D&D 5E What DM flaw has caused you to actually leave a game?

Lanefan said:

at what point during play is the damage intended to become part of the fiction by your interpretation?

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In D&D, damage is a mechanical phenomenon - an adjustment to a hit point total. In the fiction, a character is hurt or distracted or worn down or otherwise brought closer to defeat. This occurs when the relevant action is resolved. In a system - like 5e - that permits interrupts of various sorts (like the Shield spell and the dropping-to-zero rules), the action is resolved once all the interrupts have either been declared or foregone.

The idea that declaring an interrupt effect is "time travelling" is what I am pushing back against. That's clearly not what the 5e authors intended - and the issue of whether damage is rolled simultaneously with the to hit roll, or subsequently, clearly doesn't change that.

Hussar said:

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree on this one. Virtually every interupt power in 5e is used before damage is rolled. It is, however, typically done AFTER a hit is declared. So, technically, they are time travel powers since it can turn a hit into a non-hit.

That of course presumes that die rolling corresponds to actions in the game world. Which, IMO, they don't. You don't actually know the result of an action until the action is completed. So, there is no "hit" event separate from a "damage" event. There is only one event, which remains in a nebulous state until every game action has been taken. So, a "hit" might be damaging or it might not really be a hit until such time as everyone at the table signs off on it.

I'd point out that this is how 5e handles not killing as well. You hit, you deal damage, AND you declare that you aren't killing the target BEFORE anything actually happens in the fiction. Earlier editions avoided all of this because they didn't really have any mechanics that interrupted actions. ((Yes, yes, I realize that 4e had lots of them and I'm sure that somewhere in earlier editions there were examples, but, before 4e, it wasn't something common and it certainly didn't happen every single round)) There is no actual time travel. It's a case of people coming up from earlier editions misapplying how the mechanics actually work in 5e.

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I want to say that, so far from barking up the wrong tree, I agree completely with you! There's not time travel; and the view that there is results from misinterpreting the relationship between mechanical procedures and fictional events.

And I still think that someone who describes these powers as "time travelling" ie who misdescribes them, is undermining their credibility as an expositor and interpreter of the 5e rules.

EDIT: The timing of rolls and revealing of information relevant to decision-making seems to me to be completely a matter of table convention.

I think it would be a little harsh for a GM to roll the dice and call for the player to declare Shield or not before indicating whether or not the result is a hit. But not completely out of the question - after all, that's how we handled similar Rolemaster spells back in the day!

More generally, I can think of four stages of revelation: (1) I've rolled an attack against you; (2) I've rolled an attack against you, and here's the number on the d20; (3) I've rolled an attack against you, and it's a hit; (4) I've rolled an attack against you, and it's a hit for X damage. (I guess there's also a 2.5 option, where the GM tell you whether or not it's a hit but doesn't tell you the number on the die and so you don't know whether or not it's a critical hit.)

The more information you get before you're precluded from using Shield, the better off you are. But I don't think the rules dictate which of the 4 approaches should be adopted. This seems a matter of table convention, like most other aspects of rolling dice and declaring results in D&D. (Contrast eg Marvel Heroic RP, where there is a rule that all dice are rolled in the open, and where there is only a single roll to resolve an action, so a player always has full knowledge in declaring any sort of reaction or "do over" ability.)

Not quite [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]. While it does vary from ability to ability (some fighters, for example, can impose disadvantage on an attack but, by the rules, must declare they are doing so (it uses their reaction, so, they can only do it once per round) before any dice are rolled. OTOH, a Shield Spell states:

PHB p 275 said:

Casting Time 1 reaction, which you take when you are hit by an attack or targeted by the magic missile spell

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But, by and large, at least, as far as I can think right now, nothing lets you change things after damage has been rolled. That being said, it is left unstated a few times. A rogue's Uncanny Dodge ability, for example, allows you to "use your reacction to halve the attack's damage against you". There is no actual statement on the timing of that ability.

In any case, the general rule would certainly be that any reaction is used before damage is rolled. With specific beating general of course.

Maxperson said:

And this statement is EXACTLY why you and [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] are assuming that the DM will act in bad faith. Despot is NOT the proper term as a despot uses his power in a cruel and oppressive way, which is the opposite of how the vast majority of DMs use it.



See above. Absolute power does not equal despotism. Nor is the statement that the DM CAN overrule the preferences. The ability to do so(fact) does not mean that the DM will do it.

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Also just to add - a GM does not have absolute authority over anything or specifically over ANYONE. He is not the RULER.

That's because at any moment each and every person at the table can decide to say "no" and completely end the "authority" they have given the GM.

If the "players" choose to they can get up, decide you are not the GM anymore, decide someone else is GM and start their own game with the same characters in their own view of the same situation( s) and that's it.

No violence needed to get rid of you. Just " we revoke the authority we let you play with."

The GM can refuse to GM but if he wants to game must find other players to then convince them to give authority.

There is a direct link between "how much enjoyment do I as GM provide to my players" and "the authority i am given by them" in that without the former I likely not to keep the latter.

But, the choice to characterize a group agreeing to give the GM more control as being despotic GMed is telling.

Hussar said:

Not quite [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]. While it does vary from ability to ability (some fighters, for example, can impose disadvantage on an attack but, by the rules, must declare they are doing so (it uses their reaction, so, they can only do it once per round) before any dice are rolled. OTOH, a Shield Spell states:



But, by and large, at least, as far as I can think right now, nothing lets you change things after damage has been rolled. That being said, it is left unstated a few times. A rogue's Uncanny Dodge ability, for example, allows you to "use your reacction to halve the attack's damage against you". There is no actual statement on the timing of that ability.

In any case, the general rule would certainly be that any reaction is used before damage is rolled. With specific beating general of course.

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Allow me to add this bit...

The game specifies that as the default rule triggered reactions events happen **after the trigger** unless stated otherwise.

That statement means the trend in the rules will be that they only need to mention the EXCEPTIONS in the individual rules.

So any sort of conclusions based on a nose count of how many times interrupt is specifically called out or mentioned is either uninformed or deceptive in its nature since they set it up so that it was only necessary to mention the exceptions.

On despotism: clearly describing a ruler as an enlightened despot is not intended as a slander! And if one takes away the enlightened, or puts it inverted commas, that's not a slip-up but a deliberate expression of opinion about whether enlightened despotism is a genuinely feasable or desirable mode of government.

Likewise in the D&D context: if someone deliberately describes a certain GM-ing approach as despotic, and when pushed to include the "englightened" doesn't do so, that suggest they think that approach is inherently at odds with good RPGing. Just because you disagree with them doesn't mean they've made a terminological error: they've conveyed exactly what they mean to convey!

To me, the principal virtue of RPGing as an activity, which distinguishes it from wargaming, boardgaming and watching a film with friends, is the collective participation in creating a fiction. The sort of approach to GMing that [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] is characterising as despotic seems to push against that virtue; it certainly doesn't seem to push in favour of it.

Another virtue of RPGing is skilfully playing the fiction - this is a secondary consideration for me, but still important as it is one of the things that distinguishes RPGing from pure storytelling. This virtue can be reconciled with GM authority over the fiction, provided that the GM is fair in adjudication. This is why classic D&D advice like that found in Moldvay Basic or Mike Carr's B1 places such emphasis on fairness in GMing. But frankly, ones the fiction gets more complicated than the pretty simple situations found in classic D&D dungeon-crawling I think the distinction between fair adjudication of the players playing the fiction and deciding what the outcome is based on one's own conception of where the fiction should ge becomes increasingly hard to maintain. For instance, deciding what happens when I (as my PC) poke a wall with a 10' pole can be a matter of fair adjudication; deciding what happens when I (as my PC) slyly mention to the duchess at the party that I believe the duke is having an affair with her chambermaid is a different kettle of fish altogether. If I (as my PC) hope that the duchess's response will be to walk up and slap her husband, rather than (say) leave the room in tears while cursing at me, I (as a player) will be rather sceptical of a GM's determination that the only true extrapolation of the fictional situation is the latter.

So even this secondary virtue, in the context of reasonably complex fictional situations, does not seem to favour the approach to GMing that [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION] is describing, and probably pushes against it.

A reader of this post may disagree - about the virtues of RPGing, or about my analysis of what sorts of tecniques are well-suited to those virtues - but that's not a terminological dispute. Nor is it a dispute about the good faith of the GM. For many people, the objection to (so-called) enlightened despotism isn't about the englightenment but about the despotism - no matter the good faith of the ruler, the critic regards despotisim as an inherently inapt way to produce sound government that serves the common good.

Likewise with respect to GMing - my objection to sole GM authority over the fiction isn't that the GM will abuse that power but rather than such power is incapable of producing a RPG experience that delivers what I regard as the virtues of RPGing: shared creation of a fiction; and the experience of playing that fiction (given that the fiction in my RPGing will be closer to the duchess example than the 10' pole example).

Hussar said:

by and large, at least, as far as I can think right now, nothing lets you change things after damage has been rolled.

<snip>

In any case, the general rule would certainly be that any reaction is used before damage is rolled.

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But the Shield spell doesn't state this. Nor does Uncanny Dodge.

Imagine a context where the GM says "It's the NPCs mage's turn. <rolls some dice> Tara, you take 11 hp from magic missiles!" That would not be atypical in D&D play, at least as I've experienced it. Presumably it doesn't preclude Tara's player declaring a Shield spell. Or an Uncanny Dodge.

I think describing it as "time travel" is ridiculous whether or not the damage dice have been rolled. In the fiction, there's no difference between the hitting and the dealing of the damage. The latter is part and parcel of the former. The only reason it's an issue at the table is because - purely for gameplay reasons - there's a desire to draw a limit on player knowledge at one point rather than another. As I already posted, Rolemaster makes the player make the decision at the targetting step; and another option would be to insist that the player gets to know if the result is a hit or not, but not see the dice or know what AC has been hit by the attack, but the 5e rules simply don't prescribe the process in that degree of detail (in recognition of the fact that different D&D tables have long had different practices in this respect).

So at some tables Shield spells are occasionaly peirced by attacks (where the to hit result was 5 or more above what was needed) while at others, where the GM declares attacks in terms of AC struck, a Shield is never wasted (and this will nearly always be the way that players declare attacks). Whether or not knowledge of the damage roll is also a factor in the decision-making about using a reaction is just another aspect of table practice (except for those cases where the rules expressly state the contrary).

5ekyu said:

The game specifies that as the default rule triggered reactions events happen **after the trigger** unless stated otherwise.

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Here is the text on reactions (Basic PDF p 70):


So there is no general rule that reactions happen after the trigger. You seem to be thinking of the "ready" action, which (p 72) involves declaring a "perceivable circumstance" as a trigger and which then allows the readied action to be taken "right after the trigger".

If a Shield spell or Uncanny Dodge worked in this way, then the trigger would have to be being targetted by an attack as that is an (in fiction) perceivable circumstance which can be followed by creating an arcane shield or dodging the attack. But a to hit roll succeeding is not an in fiction perceivable circumstance that occurs prior to the damage being rolled!

There is an in fiction perceivable circumstance that occurs between being targetted and being struck, which is something like "How dangerous the attack seems to be as it hurtles towards me!" But D&D doesn't have any procedural step of combat resolution that corresponds to this. (Contrast some other RPGs where, eg, this might be reflected by the number of dice in the attacker's pool.)

This means that if a player declares a readied action along the lines of "I leap in front of any attack against Tara that seems likely to do more than simply scratch her" I don't think the 5e rules provide any easy way to resolve that. Because we can't tell whether or not the attack is likely to do more than simply scratch Tara until we see the to hit and damage roll. At which point the "after the trigger has finished" rule suggests that Tara has been struck by the attacker and suffered the consequences of that.

Aldarc said:

This just underlines my point.

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I don't know about that.
Enlightened Dungeon/Games Despot just doesn't work for me and didn't for Gygax.

Presumably [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] agrees with me on this, since he quotes Gygax and 1e so often upthread, unless we are picking and choosing.

Aldarc said:

"Absolute power" is also negative, but that did not stop you from describing how you envision the role. But as I said before, you can rename it to "autocrat" or something else less derogatory if you like. But that's again missing the forest for the trees.

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Why not just leave it at Dungeon Master as the original game makers intended?

So a player came to me the other day with a great original backstory for his PC, checking with me if it's ok for the campaign.
It is a 10th level campaign so I told him - his advancement from 9th to 10th required something significant like the other existing PCs who destroyed a beholder who had been feeding on the essence of a fallen deity and once they slew the outer realm being they were a-washed by ectoplasm and supernatural energies which allowed them to awaken their minds and level up from 9th to 10th.

So he came back to me with something truly creative that fits so well into the realm lore and our multi-campaign story touching on his deity. He was not so sure if was going to allow it - but to his surprise I did.

As a Dungeon Master my input was to ensure that his advancement from 9th to 10th reflected something significant that would have happened to this character's past to ensure that it was consistent with the other PCs in the campaign.

Am I really a despot for that?

All too often, polarised lines seem to be drawn on these forum discussions, and just because someone is on the one side, people envision the worst qualities, when the line is very often blurred. My role as a DM is to ensure the consistency and integrity of the campaign not to crush PC creativity, and yet I still side with DM overall control because it makes sense given I'm the primary storyteller and can see the big picture.