D&D General Poll: As a player, I am always justified in pursuing every advantage I find, no matter what.

[GMforPowergamers]

This.
...
I voted "yes" in that a player IMO is always justified in pursuing advantages*, but I'm well aware that those advantages can sometimes - often? - be bad for the game; and the corollary is that the DM should and IMO must be empowered to a) allow non-game-wrecking advantages to be exploited while b) shut down game-breaking advantages on the spot if-when they arise.

* - edit to add: within the rules. Cheating is a complete non-starter.

My group actually works on a bit of gentleman's agreement that we only use major exploits once... So if I find a way to use a 1st level spell to heal 60hp by RAW manipulation the other DMs will most likely pat me on the back, be amazed and let it slide... once as 'rule of cool' then not only will it not work I and the other player agree not to even try... and if THAT trick requires 5 different things to go right and all 5 are ALSO exploits we wont use 2 or 3 of those exploits later or in another campaign either... this was the dust of dryness bombs of 3.5 that we promised not to do again... or the magic nukes that was find city... locate city... something like that.

5e isn't as full of those things so it isn't as much an issue

 

[Mallus]

I voted 'no'.

As a player in a cooperative social game, you are always justified in doing your part to keep things running smoothly, though. Even if means occasionally ignoring the advantage.

 

[Celebrim]

This poll would make more sense broke down into individual cases where the poster might believe there is controversy. It's too broad as written to get coherent answers and be meaningful. It's going to mean different things to everyone that reads it.

 

[Gammadoodler]

It's another fine line. On one level, you're acknowledging someone did a cool thing. On another, it's basically dropping a few bucks on a "loot box".

Of course, that said, getting a "loot box" is only really a problem if

• The "loot box" advantage is disruptive,
• Other folks aren't getting loot boxes, and
• Players start to tie their good behavior to the likelihood of receiving those loot boxes.

A common thing I used to see was DMs who would give out inspiration for doing the last session's recap. Not a Holy Avenger in terms of reward, but also behavior that is not crazy different from providing a snack budget, hosting the session, providing the minis, helping the newbie, etc.

 

[Lanefan]

My group actually works on a bit of gentleman's agreement that we only use major exploits once... So if I find a way to use a 1st level spell to heal 60hp by RAW manipulation the other DMs will most likely pat me on the back, be amazed and let it slide... once as 'rule of cool' then not only will it not work I and the other player agree not to even try... and if THAT trick requires 5 different things to go right and all 5 are ALSO exploits we wont use 2 or 3 of those exploits later or in another campaign either... this was the dust of dryness bombs of 3.5 that we promised not to do again... or the magic nukes that was find city... locate city... something like that.

5e isn't as full of those things so it isn't as much an issue

As DM, I try to proactively go through and find these things first, so as to put in a patch before the players get there.

It probably helps that all my spells write-ups are a) online and b) largely bespoke to my game/system; which makes fixing something a breeze. And now I'm trying to remember what it was that came up last session that I have to fix - not an exploit, but something obvious in a spell write-up that got missed; and I didn't think to write it down at the time.

 

[Shiroiken]

I recommend invoking Wheaton's Law. Unless it's a competitive game with prizes, there's no reason otherwise.

I've never met an adult player who subscribed to that philosophy, thankfully.

Be thankful. I played with (and occasionally ran for) a guy whose philosophy not only included this, but felt his job as a player was to ruin whatever story the DM plans.

Not in DnD. Definitely in Monopoly.

The only advantage in Monopoly involves a fire pit...

 

[Hex08]

The question, as phrased, seems problematic so I voted no. Focusing solely on optimizing your own character can lead to the breakdown of cooperative gameplay (which RPGs are).

 

[tetrasodium]

As stated above: My goal was never to parade around and say "look, everyone agrees with me!" Because that's not only pointless preening, it's doubly pointless because a self-selected online poll where people are allowed to change their votes is a poll with near-zero merit.

My whole purpose was to determine how common such sentiments are, among ENWorld folks who visit the D&D subforum. I chose the expression I did because it reflects an actual opinion stated to me recently by a user here, which some others either agreed with, or disagreed with but said that their players agree with. Hence, I was curious exactly how common such opinions are. I cannot conduct a true survey, so the data is merely for my own "amusement," after a fashion. But I was still curious.

Should a debate about the merits of exploiting advantages crop up in the thread, all the better, so long as it remains civil.

Edit: And yes, I intentionally phrased it so that it could include purely in-character behaviors, purely out-of-game behaviors like social engineering pizza (...that's a phrase I'm going to have to hold onto), or purely mechanical behaviors, whether they be merely curious rule interactions, outright broken rules loopholes, or logical consequences of (house)rules used without concern for side-effects (e.g. disregarding genre conventions.)

The only thing I personally would exclude from the above is outright cheating, e.g. falsely reporting the results of your rolls or "misremembering" how much gold you have etc.

Except that you took too many different statements & rolled them into one while stripping them of context & the result is something that doesn't show anything but artificially skewed results rather than how common they are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I put down "no" pretty firmly. I mean, in some cases people will slide toward doing that collectively because the advantage is hard to miss (and outside of the D&D sphere isn't usually limited to only a subset of characters) but on the whole they aren't doing the game or themselves any favors, and "yes" only makes sense in a very competitive approach to the game.
Mind you, what usually happens with this is that everyone looks at something and says "Yeah, no," and we house rule it out, but there's always cases where its crept in before people realized quite how problematic it is, or where its baked into the rules in a way that is non-trivial to extract, either of which can make it easier to just step around it.

 

[CreamCloud0]

This is the first poll I have posted in quite some time, and the most recent poll I posted was in fact a five-point poll, and the one before that had 10 options, pick two. (And the previous had 6 options, the standard 5 spread + "your options cannot contain my answer!!") I assume you are conflating me with @el-remmen and their recent flurry of polls (though IIRC at least one other person has gotten in on the true/false poll thing.)

Ah, sorry, my mistake.