D&D 5E What DM flaw has caused you to actually leave a game?

[MarkB]

Passive checks are for when the character is doing something repeatedly, such as keeping watch or searching for secret doors while traveling the dungeon.

That's only half of what the rules say they're for. The other half is "when the DM wants to secretly determine whether the characters succeed at something without rolling dice, such as noticing a hidden monster."

 

[iserith]

That's only half of what the rules say they're for. The other half is "when the DM wants to secretly determine whether the characters succeed at something without rolling dice, such as noticing a hidden monster."

Yep, that is correct. It still doesn't say the DM can ask me to make a check without me describing what I want to do. So the DM can feel free to resolve my described action with a passive check if he or she wants to keep it secret. He or she still can't say what my character is doing.

 

[iserith]

Everything else I can chalk up to personal preference, but this here is a difference in an approach to fiction that, while I will admit the PHB spells out, is counterfactual to, well, actual reality. Which is to say; memory does that work like that. That's not to say that nobody actively attempts to recall lore or information about things, it's just that that is the exception rather than the rule, and one that is almost always prompted by a direct question (such as a school exam or trivia game). But memory, and knowledge, are generally much more passive. And while I am loathe to use passive checks in most instances, because this is a ultimately a dice game and I like it when I/my players get to roll dice to determine uncertain outcomes, I can recognize the role passive perception at least plays in not tipping one's hand too early as a DM. I do not like, however, "passive knowledge", at least not in D&D, because it treats one set of proficiencies differently than others, and I think a "you must have have this high a bonus to know this thing" DC sets knowledge skills apart from other more active skills that seems less than ideal to me. On the other hand, it strains my sense of and approach to the fiction of the world to treat character knowledge as a repository that only be accessed if players decide to boot it up.

I just think it's bad form (and bad for the game) to withhold from players knowledge their characters might (or do) know just because they don't think to use the "recall lore" action in the moment.

I've never found arguments based on how things work "in real life" to be very convincing when it comes to how to play D&D. And I would say it's a storytelling game (Basic Rules, page 2), not a dice game. A player describing his or her character as trying to draw upon knowledge hard won at a wizarding school to recall the weaknesses of trolls is telling a story by establishing that fiction. That might be something like we'd read in a book or see in a movie. To that end, I think it's fine and at the very least consistent with how every other task is resolved.

As for withholding information, I don't assert that should be the way of things. The DM is told to describe the environment which includes the basic scope of options available. That necessarily involves whatever context the players need to start describing what they want to do. From there, based on what they say, more information may be forthcoming, sometimes with ability checks, sometimes not.

 

[billd91]

I tend to ditch out of games more because of other players than the GM, but I also don't usually ditch out of face to face games, mostly just online where your likelihood of knowing the other players or GM is slim. And ultimately ditching is usually because of style differences.

I once ditched out of an online Traveller game because the GM was having us roll for... everything. We were had crashed on an icy planet with a corrosive atmosphere and had to refuel. I was playing an engineer and between me and the other players had come up with using a probe to bring ice back to the ship to refine into hydrogen gas. This was going to take something like 72+ trips to get sufficient fuel. The GM was having us roll for every one - and each one involved multiple skill checks. The fateful, hazardous failed check was pretty likely to come and do so more than once. Plus, it was simply a waste of time. Sure, the rules may have implied that each could be a separate check, but, honestly? Who does that? Someone with no sense of pacing or the patience of his players.

That said, there are few absolute deal-breakers, but a number of red flags. These include:
* being overly pedantic with the rules (such as rolling for everything when it's not serving anything useful)
* loot division based on dividing up the cash and then buying the items out of it based on their value (I detest that method)
* blatant favoritism

I'll ultimately put up with a lot more face to face than I will online, usually because the problems I've encountered have never been as extreme face to face as they have been online. I'm not entirely sure why. I'd like to think it's because, in a face to face environment, we manage to communicate better on multiple levels so the misunderstandings are less likely to get out of control. But I'm not sure that's true. It may be simply because the population of people who game online has a higher proportion of goons unable to find a decent face to face game...

 

[MoonSong]

Turns out yo ne some mom port of his favorite mom with nothing remotely 5e.

I can't for the life of mine decipher this line, would you please explain? I've got the feeling this one is relevant to my experience, but I can only be sure if I understand. (Sorry, I know it might turn out to be obvious, but I'm feeling dumb right now)

 

[Nagol]

I can't for the life of mine decipher this line, would you please explain? I've got the feeling this one is relevant to my experience, but I can only be sure if I understand. (Sorry, I know it might turn out to be obvious, but I'm feeling dumb right now)

Took me a second reading too. Replace mom with mmo (as in massive multiplayer online game) and it makes sense.

 

[5ekyu]

I can't for the life of mine decipher this line, would you please explain? I've got the feeling this one is relevant to my experience, but I can only be sure if I understand. (Sorry, I know it might turn out to be obvious, but I'm feeling dumb right now)

Mom was auto-incorrected from M M O.

 

[Rhenny]

The only DM I left behind was a DM who already wrote a story and just placed the players within the story. We had very little chance to make real decisions and he narrated way too much. The DM was a creative writing major in college when I was in college too. RPG playing is very different from one author writing a story.

 

[Celebrim]

He or she still can't say what my character is doing.

In no fashion have I ever said that a DM ought to say what a PC is doing. It is after all a player's character.

My contention with you is that in no fashion do ability checks, skill checks, savings throws, or any other fortune test necessarily state what the PC is doing either. I'm struggling really to understand that contention of yours. In the 30 years I have playing, I've never had anyone intrinsically link the idea of a roll to a PC action as if every action implied a roll or every roll implied an action. And when I listed out ways to railroad your players, never did it occur to me that an approach was 'call for an ability check' or 'call for a skill check'. Many abilities and skills represent always on sorts of things that are used to resist or overcome obstacles passively, without a need to call them out. If the game is taking place in a salt pan in ferocious heat, I'm going to be calling for Survival checks or Endurance (or some equivalent check depending on what the system calls them) regardless of whether you take an explicit action or not because the ability check doesn't represent in a direct way what you are doing, but rather only how you resist what is being done to you by something - in this case the elements.

Now of course, I concede that you could decide that you don't want to win the check, and you want your character to deliberately do things to fail that test, and I would allow that, but generally speaking that's an exception that basically has never ever come up and if it did, I'd resolve it as "taking a zero on your check". The fact that I called the test still doesn't force an action on your part.

Maybe I'd understand your position better if you explained to me a common game circumstance were a DM calls for ability checks that do impose unwanted actions on the player?

Or perhaps we should go back to that RPG loop again. Because there is an different decision making loop you can use that if misused does do what I think you are actually complaining about, but it's not one I've ever seen applied to a game of D&D - and frankly its so modern that it probably never even entered into the mind of Gygax, whose examples of play (and whatever his faults, Gygax gave very clear illustration of the processes of play by example) never touched on it.

 

[MarkB]

Yep, that is correct. It still doesn't say the DM can ask me to make a check without me describing what I want to do. So the DM can feel free to resolve my described action with a passive check if he or she wants to keep it secret. He or she still can't say what my character is doing.

Skill checks aren't just about what you're doing. They can also be about what you know, or what you perceive. That's especially true of passive checks.

I get that you don't want the DM to declare what your character is doing. Do you get that a DM can be implementing skills in such a way that calling for a check doesn't dictate what the character is doing, especially when those checks involve things like knowledge and senses that may be independent of any specific volition on the character's part?