you make the call – Dungeon's Master

You Make the Call – Questions About Rules (Part 2)

One of the DM’s Most important jobs is to keep the game moving. When we find ourselves in a situation where we don’t know the correct rule, we trust the DM to make the call on the fly based on his experience to ensure the game continues. Afterwards we look up the correct ruling in the usual places: PHB, DMG, Rules Compendium, online compendium and online forums. Yet from time-to-time we just can’t find a satisfactory answer to our rules questions. In these circumstances we’ve decided to turn to you, the people who read our blog and play D&D to help us make the call.

In You Make The Call (Part 1) we asked you to provide you thoughts and insights on strange situations that occur when you’re prone, and the ability to adjust the size and damage of area attacks. In this installment we want you to make the call on being dazed. These situations don’t necessarily come up often, but they can have a significant impact on the encounter so we want to get it right.

You Make the Call – Questions About Rules (Part 1)

Every now and then a situation arises during game play that we’re not sure how to adjudicate. This kind of thing happens much less frequently now that we’re familiar with the 4e rules, but it does still happen. In our experience it’s better for the DM to make a quick ruling and keep the game moving foreword, and most time this is how we handle these unusual situations at my game table. However, we pride ourselves on knowing the rules inside out so when we have something unexpected come up and we don’t know the answer we see it as a challenge and after the game’s over we start digging.

When trying to find the right answer we of course begin by searching in the PHB, DMG, Rules Compendium or online compendium. If we can find a definitive ruling we go to the internet and the various forums. But this doesn’t always provide us with a satisfactory answer either. So we’ve decided to try a new series where we present the situation, explain our ruling and ask for your feedback. This might end up being a very informative series that clears up a lot of confusion for players and DMs alike or it may become a series where we get flamed by the online community for not knowing something obvious. We’re hoping that the good outweighs the bad so we’ve moving forward with it.