That's not how I play. I don't have a "preferred scenario", and I'm very careful to honor the established fiction. I think you may have missed the point of my anecdote, but I realize how it might look from what I've described. The reason the creatures woke up is because they were attacked. I didn't intend this as a gotcha moment, and it didn't carry any heavily negative consequences for the players. They wanted to fight these creatures, and finding them asleep allowed the PCs to get into position around them and gain surprise quite easily. I think the player that was unhappy with my ruling may have seen it differently though, and my point was that I think this was because he had already made up his mind about how he thought his action should have been resolved, whereas my expectation is for the players to commit their PCs to an action and then be alright with finding out what happens next. The "what happens next" for the player's declaration of "I attack the creatures" was "The creatures wake up. Roll Initiative." I think now that I could have done a better job of foreshadowing that this was going to happen, but it really hadn't occurred to me that someone might have the assumption of a guarantee that a creature is going to stay asleep while being attacked, and it certainly wasn't my intention to mislead anyone in that direction.
High level D&D is a superhero game for me and pardon me but you cannot tell me what is relevant or not.
I feel like over all 5e abandoned the generalized adventurer advancement angle ... I think that does not make sense that my adventurer barely gets better on a lot of adventuring skills.
This is a consequence of "bounded accuracy" (which is something I've never liked). It was a reaction to 4E's approach of "add half level to everything". The criticism then was "Why should my character get better at skills that he does not practice?" For example, Stealth for a paladin or Arcana for a barbarian.You're missing the point. The issue is a level 1 rogue and a level 20 rogue will both fail the DC 12 (NOT talking powerful, here) CON save the same amount of the time. Especially in a feat-accessible game (85-90% of tables), it is unlikely the rogue with use an ASI on CON. Now, they might use it for Resilient, but then again there are a lot of other feats I see rogues taking first.
Anyway, this is despite the fact that the level 20 rogue has probably had to roll dozens, if not hundreds (well... maybe?) of CON saves during his adventures. But, he is NO better at them???
That makes no sense, whatsoever.
Yes, I do. Because I can reliably survive having a boulder dropped on me and pinning me. It isn’t a fluke. It’s absurd to posit that the character doesn’t understand hat they have experienced. I’ve survived failed saves vs dragon fire that would have incinerated a common guard even on a success. I can keep coming up with examples.
Sure they can, it doesn’t deal that much damage.
