Chad Pytel

Founder, Developer, and CEO at thoughtbot

This is part of my writing about D&D. View all

Following the Rules

My goal for playing D&D is to have fun and create something together. The rules of D&D are a framework and constraints that help us do that.

I am not perfect and don’t know all the rules. If I get something wrong, forget something, or you think something should work a certain way, please don’t hesitate to correct me or point it out. I will do my best to handle it gracefully and quickly.

If we got something wrong and it just happened and can easily be corrected, I am happy to quickly replay or retcon what just happened. However, if too much time has passed I may suggest we leave it as it was and move on.

I try to keep things quick, fun, and move us along. I don’t want to have long, drawn out debates about a rule or spend a lot of time looking something up. That quickly becomes not fun. Ultimately, as DM I may have to make a call on a rule in the interest of not getting bogged down and moving us along. If you disagree with my call, I ask that you give me the benefit of the doubt, let it go, and move on. I’m happy to talk about it more outside of the session if you’d like.

We don’t really have any house rules, but everything in The Player’s Handbook and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is welcome in the campaign, including the optional ability score system available that decouples the bonuses you get to your character from the races so you can use any race for any class and have it be fairly optimized. This new way of doing things gets away from race-based stereotypes and class limitations that are built-into the core rules of D&D. If you want to use something from another source or aren’t sure, feel free to ask.

I generally don’t use the optional flanking rules, and will sometimes play with an house potion rule of rolling the dice if you use a bonus action to take a potion, and getting the maximum healing if you use a full action.