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The details of how it happened will obviously not be established when a player simply "player just made up" whatever details are needed to get the GM to stop asking questions that block their solution.
No one expects it to happen that way. There's a reason it's called "Players working WITH their DM" and vice-versa. They both establish the story, under their respective roles. We're not talking about some other game, or some other way to play than what everyone is used to!
That permissiveness towards "player just made up" also works to ensure that whatever established details will be dismissed & discarded with some other JIT solution that avoids any hurdles created by an old creation of some prior session. Worse still is the disruption caused when the GM tries to reintroduce that old contact that the players forgot when the creator denies it by blaming the GM for getting confused or whatever.
As is often the case, I'm afraid I'm not following you. You tend to posit a level of competition and animosity between players and DMs that I just don't see.
I mean, I've seen it happen - back when I was in high school - but even when I play with teenagers these days, they respect the DM's authority. And the DM respects their agency. - I call it "Playing Nice With Others" and it's very basic to the game.
Note: The above is my opinion which I humbly submit to the assembly, knowing full well that it will be objected to, and under no circumstances do I expect anyone to submit to my views, nor do I think that there is only one way to play. In fact, I fully suspect that we all play very nice and successful games that differ only in the details, most of which would probably never come up if we were to play together.
So do you guys realise that you have been arguing for two hundred pages about a feature that will be removed in 5.5.?
Like regardless of whether the sailor had a contact on board or not, that ship has sailed.
I'm fairly certain that WotC has said that they want to reduce "Mother, May I" type player abilities and features from the game. I think that this thread demonstrates why they made that decision.
It feels like we're always jousting against competing stereotypes. At one table the DM is driving a train to the underworld and never takes any player suggestions into account no matter how good the idea and how little effort it would take. At the other table the player wants Tiamat to be killed by the loophole in the combination of their cantrip, background, and common magic item that they read about on reddit and they call the DM a monster if they say no that's not how it works.
[Note: In case I mistyped something, the DM is supposed to be the unreasonable person in the first example and the player in the second.]
Far-fetched isn't particularly important, because the details of how it happened would be established in the fiction. And far-fetched stuff has happened in the real world all the time, throughout history.
On top of that, the worlds of D&D are fantastical, so fantastical parts of the fiction might (they don't need to be, it depends on the details of the individual campaign) be an important part of it. But there's no reason that they need to stoop to allowing the illogical, and there's no innate "player entitlement" involved.
Beyond that, far fetched is a common trope in media. Books, movies, TV shows, etc. have something far fetched happen all the time. As long as it doesn't happen often, why not on occasion have a merchant happen to be in a city in another prime world that arrived not long ago on one of his spelljamming ships or some other coincidence?
Used infrequently, it becomes a great tool and not something that breaks immersion or serious play.
if that is his point, then I missed that, that is obviously true, you can always find a way / an excuse for why it works, however unlikely that rationale is
as long as you do not care who it happens to, sure.
I something has a one in a million chance of working and there are a billion attempts, some will work. That still means your chance at the next attempt is one in a million however
yes it is, that is the whole point of you knowing that someone
“You know how to get messages to and from your contact, even over great distances; specifically, you know the local messengers, corrupt caravan masters, and seedy sailors who can deliver messages for you.”
it even says this is ‘specifically’ how you do it…
I'm not following the logic of what you're saying. You seem to interpret the clause after the semicolon as a set of conditions to be met before you can communicate with your contact, whereas I'm reading it as reiterating and elaborating on the "how" in the first clause. I'm not sure how to bridge this gap. Here's how I'm understanding your interpretation:
If you know local messengers, corrupt caravan masters, or seedy sailors who can deliver messages for you, then you know how to get messages to and from your contact, even over great distances.
Is that about how you read the feature? Because it definitely isn't the same as how I do.
Here's how I'm understanding your interpretation:
If you know local messengers, corrupt caravan masters, or seedy sailors who can deliver messages for you, then you know how to get messages to and from your contact, even over great distances.
Is that about how you read the feature?
More or less, it also says that you know the local ones, but yes, if you are somewhere unfamiliar and do not know a messenger there, then you cannot get a message to your contact
It’s right there in the feature description “specifically, you know the local messengers, corrupt caravan masters, and seedy sailors who can deliver messages for you.”
That is specifically how you get the message to your contact, you cannot just hand it off to anyone or put it in a bottle and throw it in the ocean.
You can possibly get to learn about new messengers in the area you are in, but there might simply not be any as well, depends on the scenario
same as me, if this is the how, then what do you do in an area where you know no messengers?
Does such an area not exist? If so, that means that you do know all the messengers, everywhere in the world and across all planes, and there are some everywhere, just to ensure that you can always reach your contact… or does local maybe mean the ones in the area you grew up in / start out in… I know which of the two I consider more feasible…
No one expects it to happen that way. There's a reason it's called "Players working WITH their DM" and vice-versa. They both establish the story, under their respective roles. We're not talking about some other game, or some other way to play than what everyone is used to!
The player just made up phrase in quotes was a link for a reason, the point of contention is "sometimes", as a result the GM is already working with the player because there might be other situations where it does make sense. It literally links to a post where someone is talking about a player simply making up a ship that travels to a remote &far off area nowhere near where their sailor background had previously established traveling through. Plus that back and forth went on for quite some time in both directions back & I think that to some degree it's still continuing. Why are you acting like I presented some far out situation nobody is talking about or considering?
That should clear up quite a bit of the confusion you expressed below, but I'll continue.
As is often the case, I'm afraid I'm not following you. You tend to posit a level of competition and animosity between players and DMs that I just don't see.
It has literally been playing out for dozens of pages and you are attempting to find a middle ground between "sometimes it won't make any sense or can't be reasonable given circumstances the player might not be aware of" and "you can't if the player literally just made up some reason that they could get it". I think that you are attributing animosity at the gm where the root cause is extreme apathy on the player side of the GM screen. The hypothetical example of choice shifted from more common offenders like noble to the FR criminal in Ravenloft because the setting itself adds so many clear & unquestionable reasons for why this hypothetical is definitely one of those times. If "JIT" through you for a loop it's used in areas like staffing and some types of coding to describe where something is done as close to just as its needed &stands for just in time.
I mean, I've seen it happen - back when I was in high school - but even when I play with teenagers these days, they respect the DM's authority. And the DM respects their agency. - I call it "Playing Nice With Others" and it's very basic to the game.
Not that I doubt that it occurred, I'm going to feed this through Occam's & Hitchen's Razors to shred & dismiss the anecdote because we don't need it when this thread alone provides examples of the very sort of mindset I described & we are on page 250 with those examples going back dozens of pages if not dozens of dozens of pages. posts 496 & 497 were made literally demonstrating that while I was typing this & noticed because I clicked the show new posts thing before hitting submit.
Note: The above is my opinion which I humbly submit to the assembly, knowing full well that it will be objected to, and under no circumstances do I expect anyone to submit to my views, nor do I think that there is only one way to play. In fact, I fully suspect that we all play very nice and successful games that differ only in the details, most of which would probably never come up if we were to play together.
All I'm getting from this bit of your post that you yourself drew attention to with italics is some kind of moralizing phrased into a club so I'll assume there was a misunderstanding & clarify why it's not needed.
No matter your stance on if the 2014 background features are a good or bad thing, I think that we can all agree that by & large we can all agree that the discussion has been largely about what we view as the problematic conflicts that arise during play as a result of those incomplete features or poor wording no matter what side of the gm screen we think is where the trouble lies.
