In my experience, the term “RAW” didn’t have purpose in D&D until 5th edition. It means “Rules as Written” as opposed to “Rules as Intended.” The simplest example is the net weapon. It is implied that the net can be thrown 5 feet normally, and 15 feet with disadvantage. However, rules as written state that all thrown attacks are ranged and have disadvantage in close combat. No matter how clear intention is, the rules were written this way.

Although there is a lot of value in reading the material, RAW vs. RAI is not about clearing the rules to better understand them. It is about following rules, even when they are nonsense. What seems to make it more important is that 5th edition requires the phrase to be said a lot, since so many general rules are incredibly separated from the content they govern.

A simplistic example is when Paladins get Channel Divinity, they have to know to look at Cleric rules to learn how it works. An extreme example is that material components can be somatic, and foci can replace material components and therefore be used for somatic components when materials are required, but if a material is not required, the focus cannot be used for the somatic component. Not only is this comparison not even explained in the rules, it is designed to directly limit some spells to require an empty hand without the rules being anywhere near the spell. To the player, it is the absence of a single letter that indicates the exclusion.

Now that it is so common, and confusing, an abbreviation is needed. Before we didn’t have to discuss it, and understood that some things are simply “at the GM’s Discretion.” That phrase is so important, that many materials I’ve written have it almost once in every 2 paragraphs. But don’t get me wrong. RAW is not absence of GM’s discretion. It is absence of intention. We would gladly spell out “that’s in the rules, so you shouldn’t change it” in the old world, but now we smugly, or humorously, say “well, that’s RAW.”

This intro was all to lead to a top 10 countdown of my favorite RAW vs. RAI shinanigans in 5th edition D&D.

#10. You can go prone underwater. Your speed is already halved if you don’t have a swim speed, so good luck understanding what that means.

#9. Not needing to sleep doesn’t mean you don’t sleep. Even phrases like “nothing can make you sleep” do not prevent you from sleeping. This confusion is an optional rule designed to foil the “Coffee-Lock” trick of using short rests to trade warlock spells for sorcery points. Despite the strongest worded feature of not sleeping being a Warlock invocation, RAW can force you to sleep. This happens when lack of long rests cause the need to rest due to lack of sleep. The phrasing is very careful, but runs right past pedantic and straight into errata. It is not just the difference between “rest” and “sleep,” it is the cause of the forced rest that is undeniably due to needing sleep.

#8. Medium creatures cannot squeeze. Squares in D&D have never been good indication of physical size, but for simplicity the size of a character determines the space they need to occupy. A 25 foot long monster often occupies a 15x15x15 foot area. Since the long monster should fit through doors smaller than 15×15 foot, the simple fix is squeezing. The monster can simply occupy one size category lower. The problem is that Size category is not space. Large monsters occupy 10 foot cubes. Medium creatures occupy 5 foot cubes. Small creatures occupy 5 foot cubes… wait. If a medium creature squeezes to become one size smaller, they still occupy a 5 foot cube. Almost all PC races are size medium, and a vast majority of NPCs are also human-ish shaped and therefore size medium.

#7. You cannot open and close 2 doors in 6 seconds. You get one object interaction every 6 seconds. This leads to a vast array of funny scenarios. If you want to interact with another object you must use your action. If you want to open and run through 2 doors, you cannot dash on that turn, (unless you have a bonus action dash feature). You also cannot open then close a door and then dash, (without bonus action dash). You cannot open and close a door and then open another (without Haste or Time Stop, which we’ll ignore for the remaining examples). You cannot open and close 3 doors no matter what. Practically speaking you cannot open and close a door on the same turn you cast invisibility on yourself. You also can’t open a door, close it, and then attempt to hide (unless you have a bonus action hide). No matter what you cannot dash, open a door, close it, and then hide.

#6. All ballistic weapons are machine guns. Any weapon with the loading property can be fired only once when taking the attack action, however this attack limit resets with each turn. Passing the weapon to another creature, which may require dropping and moving, provides another shot in the same 6 seconds. If you have 20 henchmen surrounding a heavy crossbow, they can all move, fire, drop, and leave, firing the crossbow at an impressive 200 rounds per minute.

Even funnier, all ballistas have conga lines. It takes 3 actions to fire a ballista, one to load, one to aim, one to fire. This implies that 3 creatures standing next to one can fire it once on a turn. What this does not consider is that a line of roughly 12 henchman can continue to walk in a line past the ballista, taking one of these actions. The limitation of 12 is due to needing to be close enough to move to the ballista, take an action, and move 2 spaces away in any order, correcting for initiative order. The rules are so rigid, and the payoff is so small, that it’s rare for players and GMs alike to not try to speed up the process. An army of goblins will quickly line up behind a ballista once this is discovered, because it’s better than firing the underwhelming set piece once every 3 turns, if ever.

#5. Magic attacks are not magic spells. Your counter spell will not work on some enemy wizards. Any protective ability that triggers on spell attacks will not trigger on magic attacks. Nor will it trigger on a word for word reproduction of a spell, that is clearly a spell being cast as a spell, but is listed as an ability. The existence of certain keywords, including weapon attack, spell attack, ranged spell attack, or just attack, change whether certain abilities can be used. Players often have to be made privy to monster stat blocks to know what their options are.

Those semantics are not reserved just for counter spell, magic resistance can have incredibly complex interactions too. Such as working on one wild magic class feature but not another, despite it having the exact same origin. I would be remiss to not mention that since these easy to miss mechanics are more important than explanation, rogues do not have special magical protection, despite both uncanny dodge and evasion being triggered by spells more often than any other case. (Uncanny dodge is often used against ranged magic attacks that are technically not spells.)

#4. Ladder rail guns are cheaper than any other ballistic option. This is less realistic in game, because it requires bending the rules at the end, but the cause of needing to bend those rules are completely legitimate in RAW. A mile long row of peasants can prepare readied actions to pass an object to each other, say the rung of a ladder, and it all executes within 6 seconds. This means the object travels at 600 miles per hour. A mile divided into 5 foot squares is 1,056 peasants. The cost of paying the peasants for their time at 1gp for the day, feeding them, and the cost of the ladder is cheaper than plate armor.

#3. Animate Objects is the most effective necromancy spell, despite being transmutation. Dead bodies are objects, and subject to animate objects. This means that in a single action, many bodies can be raised to fight, all with better stats. The number of bodies is up for interpretation, since a body is a medium creature it may be a medium object, but a body fits in a chest, which is a small object. You will get 5-10 animated corpses with flying speed and blind sight. Despite those incredible advantages, the most effective part of this is that the most abundant source of corpses are the part of the combat encounter you’ve already killed. This is the only safe way to reanimate dead enemies during battle, especially since there is no limitation on the creature type. Even finger of death only reanimates humanoids. So in a single action, you horrify the enemy with flying corpses of their friends that can even seek and destroy invisible foes for you.

#2. You can’t miss with eldritch blast. As a spell that only targets creatures, if it misses it is not allowed to hit objects, therefore it didn’t hit something else, it simply didn’t work. Maybe it failed to appear. This appears to be intentional as force damage is kind of like a siege weapon, it overcomes a lot of limitations on destroying objects. Some spells with this limitation clearly make sense, like vicious mockery. Others seem to be similarly silly, like acid splash and frost bite. The reason this is more entertaining with eldritch blast is it is a major feature of warlocks that scales number of attacks with fighters to be used as a primary feature, so describing misses as leaving pock marks on the wall is a mistake made at Every. Single. Table.

#1. Dragons have echolocation. All young and greater dragons have blindsight. The explanation is they have a sense of their lair and feel movement on the ground. The problem is that this blindsight goes out to 60 feet for adult dragons, which is the same as a bat. There is nothing that says the dragon loses this blindsight while flying. There’s no general sense, or perception bonus for smell, just exact, precise radar. This leads to extremely weird interactions in combat, all because they want to foil Bilbo Baggins from sneaking up on Smaug… despite it working in the source material.

#Runner Up. Related to dragons and their abilities, there is one more fascinating element about 5th edition dragons. Dragons are allergic to armies. They have no protection from basic weapons. Since every roll of 20 is an automatic hit, and longbows have a range of 150/600, significantly larger than their blindsight, an army of longbows can down a dragon really fast. If we add no bonus, and assume 9 damage (4.5 average of d8 times 2 for crit), it would take only 29 crits with a longbow to take down an adult red dragon. 100 longbowmen should crit on average 5 times in 1 round. 600 longbowmen at range should down a dragon before it can take a single attack. If you instead specialize the troops and they take sharpshooter feat, this becomes much faster as they don’t take disadvantage for the entire 600 foot range. (Especially high level fighters with 4 attacks per round.)

Not only do they not like Bilbo Baggins sneaking up on a dragon, they want you to know Bard and his arrow are not special.