machineelf
Explorer
Ok, but I'm curious. If you had a player who asked, "do I know who it is," at your table, what would you say to that player in response?
D&D 5E What DM flaw has caused you to actually leave a game?
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
"How might you know?"
Celebrim
Legend
[MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION]: Well, at least I think I understand where you are coming from now. I had totally misunderstood the thrust of your argument, hence your confusion over why I was talking about rail roading. I had thought you were standing on the principle of player agency. In fact it seems more the case now that you explain yourself is that you are standing on the principle of the rules are the rules, and ought to be followed strictly as written. So all my discussion about process loops, player agency, and railroading was only tangential to the point you were trying to make.
Ok, I get that. And for the record were I to try to run 5e, I would certainly endeavor to play it by the rules at least until I understood what the rules were trying to accomplish, and what they were really good at and what they were not so good at.
It certainly is the case that writer's of 5e try to go out of there way to frame ability checks as occurring as the result of some task resolution. However, I think that while this works most of the time, there are some cases that even the writer's of 5e strain credibility to call an action. Before I get into that, let me talk about the tiny differences between 3e and 5e in its approach to ability checks.
The first thing is that there is no such thing as a skill saving throw in 5e. This is probably by design, and I know what they are going for here... and frankly I disagree. By there being no such thing as a skill saving throw in 5e, the skill proficiency bonus never applies to resisting anything (other than potentially, opposed checks). Rather the saving throw proficiency bonus is always meant to apply to resistance. So if you are proficient in dexterity saves, you always resist with that proficiency bonus applying and never on the basis of skill. The intended purpose is obviously to keep all the classes on a level playing field. The upshot though is that there is less refinement in what you can challenge a player with or what a player can be good at. For example, in 3e if you were falling, you could make a tumble 'saving throw' to reduce falling distance, and it really didn't matter who brought up the relevant skill.
The second thing to notice is that you never roll the dice on a passive skill check, and instead always assume the player "takes 10". So these passive skill checks in fact happen, and presumably can happen in secret, but the fortune is fixed even if the outcome is unknown (unknown in theory at least). Now, there is one good thing I like about this approach, and that is that it solves once and for all the "roll with it" problem of how often you should roll a passive check. With no need to roll the dice, there is no need to decide on the interval at which a passive check is made, and no need to make complex and hard to apply guidelines about how long to "roll with it". But the drawback of this approach is more than enough at least for me to discard the entire system, and that is that it becomes impossible for a scenario designer not to metagame. By making the fortune of a doubtful proposition fixed rather than variable, the scenario designer is placed in the unenviable (and to me intolerable) position of knowing ahead of time exactly the outcome. Much like with a lock in 3e using the 'take 20' rules, when the scenario designer places a challenge that will be interacted with passively (most likely) he is basically forced to decide and choose the outcome. To me that is beyond the pale, and it would probably be one of the first things I'd house rule out of the game (replacing it with a "roll with it" rule of one roll to determine the fortune).
That said, in practice your theory to me still seems unworkable. For example, no amount of linguistic straining is going to convince me that recalling facts or making a deduction is an action, much less that it can be meaningfully and repeatedly phrased over the course of the campaign as a "goal" and an "approach". The whole point of knowledge checks is generally the player does not know what his character knows, so how can he state an approach to recall what he himself does not know that he does not know? And in any event, your quibble with this use of the intelligence ability directly contradicts the Basic Rules example of play, which reads:
This problem of the actual play being much looser and freer with the application of ability checks than you want to make them is something that applies to several of the examples that they give. For example, calling out survival to be used "to avoid quicksand" sounds very much like a skill based saving throw to me, as normally speaking avoidance of quicksand is a matter of detection. You wouldn't normally expect Bob the Ranger to have to have his player state, "Bob is marching forward, being careful to avoid quicksand.", precisely because Bob's player couldn't possibly know what Bob knows, that this looks like an area that might have quicksand in it. And if not quicksand, then the fire pot plants, the deadly yellow stinger, the whirligigs, the skunkworts, and the lilies of living death - none of which the player could possibly state that they are being careful to avoid even if the character is the sort of character with the knowledge to know to avoid them. And even if he did, imagine the laundry list of things to avoid that constitute things he's doing on an ongoing basis. I think the "ongoing basis" idea of long term actions opens up an enormous legal loophole if you want to take it, as any number of tasks could be construed from an ongoing proposition like, "I try to safely cross the desert wastes." or "I carefully walk down the corridor alert to potential danger." and any number of skills called on as a result of the implied actions involved.
And this brings us to my biggest objection to being hidebound about this, and that is that you are "pixel bitching". (I don't know if I can use that term here, but it is the technical one.) By that I mean that you are waiting for your players to say the magical words or phrases that unlock the content, and until they say the right things you aren't going to let them use their abilities. You are saying things like, "While you're traveling the city, what sort of ongoing activity will you be engaged in?", "A wise PC chooses to Keep Watch unless some other activity would be of more benefit than losing a few coins to a pickpocket.", "Passive checks are for when the character is doing something repeatedly, such as keeping watch or searching for secret doors while traveling the dungeon." The upshot of that though is that you are playing in some sort of Kraag Wurld where the players must always know to say the special things that you are wanting them to say before they even get so much as a passive ability check to their credit. Where as, I don't expect players to have to say while they are in a dangerous environment that they are alert to danger and doing their best to avoid it, much less that they have to specify a particular danger to avoid and approach to do so, much less that I will then assume that they are on watch that they are now passive to danger and haven't even earned an ability check. I don't expect the players to hunt through the environment for the right combination of skills to apply to the right sort of things in order to learn things that might be apparent to highly knowledgeable in world characters at first glance. I don't expect players to have to know that 'Lilies of Living Death' are a thing in the world, and that they ought to call out the lilies as a potential hazard before interacting with them. If someone has the appropriate knowledge, I'm just going to roll for them or let them roll themselves (depending on my mood), to give them a chance of recognizing the lilies for what they are in the same way that facts typically demand your attention quite unbidden. A very little bit of this insistence on stating everything in the form of an action would start to try my patience if in fact you are as hidebound about it as you claim, though to your credit you do seems to have this idea that you need to telegraph everything in order to compensate - for example, always first showing an act of larceny before springing pick pockets upon the PCs. Apparently, if they are then always actively stating that they are on the look out for pick pockets, they don't even get to passively resist being pick pocketed?
I suspect that I would have to tell you that my character, as an ongoing matter, would like to be recalling what he knows about the things that he is seeing so as to not be walking around with the assumption that he's a mindless imbecile not paying attention to anything going on around him.
And for that I'd probably get a string of difficulties higher than what I could pass with a passive check. So maybe I'd have to say, "I try to recall the historical, arcane, or religious significance of the thing that I'm seeing, and if I can't I try to have some revelatory insight.", every time I saw something about everything that I saw. I'll do this as an ongoing action and I'll do it whenever I'm not actually stating I'm concentrating on something else."
I haven't yet decided if this is actually the intention of the designers or just your interpretation of it. Certainly, one reading of the example of play, is even though it is stated as a question, the player has given an goal and an approach. However, if that is the case, then the player must first guess what might possibly be hidden or wrong in the scene before even being allowed to test if his character notices what is hidden or wrong, which does in fact imply "pixel bitching" to a very high degree. For example, if that is the strict intent, then if the player said, "Are the gargoyles large enough to hide behind?" or "What sort of stone are the gargoyles made of?" or "Are the gargoyles carved in the Moldavian style?" or "Are the gargoyles male or female figures?" or whatever, then the Gm would be perfectly in his rights to not even give the player a chance to notice the gargoyles are living beings even while intently studying them. There is a certain Gygaxian "skillful play" logic to the idea that the player will eventually as a player learn that gargoyles are potentially alive, but it seems to go beyond even Gygaxian naturalism and I doubt very many readers have interpreted it that way.
Ok, I get that. And for the record were I to try to run 5e, I would certainly endeavor to play it by the rules at least until I understood what the rules were trying to accomplish, and what they were really good at and what they were not so good at.
It certainly is the case that writer's of 5e try to go out of there way to frame ability checks as occurring as the result of some task resolution. However, I think that while this works most of the time, there are some cases that even the writer's of 5e strain credibility to call an action. Before I get into that, let me talk about the tiny differences between 3e and 5e in its approach to ability checks.
The first thing is that there is no such thing as a skill saving throw in 5e. This is probably by design, and I know what they are going for here... and frankly I disagree. By there being no such thing as a skill saving throw in 5e, the skill proficiency bonus never applies to resisting anything (other than potentially, opposed checks). Rather the saving throw proficiency bonus is always meant to apply to resistance. So if you are proficient in dexterity saves, you always resist with that proficiency bonus applying and never on the basis of skill. The intended purpose is obviously to keep all the classes on a level playing field. The upshot though is that there is less refinement in what you can challenge a player with or what a player can be good at. For example, in 3e if you were falling, you could make a tumble 'saving throw' to reduce falling distance, and it really didn't matter who brought up the relevant skill.
The second thing to notice is that you never roll the dice on a passive skill check, and instead always assume the player "takes 10". So these passive skill checks in fact happen, and presumably can happen in secret, but the fortune is fixed even if the outcome is unknown (unknown in theory at least). Now, there is one good thing I like about this approach, and that is that it solves once and for all the "roll with it" problem of how often you should roll a passive check. With no need to roll the dice, there is no need to decide on the interval at which a passive check is made, and no need to make complex and hard to apply guidelines about how long to "roll with it". But the drawback of this approach is more than enough at least for me to discard the entire system, and that is that it becomes impossible for a scenario designer not to metagame. By making the fortune of a doubtful proposition fixed rather than variable, the scenario designer is placed in the unenviable (and to me intolerable) position of knowing ahead of time exactly the outcome. Much like with a lock in 3e using the 'take 20' rules, when the scenario designer places a challenge that will be interacted with passively (most likely) he is basically forced to decide and choose the outcome. To me that is beyond the pale, and it would probably be one of the first things I'd house rule out of the game (replacing it with a "roll with it" rule of one roll to determine the fortune).
That said, in practice your theory to me still seems unworkable. For example, no amount of linguistic straining is going to convince me that recalling facts or making a deduction is an action, much less that it can be meaningfully and repeatedly phrased over the course of the campaign as a "goal" and an "approach". The whole point of knowledge checks is generally the player does not know what his character knows, so how can he state an approach to recall what he himself does not know that he does not know? And in any event, your quibble with this use of the intelligence ability directly contradicts the Basic Rules example of play, which reads:
This problem of the actual play being much looser and freer with the application of ability checks than you want to make them is something that applies to several of the examples that they give. For example, calling out survival to be used "to avoid quicksand" sounds very much like a skill based saving throw to me, as normally speaking avoidance of quicksand is a matter of detection. You wouldn't normally expect Bob the Ranger to have to have his player state, "Bob is marching forward, being careful to avoid quicksand.", precisely because Bob's player couldn't possibly know what Bob knows, that this looks like an area that might have quicksand in it. And if not quicksand, then the fire pot plants, the deadly yellow stinger, the whirligigs, the skunkworts, and the lilies of living death - none of which the player could possibly state that they are being careful to avoid even if the character is the sort of character with the knowledge to know to avoid them. And even if he did, imagine the laundry list of things to avoid that constitute things he's doing on an ongoing basis. I think the "ongoing basis" idea of long term actions opens up an enormous legal loophole if you want to take it, as any number of tasks could be construed from an ongoing proposition like, "I try to safely cross the desert wastes." or "I carefully walk down the corridor alert to potential danger." and any number of skills called on as a result of the implied actions involved.
And this brings us to my biggest objection to being hidebound about this, and that is that you are "pixel bitching". (I don't know if I can use that term here, but it is the technical one.) By that I mean that you are waiting for your players to say the magical words or phrases that unlock the content, and until they say the right things you aren't going to let them use their abilities. You are saying things like, "While you're traveling the city, what sort of ongoing activity will you be engaged in?", "A wise PC chooses to Keep Watch unless some other activity would be of more benefit than losing a few coins to a pickpocket.", "Passive checks are for when the character is doing something repeatedly, such as keeping watch or searching for secret doors while traveling the dungeon." The upshot of that though is that you are playing in some sort of Kraag Wurld where the players must always know to say the special things that you are wanting them to say before they even get so much as a passive ability check to their credit. Where as, I don't expect players to have to say while they are in a dangerous environment that they are alert to danger and doing their best to avoid it, much less that they have to specify a particular danger to avoid and approach to do so, much less that I will then assume that they are on watch that they are now passive to danger and haven't even earned an ability check. I don't expect the players to hunt through the environment for the right combination of skills to apply to the right sort of things in order to learn things that might be apparent to highly knowledgeable in world characters at first glance. I don't expect players to have to know that 'Lilies of Living Death' are a thing in the world, and that they ought to call out the lilies as a potential hazard before interacting with them. If someone has the appropriate knowledge, I'm just going to roll for them or let them roll themselves (depending on my mood), to give them a chance of recognizing the lilies for what they are in the same way that facts typically demand your attention quite unbidden. A very little bit of this insistence on stating everything in the form of an action would start to try my patience if in fact you are as hidebound about it as you claim, though to your credit you do seems to have this idea that you need to telegraph everything in order to compensate - for example, always first showing an act of larceny before springing pick pockets upon the PCs. Apparently, if they are then always actively stating that they are on the look out for pick pockets, they don't even get to passively resist being pick pocketed?
I suspect that I would have to tell you that my character, as an ongoing matter, would like to be recalling what he knows about the things that he is seeing so as to not be walking around with the assumption that he's a mindless imbecile not paying attention to anything going on around him.
And for that I'd probably get a string of difficulties higher than what I could pass with a passive check. So maybe I'd have to say, "I try to recall the historical, arcane, or religious significance of the thing that I'm seeing, and if I can't I try to have some revelatory insight.", every time I saw something about everything that I saw. I'll do this as an ongoing action and I'll do it whenever I'm not actually stating I'm concentrating on something else."
I haven't yet decided if this is actually the intention of the designers or just your interpretation of it. Certainly, one reading of the example of play, is even though it is stated as a question, the player has given an goal and an approach. However, if that is the case, then the player must first guess what might possibly be hidden or wrong in the scene before even being allowed to test if his character notices what is hidden or wrong, which does in fact imply "pixel bitching" to a very high degree. For example, if that is the strict intent, then if the player said, "Are the gargoyles large enough to hide behind?" or "What sort of stone are the gargoyles made of?" or "Are the gargoyles carved in the Moldavian style?" or "Are the gargoyles male or female figures?" or whatever, then the Gm would be perfectly in his rights to not even give the player a chance to notice the gargoyles are living beings even while intently studying them. There is a certain Gygaxian "skillful play" logic to the idea that the player will eventually as a player learn that gargoyles are potentially alive, but it seems to go beyond even Gygaxian naturalism and I doubt very many readers have interpreted it that way.
Celebrim
Legend
Do you have any idea how tiresome that gets as a player (or a DM) by even the sixth session, much less the sixtieth or the hundred and sixtieth? That's one of those things like in the some of the Indy games books I read, where the idea might read well in the example, but sure as heck doesn't work in play after about three hours of play which makes me wonder if the Indy designer has even played his own game for more than three hours.
Seriously, by the third attempt to embellish, "Knowledge (Religion)?" with something flowery like that, I'd be ready to strangle someone.
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]: I know you know this because you've mentioned it before, but your posts are exceedingly long and dense. I really just don't have the time to address them in as equally a thorough manner. I don't want to sound dismissive because I do appreciate the effort, but this is really too much. I may not get to them for days and the thread will have moved on by then I suspect. If it hasn't then I can take the time to respond.
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
It's literally one sentence. And it serves a couple of different purposes at the same time. I would call that efficient storytelling and gameplay.
I quit a campaign because of the over-reliance on dice and skill checks. I was a ranger trying to cross a 10 foot river that was 3 feet deep and had no current. Just to be on the safe side I took off my clothes so I couldn't be weighted down, tied a 50 foot rope around my waste, tied it to a tree, gave it to the Barbarian in the party to hang on, and I waded in. I described it all in excruciating detail my plans, and then the DM said "make a dex roll".
I said "why?" and I realized that role playing, or careful character playing isn't needed in 5e, it is just how you rig your stats for this never-ending assault of skill checks. I didn't have to do anything and could have blundered in carrying 5000 lbs of gp since nobody does encumbrance, and rolled the same silly dice. I wasn't needed for this character, just my sheet was. I decided that that DM wasn't for me.
I said "why?" and I realized that role playing, or careful character playing isn't needed in 5e, it is just how you rig your stats for this never-ending assault of skill checks. I didn't have to do anything and could have blundered in carrying 5000 lbs of gp since nobody does encumbrance, and rolled the same silly dice. I wasn't needed for this character, just my sheet was. I decided that that DM wasn't for me.
Rya.Reisender
Explorer
Abjudication is actually perfectly fine for me. If I want to climb a cliff and the DM determines no roll is needed and I just succeed (or fail), that's within the rules, so I won't complain that I don't get to do an athletics check.
The problem for me comes only in when the DM interprets a rule incorrectly and doesn't listen to me when I try to correct him or when he intentionally changes a rule just because he thinks it's not balanced or something.
Sadras
Legend
So DM's cannot create house rules at the table for the game? Sorry, I'm going to disagree with that.
So in our last session a new player corrected me regarding 5e AoO, myself and the rest of the table had a relapse into old edition rules, and I was ok with it, but made a small amendment which I felt was necessary and it assisted my personal issue with the easy advantage received from flanking.
I feel as a DM I was within my rights to add that small amendment to the rules.
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