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

[HammerMan]

but inevitably you did find out. So nothing was at stake there. No risks were actually being taken, etc.

correct, and even if she told us that OUT of game we most likely (and for us shouldn't) change how our characters react.

In the end the GM told you, in some fashion, "this isn't an adventure anymore, it is just looting."

no... she didn't. We finished the dungeon and realized that there were no more doors, and the last one had the person we were there to rescue...

This is where we get into agenda. IMHO there is little chance that any narrative arising out of this activity is going to bear on the dramatic needs of the PCs or have any larger impact on their story. I have limited table time, I'd be much more apt to use it for something the participants find really interesting vs some 'grind'.

if my character doesn't know I have an hour to try and try but I the player do, I don't want to just say "I take the hour I don't know I have"

Sure, because something jumped them, or they had a time crunch, or there were an unknown number of equally inviting doors to try.

and short of us being somewhere super safe (like our own base) it just wont.

In the end though, when it comes down to it, when there's nothing left to risk, they WILL get through that door. I mean, REALISTICALLY, no door can withstand limitless time and energy spent against it.

have you never left a door unopened in a dungeon? ever?

and eventually they will be back, again, does the order they get through them matter at this point?

well in my example none of the locks stopped us... but if the two that had ended up having treasure in them DID stop us and we got the person we were there to rescue we would NOT have gone back to the other doors. Now if we opened a treasure door and both the other treasure door and the rescue target door were not unlockable we would have tried a different way into one (until we found prisnior)

Exactly, like force the door, or hammer out the lock, etc. I mean, I'm no burglar but I can think of easily a dozen ways to potentially approach getting through some random door in the real world. Most of those would work in D&D too.

and we are back to how important is this door to get through... I am starting to think you have never left a dungeon not fully explored.

Oh, perhaps, but at some point it will become apparent that said enemies are non-existent.

only if you waste time and make noise assuming that there are none... it is entirely possible to get into and out of an Orc outpost not knowing if there are more orcs in there even if you meet your objective.

I mean, 100 is really hyperbole, but it could easily eat up really significant table time to do all this pointless rolling of dice.

okay but again who would make 10?

And this is really the key here, IMHO, in my 'model' of playing this sort of game, this kind of thing is a waste of valuable time.

playing the game doesn't seem to me to be a waste of time

The best case scenario I can think of is some amusing anecdote arises about being frustrated about the stubborness of a door and the goofy response to that.

no best is you can't get through it you move on and try to meet your objective.

No monsters are going to show up, nothing, definitionally! So why not just say "OK, after some fairly tedious and exhausting labor, you break into the three remaining rooms and find X, Y, and Z." Then we can go on to the Vault of the Flying Pixie Monsters and have More Fun(tm).

because maybe you DON'T...

I have had treasure hidden, or locked, or guarded that PCs didn't get because they could not find/unlock it or just left dungeon before getting to it...

 

[HammerMan]

My PCs will always have at least a dagger on them. Too many times something has happened at parties to make it worth the risk to attend one without the ability to defend myself.

every thing you say will now be taken through the eyes of 20ish years ago when I was in High School and playing 2e... your POV now makes more sense. Thank you.

 

[HammerMan]

Answer: because if a long string of rolls and new approaches get them nowhere, sooner or later the players - via their characters - might get frustrated or bored enough to go explore somewhere else rather than continuing to whale on these doors. If the players aren't frustrated at the table it's highly unlikely they're going to RP their characters as being frustrated in the fiction; and won't even get the opportunity if you skip straight to "You've destroyed these doors after an hour's hard work, now what?".

this reminds me of how I couldn't understand the "if cantrips are at will what stops someone from breaking every wall with 1,000 uses of a damage causeing cantrip?"
"Um nothing... but nothing stops you from doing that with 1,000 swings of a pick axe... but most people are not willing to swing the pick axe 1,000 times I assume the same is not only true of the cantrip but since people with pick axes are normally more physical I actually assume people with cantrips are LESS likely to do it"

If you play it as "okay time skip you did it" and don't RP the "Man that took forever I am exhausted" it makes sense I guess

 

[Maxperson]

every thing you say will now be taken through the eyes of 20ish years ago when I was in High School and playing 2e... your POV now makes more sense. Thank you.

What does 20 years ago have to do with this?

 

[HammerMan]

What does 20 years ago have to do with this?

the time frame that I (and the groups I played with) thought like you... it is a completely different mentality one that changed for me over the years. Viewing your thoughts as if I had said them at 14 or even 22 makes me understand where you are coming from. Thinking of you as I am now in my 40's I can't understand you at all.

and I have gone out of my way not to use 'grown up' or 'mature' here so don't take offense. You just are in the same mental space i was back then. it makes sense.

 

[Ovinomancer]

hey look at that... you admited you didn't just keep doing the same wrong thing you changed approches... almost like snark aside you did EXACTLY what I said.

I did? Oh, did you mean learning new techniques? No, learning glazing doesn't invalidate layering, it adds a tool. Learning OSL doesn't invalidate dry brushing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

and we are back to how important is this door to get through... I am starting to think you have never left a dungeon not fully explored.

Back in the days, maybe 20 years ago , when we played that way? Nope, we'd even go back in and keep at it. The harder that door is to open, the more likely it is there's something awesome behind it! I mean, sure, we wouldn't bother if there was some next level or something to check out instead where the prospects for even better treasure existed. But in terms of wasting a couple days of PC calendar time to get some extra gold/XP/magic? Heck yeah!

I still have the annotated and updated, to reflect plundering, map of my original 1976 dungeon (made with the geomorphs that came with my copy of Holmes Basic). It details every door bashed in, ever room looted, everything down to the penny. The PCs even, somehow, looted the room that was guarded by the Flesh Golem (an unbeatable monster for level 1 PCs). I don't recall exactly how they managed to get around the golem, but they did. I'm sure it involved carts, mules, ropes, pulleys, grappling hooks, etc., lol! Now THAT I would play out even today! hehe.

 

[HammerMan]

Back in the days, maybe 20 years ago , when we played that way? Nope, we'd even go back in and keep at it. The harder that door is to open, the more likely it is there's something awesome behind it! I mean, sure, we wouldn't bother if there was some next level or something to check out instead where the prospects for even better treasure existed. But in terms of wasting a couple days of PC calendar time to get some extra gold/XP/magic? Heck yeah!

wow...just wow... all that for a locked door?

I still have the annotated and updated, to reflect plundering, map of my original 1976 dungeon (made with the geomorphs that came with my copy of Holmes Basic). It details every door bashed in, ever room looted, everything down to the penny. The PCs even, somehow, looted the room that was guarded by the Flesh Golem (an unbeatable monster for level 1 PCs). I don't recall exactly how they managed to get around the golem, but they did. I'm sure it involved carts, mules, ropes, pulleys, grappling hooks, etc., lol! Now THAT I would play out even today! hehe.

okay... I am really not understanding any of this..

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

wow...just wow... all that for a locked door?

okay... I am really not understanding any of this..

I'm just saying, in our 'old school' phase we actually DID systematically loot entire dungeon levels, even after the monsters were long gone, just because why not? Its not like we played that stuff out, unless it was maybe the Flesh Golem kind of thing. If it wasn't dangerous we just assumed the PCs eventually succeeded.

I still recall there is a SINGLE 10x10 block of actual stone in that 1st level. The players basically told me "yeah, we'll spend a week with pickaxes chipping away at it to make sure there's no secret room in there." I am 100% sure we didn't play out a week of hammering on stone with pick axes. Someone declared that intent, and maybe a check was made to see if some random wilderness monster wandered in or something, and then I would have declared "nope, it was just solid stone..." Then we went on to some more fun adventure that still had some danger to it.

I mean, think about it this way, in the REAL WORLD people have spent decades digging a hole, again and again, on Oak Island, purely on the basis of someone reputedly finding a few scraps of what might be treasure, 100 years ago. A locked door, short of it being so magicked it literally cannot be opened, is nothing. People would pound on that sucker for months if they had to.

 

[Lanefan]

The PCs even, somehow, looted the room that was guarded by the Flesh Golem (an unbeatable monster for level 1 PCs). I don't recall exactly how they managed to get around the golem, but they did. I'm sure it involved carts, mules, ropes, pulleys, grappling hooks, etc., lol! Now THAT I would play out even today! hehe.

Now this is the pure distilled essence of D&D, right here. Brilliant stuff!