D&D 5E Spells, Targetting, and Glass Windows

briggart said:

Agreed, but at the same time I think that the opinion of the person who is in charge of the rules and was specifically the lead on the PHB where these rules are found, should inform the discussion on unclear parts of the rules.

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Reynard said:

Man I wish people would stop repeating "rulings not rules" as if it were an excuse for the 1000 page ruleset to have failed to account for some basic stuff.

"Rulings not rules" is totally acceptable for your slim, concise game meant to empower the GM to tell a story at the players.

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TiQuinn said:

Except that there were times that Mike Mearls disagreed with him on some of these rules and interpreted things differently, which occasionally came out in interviews. Had it been Mearls providing the Sage Advice, we’d have had a different perspective, so even though Crawford liked to pose things authoritatively, even amongst the lead designers there were different interpretations.

FWIW, I listened to that podcast multiple times years ago, and I get why he interprets it that way, and I get it for the sake of consistency. But I found his attempts to explain how that magical edge case worked narratively to be quite less than convincing. His design style has always been a bit lawyerly for me, and not to my liking.

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Oofta said:

We've had these arguments for every edition of D&D. Almost as if coming up with rules for a fairly complex game is not a simple task and people like to argue.

Personally I think the rule is clear, if people want to rule otherwise that's fine as well.

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TiQuinn said:

Yeah, I can appreciate that it’s not easy, but I also think if one is going to claim “rulings, not rules” then don’t create rules that need the level of precise parsing that targeting has in 5th edition.

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Oofta said:

I think it's just the nature of the loose simulationist nature of D&D along with trying to avoid super technical game speak.

There are other approaches to games of course, some more restrictive and others that don't even really try other than perhaps group consensus. But with D&D's approach? There are always going to be edge cases.

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briggart said:

In my original reply to @Hriston I mentioned that while I agree with them that RAW total cover requires concealment, in my opinion that was not RAI, which lead to referring back to Crawford.

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Oofta said:

We've had these arguments for every edition of D&D. Almost as if coming up with rules for a fairly complex game is not a simple task and people like to argue.

Personally I think the rule is clear, if people want to rule otherwise that's fine as well.

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Reynard said:

3.5 was a much more complete ruleset. It actually gave DCs for actions and explained the exceptions.

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Hriston said:

I misinterpreted you then because, while I understood that you agreed a transparent pane of glass does not conceal a target, you also seemed to be saying it was "clear" from context that concealment is not required for total cover according to the rules, which of course is false. It wasn't clear to me you were talking about intent, which I assume is what was written since, as I said, it would have been trivial to change the language with the errata, and it was not.

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