How has the ruling of JC's tweets now being unofficial affected www.sageadvice.eu, in regards to RPG.se?

Question

We used to have answers referencing JC's tweets as RAI/RAW, but now that they are no longer official since the release of the SA Compendium, what effect has that had on the www.sageadvice.eu page?

I'm not exactly book-worming my way through the site, but I personally feel that the tweet ruling has sort of had a similar effect to how some people feel about dandwiki - i.e. "don't use it".

So, what effect has this had on the relationship between SA.eu and RPG.se?

---

For further clarification, my question is not specifically about JC's tweets, on the SA.eu website - It is about the interaction between the two sites (SA.eu and RPG.se).

Since it was not exactly about how to handle anything on this site, that's where I believe some of the confusion is, and also why I was unsure about asking in the first place.

Answer 1

Sage Advice is nothing but tweets

As far as I'm aware, Sage Advice (i.e. sageadvice.eu) is just a person who collects tweets from various people who helped with DnD 5e and its rules (primarily Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford) and is not associated with WotC in any way. In fact, the name is even annoyingly confusable with the actually official rules interpretation publication: Sage Advice Compendium.

In general, I've seen people consider tweets to be worse than useless

I've generally noticed that people have gone from using Crawford's tweets to justify claims to avoiding even referencing them (perhaps because people will downvote posts solely for using them).

I've seen a lot of people say that the tweets only showcase Crawford's (or somebody else's) viewpoint at that specific point in time. In fact, Crawford has made tweets directly contradicting (or correcting) previous ones, which has not helped to increase their validity or helpfulness when it comes to answers here.

I've similarly seen people say that Crawford, despite being the lead rules designer, is just a single person whose opinion on interpreting the rules means as little / as much as anybody else's and so the tweets should not be used for evidence in answers.

I've also seen newer users use Sage Advice and then seen others leave comments explaining that these are not official rules and should effectively be discarded from the answer. Given that some people do find the intent of the designer of the very rules we are trying to interpret to be important, I've also seen these comments not go particularly well.

---

How have I changed?

Personally, I have stopped using tweets in my recent answers (there are a few exceptions) as I got tired of the comments people inevitably left. I have also been leaving comments under answers where Crawford has a tweet that might be considered helpful. These comments are often: "For whatever it's worth, Jeremy Crawford agrees in a tweet" (with a link to the tweet (not SA) and quoting the tweet itself) whereas before they would not have included a "For whatever it's worth" clause.

Answer 2

Readers decide if answers provide valuable information.

Our goal is to help querents and future readers find solutions to their problems, and each person writing an answer is going to do that differently. When you write an answer, you decide what you think is the information valuable to solving the querent's problem, and the querent and future readers decide if the information you provide is valuable to solving the problem. That's how stackexchange is supposed to work.

So if you think JC's or MM's tweets are valuable information, that's great. I have personally found them useful in some situations. They have settled disputes at my table before, and probably will in the future. Other times they have not helped at all, and have even made things worse - JC has been known to contradict himself from time to time, and one such contradiction led to more confusion for the table.

If you think including a JC tweet in your answer would be helpful to someone reading your answer, do so. But understand, official rules and rulings are generally considered more valuable than unofficial ones. An answer that utilizes official material and a JC tweet will always be better received than answer that is just a tweet.

Answer 3

Provide Context for Links

Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there.

Context includes that these are tweets from designers but that they have no official status.

Answer 4

RAW, RAI, RAF, house-rules/homebrew (Good Subjective), or JC/MM's twitter are all useful to different games and different tables. Regardless of any consensus on this site, people run games using a variety of sources and restrictions.

Even if the question specifically asks for a certain kind of clarification, all of those are valid answers.

If they do specify certain restraints (eg, "RAW only"), then even though the information is less useful to that particular user, it may still form a valid answer for other users and shouldn't be discarded.