D&D 5E Roleplaying in D&D 5E: It’s How You Play the Game

[Bill Zebub]

The origin of our d20 checks lies in that. The idea is that in the real world outcomes are somewhat unpredictable. We can't know every factor bearing on them. Perhaps a slight humidity made this lock stiff - harder to open. Rather than trying exhaustively, and futilely, to list every factor, we roll for it.

The simple answer? Yes, works for us.

No, that’s not what I mean. I get that.

But when I hear “surprising” and “unpredictable” …which I totally agree with…I think of something richer and more interesting than just failing or succeeding when the other result is expected. I’m the first to admit that as a DM I struggle with “spontaneous creativity”, and even I can do better than stochastic pass/fail when it comes to improvising surprising outcomes.

 

[pemerton]

I think you could adjudicate it either way. Either we assume such things are being done, but that the Rogue is so good that he can automatically slip his boots on even if ambushed and suffer no penalties, or we allow players to add such details to give themselves a bonus on the check, but perhaps at a cost in the fiction- having their boots off could make moving over the gravel outside painful and slow if they have to move there suddenly before they have time to put their boots back on. Having their quiver stuffed with cloth could mean they can't use the arrows until they spend an Action to un-stuff the quiver.

Maybe. I worry a bit about that rogue who can slip their boots on so quickly that the spikes that poke out of the floor when you step on it don't have a chance to get them in the fleshy bits of their feet! It does seem rather disconnected from the fiction.

But my scepticism - which, as I've said, is part of why I don't play 5e - probably shouldn't carry much weight for 5e players!

 

[HammerMan]

I don't care. They could make up some fictional reason for gaining the info, including it was a tale heard at a music hall (see what I did there?) or that the others in the party told them. Let's move on to the fun stuff instead of what I don't find fun: forcing people to pretend they don't know things (that said, if the player wants their PC to now know something, they can go for it).

so you would make up a fictional reason to cover the knowing (and that mean telling the player there own backstory) but you wont make up a fictional action for a character that is more skilled then the player?

Ok, if that became an actual problem that impacted our fun that I was somehow ignorant about, I'd expect another player to tell me. That's a social contract issue and has nothing to do with our playstyle.

well that very issue (and us talking about it) is what has informed OUR style of gaming.

 

[Bill Zebub]

What I mean is that the likelihood that doing X will achieve Y often depends on who it is that doing X.

Eg the likelihood that running fast will catch the animal depends on who is doing the running (many people run more quickly than I do, for instance).

The likelihood that proposing to the king that I would be a suitable spouse for his daughter will have the king agree is going to depend, in part, on who makes the proposal (eg I was recently at a house auction and the auctioneer was very good at his job and I think as a result probably got an extra few thousand at least for the vendors; conversely one time when I successfully bid at an auction I was helped by the fact that the auctioneer was not very good at drumming up bids).


Do you mean better way within the context of 5e D&D's PC build and resolution framework? Or better way in general for RPGing?

If the former, you're probably right. The absence of a better way is one reason I don't play 5e D&D.

If the latter, then I think you're obviously wrong. It's trivial to design a RPG that, for instance, will give weight to the fact that it is Kirk who is trying to persuade the king, that doesn't depend simply on the GM forming a view as to whether or not the player's words or deeds are persuasive enough.

I forget that you are nearly always posting in the context of RPGs in general, even though it’s a 5e thread in the D&D forum.

(That’s not meant to be snarky. Just an observation.)

Yes, I’m talking about D&D 5e, specifically the point where the DM considers the character performing the action and all the surrounding circumstances when considering how to resolve it.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Here are some examples I can think of from my own play plus this thread:

* @Cadence's example of stuffing something into the quiver to reduce the rattling noise. I don't think it would ever occur to me, as a player, to declare something like that as part of my action.

Great creativity. Everyone at the table can learn from that. I'm not understanding how that is a problem.

* One of my players who is a bit of a military history buff had his PC build and use "tank trap" style fortifications/outworks to help defend a homestead against a goblin charge. I don't think I would have thought of that either.

Awesome. Glad that player is on my team.

* One of the regular members of my group is in customer service, and so used to talking to strangers; another is not. When it comes time for a PC to give a speech, the first is often more fluent than the second. When, in our 4e game, the first was playing a low-CHA dwarf with no social skills and the second was playing a modest-CHA deva with strong social skills I had to decide, as a GM, how to handle the dissonance between how the players came across at the table and what the PC build rules told us the PCs were like. Fortunately 4e made it fairly easy to do this (use the action to frame the check in the skill challenge; give the fluent player a +2 bonus when appropriate to reflect the compelling nature of his speech).

That's why we don't make people give speeches. If a player wants to describe something in first person because that's going to be fun, great. If a player wants to just give a short 3rd person description of how they gave a speech, that works, too. Both achieve the same thing: describing what the character is doing. Both will be adjudicated the same way. There are no in-game bonus points for being a real life linguist.

* Once in a sci-fi tournament game our PCs were trapped in a base with no fresh oxygen supply. One of our players was a pretty serious scientist and was able to calculate how much time we had before our oxygen ran out, and so we planned around that. (The GM then ignored the actual "reality" of the situation and stipulated an unrealistically short time to oxygen deprivation. That spoiled the game for us.)

Cool for having that player around. Bummer to have that DM force the story that way.


Bottom line is that we all come to the game with different real life strengths and weaknesses. Creative ideas will vary from person to person based at least partially on their prior life experience and prior gaming experience. When someone comes up with a creative idea that helps the group, that should be celebrated. Seeing those things as something that amounts to "gaining an unfair advantage" is a... strange way to look at it in a cooperative game.

 

[Maxperson]

Good lord. Here we go with "magic words" again.

"Abra Abracadabra. I wanna reach out and grab ya. Abracadabra. Abracadabra!" ~ Bigby's Hand

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I understand HOW you play (even if I disagree and you don't like the words I use to describe it)

I'm not quite certain of that based on the questions you ask and assumptions you are making.

I don't understand you taking a huge stance on "this is what roleplaying is" or "Raw this is the play loop" (TBH I don't understand why you would choose what I think of as an outdated style over the ones suggested here but that is more preference I don't understand)

You couldn't resist, huh?

The Player's Handbook is outdated? Interesting take.

 

[Voadam]

okay, but how can you justify it being a literal RAW reading that the player chooses with no input form the stats on the sheet?

Easily.

Page 11 "Your character is a combination of game statistics, roleplaying hooks, and your imagination. You choose a race (such as human or halfling) and a class (such as fighter or wizard). You also invent the personality, appearance, and backstory of your character."

The stats are mechanics. They apply when mechanics are called for.

There is a lot of talk about the character concept you come up with for your character, for instance page 13-14 "Your DM might offer additional backgrounds beyond the ones included in chapter 4, and might be willing to work with you to craft a background that's a more precise fit for your character concept."

The section on social interaction and roleplay talks about the player determining the character's thoughts feelings and actions.

Alignment is a description, not a proscription.

5e is full of ambiguity and vagueness, it is very open to doing things in a variety of different playstyle modes. Lots of it is consistent with multiple ways of doing things.

I think it is important to remember that consistent with RAW does not mean the only way to do things RAW, particularly when discussing playstyle.

 

[pemerton]

To go back to @Hriston's OP:

Roleplaying - as in, declaring actions for one's PC and more generally describing or portraying how one's PC goes about the gameworld - works differently in different RPGs.

To point to two different systems to make the point:

In 4e D&D, encounters are resolved either as skill challenges or using the combat rules. In the former context, a player's declared action typically gets translated into a stat/skill check (I say "typically" because there are some exceptions that don't matter for present purposes). So the player is free to declare whatever they like - the player of the low-CHA dwarf can declare social actions, for instance - but the effect of those actions on the fiction will depend on the outcomes of the checks that get made. So the player of the low-CHA dwarf will be less likely to contribute to skill challenge success by declaring social actions than (say) physical ones. This then feeds into encounter design and adudication - as a GM, part of what makes encounters intriguing/compelling/challenging is that the player of the low-CHA dwarf has good reason to want to declare social actions for his PC. This is the non-combat equivalent of designing and/or running a combat encounter in a way that tends to bring the casters, archers and the like into melee, rather than making it easy for them to just hang back and plink away.

In Classic Traveller, quite a bit of non-combat action gets resolved by direct adjudication of the fiction, rather than via some sort of mechanical framework like a skill challenge. If a player is playing a PC with low INT or low EDU, then at our table we expect the player to reflect that in how they choose actions for that PC. Conversely, if the player is playing a PC with (to use an example from our game) Jack-of-all-Trades-4 then it's reasonable for them to declare all sorts of MacGyver-y stuff without actually calling for checks (eg fitting custom components onto the PCs' vehicles), and rather just using that to set up the context for the ensuing action.

Just like there's no single thing that is playing a board game or playing a card game, it shouldn't be any surprise that there's no single thing that is playing a character in a RPG.

 

[HammerMan]

The Player's Handbook is outdated? Interesting take.

mine isn't. Mine says you take on the role of your character...