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Warlock, Hex, and Short Rests: The Bag of Rats Problem
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<blockquote data-quote="TriBeCa99" data-source="post: 7030900" data-attributes="member: 6873596"><p>The thread was closed because the discussion devolved into personal attacks and veered away from the actual issue at hand pretty quickly. At 10 posts/page, the rules discussion was mostly done around page 4 or 5 and then went on for 8 more pages of mostly flaming. </p><p></p><p>My hope here was to create a thread to more productively discuss this issue, which I think is a legitimate one that is going to elicit differing opinions. I considered explicitly calling out the people who were bickering in the last thread and asking them to refrain from posting here more than once, but that seemed likely to lead to a worse result than just not mentioning it and hoping there would be better behavior in this thread than the last one.</p><p></p><p>If this one ends up getting closed as well, then so be it, but it seems to me that this should be an issue that can be discussed without excessive flaming.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I think this is a perfectly reasonable response to this issue, which also highlights one side of what I'm beginning to see as the fundamental disagreement that leads to two major camps on the issue. </p><p></p><p>If you start from the point of view that this was obviously not RAI, then yes doing it seems like "gaming the system." You can then either decide you want the player to have the spell slot and go with something like 3a), or you can decide they can't and go with option 1) or the option 4) someone suggested on the first page, or something else along those lines. And that's totally fine.</p><p></p><p>But it's also the case that the characters live in a world that works in this way, and it's not entirely clear to me that that wasn't actually intended. Certainly it's absurd to expect the DM to have a written rule for every situation that can arise in a game. But I don't think this is even an especially unlikely one, if you have a warlock at level 5+ in your party. It doesn't take a lot for either the character or the player to realize that there are concrete benefits to doing this. For my character (and me), the decision to actually go ahead with it (with my DMs okay, of course) came after our party of 4 level 6 characters took on a random encounter that was way over our heads--5 giant apes. I dumped two fireballs in the first two rounds, using both my spell slots, and then spent the rest of the fight missing hex while we were all under threat of being one-shotted. The realization that I nearly died in part because I hadn't bothered to kill some inconsequential little critter in the morning. This character is the sole survivor of a nomadic hunting tribe that was subsisting amongst hostile orc tribes, so proper preparation for combat and survival is paramount. Given that this character really does live in a world where "bag of rats" behavior results in an extra pact magic capabilities in a potentially fatal encounter, it would be weird for her *not* to start killing little critters on the daily. And honestly I don't think this is really cheating or gaming the system in any meaningful sense; it's the character (and player) at some point realizing a benefit to a certain behavior and then acting on it. Of course, this is totally predicated on the world working in this way. If my DM tells me the world doesn't work like that, I say okay and move on.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="TriBeCa99, post: 7030900, member: 6873596"] The thread was closed because the discussion devolved into personal attacks and veered away from the actual issue at hand pretty quickly. At 10 posts/page, the rules discussion was mostly done around page 4 or 5 and then went on for 8 more pages of mostly flaming. My hope here was to create a thread to more productively discuss this issue, which I think is a legitimate one that is going to elicit differing opinions. I considered explicitly calling out the people who were bickering in the last thread and asking them to refrain from posting here more than once, but that seemed likely to lead to a worse result than just not mentioning it and hoping there would be better behavior in this thread than the last one. If this one ends up getting closed as well, then so be it, but it seems to me that this should be an issue that can be discussed without excessive flaming. I think this is a perfectly reasonable response to this issue, which also highlights one side of what I'm beginning to see as the fundamental disagreement that leads to two major camps on the issue. If you start from the point of view that this was obviously not RAI, then yes doing it seems like "gaming the system." You can then either decide you want the player to have the spell slot and go with something like 3a), or you can decide they can't and go with option 1) or the option 4) someone suggested on the first page, or something else along those lines. And that's totally fine. But it's also the case that the characters live in a world that works in this way, and it's not entirely clear to me that that wasn't actually intended. Certainly it's absurd to expect the DM to have a written rule for every situation that can arise in a game. But I don't think this is even an especially unlikely one, if you have a warlock at level 5+ in your party. It doesn't take a lot for either the character or the player to realize that there are concrete benefits to doing this. For my character (and me), the decision to actually go ahead with it (with my DMs okay, of course) came after our party of 4 level 6 characters took on a random encounter that was way over our heads--5 giant apes. I dumped two fireballs in the first two rounds, using both my spell slots, and then spent the rest of the fight missing hex while we were all under threat of being one-shotted. The realization that I nearly died in part because I hadn't bothered to kill some inconsequential little critter in the morning. This character is the sole survivor of a nomadic hunting tribe that was subsisting amongst hostile orc tribes, so proper preparation for combat and survival is paramount. Given that this character really does live in a world where "bag of rats" behavior results in an extra pact magic capabilities in a potentially fatal encounter, it would be weird for her *not* to start killing little critters on the daily. And honestly I don't think this is really cheating or gaming the system in any meaningful sense; it's the character (and player) at some point realizing a benefit to a certain behavior and then acting on it. Of course, this is totally predicated on the world working in this way. If my DM tells me the world doesn't work like that, I say okay and move on. [/QUOTE]
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