Sage Advice Compendium - Sage Advice Compendium (2025)

Sage Advice Compendium. The Sage Advice Compendium collects questions and answers about the rules of Dungeons & Dragons (fifth edition). The document's version number changes when substantive additions or revisions have been made to the text. Rules References The fifth edition of D&D has three core rulebooks: Player's Handbook Monster Manual Dungeon Master's Guide Errata Errata have been issued for certain fifth edition books and are available at the following location: Sage Advice & Errata. Official Rulings Official rulings on how to interpret rules are made here in the Sage Advice Compendium. 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. The public statements of the D&D team, or anyone else at Wizards of the Coast, are not official rulings; they are advice. 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 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 unwieldy. 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 took for fifth edition was to lay a foundation of rules that a DM could build on, and we celebrate the DM as the bridge between the things the rules address and the things they don't. In a typical D&D session, a...