Back when the 5e public playtest started in May of 2012, Mearls and Crawford gave a series of interviews about it, and one primary theme they emphasized (borrowed I think primarily from the OSR) was the focus on Rulings, Not Rules.

You can find some quotes here. For example, "The biggest hurdle has been trying to make sure that we can encourage more creativity, immersion, and flexibility in DMs and players. We want to have a solid set of rules, but at the same time I think D&D is at its best when the game is about the DM's rulings rather than the actual rules. The rules are a tool that a DM uses to keep the game moving and inform decisions. The rules don't make decisions for the DM, unless that's how the DM wants the game to work."

You can also hear a podcast here starting around the 10 minute mark.

Here is an excerpt in part, but it's worth listening to as Crawford also chimes in, and then Mearls expands on the concepts further and describes how this approach will differ from organized play approach where there will be much more canonical rules:

Q: What part of the playtest are you most looking forward to?

A: [Mearls] "I am really curious to see how people react to the way we've approached DM'ing. Because we really tried to take a different tack on things. One of my personal things with D&D is I think the rules are there as a tool for the DM to use as the DM wants. The rules aren't just this canonical thing that the DM must obey. The DM obeys the rules when the DM feels like yes these rules make sense for my campaign. And so we're really emphasizing this idea of instead of saying hey here's this hard and fast rule, it's here's a rule you can use, but really we're going to rely more on the DM to make rulings based on the situation. One of the things we focused on in the DM'ing packet was giving the DM a really clear sense of 'here is how checks work' and different die rolling conventions or whatever, but here's how you use these things. And what I imagine is, in a lot of adventures we write, I want to just be able to describe a room and not give any DC's. And the DM just judges and is like 'Hey a character wants to try and do this, here's what I think the DC should be.' Or 'here's the kind of tweak I want to make to this check, OK you can that but if he fails by more than 5, or whatever, something bad is going to happen to you.' So instead of giving you this full page rules on climbing that covers all these different cases, we need to say well hey if a character wants to climb well here's how fast you can climb, and usually it's a strength check and here are some sample DC's, and here's some other tweaks you might want to make to the check, but it's really up to the DM. And the goal is to make those guidelines and rules simple enough that the DM is using them on the fly. You know it's the kind of thing where it takes 5 minutes to learn it and then a lifetime to master."

So, given that intent at the initiation of 5e, what do you think? Did they accomplish that goal? Did it get pushed by the wayside? Something in between?

Did they accomplish it?  Depends on how strictly you want to measure it.

A. If you approach 5E that way, make rulings, basically ignore their "Sage Advice" and some of the errata (official rulings posing as cleanup), go with the general intent instead of the letter of the game, etc., then probably so.  Yep, that's what I do, and the game works very well with the approach that they suggested.  It's not difficult to run 5E in that manner, if you already know how to do it.

B. Looking more broadly, however there isn't a lot of positive reinforcement of that goal.  Some of the advice, even in the DMG, is too narrow on styles.  They specify DCs, the trap guidelines and encounter guidelines pick strange points in which to be specific or leave things open, the monster design guidelines are a mess, etc.  And you need to ignore an awful lot of what they are saying.  Worst, however, there is nowhere in the rules where they teach a new GM (or at least, not an old school GM) how to run that style.  No examples, no targeted advice, nothing.

That's not even taking into account how the Organized Play and the mostly "adventure path" style adventures work at cross-purposes to such a game.  They couldn't even do one "Dungeon Craft" series where they show a new GM how to set up a sandbox from the ground up?  Admittedly, sandbox play isn't required for "rulings, not rules".  An adventure path would be better run that way, too.  The starter set helps a little, but isn't perfect, and then doesn't really go anywhere.  There's not follow up support to the goal.

I don't know.  Is it sufficient to achieve a goal to simply not get in the way too much?

It more or less succeeded. Every table is different, and I'm sure there are still rules lawyers out there. But even making theatre of the mind play viable is a big win in terms of rulings not rules. And whether you enjoy the live-streaming D&D phenomenon or not, one thing it has accomplished is to take online discussion of the game out of the hands of char op nerds who spend their Friday nights building out the ultimate multi-class PC to 20th level, and present the game as stories generated at the table.

Nope.

Quote from: Mistwell;1053943So, given that intent at the initiation of 5e, what do you think? Did they accomplish that goal? Did it get pushed by the wayside? Something in between?

Something in between they managed to accommodate both. In addition to the tone they set through marketing and outrreach it reinforced by not releasing an endless series of splat books along with the adventure campaign supplement. Yet through use of Unearthed Arcana articles and the few rulebook they release they manage to keep the rules guys complaining less.

Quote from: Mistwell;1053943So, given that intent at the initiation of 5e, what do you think? Did they accomplish that goal?

Pretty much, yes. I'm tempted to say they were fully successful. Certainly the two players I know who really like 4e, and quite like 3e, don't much like 5e, and the lack of opportunity for player rules mastery is a big part of that. Conversely it makes the game much more accessible for new players, and helps new GMs develop their GMing muscles.

If the comparison is with OD&D or an OSR clone then no, they are not fully successful. 5e still requires a rough class balance among the PCs that is dependent on the GM using the combat rules more as less as written. The GM who wouldn't let my son's Rogue sneak attack (in a shot into melee) was doing something different from an OD&D GM ruling that a Thief could not Backstab - 5e clearly defines when the Rogue can sneak attack and by disallowing it the GM was weakening the class.

I've been finding the rules streamlined enough that they are rarely a problem but they are robust enough that I rarely need to make any rulings.  It's not like 4e or heaven forbid 3e where every little thing is legislated and there are set DCs for every action.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1053947That's not even taking into account how the Organized Play

To be fair at that same time they specified Organized Play would be more canonical in nature:

Mearls: I think there was a sense when 3rd edition came out, before the Internet really became such a social venue, that you wanted groups to have a really consistent application of the rules from group to group so that people can move around. But I think now that since everyone is online these days, or it's easy to get on line and talk about things, that we have a much more connected community. And when you have a much more connected community it makes it much more easy for us to be much more open with letting people tinker with the rules, and we just assume you're going to do that, because it's much more easy to see as a whole what the community is doing, what DM's are doing, different blogs about DM'ing, or how to put together adventures and stuff. There is a lot more communication. People are not as isolated as they used to be. So its much easier now, if you're really into D&D, to just go online and just read up on how other people are approaching the game, and the different techniques. So you don't have to say OK this is canonical, what you must do.

Now for something like Organized Play, like the Forgotten Realms, what I imagine we'll do is something similar to what a lot of games do, like say Magic [the Gathering] or whatever. And we'll just say alright for Organized Play program, here are the ground rules. For that we'll probably just say here's what we expect the rules to be. But we don't have to design the game for that. We just have to design a good game, and then create the subset of rules or the rules we add on that say here's how it works for playing in Organized Play. Like for example in Magic you could put eight copies of a card in one deck. No one is stopping you. But that's not a tournament legal deck, right? You could easily play that way. You could play Planechase at home, but that might not be what you're playing at a Pro tournament. But you know that's fine, it doesn't break the game or make Magic incomprehensible, it's just a different variant.

Isn't that more of a DM thing than a book/rulings thing?  I've been doing rulings over rules since I started.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1054028Isn't that more of a DM thing than a book/rulings thing?  I've been doing rulings over rules since I started.

Ding ding! Winner!

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1054028Isn't that more of a DM thing than a book/rulings thing?  I've been doing rulings over rules since I started.

Yes but some games encourage it while others fall apart if you change anything.

I ran both 3E and 4E with "rulings, not rules".  It was more hassle to run them that way than 5E is.  Still doable, though.

From what I saw when I recently sat down and watched a session some friends were playing in, they were definitely unsuccessful at leas when it came to that group.
The same was true in a PbP game I was following for a couple months, too:).

Obviously I can't speak for many other groups, but I doubt it. The books are written in a way that assumes rules shall be used, and rulings would be secondary to that, AFAICT;).

5e's a weird duck as far as that goal goes.  On the one hand, they do say "Up to the GM", "GM is ultimate arbiter" etc all over the place and include options and tweaks.  On the other hand, it's a WotC product, so all the characters are exception-based widget decks with specific wording and exact meanings.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1054028Isn't that more of a DM thing than a book/rulings thing?  I've been doing rulings over rules since I started.

Agreed. Sometimes due to mistakes or omissions, or just plain lazy writing, in a book you have to do this even.

d20m Gamma World is still the posterchild for all of the above.