D&D 5E "As DM, I Know How All the PCs' Abilities, Spells, and Items Work" (a poll)

[el-remmen]

Okay, time for another true/false poll, but this time with a slight clarification.

True or False: "As DM, I know how all the PC abilities, spells, and items work to the best of my ability."

I added the "to the best of my ability" caveat because I know it is virtually impossible to know how everything works or to remember it accurately all the time, so the poll question here is about intention not results. We all forget some things some time, so just because you have forgotten how something works at some point doesn't mean it is false, if it is your objective to know how they all work.

 

[Professor Murder]

Do we still use LMAO?

 

[DEFCON 1]

I am always constantly trying to make the game easier for my new players, as I more often than not will have a few of them in any particular campaign. So a lot of my time is spent typing and re-typing and organizing PC abilities into handy docs and charts so that they can more easily know what to do when I ask them to do something. As a result, I've learned a staggeringly large part of the books-- not because I wanted and tried to memorize them, but just mainly through rule osmosis and having read them over and over.

 

[CleverNickName]

Yep. Chances are, I'm the one who wrote the macros for them, manually added the houserule stuff to their character sheets, and configured their tokens to display the number of ki points or sorcery points (or whatever) that they have on mouse-over, etc., in Roll20.

 

[WarDriveWorley]

I have one brand new player, one that has information retention issues, and one that's legally blind (he can see some if the print is large/clear enough) so I create "cheat sheets" for them. As a result I have a in-depth knowledge of their characters. The other 3 players I generally have a decent to good grasp of their characters.

 

[Maxperson]

It's not that I don't trust my players. I do. It's that until I'm given a CR system that works, I have to know what the PCs are capable of in order to create encounters of the various challenge levels.

 

[J-H]

Eh, usually. I'll go "remind me" if it's been a while. I don't remember every single unique magic item I made 2 years ago.

 

[el-remmen]

It's not that I don't trust my players. I do. It's that until I'm given a CR system that works, I have to know what the PCs are capable of in order to create encounters of the various challenge levels.

Based on that answer, I think I know how you voted on this poll.

 

[payn]

Yep. Chances are, I'm the one who wrote the macros for them, manually added the houserule stuff to their character sheets, and configured their tokens to display the number of ki points or sorcery points they have on mouse-over, etc., in Roll20.

Before VTT the answer was false, but its quickly becoming true because of the above.

 

[Oofta]

All abilities spells and items? That's a pretty high bar. Most, or at least the most consequential ones? I try to at least have a general idea. But at a certain point I have to trust my players to run their own characters. I try to understand just because I'm curious how things work and there are times when people have a different interpretation of the rules (thankfully rare in my home games nowadays) than I do.