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

pemerton · Oct 22, 2018

Maxperson said:
You get experience in D&D by killing things. It's in the rules, so I learned it..............in the rules. Without killing and being intimately familiar with killing and people trying to kill them. And before you go on about how NPCs in 5e don't need stats and levels, a champion who has to fight does. They need everything a PC needs for combat, since a PC may end up fighting him.

I thought in 5e you could get XP for defeating foes, not just killing them.

And I didn't know there was any rule in 5e that NPCs need to earn XP to gain levels; or to put it another way, I dind't know that in 5e the XP rules were a model of how things work in-fiction as opposed to a device for establishing the progression of the PCs.

pemerton · Oct 22, 2018

5ekyu said:
Nope... Acquainted with meting it out

That's not what the text says! I'll quote it again (Basic PDF, p 24):

[T]hey are well acquainted with death, both meting it out and staring it defiantly in the face.

This syntax is not ambiguous in any way. Who is the subject of meting it out? They, ie, fighters. The 5e Basic rules say that fighters are acquainted with death because (among other things) they mete it out.

pemerton · Oct 22, 2018

Aldarc said:
And do we also wind up with message boards choked with hyperbolic unrealistic examples like these? No thx.

Right. If one reads [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s post, or the text of the game he posted, T-Rexes walking unnoticed through town has nothing to do with it.

Hussar · Oct 23, 2018

5ekyu said:
No, not likely a big thing but also not a lot in my ecperience who want or expect their bears and trexs to be town friendly either.

Nobody expects this. No one is arguing for this. Remember, it cuts both ways. While that element is backgrounded, the player has no access to it either. So, no bringing your T-Rex into town and hiding it somehow so you can use it while in town.

Hussar · Oct 23, 2018

5ekyu said:
And we wind up with towns choked with trexs cuz nobody has to bother with checking their trex at the gate anymore? No thx.

Also, the bigger key is this, **if you pick a trex** over a more town friendly large dog **and then** you ask me to background thectrex in town issue **but** you are perfectly fine using the trex combat edges over the large dog when fights break out - in or out of town - then tell me how that is different from backdooring my god hates undead and walking around with undead?

In both cases you made a choice that had good and bad options and you wsnt to backdoor around the bad but keep the good ones.

If i can backdoor my way around people noticing and taking bad reaction to my trex on main street and thats fine, why cant i bavkdoor my way around Cuthbert hates undead and would react badly to my train of bone fodder?

Again, this is a complete misreading of what Backgrounding is. But, if that's your interpretation, then I can see why you would argue against it. I would too.

BryonD · Oct 23, 2018

pemerton said:
And I didn't know there was any rule in 5e that NPCs need to earn XP to gain levels; or to put it another way, I dind't know that in 5e the XP rules were a model of how things work in-fiction as opposed to a device for establishing the progression of the PCs.

A thousand times: THIS

XP are the default mechanic for establishing a reasonable time to quantum up. They work fine as a meta-mechanic. But get really awkward when viewed as a simulation of anything and even worse when applied off-screen

Maxperson · Oct 23, 2018

Nagol said:
Galahad would beg to differ.

As [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is so quick to bring up when book characters are used against him, characters written for a book are very different from ones in an RPG.

Maxperson · Oct 23, 2018

Lanefan said:
Not quite.

You get experience in D&D by defeating things. "Defeat" doesn't always have to mean that the foe dies, and can't at all when what's being defeated is a trap or a riddle or some other environmental challenge.

Might want to go back and give those rules another look...

Sure, in a white room I suppose it's possible to go to a high enough level to be king's champion without ever killing a single creature. In actual play, it doesn't work out that way. It's not at all reasonable to think that a fighter reached 10th level or so by disarming traps and solving riddles, or that in all of the fights it took to reach that level, nothing died. The odds of that happening is probably around the odds of my winning 1.6 billion tomorrow night. If I win, I will happily concede the point.

Maxperson · Oct 23, 2018

pemerton said:
I thought in 5e you could get XP for defeating foes, not just killing them.

As I mention above, this is a white room scenario. While it's true that you get XP for defeating foes, it's absurd in the extreme to think that you would reach 10th or so level without killing anything.

And I didn't know there was any rule in 5e that NPCs need to earn XP to gain levels; or to put it another way, I dind't know that in 5e the XP rules were a model of how things work in-fiction as opposed to a device for establishing the progression of the PCs.

Are you really suggesting that the king's champion came out of the womb at 10th level? If not, then he had to earn those levels somehow, and that how is via exp. That's the mechanic by which the fighter class gains levels, PC or not.

Also, in the DMG when you create an NPC using classes and levels, you can create them as you would a PC. That means that the NPC has experience points that he had to earn somewhere. You also have adventuring NPCs that are run like PCs.

Level means something and the measure used to get those levels is XP.

Hussar · Oct 23, 2018

BryonD said:
A thousand times: THIS

XP are the default mechanic for establishing a reasonable time to quantum up. They work fine as a meta-mechanic. But get really awkward when viewed as a simulation of anything and even worse when applied off-screen

Sorry [MENTION=957]BryonD[/MENTION], laughed at this because the typo was really funny.

Time to quantum up really needs to be a battlecry for my next superhero character. lol

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

pemerton

Legend

pemerton

Legend

pemerton

Legend

Hussar

Legend

Hussar

Legend

BryonD

Hero

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus

Hussar

Legend

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