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

iserith said:

The DM doesn't need to ask for checks, unprompted by a player's description of what he or she wants to do, to provide information. He or she can just... give them the information when describing the environment. If the players want more information, they can take effective action to achieve that which may or may not call for an ability check. There is really no reason in my view to gate information necessary to take action behind a check that both assumes the action of the character (not the DM's role) and can also fail, leaving the players without the very information they need to act.

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I disagree, with respect! I do it because I have a very wide breadth of experience in my group, and prompting basic checks sets the expectation that there are clues for the characters to locate. My players know that they are under no requirement to actually make said checks, however; if they think that their character wouldn't or couldn't make that check, then that's their character and their action to take!

Nagol said:

Took me a second reading too. Replace mom with mmo (as in massive multiplayer online game) and it makes sense.

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5ekyu said:

Mom was auto-incorrected from M M O.

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See? I told you it was going to be obvious.

iserith said:

Your own loop has the player describing an action before the DM calls for the "fortune check." Why then is my assertion that you don't get to ask for a check before I describe an action "weird?"

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Because plenty of fortune mechanics in all traditional RPGS - including ability checks and including those in 5e - resolve other things about the fictional position other than the PC's actions. For example, they may resolve passive challenges or resolving resisting things that are happening to you happening to you.

Ability checks and saving throws are different things in D&D 5e.

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Which in my opinion is besides the point. In the basic RPG decision loop I described, I was describing play in all traditional RPGs. What a particular fortune roll is called isn't really important. But even if I concede that ability checks and saving throws are different things, it still doesn't prove an ability check in and of itself forces a PC to take some action.

I would say that saving throws are somewhat at odds with 5e's "How to Play" and I surmise included as they are for nostalgic purposes. My position has always been about ability checks though and nothing else in the context of 5e.

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I'd have to see the text of 5e your opinion is inspired by before I'd give that any credence. But more to the point, you seem to have something very particular in mind and I'm completely unable to imagine how you came to your position. Perhaps some real examples of bad DMing which illustrate your point would clarify to me what you are thinking.

Different games demand different approaches.

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I've ran dozens of games. All of them use the decision making loop I described. I concede that I know of from the rules of other games at least two other decision making loops, but I've never played those games and in my experience people who normally play D&D also don't play those games and can't even imagine what those decision making loops are like because they are so vastly different from traditional D&D's model. 5e is certainly NOT vastly different from traditional D&D's model and I'm not yet ready to concede it requires - much less specifies clearly in the rules - a process of play radically different from 3e or 1e.

Sorry, I will not address or discuss specific examples which only serve to muddle rather than explain in my experience.

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Oh, well never mind then.

I don't (and can't) care what you roll behind the screen. I won't be aware of it, presumably. Again, my position is don't ask me to make a check for an action I haven't described. It's very simple.

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But if you concede that I can make an ability check behind the screen and it not force an action on the player, surely you then have to concede that there is no link between ability checks and actions? I'm still struggling to understand where the link comes from in your head. How did you get burned by a DM so badly that you are defending yourself with this sort of take on how a game is to be played?

I will add that passive checks aren't resolving characters being passive. They are performing a task repeatedly. This is described in the rules under "Passive Checks." The player needs to declare what that task is e.g. "Keeping Watch for hidden dangers while we explore the dungeon." Otherwise, the DM is assuming what the character is doing which is not advisable in my view.

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That's purely splitting hairs. I don't demand that a player tell me that he is listening in order to hear things. Most peoples hearing works whether they want it to or not. That's just the nature of hearing. If the players collectively take the action of holding still and listening, it might make them better at hearing, but it isn't necessary in order to hear - certainly not if you are playing Iszeka the Keen-Eared Elf (or whatever).

I didn't even bring up railroading, so I'm not sure why this is relevant.

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Railroading is the act of taking away a players agency by forcing them to take actions. It's your contention that every time a DM asks for an ability test that it forces them to take an action. Your whole argument is based around the idea that by asking for an ability check before the player declares an action the DM is imposing an action on the player. That never occurred to me because I've literally never seen it happen, and it seemed to me that while many ability checks occurred as the result of a player action that they could occur for many other reasons. I'm guessing that once you got burned by a DM that tried to handwave something and it involved an ability check and you got a legitimate beef against whatever injustice happened there and have applied a particular rule or guideline to a general case it doesn't in fact cover.

The DM decides when dice are rolled. When the DM makes that decision, I prefer it if the results are not fudged. Unless you're calling into question my preferences, I think this line of discussion is concluded.

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I'm not actually calling into question that preference. I'm well aware most players don't want their DM to fudge or railroad them or anything of the sort. It's one of the reasons I hide it; not because I'm ashamed of the technique, but because artful illusionism is the technique and if you take the curtain off it's like showing how the magic trick is done - no one really wants that, because usually the magic turns out to be a pretty tawdry trick. And I'm well aware some players would prefer I did every single roll in the open and always stayed true to the established fiction and always played completely ruthlessly. It's just if I did that all the time, my kill counts would be much much higher than the already fairly high numbers that they tend to hover in. It is in fact an art. I will say that I completely agree with you that fudging is a crutch and often overused and often abused, and the better I get as a GM the less I do it.

So I'm not really calling into question your preferences, but rather informing you that though those might be your preferences, any good DM is going to be able to fudge with you never catching him and never knowing when or why it happened.

jimmytheccomic said:

I probably wouldn't hate you! Like I said, it's a "Red Flag", not a deal breaker.

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I used to be the self-appointed monitor of the 'house rules' forum back when we had a specific house rules forum. It didn't get much traffic, but it was more interesting to me than most of the rest of the site (which I mostly ignored at the time). There were tons and tons of bad house rules offered up for the approval of the people in the forums, often with the most earnest sincerity and even occasionally with the best of intentions.

House rules are hard to get right. I happen to think I'm pretty good at it, but I've known plenty of very good DMs that couldn't rulesmith themselves out of a paper bag. So yeah, as long as you are talking "red flags", I'd probably consider myself a red flag at least until I read my own rules.

I certainly wouldn't nerf something until I had solid evidence that it needed nerfing - 3.5 era shape changing spells for example are almost universally broken across the board and worse the brokenness invites their frequent use which in turn drastically slows down play using the finnicky highly detailed rules that they are written in.

I totally hate adversarial DMing as well. I'm not that DM, although I will accommodate a player that wants to 'step on up' and treat the game as if it was a competition, it's a competition that is rigged in his favor (and part of keeping that player happy is not letting him in on that fact).

The tightest system I've seen was 4e. It was not conducive to house rules, though I've seen some real masters of that system offer up some that seemed good to me. I'm just not conversant enough in that system to really offer up suggestions, especially considering how inflexible it is. 5e... I'd have house rules I'm sure within just a few weeks of experience with the system - if that long.

I have recently left a game I had been playing for 3 years, the issue came with a new player joining our group, the DM had him in other games he refereed. The player likes being the centre of attention. The DM likes his role playing but they spend up to 75% of the sessions and in one case the whole session just bantering back and forth with his pet goat, or discussing with bar tenders how to brew a beer, a Druid character trying to find the a nice horse to copy for his shape changing. Others players have discussed this with the DM and even called them out during the game, they acknowledge it happens but don't stop - so as of last night I am the third person to leave that group.

MNblockhead said:

Wow. What made the DM so bad that made such an ego-crushing intervention was required? How did s/he take it? Offended or relieved to have the burden removed?

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Well, I haven't spoken to the guy for more than a few minutes in the year since the events took place, so I don't think he took it well. It was a litany of things, most of which have been mentioned at various times throughout the thread!

* An enormous railroad: we had no say in the game, in the story that we were trying to tell, or the events that would happen around us. He cared nothing for player agency; it was his story we were playing, and we should be delighted by how amazing it was (it wasn't). If a player tried to stick up for themselves, it was passive aggressive, snide side comments galore, usually about metagaming or some other complaint.

* Every other session had a deus ex machina in it. For example, he had been trying to build up this "blood cult," leading to a confrontation with the cult summoning up a balor. We were level 5, but we were like, "Hell, yeah, bring it on!" because, I suppose, we were slightly suicidal and we enjoyed a challenge. This is coming from my previous campaign, The Isle of Dread, where the group would consistently get into fights that they probably shouldn't have, but still managed to pull off because luck, shenanigans, and sheer chutzpah. So, for this balor summoning, the bad guys succeeded in summoning it, but, lo and behold, a solar angel showed up and fought the balor for us, while we were expected to fight the NPCs left.

* Custom setting with no detail or lore, or basic grasp of geography. As a group, we're pretty story and lore focused (probably also my fault, because my games are lore and story focused in general), but the custom setting the DM was convinced was amazing had next to no details. Admittedly, the setting had promise, but it was so disjointed and didn't make sense, sort of like trying to read a history textbook with only one out of eight pages in it. It was incredibly annoying, because we all played characters that we really loved, but its almost as if they were spoiled by being used in such a bad campaign.

* A fundamental disregard for how the rules worked; couldn't grasp the basics of action economy, concentration (we were playing 5e, for reference), how spells worked, etc. Further, he refused to learn the mechanics, stating that, "I can't read it, its not entertaining enough," and similar excuses.

* Abhorrently slow leveling. We played for almost a year, and we made it to level 7. Level 7. Also, no treasure to speak of, either. I think the group had maybe 200 gp between all of us, from level 1 to level 7, not including gear we got with chargen.


Unfortunately, he wasn't any better as a player; he couldn't grasp that his character wasn't a superhero, and could die. I don't run a meatgrinder campaign or anything, but plot armor doesn't exist, and if the dice say your character gets eaten by a dragon, well, your character gets eaten by a dragon. He also hated when players weren't following what he thought of as "the script," going out into town or village to get into shenanigans and roleplay and have fun.

He was egged on by an individual in his other group, who were playing the same campaign, and this person spent considerable time convincing the DM that me and my ideas were bad and I was a horrible DM. Ironic, because at that same time, I just got a job writing for a TTRPG; I've yet to tell him that, because I worry it'll push him even further away from the hobby. The person was one of those people who were utterly convinced that they were correct and everything they did was perfect, despite the fact that he played a single session in my group before the group asked me to remove him from the group permanently, after he told one character to off when they objected to him playing the same class as they were. He also bitched for 20 minutes about the fact that I wouldn't let him play a chaotic evil character when every other character was some version of good.

Celebrim said:

In no fashion have I ever said that a DM ought to say what a PC is doing. It is after all a player's character.

My contention with you is that in no fashion do ability checks, skill checks, savings throws, or any other fortune test necessarily state what the PC is doing either. I'm struggling really to understand that contention of yours. In the 30 years I have playing, I've never had anyone intrinsically link the idea of a roll to a PC action as if every action implied a roll or every roll implied an action. And when I listed out ways to railroad your players, never did it occur to me that an approach was 'call for an ability check' or 'call for a skill check'. Many abilities and skills represent always on sorts of things that are used to resist or overcome obstacles passively, without a need to call them out. If the game is taking place in a salt pan in ferocious heat, I'm going to be calling for Survival checks or Endurance (or some equivalent check depending on what the system calls them) regardless of whether you take an explicit action or not because the ability check doesn't represent in a direct way what you are doing, but rather only how you resist what is being done to you by something - in this case the elements.

Now of course, I concede that you could decide that you don't want to win the check, and you want your character to deliberately do things to fail that test, and I would allow that, but generally speaking that's an exception that basically has never ever come up and if it did, I'd resolve it as "taking a zero on your check". The fact that I called the test still doesn't force an action on your part.

Maybe I'd understand your position better if you explained to me a common game circumstance were a DM calls for ability checks that do impose unwanted actions on the player?

Or perhaps we should go back to that RPG loop again. Because there is an different decision making loop you can use that if misused does do what I think you are actually complaining about, but it's not one I've ever seen applied to a game of D&D - and frankly its so modern that it probably never even entered into the mind of Gygax, whose examples of play (and whatever his faults, Gygax gave very clear illustration of the processes of play by example) never touched on it.

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"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." (Basic Rules, page 58)

Therefore, if you are calling for me to make an ability check, my character must be attempting an action of some kind. Otherwise, there can be no check. There are additional qualifiers in the DMG as to the task being somewhere between impossible and trivially easy and carrying with it a meaningful consequence of failure.

So, don't ask me to make a check until I've described what I want to do.

MarkB said:

Skill checks aren't just about what you're doing. They can also be about what you know, or what you perceive. That's especially true of passive checks.

I get that you don't want the DM to declare what your character is doing. Do you get that a DM can be implementing skills in such a way that calling for a check doesn't dictate what the character is doing, especially when those checks involve things like knowledge and senses that may be independent of any specific volition on the character's part?

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There are no "skill checks" in D&D 5e. There are ability checks which may or may not have a skill proficiency applied to them. Ability checks are necessarily resolving an action by the character. That is the definition of an ability check as I point out here. Passive checks are just a special kind of ability check that doesn't involve any die rolls.

If the DM is calling for an ability check and I have not declared an action, the DM is establishing that my character has done something that has an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure. Which is not the DM's role.

I get that many DMs do this regardless of what games they're running, but I've always wondered how many people actually thought this approach through. Now I have a better idea.

Inchoroi said:

I disagree, with respect! I do it because I have a very wide breadth of experience in my group, and prompting basic checks sets the expectation that there are clues for the characters to locate. My players know that they are under no requirement to actually make said checks, however; if they think that their character wouldn't or couldn't make that check, then that's their character and their action to take!

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Another way to set expectations is to say "After I describe the environment, you can do stuff and, in the doing, you might find some clues. So, what do you do?"

iserith said:

If the DM is calling for an ability check and I have not declared an action, the DM is establishing that my character has done something that has an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure. Which is not the DM's role.

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Pfft. The DM has established that your character has existed and noticed things around him. There are hills worth dying on, but that doesn't strike me as one.