D&D 5E "My Character Is Always..." and related topics.

[5ekyu]

Jesus Christ, would you stop being so condescending towards other people who use these forums? This is an incredibly rude way to talk to someone.

i am sorry you find it so upsetting but to me the post i responded to started with emotion, listed a specific case, then finally got around to an example of a very different topic - one which was covered in the first post on this thread in fact.

See, telling them that to me their statement initially and their provided example were of two different things thrown together etc and then illusrating how far apart they seem to me and even finishing up with that if it makes sense to them thats fine... i thought that was Ok around here where we can disagree, point out our disagreements, even highlight where we do agree and then make allowances for the fact that if others see it differently that is fine too.

i really do not have to understand someone else's reasoning to say that its fine if it makes sense to them, do I?

Like i said during the majority of my post (included in the parts you choose to cut out odd thing that), it seemed there was much agreement between their example of play and mine as well - agreed, much more than disagree.

 

[5ekyu]

This is a swift-moving thread and you're posting quite a bit.

On the topic of your original post, where you excerpted one line from an unnamed "published product," I think most people in this thread are in agreement that that is not the best presented advice to a GM. I mean, I don't know what the product is, and I only have your descriptions of the context, but I'm not sure that it's a great sentence. (I find things like this in adventures all the time. I was reading an adventure last night with a secret door mechanism in a floor. The adventure suggested that the GM roll for every 10 minutes characters spent to see if they "accidentally stepped on the mechanism," but included no description of the mechanism by which characters could actually actively find the mechanism. wtf.)

The bolded text you quoted is tangential. You can ignore it if it doesn't speak to you. It was in part responding to something else you said in a different post, because I didn't feel like multi-posting or multi-quoting.

Mainly, what I am talking about is your repeated dismissal of DM's who don't just call a check ON EVERYTHING as DM's who operating from an "auto-play checklist." That's not a sidebar. That is what all of these threads boil down to with you. You accuse DM's who adjudicate PC actions in any other way than calling for a skill check of being arbitrary, gotcha DMs.


I believe, though it's tough to track sometimes, that you were responding to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], who eschews skill checks in his game. I believe lanefan plays AD&D 1e. In his case, he would never reference the character perception score, because there is no perception score in AD&D. Lanefan also, by my reading, does expect his players to role-play their ability scores, so it's not that he ignores them. He just has a different way of interacting with them.

So, the daylight, the major gap between us, is that you keep disparaging a pretty broad swath of play approaches using terms like "auto-play checklist," "magic words," "gotcha," etc. That's not a valid characterization of any of the approaches I've seen described here.

Ok so let me get this straight you are upset about how you see me mischaracterizing the way some Gms play etc etc...

And in the bolded section you yourself choose to characterize what i do as "dismissal of DM's who don't just call a check ON EVERYTHING" when over and over i have said something quite different and have never, not once, referenced requiring a check ON EVERYTHING cor anything close to that?

Do you see the problem?

i have said on more than a few occasions that IMX most (if not all0 Gms have a spectrum with auto-play on one side and checks on the other and even with many mixes in between (like say basing some auto-play on character stats as opposed to divorcing the two) with nobody that I know of being all one way or the other... although certainly there are some games which eschew one for the other.

That very type of "ROLL FOR EVERYTHING" mischaracterization which keeps getting slid in under the radar in comments by those who seem prefer a wider auto-play as a matter of course and which, maybe i am wrong, but i do not recall having seen you speak out against?

As i have stated, the biggest difference i see is that along this spectrum some allow a much larger scope of resolutions to fall within the auto-play window (specifically the auto-play without reference to stats of the character) and push more of the resolution process onto the player-gm interaction alone while others (like me) see it as more beneficial to have the character stats play a role in that process for a lot of the cases that seem to be being described in the auto-play by others.

As for your comment about following this and that and how your end was not related to your beginning... I get that threads wind around a lot but starting with "annoyed" and providing one detailed example that is on a completely different subject is bound to get a question, right?

 

[5ekyu]

I believe, though it's tough to track sometimes, that you were responding to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], who eschews skill checks in his game. I believe lanefan plays AD&D 1e. In his case, he would never reference the character perception score, because there is no perception score in AD&D. Lanefan also, by my reading, does expect his players to role-play their ability scores, so it's not that he ignores them. He just has a different way of interacting with them.

Now this though i can clear up for you.

You may have noted that in my posts i tend to use quoted text and even highlight frequently certain parts of it.

those have for some been used as clues to who i am responding to and what i am referencing.

In the case in question, i was responding to ehren37 and i was not referencing lanefan.

None of the three walk into a bars cases i gave in that rather tongue-in-cheek post cam from lanefan's posts (as far as i know, its not like i have been a devoted follower of his dialog there.)

So, maybe you saw it as some specific attack aimed at lanefan or maybe you thought it something else, that i am not sure of.

but, i can assure you, when i want to address something lanefan says i will quote it and make it clear so you really do not have to spin any gray-matter-cycles trying to come up with that kind of thing on my account.

You can, of course, if that is what you wish, but i try and make it clear when responding who i am responding to and about what.

Does that help?

 

[redrick]

Ok so let me get this straight you are upset about how you see me mischaracterizing the way some Gms play etc etc...

And in the bolded section you yourself choose to characterize what i do as "dismissal of DM's who don't just call a check ON EVERYTHING" when over and over i have said something quite different and have never, not once, referenced requiring a check ON EVERYTHING cor anything close to that?

Do you see the problem?

i have said on more than a few occasions that IMX most (if not all0 Gms have a spectrum with auto-play on one side and checks on the other and even with many mixes in between (like say basing some auto-play on character stats as opposed to divorcing the two) with nobody that I know of being all one way or the other... although certainly there are some games which eschew one for the other.

That very type of "ROLL FOR EVERYTHING" mischaracterization which keeps getting slid in under the radar in comments by those who seem prefer a wider auto-play as a matter of course and which, maybe i am wrong, but i do not recall having seen you speak out against?

As i have stated, the biggest difference i see is that along this spectrum some allow a much larger scope of resolutions to fall within the auto-play window (specifically the auto-play without reference to stats of the character) and push more of the resolution process onto the player-gm interaction alone while others (like me) see it as more beneficial to have the character stats play a role in that process for a lot of the cases that seem to be being described in the auto-play by others.

As for your comment about following this and that and how your end was not related to your beginning... I get that threads wind around a lot but starting with "annoyed" and providing one detailed example that is on a completely different subject is bound to get a question, right?

I appreciate that you feel like our approaches (and I mean "our" in the general sense, not just the "us two" sense) are more similar than they are dissimilar. You are probably right in most cases.

I don't want to get into parsing out the details of your or my game, because I think it's hard, without being at the table, or having play transcripts, to really know what goes on. From what I can piece together, you seem to have a reasonable way of running your games, and, based on what you have described, I imagine that I would be happy at a table with you as the DM. By what you have posted, I do think it is fair to characterize your games as requiring more checks than some other games. That's fine. It is, as you have said, a spectrum.

I run into issues with the way you describe games other than your own. I mean, even the term "auto-play" is a misrepresentation. Asking the character to state a goal and an approach, and determining that the outcome is obvious, is the opposite of "auto-play." It is play. It is the player describing what their character is doing, and the DM saying, "Yes, what you are describing is not hard to do and would achieve the desired outcome."

So, again, that's where the daylight exists between us. Not in the nitty gritty differences between our games, where I might encourage player knowledge and attention, and where you might encourage players to focus on how their respective ability scores and proficiencies would influence their behavior. It is in the way you dismissively describe games you have never played in and whole approaches.

I think, upthread, in one of your responses to my posts, there was an interesting conversation to be had about an approach that you felt stifled player involvement in a way that I felt it encouraged it. I'd enjoy exploring that, but, honestly, I can't, because I'm too busy getting pulled off-topic by all this nonsense about "magic words."

 

[Charlaquin]

i am sorry you find it so upsetting but to me the post i responded to started with emotion, listed a specific case, then finally got around to an example of a very different topic - one which was covered in the first post on this thread in fact.

See, telling them that to me their statement initially and their provided example were of two different things thrown together etc and then illusrating how far apart they seem to me and even finishing up with that if it makes sense to them thats fine... i thought that was Ok around here where we can disagree, point out our disagreements, even highlight where we do agree and then make allowances for the fact that if others see it differently that is fine too.

There is a world of difference between telling someone that you don’t see the connection between their examples and saying “you might as well be talking about pizza and ice cream.” The latter is dismissive of any point they may have been trying to make. At that puint you’re putting it on the other person, saying it’s their point that doesn’t make sense, rather than you not understanding their point as it was presented. Furthermore, saying, “did you get confused, or what?” is extremely rude, characterizing the other person as less capable of following the line of conversation than yourself.

i really do not have to understand someone else's reasoning to say that its fine if it makes sense to them, do I?

No, but you do have to keep in mind that tone is difficult to communicate through text mediums, and anticipate how your words might be interpreted when divorced of tone. Dismissing someone’s argument as meaningless non-sequitur, suggesting they are not making sense to you because they are the one who’s confused, and then following that up with “but if it makes sense to you, that’s all that matters” comes across as incredibly condescending. In the context of the rest of your post, it doesn’t come across as “I don’t understand what you’re saying, but that’s ok, I don’t have to understand it to recognize you have a valid point to make,” it comes across as further dismissing their point and patronizingly telling them as long as they feel good about themselves, it doesn’t matter if their point is stupid.

Like i said during the majority of my post (included in the parts you choose to cut out odd thing that), it seemed there was much agreement between their example of play and mine as well - agreed, much more than disagree.

Yes, and I left those parts out because I took no issue with them and there was really nothing further to discuss there. Good for the two of you for having common ground, but that doesn’t excuse you talking down to them in the rest of your post.

 

[5ekyu]

There is a world of difference between telling someone that you don’t see the connection between their examples and saying “you might as well be talking about pizza and ice cream.” The latter is dismissive of any point they may have been trying to make. At that puint you’re putting it on the other person, saying it’s their point that doesn’t make sense, rather than you not understanding their point as it was presented. Furthermore, saying, “did you get confused, or what?” is extremely rude, characterizing the other person as less capable of following the line of conversation than yourself.


No, but you do have to keep in mind that tone is difficult to communicate through text mediums, and anticipate how your words might be interpreted when divorced of tone. Dismissing someone’s argument as meaningless non-sequitur, suggesting they are not making sense to you because they are the one who’s confused, and then following that up with “but if it makes sense to you, that’s all that matters” comes across as incredibly condescending. In the context of the rest of your post, it doesn’t come across as “I don’t understand what you’re saying, but that’s ok, I don’t have to understand it to recognize you have a valid point to make,” it comes across as further dismissing their point and patronizingly telling them as long as they feel good about themselves, it doesn’t matter if their point is stupid.


Yes, and I left those parts out because I took no issue with them and there was really nothing further to discuss there. Good for the two of you for having common ground, but that doesn’t excuse you talking down to them in the rest of your post.

Just to be clear, after my response the poster i was questioning admitted that the two parts were on different topics. Apparently the one "annoyed" issue was followed by an example that was not related to it.

Does that at all impact your assessment over whether or not it was appropriate to express it as "non-sequitur" (meaningless is your characterization - ice cream and pizza have meaning to me.

Specifically they said

"The bolded text you quoted is tangential. You can ignore it if it doesn't speak to you. It was in part responding to something else you said in a different post, because I didn't feel like multi-posting or multi-quoting."

So, maybe, possibly you can see that my comments about how the one did not mesh with the other, one did not follow from the other, one not supporting the other etc - like pizza and ice cream - was maybe not so out of whack with what was said and later acknowledge by the original poster?

Maybe?

 

[5ekyu]

I appreciate that you feel like our approaches (and I mean "our" in the general sense, not just the "us two" sense) are more similar than they are dissimilar. You are probably right in most cases.

I don't want to get into parsing out the details of your or my game, because I think it's hard, without being at the table, or having play transcripts, to really know what goes on. From what I can piece together, you seem to have a reasonable way of running your games, and, based on what you have described, I imagine that I would be happy at a table with you as the DM. By what you have posted, I do think it is fair to characterize your games as requiring more checks than some other games. That's fine. It is, as you have said, a spectrum.

I run into issues with the way you describe games other than your own. I mean, even the term "auto-play" is a misrepresentation. Asking the character to state a goal and an approach, and determining that the outcome is obvious, is the opposite of "auto-play." It is play. It is the player describing what their character is doing, and the DM saying, "Yes, what you are describing is not hard to do and would achieve the desired outcome."

So, again, that's where the daylight exists between us. Not in the nitty gritty differences between our games, where I might encourage player knowledge and attention, and where you might encourage players to focus on how their respective ability scores and proficiencies would influence their behavior. It is in the way you dismissively describe games you have never played in and whole approaches.

I think, upthread, in one of your responses to my posts, there was an interesting conversation to be had about an approach that you felt stifled player involvement in a way that I felt it encouraged it. I'd enjoy exploring that, but, honestly, I can't, because I'm too busy getting pulled off-topic by all this nonsense about "magic words."

But you are not pulled off by dismissively describing games as in the check FOR EVERYTHING even when clearly and explicitly that is not what is being described?

Right?

Thats not something to be taken as annoying?

"Auto-play" is supposed to be just "play" unlike say "check for everything" which is not also just "play"?

I use auto-play to differentiate the stages as they have been differentiated by some of the players on this thread and others - that there is a stage where there is a detemination of auto-fail or auto-succeed that precedes a consult of character skill.

That "auto-play" stage exists between the player statement of action/approach/etc (with necessary clarifications as needed back and forth) and the announcement of resolution (success/fail) and that stage can result in a determination of fail, succeed or a check-the character dice mechanic for "uncertain" results.

Some have described it as good strategy, so much so that at other tables they may go and recommend to try and get the resolution in that auto-play stage instead of getting to the character stage.

Some have even quoted sections where whether the word "on" or "in" was stated it would be the difference between auto-succeed and either auto-fail or character/mechanics.

So, those different stages of resolution seem markedly different - very distinctive - one focuses solely on the exchange between player and Gm and the other focuses on and brings into play the character and their capabilities - one can hinge on a single word said or unsaid - the other can be decided by a modified roll vs a difficulty etc.

So, if "auto-play" is now somehow offensive for calling that stage where the Gm decides without consulting character stats whether or not to have it be auto-success, auto-fail or consult the character... what term would you use to identify resolutions made at that stage as opposed to the others that you would find less offensive?

i and others have stated quite a few times why we prefer varying degrees of checks, why we prefer the results we see in play and enjoyment etc... and i don't think we take offense at being told we make more rolls or checks but we might just have to wonder why the misreprsentative "check FOR EVERYTHING" is perfectly fine but "auto-play" to describe the stage where the success/fail is determined as automatic without considered character stats is offensive or dismissive?

is it possible (in your view) that the difference in whether or not you see "auto-play" as so offensive or dismissive and yet you toss in "check FOR EVERYTHING" without batting an eye is that you see yourself as more in agreement with the side you take offense for?

Perhaps?

 

[5ekyu]

Yes, and I left those parts out because I took no issue with them and there was really nothing further to discuss there. Good for the two of you for having common ground, but that doesn’t excuse you talking down to them in the rest of your post.

However, as you say, tone is not always easy to convey.

In fact, i think i am not on controversial ground here when i say it is often recommended to START with where you agree in discussions with someone, to lay a foundation of interest and get things off positive footing, before you go into the disagreements because going directly into disagreement can send a different tone etc...

by cutting out the positives, by choosing to dismiss the positive front loaded approach, etc... you seem to be skewing the pooch in a sense by choosing as not relevant the parts of the post where i did put effort into paving the positive ground before we got into the disagreement over the lack of linkage between the claim and the one cited example - which later on the poster admitted was on a different topic altogether.

I mean if somebody says
i dont like a because
b
c
d (Where D is the only actual example of style of play referenced for differences)

and then later admits d was on some other subject altogether

Is it really that offensive or dismissive to go into how d doesn't follow, how d seems to not be the same or to even ask if they got two different things confused into the one post?

 

[Satyrn]

I use auto-play to differentiate the stages as they have been differentiated by some of the players on this thread and others - that there is a stage where there is a detemination of auto-fail or auto-succeed that precedes a consult of character skill.

I would never have been able to figure out that was how you defined your use of "auto-play." I wouldn't have even come close to guessing that's what you meant.

It looked like you were using it in a way that suggested players using a sort of script, like howsome posters refer to "door procedures" as a shortcut to tell their DM how they handle examing, opening and entering a door.

 

[5ekyu]

I would never have been able to figure out that was how you defined your use of "auto-play." I wouldn't have even come close to guessing that's what you meant.

It looked like you were using it in a way that suggested players using a sort of script, like howsome posters refer to "door procedures" as a shortcut to tell their DM how they handle examing, opening and entering a door.

i believe the first use of it here may have been just a few pages ago

"All that before each player goes into their monologue that describes their approach to the challenge of looking in the bar in hopes it passes the GM's auto-play checklist that ignores character stats?"

If you think "GM's auto-play checklist" is referring to the player's side of that as opposed to the part of the way the Gm decides resolutions, then yes, perhaps i did not communicate it clearly enough to reach everyone's understanding.