Official Dungeons and Dragons site D&DBeyond shared a new ‘Sage Advice’ page on April 30, which will serve as a home for rules clarifications and errata going forward. While Sage Advice aims to settle debates about how the 2024 rules interact with each other, these decisions will likely start as many community arguments as they solve.
That’s how the older iterations of Sage Advice used to work, at least. Wizards of the Coast has used Sage Advice as a platform to advise on fifth edition rules for many years, though the practice fell by the wayside as the publisher prepared to release its 2024 Player’s Handbook. Previously, the spearhead of Sage Advice was Jeremy Crawford, the former D&D game director who recently retired from Wizards.
The new page currently answers 163 questions about how to play Dungeons and Dragons (not including ‘Why even have Sage Advice when a DM can just make a ruling?’). This covers simple queries like ‘Is a 1 on an ability check an automatic failure?’, as well as ones that need lengthy answers like ‘Can a spell with an attack roll be used as the attack in the Attack action or as part of the Extra Attack feature?’.
Some of the rulings have been carried over, unchanged from previous editions of Sage Advice. One example is ‘If you use Great Weapon Fighting with a spell like Divine Smite or Hex, do you get to treat any 1 or 2 you roll for the additional damage as a 3?’. “The Great Weapon Fighting feat benefits only the damage roll of the weapon used for the attack”, Wizards of the Coast says.
Others are clearly new additions, as they address rulings that have been hotly debated by the fanbase in recent months. Wizards of the Coast has confirmed that a recent change to the Stunned condition, which now lets you move while afflicted by it, is intentional and intended to differentiate it from being Paralyzed.
The Sage Advice page also addresses drawing and stowing weapons when you’re making an attack with a Light weapon (which played a major role in some seriously silly combos when the new rules first arrived). The capabilities of the vastly altered DnD spell True Strike have been addressed and, much to the chagrin of Shillelagh build lovers, it’s been confirmed that Shillelagh can’t buff the damage die of a bonus action attack made thanks to Polearm Master.
There are plenty of interesting rule interactions included that we’d never considered. It turns out that Orcs can survive automatically dying to Disintegrate thanks to their Relentless Endurance, and Druids can use Wild Shape to escape restraints as long as their DnD size changes significantly.
If any of these rulings don’t agree with you, then you’re fortunately free to ignore them. The Sage Advice Compendium specifies that “The public statements of the D&D team, or anyone else at Wizards of the Coast, are not official rulings; they are advice”. You’re free to DM as you see fit.
If you’d like to share your thoughts on these rulings, we’re all ears over in the Wargamer Discord. Or, if you’d like to swot up on a few more rules, here’s all you need to know about DnD classes, DnD races, and DnD 2024 backgrounds.
Source: Wargamer
