It's possible different people imagine different things with the language used. By "punish" I (and I think others) are imagining the DM intentionally trying to make sure the player/character is forced to use the dump stat. But maybe others use "punish" to mean just letting people play the game, and not always giving the player an "out" to avoid using the dump stat.
Yeah, I agree that the term "punish" is poor wording for how I look at it as well.
I'd point out the original statement did also say they should be rewarded for having high stats as well, which is why I think they meant it more in lines with not giving people outs to avoid having to care about their weak points.
By all means, quote the post where I said “you should do it this way.” If you can point to it, I will cede that I misspoke and apologize. But this whole time I have done nothing but answer your questions about my DMing style and correct your misapprehensions about it. From my perspective, I am just being grilled relentlessly on my DMing style, while simultaneously being accused of attacking yours.
The one thing I did “attack,” if you want to call it that, was your suggestion of a “better” way to adjudicate the stupid poisoned handle scene. And my only point in doing so was to say “I don’t like it when the DM dictates what the PC does, especially when what they narrate contradicts the plauer’s description of their own action.” My approach to action adjudication avoids that. I don’t really care if you adopt my style or not.
1) I really hate this type of "By all means" because going back through hundreds of posts is an absolute pain and on a normal day I'd have no time for it. Luckily, Good Friday means I can go back and reread hundreds of posts to see how things shook out weeks ago.
2) Here is what I've determined.
Seems I was slightly mistaken in one respect, which was that I thought you and myself had discussed before Elfcrusher's poisoned doorhandle post. But it seems your first response to me was on April 6th, in regards to that exact post (#483 on my counter)
Before that I was mostly talking with Iserith and Elfcrusher. However, it also seems that you agreed with iserith more than once, which might be how I confused things, since you seemed to hold similiar beliefs I may have grouped discussions with them as discussions with you. I only went back another 250 posts after that event though, so I could have missed something. I did not a lot of XP given to iserith for their responses to me though, indicating a level of agreement with their stances.
However, there are some posts that might show why we grew increasingly more defensive with each other. Spoilering it so everyone else can ignore it.
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This is why vague statements like, “I check for traps” are a poor strategy. Yes, if I just said I check for traps without saying what I’m doing to check for them, we have little choice but to determine what my character was doing that resulted in that failure retroactively. The dice are generating the story - we didn’t really know what my character was doing until we found out whether it worked or not, and then we came up with a narrative explanation for the result. And if you like to play that way, more power to you! I do not like to play that way, because it puts my successes and failures in the hands of chance. I want my successes and failures to be in my hands. I enjoy the game more when I succeed because I thought of a clever plan or fail because I took a calculated risk and it didn’t pay off.
Calling ease of play poor strategy, and saying that this is somehow against the making of clever plans or calculated risks. This is a jab at the playstyle, instead of being highly specific in what the player was asking, they were general. You did mention it was fine if I liked it that way, but there does seem to be a value judgement there.
Yes, absolutely. If we all agree to let the dice decide whether I succeed or fail, we need to come up with an explanation for what the dice say happened. That, to me, is putting the cart before the horse. You’re starting from the result and working backwards to explain how we got there. I prefer to start from the action, and only if we cannot figure out what is most likely to happen as a result, then we turn to the imartial random number generators to help us decide.
This one from the same post (#502 from my count and on April 6th again) started a long discussion about why you thought I was putting the cart before the horse. IT seemed to come down to you didn't like a general action being declared, and then the narrative filled in from the dice roll. You prefer the narrative to be settled, then the dice to give an answer... though in the end the results are the same, just the details are not.
No. The flaw in your approach is in deciding that your obstacle must be resolved by way of a check, and closed yourself off to other possibilities. You’re treating checks as things that exist in their own right, instead of as the means by which you determine the success or failure of actions with uncertain outcomes.
This particular one, now that we've discussed it to death, seems to have arisen from you misunderstanding me. I was putting forth the idea that in this discussion on resolution the only flaw you seemed to find in my approach was the assumption that there is uncertainty in the outcome. You might remember bits of the conversation that followed about the existence of DCs and the fact that the checks are certainly possible but some things might bypass their need.
So, still, the only flaw you had was that I was assuming a check would get called for. While you wanted to insist that my flaw was a desire to call for checks despite whatever the players may have planned, and in fact you seem to not want to look past the players declarations and stop the discussion there. Oh, and the various times you called that backfilling me "overstepping my bounds as a DM"
Also, interestingly, I found yet another place where I asked you how you as a player would describe a set of actions to resolve an obstacle, a thread you never responded to. But, that point might be further in this post.
Sure they could. In my experience, however, they don’t tend to. Before I adopted the goal and approach style, players only ever spent Inspiration on death saving throws, and they either never used guidance and/or worked together, or they did so on every roll. With the goal and approach style, players have enough information to consider whether or not to use those resources, and do so when they feel it is appropriate.
I might be a little nit-picky with this one, but you are the one who decided it would be a good idea for me to go back over hundreds of posts (likely thinking I'd never bother to do it and just accuse you with no basis). However, you definitely view my approach as not the "goal and approach style" so when I was confused why players would choose not to use resources like guidance or work together with the Help action [which on a side not my players do constantly, to the point where I need to find logical times they can't help each other just to tone down the constant advantage] you posted this response.
In general, there are assumptions that my players don't use their resources properly, don't work together, and don't have enough information to make a decision on using those resources. All because I am not, as you understand it, using the goal and approach style.
By this point, we'd obviously irritated each other, and things started getting a little less civil.
Say, Pot, have you met my friend, Kettle?
I think you two would get along, you have so much in common
It's an expression. "A hill to die on" is a cause you defend in spite of significant resistance. Historically, it carries connotations of defending a point with no real tactical value. I'm saying that this point you've chosen to defend to the death doesn't seem to me like a point worth dying for.
This one particularly irritated me, since you seemed to assume my response to your "strange hill to die on" comment meant I didn't understand a very commonly used turn of phrase. I know you don't know anything about me, and it may not be as common outside of the US, but that sort of assumption of ignorance irritates me on a personal level.
But, to be fair about all this, perhaps I've been a little defensive. The debating with other posters could have stained my view of your responses, taking some of your assumptions of superiority more to heart than I should have. I'm also not going beyond post #790 on my end (April 13th) since it gets even more heated on both our sides, and frankly, being rude to each other isn't what I want.
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Clearly we do do (heh) things differently. I only call for checks when the character’s approach has a reasonable chance of succeeding at achieving the player’s goal, a reasonable chance of failing to achieve the player’s goal, and a cost for the attempt or a consequence for failure, and if it has those things, I tell the player the DC and consequences so that they can make necessary preparations and/or decide not to go through with the action. You... Well, to be honest, I’m not sure what you do. This conversation has been almost entirely focused on what I do, which makes it extra strange to be accused of attacking your play style. I don’t even know what your play style is.
My style isn't very strict, I don't have a standardized way of handling things.
Player declares what they want to do. Sometimes that is a goal and approach, sometimes it is asking for a roll with an implicit set of actions that will lead to an implicit goal. I either call for a roll or I don't. Certain actions regularly get rolls called, like breaking down doors, and depending on the circumstances I either have them succeed but struggle with it for an amount of time, or they smash through. Sometimes players ask things I didn't consider, like looting a room I didn't expect them to loot, and a high roll will add something that I hadn't placed there before (like a magic bottle based off the Alchemical Jug, except it contains different vintages of rare wines). Soemtimes I ask for clarification, sometimes I double check what they want to achieve. I pretty much never tell them the DC or consequences, but I will sometimes give them an idea of the difficulty, or summarize what they are attempting to do if it is a really bad idea (So, you want to open yourself to all the energy created by this magic fusion generator and try and absorb all of its power at once? Are you sure?)
There is a process of me thinking about the action and the scene, and sometimes weighing information the players don't know (they once got a very powerful item for selling something they didn't realize was an artifact to a hag) , but I don't standardize it as much as I just run it through a movie projector and play out some likely scenes.
I do play as a player, but when I do, I don’t tend to adjudicate actions. You’re asking me what I would do if I was a player in my own game? I don’t know. If it was my game there’d be more context than “you’re locked in a cell and there’s a guard.” But I guess since the guard is the only feature of the environment I’ve been given any information about, I’d try to talk to him? Or maybe ask the DM for more details about my environment. I don’t know, this is a very strange exercise and I really don’t see the point of it.
We have been talking a lot about how the players present their actions. But, you've been approaching the discussion from how the DM judges those actions. And, I'm sorry, but if you are tying to be funny with your first sentence I don't get it. I never asked you to adjudicate your own actions, I wanted what your response would be as a player.
The point of the exercise (or at least an attempted point) was to try and understand the difference in player approach. You seem to have a very specific set of things in mind when a player declares a goal and approach. So, getting an example of you responding to a scenario is useful in seeing what you mean.
I'm sure we could start giving context to this cell, but most cells would be fairly bare of things which could be used to escape them. You might have a chamber pot and a pile of rags to sleep on, but beyond that there would be little around unless there was something special about the cells.
If I’m jabbing it’s in retaliation for being jabbed. Sorry, that’s a bad habit of mine, but your “is it really that hard for you to understand?” comment really rubbed me the wrong way. And for the record, it was in its own line apart from the preceding paragraph, I didn’t isolate it any more than it was already isolated.
I tend to break into paragraphs because walls of text make me go cross-eyed. Not always because the to ideas do not flow from one another.
And I apologize, I'm obviously getting too frustrated with this conversation and our lack of progress in understanding what the other means. I'm trying to rein that frustration back.
One thing we have to stop saying is that there’s “a correct approach”, there a good approaches and bad approaches. It’s very poor DMing (Imho) to have situations with a single acceptable approach. In fact I never even consider approaches when I put obstacles in the way of the players, I just think of what would naturally be the result of either their or NPCs actions (or the environment) and throw them in their way. Their job is to figure creative ways to overcome them. One reason I dislike the published adventures providing ability checks (and DCs) it encourages the belief that there’s one “correct” approach.
"Good" and "Bad" are equally problematic in reference to what [MENTION=762]Mort[/MENTION] was saying.
In that context a "good" approach avoids rolling and gives the player a pass on doing what they want to do. A "bad" approach then means that a roll is necessary.
I think that is almost worse than "correct" since there is some inherent sarcasm in the idea of a correct approach that highlights what it was Mort was objecting to. Mainly, that describing a set of actions that the DM agrees with means you will not have to risk failure. Which leads to what some people refer to as "gaming the DM" where they can dump intelligence or charisma stats and still dominate the social and exploration parts of the game, because they know how to describe things to the DMs liking, while players who have those stats and abilities but can't or don't describe things to the DMs liking end up suffering because of it.
