D&D 5E Menacing and Diplomat from UA Skill Feats

[Corwin]

Really?

Yep. Really.

So you've decided that even if Han has the menacing feat, he can't use it against Vader.

Until you respond to my previous post regarding this hypothetical example, the example you brought to the discussion, I don't see how I can keep up with you on it. Because you aren't giving enough information with which to base an opinion.

You are literally saying "I don't care what the feat says, it's not going to work". That, IMHO is the very definition of adversarial play.

It's hard to take serious the opinion that 5e is written to be played adversarialy (thanks for that, satyrn). Even if such a statement was due to the application of hyperbolic examples as a basis.

 

[Gradine]

I think telling a player "no you can't do that even if the rules say you can*" is adversarial.


*[EDIT]Just to be clear - that should probably be "telling my players they can't with no justification other than I said so". There are going to be times when the players can't do something for reasons that are not clear to them at the moment.

This is precisely the DMing style that I'm advocating.

Giving adversaries additional characteristics designed to negate a character's abilities for no reason other than to negate the character's abilities is also adversarial. In other words, a fire elemental is going to be immune to fire but if all of my NPCs are suddenly immune to fire because I don't like feature X that does fire damage, I'm just being a dick.

You can't seem to get past the idea that we're making this ruling for no other reason but to screw over the player or saying "because I said so". This is so far from what anybody on this thread, on any side, has been advocating that I can only believe it is an intentional strawman. Please drop this line of argument because literally nobody is advocating for this.

This is especially exasperating because the example you've been using to explain why these feats are problematic are actually completely logical. The powerful evil warlord should not be intimidated by a low-level scrub in the span of three-someodd-seconds in the middle of a fight. The rules say that the DM determines whether the outcome is uncertain before calling for a roll; they are well within their powers to declare there to be no chance of success; the DM is the ultimate arbiter of all ability checks and nothing within these feats have convinced me otherwise.

 

[Oofta]

It's not. For any given action declaration, the DM is charged with determining if the action has a certain or uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure. That is how the game works. It happens before rules are ever applied. Players need to understand this.

In this case, the outcome of intimidating the target is certain according to the DM - it fails, no roll. A savvy DM, in my view, will telegraph this as a thing while describing the environment so that the player understands that intimidation is not a tactic that will bear fruit.

Correct me if I'm wrong. You're stating that some NPCs are not going to be easily intimidated. I agree 100%. In my campaign the PCs fight everything from cowardly goblins to professional soldiers that are much tougher than the typical town guard soldiers. The goblins can be intimidated, by and large the soldiers cannot (it's not always quite that simple of course).

The reason I don't like the menacing feat is because if you just take the feat as written, there is no wiggle room in who can be intimidated as long as they are humanoid or what the results will be. Win an intimidate check and the target is frightened. Frightened has a very specific mechanical in game effect unless they are immune to fear.

You can always add to the feat "if the DM allows a check", but it's not what the feat says.

Some of my players are "rules lawyers"* and would be upset if I say "no because I said so". I don't understand why that is a hard concept to grasp that I would rather not upset my players.

*I'm not a rules lawyer, that doesn't mean I don't respect their opinions or point of view.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The reason I don't like the menacing feat is because if you just take the feat as written

As the DM, you don't have to, this is the Wild-West of 5e, Rulings-not-Rules, if your players start complaining that something's against the RAW, just do your worst Sly Stallone and go "I AM THE RAW!"

there is no wiggle room in who can be intimidated as long as they are humanoid or what the results will be. Win an intimidate check and the target is frightened. Frightened has a very specific mechanical in game effect unless they are immune to fear.

Sounds like a lot of wiggle room, humanoid or not, how hard the intimidate check is, whether the target is immune to fear. For that matter (specific beats general) the frightened condition could be different for a specific creature ("if the Yttrian Berserker become Frightened for any reason, it enters it's Rage and attacks the creature that imposed the condition until it or the creature are slain, while granting advantage to all attacks from other enemies").

Really, we've got room to more than just wiggle.

In other words, a fire elemental is going to be immune to fire but if all of my NPCs are suddenly immune to fire because I don't like feature X that does fire damage, I'm just being a dick.

So don't be one, but do make the figurative fire elemental immune to figurative fire, rather than banning fireball.

That said, it wouldn't hurt for the feats to punt the DC, for instance, to the DM, explicitly, to properly set player expectations.

 

[Corwin]

...if you just take the feat as written...

Found your problem right there.

 

[Satyrn]

Correct me if I'm wrong. You're stating that some NPCs are not going to be easily intimidated. I agree 100%. In my campaign the PCs fight everything from cowardly goblins to professional soldiers that are much tougher than the typical town guard soldiers. The goblins can be intimidated, by and large the soldiers cannot (it's not always quite that simple of course).

The reason I don't like the menacing feat is because if you just take the feat as written, there is no wiggle room in who can be intimidated as long as they are humanoid or what the results will be. Win an intimidate check and the target is frightened. Frightened has a very specific mechanical in game effect unless they are immune to fear.

You can always add to the feat "if the DM allows a check", but it's not what the feat says.

Some of my players are "rules lawyers"* and would be upset if I say "no because I said so". I don't understand why that is a hard concept to grasp that I would rather not upset my players.

*I'm not a rules lawyer, that doesn't mean I don't respect their opinions or point of view.

Aye.The feat seems written very much like so many of the other combat features in the game that give the expectation that they ought to apply nearly always. I expect that my gnome battlemaster's pushing strike ought to impose a save to avoid being pushed back - and when the DM rules otherwise (as he did last weekend) I except a decent explanation (which I got) but I also expect he won't do so often. That would be irritating.

Back to Menacing. I think I'd rule as a DM that Intimidating someone in combat would not have the effect this feat describes more often than I as a player would expect as reasonable for a combat feature, and thus I don't want it written so much like a combat feature.

Well. I'm not sure that makes sense.

 

[iserith]

Correct me if I'm wrong. You're stating that some NPCs are not going to be easily intimidated. I agree 100%. In my campaign the PCs fight everything from cowardly goblins to professional soldiers that are much tougher than the typical town guard soldiers. The goblins can be intimidated, by and large the soldiers cannot (it's not always quite that simple of course).

The reason I don't like the menacing feat is because if you just take the feat as written, there is no wiggle room in who can be intimidated as long as they are humanoid or what the results will be. Win an intimidate check and the target is frightened. Frightened has a very specific mechanical in game effect unless they are immune to fear.

You can always add to the feat "if the DM allows a check", but it's not what the feat says.

Some of my players are "rules lawyers"* and would be upset if I say "no because I said so". I don't understand why that is a hard concept to grasp that I would rather not upset my players.

*I'm not a rules lawyer, that doesn't mean I don't respect their opinions or point of view.

The feat does not supersede the basic functioning of the game, that is, the DM judging each fictional action declaration and deciding IF the rules - including feats - apply to that action declaration's resolution. If your players don't understand that, I highly recommend making an effort to see that they do.

"No because I said so" is not a good practice in my view. "No, because as I already mentioned when describing the NPC - well before you acted - it is not responsive to attempts to influence its behavior via intimidation..." is better. It is not a "hard concept to grasp" that you would rather not upset your players. Conflict avoidance is chiefly about setting expectations in my experience. Do that via Step 1 of the basic conversation of the game.

And even if you disagree with that simple and sensible approach, I hope you can agree that the impact on combat is minimal in most situations for the reasons I already stated.

 

[Gradine]

Let's apply this principle to PHB feats, shall we?

Athlete
* When you are prone, standing up uses only 5 feet of your movement.
* You can make a running long jump or a running high jump after moving only 5 feet on foot, rather than 10 feet.

These are both things the feat says the players can do, without condition. And yet... might the DM impose conditions, when they are appropriate? Is the DM being "adversarial" if they tell a PC with Athlete they can't stand up from prone after moving only 5 feet, because they happen to be 6' tall but the ceiling is only 4' off the floor? How about 3'? If a corridor is more than 5' long but only like, 1'6" wide, is the DM being adversarial to declare that the PC cannot run and therefore cannot activate that ability from Athlete?

Here's a better one:

Defensive Duelist
When you are wielding a finesse weapon with which you are proficient and another creature hits you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to add your proficiency bonus to your AC for that attack, potentially causing the attack to miss you.

This seems fairly cut and dry, right? You get hit by a melee attack and still have the ability to use your reaction, you get to use this feat, right?

What about if your PC can't see the attack coming? An invisible attacker successfully sneaks up behind you and hits you with a melee attack? Is the DM being adverserial to say that the PC cannot use Defensive Duelist in this case? There's nothing in the rules saying you have to be able to see the attack coming. And yet, the implicit fiction of how the feat works is fairly clear. Does the PC get to use their reaction to react to and block an attack they couldn't possibly know was coming until it hit? Or does the feat confer Spidey Senses?

I could probably dig through some class features and point out times where the DM would be well within their rights to say "no, because..." (especially if they don't follow that up with "I said so" which such a ludicrous mis-characterization of our argument that it still kind of ticks me off), because the the game empowers the DM to make exactly those kinds of rulings all the time.

I don't care what kind of literal, rules-lawyer-y player you may or may not have; whether a home-game that's lasted years (if not decades) or a pickup game with strangers at a game store, D&D is a game that requires trust, and primarily trust that the DM will referee fairly and impartially in order to maintain an internal fictional consistency. Despite your best attempts at arguing at strawmen, we've shown pretty clearly that such rulings would easily be seen not only as fair and impartial but also perfectly logical by anyone with any sense in their head. Anyone who's going to waste the table's time and energy arguing with a DM because "technically the RAW says..." is not interested in playing a fair or impartial game (the very definition of a rules lawyer is someone who will twist the words as written to every possible advantage they can receive, frequently without care of game world logic) and does not belong at that table.*

*I'll own that I'm sure there are tables full of players who all play the game that way and find such rules lawyering to be quite fun; and more power to you. But if you are a DM and you're wringing your hands over a feat that threatens the verisimilitude you obviously care about because you feel you need to appease a rules lawyer player who will only allow the feat to be interpreted a specific way, the problem is with your player and out-sized influence you've allowed them to wield over the internal consistency of your world, not with the feat.

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As a final aside, I have to say that re-reading Skulker also made me LOL since it has the exact same kind of cognitive dissonance as Stealthy supposedly has (you could be hidden from a creature, pop-out while they're looking directly at you, miss with a ranged attack, and the creature doesn't even get a chance to see you).

 

[Oofta]

The feat does not supersede the basic functioning of the game, that is, the DM judging each fictional action declaration and deciding IF the rules - including feats - apply to that action declaration's resolution. If your players don't understand that, I highly recommend making an effort to see that they do.

"No because I said so" is not a good practice in my view. "No, because as I already mentioned when describing the NPC - well before you acted - it is not responsive to attempts to influence its behavior via intimidation..." is better. It is not a "hard concept to grasp" that you would rather not upset your players. Conflict avoidance is chiefly about setting expectations in my experience. Do that via Step 1 of the basic conversation of the game.

And even if you disagree with that simple and sensible approach, I hope you can agree that the impact on combat is minimal in most situations for the reasons I already stated.

I've always played that specific overrides general. YMMV.

But let's take a realistic game scenario. The PCs are mid-to-low level (say, level 7). They aren't broadly known yet, they are facing soldiers they've never faced before. My soldiers are Champions - CR 9 from Volo's Guide.

I view these champions as seasoned professionals. They aren't named characters, but I also don't see how they could be easily intimidated, especially by a PC they've never heard of. In addition, at level 7 the DC of a spell will be around 14, while the intimidate check will average around 19 (although it will be a lot "swingier"). Since it's not a saving throw they don't get there 2/day Indomitable reroll of a failed save.

By the wording of the feat there is nothing that stops the intimidate.

As far as frightened not having much effect, I completely disagree. They go from +9 to hit, average damage 12 points per hit to an effective +1 to hit 6 points per hit (they're normally +6 to hit with their bow, disadvantage drops that to +1)

They go from a major threat to being an annoyance.

 

[Gradine]

But let's take a realistic game scenario. The PCs are mid-to-low level (say, level 7). They aren't broadly known yet, they are facing soldiers they've never faced before. My soldiers are Champions - CR 9 from Volo's Guide.

I view these champions as seasoned professionals. They aren't named characters, but I also don't see how they could be easily intimidated, especially by a PC they've never heard of. In addition, at level 7 the DC of a spell will be around 14, while the intimidate check will average around 19 (although it will be a lot "swingier"). Since it's not a saving throw they don't get there 2/day Indomitable reroll of a failed save.

By the wording of the feat there is nothing that stops the intimidate.

Advantage on Insight.
Disadvantage on Intimidate.
Q.E.D.