Missing Rules

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iserith said:

Yeah, at a certain point, the rules leave off and the role of the DM necessarily kicks in to make a ruling and that's going to come down to preference. So while you, and Max, and I can explain why we would make the call we would make in play and pemerton and robus and others can explain why they'd make a different call, these are all matters of personal preference and not up for debate, at least in terms of being correct or incorrect.

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With the preface that I am absolutely in support of groups playing their game their way, I do not see rules as completely ambiguous in that way. The sentence construction and words have meaning. Taken as a whole the expressed mechanics lend themselves better to some meanings than others.

To give an absurd example, no one (probably) thinks that the Jumping rules tell you that you can drink up to your Strength in cider if you are standing on your head. Ludicrous, right? But having that belief entails that there really are better and worse readings of a text. Here better doesn't mean - play it this way or god will rain fire down on you - but rather, read this way the mechanic literally makes sense in context and resolves the case in a consistent way, while read another way it does not.

There are rules and by and large they have a clear meaning. Ignore or change them as desired: there's no need to distort them.

Where Jumping is ill-defined is on the DC for Athletics checks for stunts and unusually long distances. Probably the designers intended DMs to choose a difficulty class. One might even say that there was no more need for them to give clear guidance on that, than on the enormous number of other freeform cases where DMs set a DC. Denying a character the ability to reliably jump up to their Strength is not what the rule offers, even if it works well in a given group's game.

So yeah, mountains, molehills and all that. Carry on

clearstream said:

Where Jumping is ill-defined is on the DC for Athletics checks for stunts and unusually long distances. Probably the designers intended DMs to choose a difficulty class.

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I can't say for sure that's what the designers intended. What I can say is that in order to arrive at a DC, a DM needs to judge an approach to a goal. A solid approach to a goal might garner automatic success. A terrible approach to a goal might garner automatic failure. Somewhere in the middle are varying degrees of difficulty that are uncertain. The rules cannot set forth what that might be as it only mentions a goal, not an approach. The player adds that part when describing what he or she wants to do so that the DM can make a judgment as to uncertainty and, if applicable, a DC. Different DMs will make different judgments as to that.

robus said:

i dunno 300+ posts seems like a mountain.

Are we really just arguing about action adjudication? or are we arguing about the jumping rules? Every time i think we’ve settled on the former a person on the other side says no, you can’t jump beyond the limit prescribed in the book without some approach other than sheer effort. Basically that the rules say there’s a hard limit on pure jumping: guaranteed success followed immediately by guaranteed failure.

Which is it for you?

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The rules do say the latter. The jump rules state that your strength determines how far you can jump. Not how far you can jump without a roll. Not how far you can jump without effort. It doesn't offer more, so that's as far as you can go unless you do something that would allow you to go unusually far via an athletics check.

clearstream said:

5e is very much about rules. It's the most sophisticated and in many areas the tightest rule system D&D has ever had.

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They've stated that 5e is rulings over rules. The DMs rulings override any rules in the book, and while the rules are tight in many areas, they are vague in many more. I think a lot of that vagueness is intended.

However, in this case we are simply debating a literal meaning. "Up to" in games means that a player can choose any value from the minimum to the maximum. It is used by experienced designers for casing mechanics, where it is necessary to be clear that a player can choose a value lower than the maximum. WotC designers in particular use it as part of their vernacular.

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I was under the impression that we were debating what is meant by jumping an unusual distance under the athletics section. The jump section just helps define the parameters of what is usual and what is unusual. During that discussion, you made an error with RAW and I helpfully corrected the mistake is all.

Or to put that another way, where is a check stipulated under jumping, when you want to jump exactly your Strength in feet? If, as one might believe, a check is required, it is perverse to not discuss that check in that rules section.

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There is no check under jumping. You can go anywhere from 1-strength score feet without a check. Although, I don't see why anyone would actually want to jump 1 foot, but hey, if that's how they get their jollies...

Oofta said:

I think it's a mountain created around a molehill and that most people just make a ruling on and move on.

It's a molehill.

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Clearly, if it was a molehill we'd be able to jump over it and move on. The problem is that no one has come up with a description that allows us to jump an unusual distance yet. Thus we are stuck in this thread.

pemerton said:

Yes. That's why it's often uncertain that a PC will jump as far as s/he can, which therefore suggests that rules that set a certain distance (ie the rules on p 64 of the Basic PDF) aren't rules that set the furthest a PC can jump!

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No, that's not why it's uncertain that a PC will jump as far as he can. It's not uncertain all as the jump rules state very specifically how far that is. Reality is uncertain. The game is not. The only possible uncertainty comes if the players describe a way that makes sense to allow the PC to exceed his maximum. Go an usual distance.

That second sentence is unwarranted. A player delcaring "I jump as far as I can!" is (i) not asking to make an atheltics check, and (ii) is not forcing the GM to play his/her character. S/he is forcing the GM to decide whether or not it is uncertain that the furthest the PC can jump is more or less than the width of the chasm, but that's what the GM gets paid to do!

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It's not unwarranted if the player is having his PC make a simple jump. If the player is wanting to go an usual distance, it fails to give the DM anything to go on to narrate the result. The DM will have to invent the PC doing something unusual to go that extra distance, playing the PC in the process.

As for the first sentence, would you care to give an example or two?

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For the umpteenth time, the PC takes a short jump up onto a boulder near the chasm and uses that to propel him forward from a higher point, adding some extra distance. The player grabs a stalactite in mid jump and pulls himself forward adding some distance.

Charlaquin said:

And that’s really all there is to it. We have talked circles around it for days, but ultimately this is what it comes down to.

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Fixed that for you

iserith said:

I can't say for sure that's what the designers intended. What I can say is that in order to arrive at a DC, a DM needs to judge an approach to a goal. A solid approach to a goal might garner automatic success. A terrible approach to a goal might garner automatic failure. Somewhere in the middle are varying degrees of difficulty that are uncertain.

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When I say "Probably the designers intended DMs to choose a difficulty class" I am thinking about the location of the mention of stunts and unusually long distances in Athletics, under Ability Checks, in the same chapter where Difficulty Classes are detailed, below the words "The Athletics skill reflects aptitude in certain kinds of Strength checks". I think one can say for sure that the designers intended a check to be made against DCs guided by those listed on the table, for jumping unusually long distances. Or to put it another way, if that's not what they intended, they took the most remarkable steps to obfuscate their meaning.

iserith said:

The rules cannot set forth what that might be as it only mentions a goal, not an approach. The player adds that part when describing what he or she wants to do so that the DM can make a judgment as to uncertainty and, if applicable, a DC. Different DMs will make different judgments as to that.

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The Using Ability Scores section goes to a lot of trouble to lay out an approach. It's a method that is at the heart of 5e. "An ability check tests a character's or monster's innate talent and training in an effort to overcome a challenge. The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results. For every ability check, the DM decides which of the six abilities is relevant to the task at hand and the difficulty of the task, represented by a Difficulty Class. The more difficult a task, the higher its DC. The Typical Difficulty Classes table shows the most common DCs."

That all said, I don't think we're disagreeing by much. I don't buy the rulings not rules propaganda, because it is profoundly contradicted by rule books running to hundreds of pages, that players spend good money on and use much of as written. When players cast a Magic Missile, they overwhelmingly go by the rules, i.e. roll a number of d4+1s. Or perhaps more the way I understand the rulings not rules concept is that it simply states out loud something that has always happened in PnP RPG, which is that the situations that can come up, the things that players want to do, are so wide roaming, our narratives and actors so diverse in the particulars, that no rule set will ever cover everything that we might imagine. The incompleteness of rule sets, is what calls for rulings. Rules and rulings: the rest is propaganda

I would recast your framing as - The rules set forth an approach: the group uses and as necessary modifies that approach to achieve their goals.

Maxperson said:

I was under the impression that we were debating what is meant by jumping an unusual distance under the athletics section. The jump section just helps define the parameters of what is usual and what is unusual. During that discussion, you made an error with RAW and I helpfully corrected the mistake is all.

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That's hugely amusing! I was responding to an assumption that I thought you were making, which is that a check would be needed to jump say Strength in feet (being a value included in "up to Strength").

It seems we were in fact in furious agreement that a check is only called for (under Athletics) when a character wants to cover more than that distance! The shortcut I use to find DCs is essentially to just make them the distance to be jumped, however inverting that slightly to say that the jumper jumps either their check, or their Strength, whichever is lower. That's a quick and easy way to determine an unusually long jump distance. Admitted there are mechanical incongruities, but I've found in play those really don't matter and in many cases could be considered a feature.

FWIW I do not think the designers envisioned doing as I do. I think they envisioned instead (and this is spelled out in the Using Abilities section) that a DM will decide if an unusual jump is easy, hard etc, and set a DC. A DM might feel Strength +1 is very easy, for DC of 5. Whereas given a Strength of 10 I would give a DC of 11 for that.