Coming back to 5e

[heavyfuel]

I'm back to DMing a 5e game after a pretty long while (haven't played since the PHB was published basically) and I have some questions about the resources available to me

1 - Is there an SRD already? I remember them talking about adding one, and then they did but it was really incomplete with only the Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric I think.

A quick Google search revealed this website: https://www.5esrd.com

Is it legal? Is it reliable (unlike, say, D&Dwiki for 3.x)?


2 - Did WotC make Sage Advice actual RAW, or is it still just a suggestion with absolutely no weight?

On this subject, has there been any really stupid Sage Advice I should mind, or have they been good overall?

Is there a comprehensive list of Sage Advices so far? WotC's own website seems to be lacking some of the Tweeter Q&A

3 - Is there a consensus on the quality of the Unearthed Arcana articles?

The last one I remember reading about was the Favored Soul one, which I guess was OK.

Have there been many more? Can I find them all on WotC's website?


Thanks!

[Falcon X]

1. Somewhat. You can find spells online, and all classes, but not all subclasses.

2. Sage advice is not RAW. I believe you can find an explicit statement of such in the Unearthed Arcana: Sage Advice article you can google.

3. Unearthed Arcana is considered hit and miss. Think homebrew, but never gets to stupid levels.
Some UA won’t fit perfectly, but none of it is going to just ruin your game.

[Kane0]

1. That was the starter pdf, there's more out there now but still incomplete.

2. Still the word of the Devs, they carry as much weight as you allow them to

3. Hit and miss. Only a small portion of it is truly broken, for the most part you'll be fine using it. A lot has been polished and published in Xanathar's Guide

[MaxWilson]

2 - Did WotC make Sage Advice actual RAW, or is it still just a suggestion with absolutely no weight?

On this subject, has there been any really stupid Sage Advice I should mind, or have they been good overall?

It's a suggestion with corporate weight, which I take to mean that WotC feels that having an "official" answer channel is good for their brand--but Twitter is a terrible format that lends itself to bad answers because it's so terse. One particularly bad answer that comes to mind is a Crawford tweet that having someone eat a berry created by Goodberry counts as using a spell to heal somebody and thus triggers Disciple of Life--if Crawford had had to answer at greater length he might have thought through what the "instantaneous" duration on Goodberry really means and come to the correct conclusion, which is that Goodberry creates magic berries just like Animate Dead creates undead skeletons, and both berries and animated skeletons have certain properties for the first 24 hours after they are created, but Goodberry no more triggers Disciple of Life (Life Cleric feature) when someone eats a berry than Animate Skeleton triggers Grim Harvest (Necromancer feature) when someone is killed by a skeleton.

Anyway, Sage Advice isn't always wrong but when it isn't, it's just answering obvious questions by restating the PHB for you, so you can safely ignore Sage Advice and just stick to what's written in the rule books.

One important errata that you should be aware of: they fixed the way darkness works so that it actually matches the way DMs intuitively run it. The original PHB had darkness as heavy obscurement which blinds anyone within it. This meant that holding up a candle in a huge dark cavern let you perfectly see everything in the cavern (since you were not heavily obscured), but none of the monsters hiding in the darkness could see you (because they were heavily obscured). No sane DM ever ran darkness this way of course, and later PHB printings later reversed the rule: heavy obscurement now blinds other creatures with respect to that which is heavily obscured. The creatures in darkness can see you because you're not heavily obscured, but you can't see them because they are in the dark. This causes some occasional controversy for things that should logically be opaque (like Fog Cloud), and you may have to fix that yourself by ruling that more than 5' of Fog Cloud also blocks line of sight or something like that, but at any rate that is the single most important rule change you missed while you were away.

[LordEntrails]

Yes there is an SRD 5E. You can download it from wizards.com and their are several online versions of it like the one you linked. Yes they are official. No they are not "incomplete" because they contain everything released in the SRD 5E, which intentionally does NOT have everything in the PHB. The SRD is designed for third party publishers to use to make compatible products, not for gamers to be cheap and not buy the actual products. There are the free Basic Rules which are designed like a demo or lite version to get started with that mostly overlap with the SRD 5E but not completely and are more complete from a mechanics perspective, but not from a players options perspective.

Sage Advice is not RAW. It has as much weight as the DM decides it has. Yes their are plenty of examples of Sage Advice being simply considered wrong. Google will link you to several different archives of Sage Advice.

Consensus on UA? No. Some of it's good, some of it isn't. Depends upon what you want etc. None of it will break the game though. Some of the older ones are considered obsolete, but not sure if they are still available or not.

[Millstone85]

Is there a comprehensive list of Sage Advices so far? WotC's own website seems to be lacking some of the Tweeter Q&A

It's a suggestion with corporate weight, which I take to mean that WotC feels that having an "official" answer channel is good for their brand--but Twitter is a terrible format that lends itself to bad answers because it's so terse.

Though I refer to both while discussing RAI, this is why I consider the Sage Advice Compendium to have more weight than collected tweets. They hopefully took the time to mull over a question, and are less constrained in the length of their answer.

[Unoriginal]

The Sage Advice Compodium IS "RAW", in the sense it's the official explanation of X thing that were unclear in the book.


Dunno why people are saying the contrary, but WotC always made clear that Crawford's Sage Advice was the official interpretation.

[GlenSmash!]

I'm back to DMing a 5e game after a pretty long while (haven't played since the PHB was published basically) and I have some questions about the resources available to me

1 - Is there an SRD already? I remember them talking about adding one, and then they did but it was really incomplete with only the Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric I think.

A quick Google search revealed this website: https://www.5esrd.com

Is it legal? Is it reliable (unlike, say, D&Dwiki for 3.x)?


2 - Did WotC make Sage Advice actual RAW, or is it still just a suggestion with absolutely no weight?

On this subject, has there been any really stupid Sage Advice I should mind, or have they been good overall?

Is there a comprehensive list of Sage Advices so far? WotC's own website seems to be lacking some of the Tweeter Q&A

3 - Is there a consensus on the quality of the Unearthed Arcana articles?

The last one I remember reading about was the Favored Soul one, which I guess was OK.

Have there been many more? Can I find them all on WotC's website?


Thanks!

This is the SRD http://media.wizards.com/2016/downlo...D-OGL_V5.1.pdf

There are a few sites like that one you posted that, but seeing what's official and what's homebrew on it can be difficult. Though 5esrd.com seems do do a better job differentiating than D&dwiki does, however I don't think there is any quality control on either.

As far as sage advice goes, do you mean Jeremy Crawfords tweets, or the actual Sage Advice articles on wizards.com? The former is advice from the game designer on how he would run the game. The later is, as far as I know, RAW.

Still, I would prioritize RAF over RAW, but YMMV.

UA sublasses vary wildly in quality, which shouldn't be a surprise as they are for play testing. Some concepts start out rougher than others.

As far as Favored Soul goes, it saw it's final form in the recently released Xanathar's Guide to Everything as the Divine Soul Sorcerer which also had the final forms of a lot more subclasses a lot of which I really like.

[Contrast]

The Sage Advice Compodium IS "RAW", in the sense it's the official explanation of X thing that were unclear in the book.


Dunno why people are saying the contrary, but WotC always made clear that Crawford's Sage Advice was the official interpretation.

What's the difference between Sage Advice and errata then?

For OP: the impression I've got is that Sage Advice isn't RAW but could probably be more accurately described as 'How Wizards think you should run that rule in your game unless you decide otherwise'. See the 'The Role of Rules' section in the Sage Advice Compendium.

[Unoriginal]

What's the difference between Sage Advice and errata then?

An errata is when they correct something in the published books that was wrong, ex: "the Kraken was meant to have +17 to hit, not +7".

The Sage Advice just explains something that was interpreted wrongly or not outright spelled out, ex: "Q: can you use a spell that doesn't require line of sight from the inside of a Leomund's Tiny Hut to affect the outside? My DM said yes. A: No, this part of the spell text shows why it doesn't work."

[Baptor]

I'm back to DMing a 5e game after a pretty long while (haven't played since the PHB was published basically) and I have some questions about the resources available to me

1 - Is there an SRD already? I remember them talking about adding one, and then they did but it was really incomplete with only the Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric I think.

A quick Google search revealed this website: https://www.5esrd.com

Is it legal? Is it reliable (unlike, say, D&Dwiki for 3.x)?


2 - Did WotC make Sage Advice actual RAW, or is it still just a suggestion with absolutely no weight?

3 - Is there a consensus on the quality of the Unearthed Arcana articles?

Thanks!

1. Yes there is an official SRD now. It's so complete you honestly don't need anything else if you are running on the cheap.

2. I don't know and I don't care. I hate the Rule of Tweets that seems to be going on in 5e. The point of this edition was rulings not rules and to give some flexibility back to Dungeon Masters. I don't care what Mearls or Crawford say about anything.

3. I feel they are pretty good and my players are free to come to me if they want to use something. I will review it and possibly allow it with some tweaks. I also reserve the right to adjust those tweaks in play as needed if its a UA thing. Many of the good ones have now been polished and published in Xanathar's.

[2D8HP]

You'll find this

link

useful.

[KorvinStarmast]

1. The SRD isn't a web site, it's a rules book with monsters and magic items in it. It's a good product.

2. The only Sage Advice product that I'd equate with RAW is the latest version of the sage advice compendium. Down load it, refer to it. It explains a lot. The various SA tweets I'd not bother with.

3. UA: most of it isn't real good, but it's play test material so if you and your table like to find the holes in stuff, try some. Some of it is decent. There are loads of them. One of the most popular is the Revised Ranger.

4. Get the rule book errata for MM, DMG, PHB. It corrects some errors.

All of the above are available on the WoTC site.
Links have been provided upthread.