DnD Players & Christians can bond over buying a book and then willfully misinterpreting it for their own benefit.
Ugh what was it….? I had a player saying he should be getting 4D8 hit dice HP at lvl 4 after we’d already gone through 1-3 properly, then reading the rule saying you get one hit die per level.
“Per level! That’s level 4 so I get 4!”
He would not give it up so I was like, “I guess it could be interpreted that way if you were trying really hard to gain an advantage, but earlier in the book it says DM has the final say and I say it’s one.”
Dictionary.
I had a welding teacher that was always saying that he had read the dictionary twice. It felt like he was saying that as a way to show how he had a superior intelligence or something. It was pretty funny.
Elon Musk claimed to have read an entire encyclopedia as a kid for the same reason
To be fair, many guides and handbooks and other books of that nature are more meant to be referenced as opposed to read back to front.
The forgotten realms campaign setting book for 3.5e reads more like a novel than a rulebook. It’s pretty dope. Just so much detail about the gods, the countries, even touches on some extra-planar stuff.
omg, look at you here as well, I’m gonna pop out on every comment of yours I come across
When I first picked up the Nobilis RPG, I read it cover-to-cover, the margins were always crammed full of stories and examples that really helped develop the setting and ideas and contextualize everything. I think the majority of RPGs that I’ve picked up have been read back to front… because what else are you going to do on your first pass?
I’ll definitely agree that it’s good to have books that work as decent reference manuals, especially for rules heavy games… but… have you tried to use the indexes in the 5e books - the PHB index is an experience and a half.
I’m not saying they can’t be read front to back just that it’s not necessarily strange for someone to not fully read a guide/manual/handbook.
I think the idea of the initial post is that, when presenting someone with a “guide” for running a game, you kind of expect someone to have read the whole thing at least once, and then use it for reference.
With the case of the 5e DMG, it actually has quite a lot of good advice in it, but most people running games haven’t read it fully… You constantly see complaints about 5e saying “there’s no advice for (x)” where the advice is just in the DMG
I do think that the 4e DMG had a lot of practical DMing “advice” that got dropped for the 5e one sadly. Stuff about how to tell a fun story and organize a full campaign.
I raise you the player handbook.
