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

[Swarmkeeper]

This is totally fine. Players can either act as a player as shown [requesting to use a mechanic] or instead act as a character [describing character activity and letting the DM pick the mechanic]. The two are equally valid from my perspective.

My first reaction is to say the latter is much more preferable as it is kinda part of the point of what we're doing here - that RP thing. Both do achieve the goal, however, so maybe sure fine once in a while. I still like to encourage the players to act out (1st person) or describe (3rd person) what it is the PC is doing, though. Otherwise, we're perhaps just pressing buttons on our character sheets. That's not really what I've signed up for.

I am okay with veteran players taking the initiative to roll. After all, if I don't care about the roll, they'll never know. I would not encourage new players to assume they should roll.

IME, it is a much smoother session when players are paying attention and telling me what their character is doing rather than slinging dice. Veterans certainly know better than to roll ability checks without prompting - why introduce a chance of failure when the action they are taking might auto-succeed towards the goal they are trying to accomplish?

Side note: In combat, everyone should just roll as they declare their action to avoid slowing down the game. (e.g. avoid "I bring my mighty sword down upon the goblin's skull." "Okay, make an attack roll.")

Absolutely in 100% agreement here. Roll 'em quick in combat - perhaps even rolling the damage dice along with the d20 juuuust in case the attack hits. The DM really shouldn't even have to tell the player it is his/her turn. Know your spot in the initiative, be ready with an action, and keep it moving. That goes for the DM, too! Don't throw a mixed crew of enemies at the players and then not be quickly able to resolve each of their unique combat actions. Every. Single. Combat. (And here we have my contribution towards the OP - this is a sub-heading under a DM not being prepared).

I will do this if pressed for time. But a better solution would be to hand-wave the roll and just say "You see a statue of a woman holding a scythe. Because of your knowledge of religions of this area, you know it is a It is a statue of Kishar, the goddess of agriculture."

Agreed. In many situations, let the PC just succeed based on what you know about their proficiencies/background/creative approach.

This is bad wrong fun. If you (as a player or DM) like this you are officially a "bad wrong fun haver".

This made me chuckle out loud.

 

[Celebrim]

"It's my contention that in cases where the character can receive no immediate feedback as to how well they are doing, that the player should also receive no immediate feedback as to how well they are doing. So for a 'move silently' check or an attack roll or a climb check, sure I have no problem with the player rolling their own dice because as in real life, that character should be getting some sort of immediate feedback."

But you make my point.

You are assuming they have no immediate feedback on their move silently check.

Read it again.

Read it again.

You rolled another 1, and didn't realize it.

If you'd read it again you'll find that I offered up "move silently" specifically as an example of something where they character would receive immediate feedback, and therefore it made sense for the player to roll there own dice. I linked "move silently" to things like attack rolls and climbing a wall as something were the player ought to make their own rolls for a character. I then contrasted that with observation skills where when someone fumbles completely they generally don't realize it.

Are they deaf?

I don't know. Can you read? I imagine that you can, but you just failed a low DC reading comprehension test in a thread about how you always have a good sense of whether or not you were succeeding in something. Sure, everyone misreads something from time to time - I'm sure I've done it many times. I've mistyped things all the time as well. We can often read something multiple times and misread it every time. But the point is that you just wildly misread something and didn't notice it. Who is making whose point here?

Look, I confess I have a pet peeve. There are a lot of things I have patience with, but the thing you just did is not one of them. It is extremely obvious what the intent of my statement was. For you to go off on me as if I said the opposite of what I clearly said is one of the few things that 'gets my dander up'. If you are going to keep doing it, I'm going to just have to block you because it will drive me up the wall. There are few trolls on EnWorld that I think did it repeatedly and deliberately just because they knew they could get a rise out of me, and I've had to block them just for my own sanity.

 

[5ekyu]

Read it again.

Read it again.

You rolled another 1, and didn't realize it.

If you'd read it again you'll find that I offered up "move silently" specifically as an example of something where they character would receive immediate feedback, and therefore it made sense for the player to roll there own dice. I linked "move silently" to things like attack rolls and climbing a wall as something were the player ought to make their own rolls for a character. I then contrasted that with observation skills where when someone fumbles completely they generally don't realize it.



I don't know. Can you read? I imagine that you can, but you just failed a low DC reading comprehension test in a thread about how you always have a good sense of whether or not you were succeeding in something. Sure, everyone misreads something from time to time - I'm sure I've done it many times. I've mistyped things all the time as well. We can often read something multiple times and misread it every time. But the point is that you just wildly misread something and didn't notice it. Who is making whose point here?

Look, I confess I have a pet peeve. There are a lot of things I have patience with, but the thing you just did is not one of them. It is extremely obvious what the intent of my statement was. For you to go off on me as if I said the opposite of what I clearly said is one of the few things that 'gets my dander up'. If you are going to keep doing it, I'm going to just have to block you because it will drive me up the wall. There are few trolls on EnWorld that I think did it repeatedly and deliberately just because they knew they could get a rise out of me, and I've had to block them just for my own sanity.

you are correct. i misread you.

i apologize.

 

[Celebrim]

you are correct. i misread you.

i apologize.

OMG. You are now like most honored among all internet posters. I'm not sure I've ever had such a graciously unadorned apology. I should take a screen shot of that. You are like restoring my faith in humanity.

So, for my part, I apologize for how aggressive I get in these debates. I once had a friend, a good friend mind you, tell me that arguing with me was like taking a 2x4 to the face. I know I'm a bombastic abrasive person quite often, and it's easy to get justifiably irritated with me.

 

[neobolts]

My first reaction is to say the latter is much more preferable as it is kinda part of the point of what we're doing here - that RP thing. Both do achieve the goal, however, so maybe sure fine once in a while. I still like to encourage the players to act out (1st person) or describe (3rd person) what it is the PC is doing, though. Otherwise, we're perhaps just pressing buttons on our character sheets. That's not really what I've signed up for.

I probably run a less immersive D&D table TBH. I've had players who range from "I am Elfavarius, Keeper of the Evergrove, and this is my lineage..." to "Dude look how many d6 I am about to roll lolz". Most of my current players are some mix of the two.

 

[5ekyu]

OMG. You are now like most honored among all internet posters. I'm not sure I've ever had such a graciously unadorned apology. I should take a screen shot of that. You are like restoring my faith in humanity.

So, for my part, I apologize for how aggressive I get in these debates. I once had a friend, a good friend mind you, tell me that arguing with me was like taking a 2x4 to the face. I know I'm a bombastic abrasive person quite often, and it's easy to get justifiably irritated with me.

i added an edit to my original response about the error but did not change it so the error can remain clear.

As for the "low dc" all i can say is that a low dc on a intenet read post varies from person to person and half-blind to fully sighted - as does typing.

However, my reading and typing lacks aside, the point to me still stands.

A search check of 2 can be narrated as "a crwoded fridge with things shifting around a lot" or "a tourough search you are certain of."

You keep conflating failure and confidence.

Have i searched a fridge and though i was out of cheese only later to find it in the cirsper later? Sure. Thats because i did a quick look in the obvious places and then called it done. Likely if my wife had said "no, i know we have cheese, i just bought it yesterday when i got the potatoes and onions." i would have looked more closely and found it.

The examples i gave were all failure - but they were failures in which some times the Gm decided to represent the d20 influence into the game as narration and sometimes they did not. That creates a case of some d20 being in-game and some not when in fact the Gm can just as well provide the same kind of "how did it go" along with the attempt.

An insight check (successful or not) can be a read that sees only a few tells, mixed signals and nothing direct (low roll) or it can get a clear view with strong and consistent tells (high roll) but only if the Gm decides to provide narration to reflect the roll. Did the mark get irritated and snappy at the line of questioning or did he get irritated and snappy at the tabaxi at the next table being so loud its very difficult to hear? thats a decent pair of GM narrations that can lead the player/character towards confidence or lack of confidence in that insight check.

its a Gm choice what narration to apply on the way to success or "failure" and given that "failure" in 5e includes "progress with setback determined by Gm" and not just "no progress" it has never seemed right to me to treat some d20 as "unseen" and others as "seen" in narration. It seems destined to lead to complications that are not beneficial.

As an aside, i have seen Gms roll stealth behind the screen for the "you dont know if you were heard" thing too. Those were some of the things that led me down this path.

As i said at one point on this thread or others - in my games your roll of 2+9=11 "failure" on an insight check might lead to a narration that tells you the truth with lotsa of "low confidence mixed signals" with a setback of "while you were trying to cut thru the noise enough to get a good read, you missed the cutpurse snagging one of your pouches." (Progress with setback that you will find out about later.)

 

[5ekyu]

OMG. You are now like most honored among all internet posters. I'm not sure I've ever had such a graciously unadorned apology. I should take a screen shot of that. You are like restoring my faith in humanity.

So, for my part, I apologize for how aggressive I get in these debates. I once had a friend, a good friend mind you, tell me that arguing with me was like taking a 2x4 to the face. I know I'm a bombastic abrasive person quite often, and it's easy to get justifiably irritated with me.

Honestly, compared to some, i find you refreshing.

You at least discuss from logic as opposed to dogma and are open to other ideas.

Now enough of this being nice on the internet crap - consider yourself insulted in some odious fashion and your parentage questioned in some dubious way.

 

[Celebrim]

You keep conflating failure and confidence.

I suppose so. In an 'ideal' system I suppose we'd make a second secret 'wisdom' check after failing any sort of mental social skill check in order to determine how oblivious the character actually is to his own failure - he doesn't realize his joke wasn't funny and went over like a fart and he's the only one laughing, and so forth.

But seeing as we are usually testing perceptiveness in the first place, I prefer to just simplify and make a single die roll. If that die roll is secret then its up to the player to be oblivious to his failure or not as he sees fit, and I don't have to tell them how to react and risk playing their character for them.

For a great many mental tasks we simply do not have any feedback regarding how well we are doing until trip over the metaphorical or literal tripwire. Not giving the player the actual roll of the fortune die to determine observation skills is simple and obvious way to simulate this, and its pretty much been the normal procedure on 'find trap' sort of rolls since I was in elementary school. Rather than leading to complication, it greatly simplifies things for all participants.

As an aside, i have seen Gms roll stealth behind the screen for the "you dont know if you were heard" thing too. Those were some of the things that led me down this path.

Meh. I don't really see the point of that, though as a player I wouldn't object to it. Stealth is an opposed roll, so it really depends on the DC more than anything else. The 1e 'Find Traps' roll on the other hand had a fixed chance of success, and there it was essential. It's a bit less essential in 3e than it was in 1e because of the expectation of varying DCs, but I still prefer to stick to established practices of play that I've learned over the years are good for everyone.

As i said at one point on this thread or others - in my games your roll of 2+9=11 "failure" on an insight check might lead to a narration that tells you the truth with lotsa of "low confidence mixed signals" with a setback of "while you were trying to cut thru the noise enough to get a good read, you missed the cutpurse snagging one of your pouches." (Progress with setback that you will find out about later.)

I prefer to make the roll and give the narration, and let the player act according to the narration rather than the roll. That way, if I roll a '1' and I say to the player, "He's definitely lying", he has no way of knowing whether he rolled a "20" and caught a liar, or whether he fumbled and now believes the honest person is lying. Indeed, in a real sense it is always and only the narration that matters. A player never really needs to know what the mechanics or the fortunes were that led to the narration, it's just that often it does know harm to let them know and saves a lot of time at the table to distribute that burden around the players rather than forcing the GM to make so many dice rolls.

 

[5ekyu]

I suppose so. In an 'ideal' system I suppose we'd make a second secret 'wisdom' check after failing any sort of mental social skill check in order to determine how oblivious the character actually is to his own failure - he doesn't realize his joke wasn't funny and went over like a fart and he's the only one laughing, and so forth.

But seeing as we are usually testing perceptiveness in the first place, I prefer to just simplify and make a single die roll. If that die roll is secret then its up to the player to be oblivious to his failure or not as he sees fit, and I don't have to tell them how to react and risk playing their character for them.

For a great many mental tasks we simply do not have any feedback regarding how well we are doing until trip over the metaphorical or literal tripwire. Not giving the player the actual roll of the fortune die to determine observation skills is simple and obvious way to simulate this, and its pretty much been the normal procedure on 'find trap' sort of rolls since I was in elementary school. Rather than leading to complication, it greatly simplifies things for all participants.



Meh. I don't really see the point of that, though as a player I wouldn't object to it. Stealth is an opposed roll, so it really depends on the DC more than anything else. The 1e 'Find Traps' roll on the other hand had a fixed chance of success, and there it was essential. It's a bit less essential in 3e than it was in 1e because of the expectation of varying DCs, but I still prefer to stick to established practices of play that I've learned over the years are good for everyone.



I prefer to make the roll and give the narration, and let the player act according to the narration rather than the roll. That way, if I roll a '1' and I say to the player, "He's definitely lying", he has no way of knowing whether he rolled a "20" and caught a liar, or whether he fumbled and now believes the honest person is lying. Indeed, in a real sense it is always and only the narration that matters. A player never really needs to know what the mechanics or the fortunes were that led to the narration, it's just that often it does know harm to let them know and saves a lot of time at the table to distribute that burden around the players rather than forcing the GM to make so many dice rolls.

If a game had fixed Dcs that were unchanging and more predictable than the in-game predictability, i could see hiding some rolls.

but where Dcs are either predictable in-game or variable - i see no benefit to hiding rolls.

For my 1 on insight checks - i would narrate a very crappy read and then give them an answer - which might be "you cant tell", "you think he is lying" or "you think he is telling the truth." The player/character would know they are not confident in either of the latter but neither would know if that was a "failure" or a "progress with setback" and so the "is he lying or not" would still be in doubt. (Truthfully, 1s and 20s are not auto-fails/success so it could just be the right answer *if* the other guy was bad at deception or not lying.)

So i keep the same "not sure of the outcome" without any metagame frets and fusses over who saw what die.

its enjoyable to never touch a die when i Gm and to watch them sweat their own rolls - to me at least.

 

[Celebrim]

Now enough of this being nice on the internet crap - consider yourself insulted in some odious fashion and your parentage questioned in some dubious way.

The traditional response is to imply that I'm an immoral person who probably needs to psychiatric care and that people like me need to be sterilized and have their children taken away for the collective good, then proactively run to the moderators to tell them how impolite I am so that they can get away with it.