Are interviews reliable sources for supporting an answer?

Question

The current site policy is to not consider tweets from Jeremy Crawford (or other game designers) as main support for answers to D&D 5e questions, following the Official Ruling section in the Sage Advice Compendium: How has the ruling of JC's tweets now being unofficial affected www.sageadvice.eu, in regards to RPG.se?.

Should the same policy be applied also for interviews and podcasts in answer to D&D 5e questions?

Answer 1

I will echo my answer here. It’s about tweets, but it applies to interviews.

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 2

(Non-D&D answer since this question is no longer D&D5-tagged.)

I think we've hit a point where different game systems have different standards and your answer should reflect that.

E.g.,

• Modern D&D has a lot of rules, written by multiple authors, which accumulate over time.
• There are official channels for rules updates and clarifications, which also accumulate over time.
• The D&D rules interact with each other in complex ways.
• The D&D community in online fora &c. has specific concepts like "rules as written," which constitute guidelines for how a game text should be interpreted and also for how your analysis should be presented.
• AFAIK, they still do the thing where you can ask a paid customer service representative your game specific question.

So D&D5 answers should be written with all this in mind.

Non-D&D answers should be written with the specific game's specific circumstances in mind:

• How was this specific game text intended to be read and used?
• How are this game's "canonical" or "official" clarifications normally communicated?
• How "technical" is the terminology in the text?

Consider this example doppelgreener offered in the comments:

As a high-profile alternative example, the Fate community utilises developer commentary heavily to the point that our community's go-to third party Fate SRD incorporates a lot of it as sidebars—it's readily available, highly dependable, and super relevant guidance on how to best utilise the system's elements.

So, there's no one-size-fits-all "policy" shortcut here, you need to know how a particular game and community operate. (In WotC's case they do straight-up tell you what's "official," as Purple Monkey pointed out in the comments.)