Victoria BC Dungeons & Dragons

THE RAW MANIFESTO

by DM the DM

Playing D&D Rules as Written (RAW) just means sticking to the rules to the best of your ability. No different than if you were playing Monopoly. That’s it.

Playing RAW is EASIER, not harder than the alternatives. Many are daunted by the size of the rulebooks and afraid to play RAW because of it. This is an understandable error, but an error none-the-less.

The 5e D&D rules are challenging. They are long, complex, and not always well explained or laid out. Playing RAW does not mean you can’t make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes.

When playing RAW we seek out mistakes. It is a chance for us to learn and improve going forward, just as you would playing any other complex tabletop game.

The expectation that the DM must have an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules is absurd. The very best way for a DM to learn the rules is to play RAW with a group of players who all know the rules and can correct the DM when they make a mistake. The disposition between DM and players should always be a collaboration to follow the rules as best as possible, no different than a board game.

Sadly, the tone often becomes adversarial. This culture can be traced back to 1st edition and the prevalent attitude of “DM is God.” Known as Rule 0, it frequently tainted the play environment at the table. This toxic culture must be resoundingly rejected when DMing RAW, and a new culture of DM-Player collaboration explicitly adopted. (See sidebar “RAW Table Etiquette”)

For players and DMs alike, playing by RAW is far better than a DM trying to “wing it” or make up house rules, sometimes called “homebrew.”

Playing RAW allows everyone at the table to let the professional game designers do their job. Changing rules through homebrew, DM fiat or Rule 0 implies that the DM “knows better” than the game developers.

Let’s think about that.

The 5e rules have been carefully designed and play-tested by a very large, very smart professional development team. Crack open the first page of the Player’s Handbook and casually peruse the list of credits. Game design professionals working 40 hours per week, for years! Think about the thousands of hours of play testing and focus groups that have gone into the development of the 5e system. (To see an example of this, watch this video.) 

Rarely do I encounter tabletop gamers who take it upon themselves to make house-rule changes to Settlers of Catan, Warhammer or Magic: The Gathering. Yet time and again I come across DMs that decide to toss out or change entire swaths of the D&D rules. For goodness sakes, WHY!?

I did not spend hundreds (thousands?) of dollars to buy all these books full of finely balanced and professionally tested rules, only to have some rank amateur DM with a shaky grasp of game design toss them out on an ill-considered whim. It is the Dunning-Kruger effect in overdrive. What hubris!

Having played D&D since the Red Box Basic in 1982, I can say with exuberance that the 5e rule-set is the best balanced and designed edition in D&D’s 40 year history. Like any complex system, 5e is a carefully tuned web of connections. A seemingly innocuous change in one area can trigger far reaching, unintended consequences elsewhere.

Here is a real-life example from one of our groups: A skilled player crafted an optimized paladin that fielded a very high AC. The novice DM became frustrated by “his” inability to hit the character (notice the DM’s adversarial attitude). In a misguided attempt to increase the challenge he targeted the character with a lightening bolt but denied them a saving throw, asserting by DM fiat that it was a “touch attack” because… reasons.

It should go without saying that none of this was according to the rules. At first glance this may seem minor, but it actually has far reaching and unintended consequences for game balance. It is grotesquely unfair to the player(s) involved, who may have invested dozens of hours into building their character under the perfectly reasonable assumption that the expensive rule books that they spent their money on would be the rules that the game follows.

Denying a saving throw to a lightning bolt is a massive rule change that fundamentally alters the nature of the spell, and the nature of spell casting in general. Observe: A level 20 wizard with max int of 22 (including a +2 tome) wearing a Robe of the Archmagi up-casting Lightening Bolt as a 9th-level spell would have a spell save DC of 22 (8base+6prof+6int+2robe). An ancient blue dragon’s lightening breath has a dex save DC of 23.

Even the most powerful lightening bolt in the game, from Tiamat’s blue dragon head, has a DC 27 dex save. Removing a save all together effectively makes the save DC higher than 30, higher than 300, in fact the DC becomes infinite. Upon analysis, this innocuous little 5th level homebrew lightening bolt is more difficult to dodge than Tiamat’s herself, which is an absurd outcome.

But the unintended consequences to game balance are even more far reaching: removing the saving throw completely eliminates the ability of a level 20 rogue or monk to use Evasion, which is a core feature of those classes. Without even realizing it this DM has fundamentally crippled all tank and evasion character builds.

Thus, the casual hubris of a DM breaking RAW with an apparently minor homebrew can have dramatic unintended consequences, rippling across the game, completely shattering the delicate play balance that the pros worked for years to develop. Professional game designers are keenly equipped to detect and balance these effects. Everyone else… not so much.

The final lesson is resoundingly clear: if you are not a professional game designer with decades of experience, gobs of development money to pay for focus groups and a team of support staff, then YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS BREAKING THE RULES AS WRITTEN.

For the love of Goodness,

PLEASE. PLAY. RAW!