.”

A lot of DMs, in this situation, will be bothered by this argument but not be able to put their finger on what’s wrong with it, so if they wind up saying no out of principle they feel like they shot down part of the character’s concept, or they’ll not be able to defend the rules or their decision any better than by shrugging and saying, “Well, the game doesn’t always make sense.”

But this is really the same situation as in that GURPS game. Having a “mere” Strength of 15 doesn’t require you to ignore your character’s backstory where they have distant giant blood, or had a massive protein intake and bodybuilding regimen, or were blessed with phenomenal strength by a god, or whatever. Rather, it reflects it. Even though as a player you are absolutely entitled to take your attribute points and spend them in order to get a 15 on whatever attribute you see fit, the character you create was shaped and molded by the circumstances of their life in order to wind up with such an extraordinary (and it really is extraordinary!) capability that a 15 represents.

I know, it’s hard to remember that an unmodified ability score of 15 is extraordinary when you’re traveling with 3 to 5 other people who pretty much all have one, too. But this is where it’s important to remember two things: one, you’re not the star of the show here, but two, you are one of the stars.

Back in the day, when we all rolled our stats in order (and then fudged the heck out of them), player characters were theoretically average individuals who might, if they lived long enough, become great heroes. From 3rd edition onward, the trend has been against that, with 3rd edition formally adopting as default weighted die rolls and a generous point buy system. 4th edition really solidified what I call the Lake Wobegon school of character design, “where the halflings are strong, the half-orcs are good looking, and all the adventurers are above average”. 5E more or less continues that trend, not strengthening it but not shying away from it.

But even if a 15 doesn’t make you anything special among the sort of heroic adventurers you find yourself banding together with, it is still special. A score like that really cries out for explanation, honestly, and a backstory that explains how you came to be so blessed is not just acceptable, it’s great.

But while your backstory can explain how you came to have the abilities you do, it can’t be used to justify a score that’s even higher.

That’s talking strictly about ability scores, which have a literal point buy scale associated with them. What about other capabilities, though, like our nature lover?

Even without an explicit “point cost”, the answer is the same. When you choose a background, class, race, skill proficiencies, feats, etc., you are essentially spending a single point to buy a thing or package of things. You can (and by all means, should, if you have the inclination) explain the results of that purchase in terms of your character’s backstory, but you don’t get more points to spend because of the backstory.

If your character is a druid or ranger, then your nature skills and natural magic represent your character’s profound spiritual connection to nature. If you’re making a human with the variant rules and take the magic initiate feat and use animal friendship or speak with animals as your one level one spell, that’s likewise a result of that connection.

“But that’s the feat I get just for being human!” the player might say. “This comes from something unique to my character.”

This is confusing choices you make as a player with things about your character. The ability to choose a feat just for being human (or rather, just for making a level 1 human adventurer who is intended to stand alongside humanoid dragons and quasi-immortal forest jerks) is a player resource; but the feat you choose is (or represents) something unique about your character. You can do as much or as little as you want to integrate that unique thing into your character’s concept and backstory (or ongoing story).

Now, there is a difference between wanting something extra and wanting something different. If a player wants to use a custom feat in place of any of the existing examples, or wishes to have a custom sub-class to take instead of one of the existing ones, that’s theoretically no different than spending their points differently in order to achieve a desired result.

For instance, it’s not uncommon to encounter a player who wants to play as a heroic werewolf or vampire. The Monster Manual already provides rules for converting a bitten character into monsters of those type, but they add an immense amount of power in the process and balance-wise, they really work better for “your character died and now there’s a new villain” than “your character was bitten by the fantasy equivalent of a radioactive spider and now you have all of the superpowers”.

This isn’t to say that you have to say no. The trick is to figure out what abilities a vampire or werewolf character class would have at level 1 that would be comparable to what any other character class gets at level 1, and give them that as an option for their next character level. If they want to keep developing their monstrous new abilities, then at level 2, you do the same thing, and so on.

Obviously this is a lot of work compared to the alternative, which is saying, “No, lycnathropy/vampirism is not a cool origin story but a horrible, horrible curse which basically means you have no control over your actions/you are dead and a twisted reflection of you is occupying your body,” and it may or may not be worth putting in that much effort to keep things balanced. And if it’s not worth it to you, then I urge you to just say no, because having one player who is disappointed is better than wrecking the game for everyone else.

Also? It’s not like there’s a shortage of cool character concepts that can be modeled with just what’s in the Player’s Handbook. Players who are that blasé about the possibilities embodied by high level characters of any class probably don’t understand the potential of them, and would benefit by spending more time looking at them.

But at the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with coming up with alternatives for players whose character concepts are on the same general level as what’s available, but not otherwise mechanically represented. The trick is to make sure that whatever they get from the custom feat or sub-class or whatever is not any better than what they give up in not taking an existing feat or sub-class.

This can be trickier than it sounds, which is why I recommend that inexperienced players work with what’s already available and, even more so, that inexperienced DMs practice saying no to any custom options pitched by players. You have to know how the system works and why it works the way it does before you can understand if and how a new option is going to work with the system.

One area that can be really tricky is the idea of using a custom “race” build to implement a character concept. There’s a certain school of thought that already views character class and race as nothing but abstract bags of mechanical pieces. If you have a character concept for an elf that would benefit more from a high Constitution and more hit points, they’ll tell you “Take dwarf and say you’re an elf. That’s just roleplay.” Why anyone would say something is “just roleplay” in reference to a roleplaying game is beyond me, but we’ll let that go. The point is that if you see the races in the PHB as nothing but means to achieving an end for your character, then the next step is to treat them as a sort of smorgasbord.

This might be a pet peeve of mine, but I’m always immediately suspicious of a player who wants to play mix-and-match with racial abilities. It might seem like this is a decent approach to keeping things balanced, but they rarely weigh what a given feature is worth in any real way. It’s more a sense of “Well, there are races in the book that have this, so it must be balanced if I have it.”

The most egregious example I saw was a player who wanted a character who was human who had been blessed by angels but who also gained power by drinking demon blood. He took pieces from the tiefling, aasimar, and variant human race, and added another feat (on top of the one you get “just for being human”) to represent demonic strength/power. Another, less egregious recent example was a player who wanted his character to have both the halfling luck trait and the Lucky feat at level 1, in order to make a character whose concept is the luckiest person in the world.

Neither player was at my table, but I would have given both of them the same answer: make your character normally and then use this backstory to explain what you’ve got.

If your demonic-angelic avenger character is a paladin with reasonably high Strength and Constitution scores, you’ve got your blessings (the paladin abilities) and you’ve got your demonic power (the physical attributes). Take the tiefling or aasimar race to mechanically represent more demonic or more angelic flavor, or just take variant human and use your feat to get a couple of cantrips that represent both.

If your character is supposed to have luck as an overwhelming defining trait, play them as lucky. Take the halfling or variant human race to get some mechanical luck, sure, but don’t stop there because those two abilities put together won’t come up often enough to really define you. Take high dexterity but describe your character as no more than usually graceful, just prone to getting off lucky shots and being missed due to happenstance.

A rogue with this kind of character concept might have their Sneak Attack damage defined not as a matter of skill but everything lining up perfectly. A monk might have their martial arts described as coincidental slapstick. And so on.

Now, the player with the angel/demon knight concept was already planning on being a paladin. He wanted more supernatural blessings than you get “just for being a paladin”, though. The real problem with the character was that he, as my boyfriend Jack puts it, “had a level 20 backstory for a level 1 character”.

I.e., he’d already met angelic beings who singled him out for special powers and a great destiny, already learned the secret of gaining power from drinking demon blood. D&D player characters are by definition potentially epic heroes, but you have to go on the epic quests to get there.

And that, more so than any point about game balance or creativity, is my final answer to any player who feels strongly that they should be allowed to have a bunch of extra powers not because they want them for any advantage but because they think it would be fun to play a vampire or a god in human form or an indestructible construct or a celestial half-fey half-dragon. The game you’re playing is designed to model certain things, and those things are mostly “the increasingly epic adventures of increasingly epic mortal heroes.”

You start out special, you start out larger-than-life, but there’s a ceiling on those things, and if you can’t work within those limits, you need to dial your vision back in one way or another, if not by throwing it out than by deciding to grow into it.

4th Edition had epic destinies (endgame prestige classes, basically) that represented a character who gradually realized over the course of their career that they were the living embodiments of a god or primordial, or for characters who become royalty in hell, or powerful members of a fey court. In each case, though, you got no mechanical in-character benefit from these things before level 21, and then you spent 10 levels growing into it.

5th Edition does not have anything like that, but by the time you reach level 20, you are metaphorically or in some cases literally a force of nature. If you can’t raise the dead or reshape reality with a word, you can stand shoulder-to-shoulder or toe-to-toe with gods and titans.

But you’ve got to get there.

Going strictly by encounter XP budget, by the time you’re ready to tangle with a vampire one-on-one you’re going to be level 19. This is not a perfect measurement, but it’s close enough to make the point that a single vampire is comparable in awesomeness to a very high level character. You can’t expect to get that at level 1.

As a final note: DMs who wish to head off a certain amount of more reasonable “concept fishing” and allow more customization at level 1 might consider a house rule that allows each player character to choose a single feat at level 1. You might also consider taking the feat-based human variant off the table if you do this, though in my experience, the appeal of that option falls off sharply when it’s not the only path to getting a feat at level 1.

Alexandra Erin has been playing roleplaying games since 1989, and has been experimenting with game design since about one week after that. She is the author of the character option manuals Clerics of Lesser Domains, Warlocks of Other Patrons, and Feats of Heroism: 36 New Feats for 5th Edition, currently in the top 5 titles on the DMs Guild.

In my last Spherical Goblins post, I talked about how to read and interpret the rules governing a special ability on a mechanical level. In this post, I’m going to talk about how to do so thematically.

An awful lot of DMing advice centers around the idea that you as DM have complete control over the world and over interpreting the rules of the game. “The rules are just guidelines!”, after all. And “if something doesn’t make sense to you, you can just change it!”

At the risk of going against the conventional thinking, I’m going to say that the latter suggestion is actually terrible advice, particularly to new DMs. A lot of things that “don’t make sense” about a roleplaying only don’t make sense because you don’t yet have the experience to see how it all hangs together, or you’re hung up on a preconceived notion about how you think things should work.

For instance, a lot of DMs will disregard the cap on falling damage (it stops accumulating at 20d6) or simply rule that certain falls are insta-kills, because “obviously there’s no way you could survive that.”

But the thing is, if we’re talking “realism”? There is no actual upper limit on how far a human being can fall and survive. The world record for surviving free fall is something like 10 miles. Terminal velocity means that past a certain point, a body in motion stops accruing kinetic energy, which means that just like in the game, there is a cap on the damage that can be done from falling.

Of course, it’s not likely you’ll survive a fall of multiple miles, or even multiple hundred feet. People die falling fifteen feet sometimes. A lot of it is down to what part of you lands on what kind of surface, and you don’t have a lot of control over that in the moments you spend falling, which is why the game uses dice for the falling damage.

So this is an example of a rule that is if not a perfect model of reality, at least based in reality, but which many people throw out for being counterintuitive.

Other rules that commonly get ruled against in the name of reality include:

• The ability to sneak attack when you’re not literally sneaking.
• The ability to regain HP by resting.
• All manner of things having to do with the monk’s Martial Arts and related abilities, like doing more damage with weapons and using Stunning Strike on various non-humanoid creatures.

One thing all of these things have in common is that they’re all changes that take something away from a player character. I mean, sure, the rules for natural HP recovery could be used by a DM to figure out how much antagonists bounce back between encounters, and an NPC could have levels in rogue or monk, or the equivalent abilities. But by and large, DMs who engage in these kinds of off-the-cuff reality checks are making calls that “nerf” the player characters.

Less formally, it’s not uncommon to encounter DMs who do things like have all the players’ enemies immediately stick their hands through any illusion cast by a PC on the grounds that “obviously they’re not going to believe it’s real when it just appeared out of nowhere.” Notably, those same DMs never have a character stick their hand into a wall of fire or poke at a summoned bear, even though these things also “just appear out of nowhere”.

It’s the illusion one more so than anything that reveals one of the subconscious motivations of these kinds of objections and the rulings that they spawn: an inability to let go of an adversarial approach to the game. If you think of the NPCs under your control as “your side”, playing pieces to fight against the PCs—even if you’re just trying to give them a run for their money, not outright crush them—then you’ll be concerned, consciously or not, with making sure “your side” gets a fair shake.

For things like illusions, disguises, mystical compulsions, and other sundry ruses, there’s the added dimension that you as DM are expected to play along with them even though you know better. If you have a hard time separating your ego from the persona of the characters who are being fooled, this can be a tad insulting.

So you rule that “your side” doesn’t fall for the sneak attack, or illusion, or mind control spell, or whatever… not because you’re on an overt power trip, but because it’s in your perceived interest to find objections, and you also happen to be the one who rules on such objections.  If you were a player and your character was a gelatinous blob with no nervous system and the DM said you were paralyzed by a fancy martial arts punch, you’d be like, “Wait, how…?”, and so you do the same as a DM, only you’re the one you’re asking, “Wait, how…?”, and so without an obvious answer, you say those four little words that should strike more fear into the hearts of a player than any other, up to and including “The dragon looks hungry”.

Those words are, “That doesn’t make sense.”

The thing is that when you’re DMing and you ask, “Wait, how…?”, not only are you implicitly asking yourself, but you have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t bother coming up with an answer. This is a game powered by the human imagination. Nothing in it makes sense in any inherent way; it’s all abstract rules and arbitrary numbers until someone comes along and makes sense of it, and when you are the Dungeon Master, that someone is you.

As soon as a DM declares that some intersection of the rules, the dice, and a player’s decisions don’t make sense… well, that’s like a pilot wandering back into the cabin and announcing that no one is flying the plane. It’s technically true, and yes, it is a pressing problem… but one easily solved by the person pointing it out turning around and doing their job.

As a DM, it is your responsibility to make sense of things. The rules of D&D are not a detailed model of reality. They are (particular in 5th Edition) a very simplistic way of calculating success or failure for broadly defined tasks, with a bunch of exceptions stapled on to represent Cool Things Some People Can Do. There is a high level of abstraction and simplification

Ideally, players are making their decisions (both when creating characters and while playing the game) based on an understanding of what things the rules allow them to do, or at least try to do, and what the general odds of success will be.

If a player chooses to play a rogue based on the understanding that they have the ability to Sneak Attack for extra damage in certain circumstances and that same player chooses to engage an enemy based on the understanding that they will be able to use this ability, a DM who declares, “Wait, that makes no sense. The guard knows you’re standing right there. How could you Sneak Attack?” is invalidating that player’s choices and more, destroying the ability of the player to make informed choices.

Now, you can accept that the rule is what it is and just chuckle about how ridiculous and unrealistic the world of D&D is, that you can Sneak Attack someone who knows you’re there. Many people do, concluding that the game makes no sense and just rolling with it.

But there’s no reason to choose between accepting a lack of plausibility or nerfing the everloving heck out of certain classes. You can make sense of these things. The most important step in doing so is realizing how simplified the rules are. They act as though combatants are standing still 5 feet away from each other while fighting. They act as though battle is a matter of taking turns. If you realize that the actual battle that the rules and die rolls and turns would be describing would not unfold as neatly or nicely as the one the turn system and movement system approximate, it’s a lot easier to understand how a moment’s distraction on the target’s part is enough to score a “Sneak Attack”.

It isn’t that the victim didn’t expect to be attacked; it’s enough that they didn’t see a particular attack coming.

Now, the text of the Player’s Handbook never actually explains this. In 5E, they have a huge tendency to stick to the nuts and bolts of mechanics rather than explaining the intent. There is, however, a single line of descriptive text at the start of the Sneak Attack ability:

“Beginning at 1st level, you know how to strike subtly and exploit a foe’s distraction.”

A lot of the people who are hung up on how Sneak Attack can work when you’re not sneaking miss that (just as they miss the fact that the rules for Sneak Attack don’t mention stealth once). Last time, I mentioned how remembering the shorthand version of a rule can trip you up. This is the thematic counterpart of that: only remembering a single shorthand version of what it is an ability is supposed to represent.

Sneak Attack works (among other times) whenever you have advantage, and you can get advantage by attacking from hiding… that coupled with the name makes it easy to think of it as the “attack-from-hiding” ability. But that one line of descriptive text should be enough to prove that wrong; Sneak Attack is the ability to “exploit a foe’s distraction”.

But say that text wasn’t there. Say you had nothing but the bare mechanics to read:

“Once per turn, you can deal an extra 1d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have advantage on the attack roll. The attack must use a finesse or a ranged weapon.

You don’t need advantage on the attack roll if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it, that enemy isn’t incapacitated, and you don’t have disadvantage on
the attack roll.”

Can we make sense of this? Of course we can. First, the rogue can do more damage when using weapons that may use dexterity to attack, so we can infer that the added damage is due to what we might term precision. The extra damage only happens if the attack has advantage—meaning the target is in a vulnerable position—or the target has another enemy within 5 feet.

Why would having another enemy nearby make the target vulnerable like this? The most obvious answer is: they are distracted.

Why aren’t they so distracted that anyone can do this extra damage?

Because no one else has this feature, is the obvious answer. And maybe it sounds glib, but from that we can make the next inference: only the rogue has the expertise necessary to do this.

How do we know it’s this and not something else?

Because this is the explanation that makes sense.

Many other common complaints about a lack of sense in the rules similarly comes down to failing to understand or accept the amount of fuzziness in the model. The rules for HP recovery are an example of this. I’ll admit, this one can be a matter of taste, which is why the DMG includes official variant rules for making healing either more or less forgiving than the default. But I have seen a lot of people running for the “gritty” variant as their new default because “it doesn’t make sense that someone could be almost dead and then rest a bit and get all their HP back.”

But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what hit points are. The truth is, the number of dagger wounds it takes to kill a person is one, as long as it’s the right one. No amount of fighting experience changes this; instead, it makes one better at avoiding that last hit that will put you down. This is what Hit Points are: not the size of the dog in the fight, but the amount of fight left in the dog. The hit points you have don’t measure health or vitality or life force or blood left in your body, and the amount of hit points you lose don’t measure your woundedness in any absolute sense.

The hit points are your grit, your determination, your pain resistance, your ability to keep your guard up and take hits in a way that won”t take you down. The damage is pain, fatigue, eroding morale, minor injuries that slow you down. The last hit that takes you down is the only one likely to be “bad”, and how bad it turns out to be is going to depend on how you roll afterwards… after all, if you were bleeding to death from severe internal or external injuries, you couldn’t make three “death saves” and spontaneously stabilize within 30 seconds.

It wouldn’t make sense.

So we make sense of it: being reduced to 0 HP is being taken out of the fight, with a hit that is certainly worrying to look at but may or may not be serious.

Now, it is a serious simplification that the game by default does not allow for even the possibility of a long term injury from such a hit, and given that the player characters are the only combatants we follow for the long term, this simplification is definitely in their favor.

But that is all the more reason not to change the rules on the fly. If you want to inject a little gritty realism with things like lasting injuries, have at it. Just make sure everyone knows the score before they wind up in a situation where they’re going to be saddled with one.

If a player makes the choice to rush into the dragon’s den or jump off a cliff, they are already accepting the possibility that their character might die… but that is balanced against the possibility that they might not. They make the decision based on what they know of their character’s capabilities, as measured by their abilities (including hit points) and the rules for interpreting those abilities.

Changing the rules on the fly makes the whole system make less sense, because every rule in the book now has an implicit asterisk after it that says, “Unless something bugs me about a particular example, in which case we’ll just make something up.”

At the end of the day, it’s true that the DM is the final arbiter of the rules, and there’s nothing wrong with adding a house rule or two or seven.

Just follow these simple guidelines:

1. Make sure you understand the rules as written before you start trying to fix them.
2. Only make mid-game rule adjustments or exceptions to the rules when they benefit the players.
3. Do not introduce changes that hurt the player characters without discussing it outside of gameplay first. Ideally players should know any such house rules before the campaign begins.
4. Never introduce changes that remove or massively deflate a class feature.

And above all, when you find that something doesn’t make sense… make sense of it. It’s what you’re there for. The dice and the rules, they tell you what’s possible, what succeeds and fails. They don’t tell you the story. You, the DM, do that.