Sage Advice Compendium (2014) - Sage Advice Compendium (2014)

Sage Advice Compendium (2014). The Sage Advice Compendium collects questions and answers about the rules of Dungeons & Dragons (fifth edition). Rules References The fifth edition of D&D has three official rulebooks, each of which was first published in 2014: Player's Handbook (2014) (abbreviated PHB) Monster Manual (2014) (abbreviated MM) Dungeon Master's Guide (2014) (abbreviated DMG) The free Basic Rules (2014) contains portions of those three books. Official Rulings Official rulings on how to interpret rules are made here in the Sage Advice Compendium. The public statements of the D&D team, or anyone else at Wizards of the Coast, are not official rulings; they are advice. The tweets of Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford), the game's principal rules designer, are sometimes a preview of rulings that will appear here. A Dungeon Master adjudicates the game and determines whether to use an official ruling in play. The DM always has the final say on rules questions. Compiled Answers Sage Advice answers that are relevant to the current state of the rules are compiled here. The Role of Rules Why even have a column like Sage Advice when a DM can just make a ruling? Rules are a big part of what makes D&D a game, rather than simply improvised storytelling. The game's rules are meant to help organize, and even inspire, the action of a D&D campaign. The rules are a tool, and we want our tools to be as effective as possible. No matter how good those tools might be, they need a group of players to bring them to life and a DM to guide their use. The DM is key. Many unexpected things can happen in a D&D campaign, and no set of rules could reasonably account for every contingency. If the rules tried to do so, the game would become unplayable. An alternative would be for the rules to severely limit what characters can do, which would be counter to the open-endedness of D&D. The direction we chose for the current edition was to lay a foundation of rules that a DM could build on, a...