D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Voadam]

So... we could have Dragons fight in the Dungeon!

I know Dragonmech is a thing (have the book), but considering the Apparatus of Kwalish is a thing and there's an old adventure with gnomes building a giant robot, we should have a thread on mechs in D&D.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

No. we're clear as to whether or not I was wearing gloves since you could read what I typed. Gloves would make clear typing difficult to impossible, depending on the gloves.

More likely you just aren't understanding me. The action is not my narration of the PC dodging the fireball. The action being performed by the PC is the saving throw. Once the action is determined to be a success or failure, I then narrate the results, which can include the PC dodging behind a pillar briefly to avoid some of the damage(successful save) or trying and not getting there in time(failed save). Narrations of PC actions(not the same as combat actions) is my job as DM.

Were I to agree with what you said and not move the PC at all and the player didn't describe to me movement, the PC who then did nothing to warrant a save would require a ruling by me that he automatically failed it. You can't just stand there and expect not to take full fireball damage.

No, I understand you perfectly: you are ok with telling a player what their PC has chosen to do (i.e. "dodging behind a pillar"). If your player is fine with that, great.

I prefer that the player tell me how their PC is acting, thinking, or speaking. I prefer not to take on that role as DM.

Simple question: Do you see the difference? (note, I am not asking you if that difference matters to you)

 

[Voadam]

Only if you think a standard like "If the gear isn't on your character sheet, it doesn't exist" is an arbitrary and biased standard.

The situation is they have "set of traveller's clothes" on their sheet. The question of whether the undefined traveller's clothes set comes with gloves seems more like a storyteller detail than a question of whether it is on the sheet or not.

 

[aco175]

Yes.
Walk around or fly over a pit trap. Mage hand to lift a lid or open a door. Or a thousand other possibilities that would mean a trap would not apply.

I once had a cleric that carried a skeleton hand around and could pull on the remaining tendons to make the hand close. He would use that to open doors and shake hands. It did save him from a trap once.

 

[Maxperson]

No, I understand you perfectly: you are ok with telling a player what their PC has chosen to do (i.e. "dodging behind a pillar"). If your player is fine with that, great.

That you said that is proof positive that you are failing to understand me. I did not decide what the PC chose to do. The choice was to make the saving throw. The dodging was only the narration of that choice.

I prefer that the player tell me how their PC is acting, thinking, or speaking. I prefer not to take on that role as DM.

Same here. I have enough to deal with behind the screen. The more they take off my shoulders by making it easier for me to narrate results, the better. I'd much prefer the player to say that as part of the saving throw he's trying to step behind the pillar to blunt the fireball damage and then back out again. Often, even usually, they just roll the dice leaving it to me to fully narrate the action of the successful or failed save.

Simple question: Do you see the difference? (note, I am not asking you if that difference matters to you)

I know the difference. I'm telling you that I'm not deciding the PC's action, but merely narrating the result of the action to resist the hostile spell.

 

[iserith]

I do think that they could have stood to include the line, "PCs are immune to social skills" if that was their intent.

I'm not sure that's fully necessary because if one takes the rules as a whole and follows them logically, one arrives at this conclusion. I think a lot of people don't reach this conclusion because they played this way in other games or learned from people who played those games. For example, in D&D 3e, you could do things like Feint or Demoralize with skill checks. So that just ends up getting smuggled into future editions of the game by folks who assume an NPC can can "use ability checks" on PC. A statement along the lines of "This game stands alone. Previous editions of the game are separate games and their rules and approaches do not apply here..." might be good though.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

That you said that is proof positive that you are failing to understand me. I did not decide what the PC chose to do. The choice was to make the saving throw. The dodging was only the narration of that choice.

Same here. I have enough to deal with behind the screen. The more they take off my shoulders by making it easier for me to narrate results, the better. I'd much prefer the player to say that as part of the saving throw he's trying to step behind the pillar to blunt the fireball damage and then back out again. Often, even usually, they just roll the dice leaving it to me to fully narrate the action of the successful or failed save.

I know the difference. I'm telling you that I'm not deciding the PC's action, but merely narrating the result of the action to resist the hostile spell.

It truly befuddles me that you honestly think you are not controlling the PC's action in the scene when you, as DM, decided that the PC has dodged behind a pillar. And so we're clear on definitions: "action" = "something the PC is choosing to do in the fiction".

 

[Micah Sweet]

They're right, though. If the result of the save is death, a roll to save is like spinning the cylinder with multiple bullets in it, the exact number would depend on how likely the save is to fail. Need an 11 or higher to avoid death and the cylinder has half the bullets in it. 50/50 of randomly ending up with death.

That's why I was happy with 3e's changes to poison. It kept poison with teeth and could kill if you missed the save, but it could also(and usually did) just mess you up badly and keep you alive.

Too bad 5e walked that back.

 

[Celebrim]

The situation is they have "set of traveller's clothes" on their sheet. The question of whether the undefined traveller's clothes set comes with gloves seems more like a storyteller detail than a question of whether it is on the sheet or not.

It doesn't seem much like a storyteller detail at all. Storyteller details are like what this NPC's backstory and motivations are and what future actions are they planning that might drive the conflict and thus the plot. Storyteller hat tends to encourage a bit of illusionism and railroading to keep the pacing of the story fast and drive toward some sort of exciting resolution. That's not what is going on here.

The question of whether the undefined traveler's kit contained gloves was settled by narration of the proposition, "I open the box" which was something like, "when you close your hand on the handle you feel an oily substance, roll a saving throw" which is not really storyteller hat either but mere referee. The player attempted to make an argument that this adjudication was incorrect because he had traveler's clothes, but this argument in my opinion fails for lack of evidence. Gloves aren't mentioned on the character sheet (else the player would have presumably said, but "I have gloves") and the traveller's clothes description makes no mention of gloves (unlike the description of say a climbing kit or heavy winter clothing). Therefore, as a secret has been revealed and a GM ruling already made, the lack of evidence and the ambiguity itself does not present a case for the highly deleterious step of doing a retcon. The GM's ruling and handling of the situation maybe could (with more context) have been more artful, but it is not wrong.

Any skillful player who had a priori suspicion that "open the box was dangerous" and who seriously considered the question of gloves as important would have glanced at his character sheet, noted the lack of gloves, noted the ambiguous meaning of what is normally just "color" with little mechanical impact in a "traveller's clothing" and would have attempted to establish the fiction by asking a question about it like, "I am wearing traveller's clothing; does this also come with gloves?" This would have then put the GM in a position to make a ruling, which could have been informed by any combination of the hats the GM was wearing at the time and could have been any number of answers. (Though all of them are in some sense irrelevant since that question was apparently not asked.) But with the fiction not established, the impartial referee thing to do (and impartial referee is definitely the hat to be wearing when it comes to matters of traps and saving throws, otherwise, don't bother having them) is to narrate a simple natural proposition like "I open the box" in the simplest and most natural way possible.

 

[Celebrim]

It truly befuddles me that you honestly think you are not controlling the PC's action in the scene when you, as DM, decided that the PC has dodged behind a pillar. And so we're clear on definitions: "action" = "something the PC is choosing to do in the fiction".

I think it's right on a line, and I see both sides of it. Most tables I've experienced including mine, waffle back and forth across that line when it comes to narration of the resolution of a proposition.

Part of the resolution of the narration of this proposition involved needing to make some sort of saving throw. If the save was successful it implies the character did something to mitigate against the damage. The narration that Maxperson is giving is implying that either the PC would take the fireball to the face or else they were forced to do something on reflex and instinct in order to avoid that, in this case hurl themselves behind a pillar.

Fundamentally, this is narration that I think is intended solely as color and not to make any meaningful change in the fictional positioning of the scene or to compromise the player's agency, and I think most players at most tables would take it at that.

But it does cross a bit over the line, and some tables - particularly ones sensitive to these sorts of concerns about player's right to self-narration - would hand it over to the player to narrate how they escaped the fireball contingent on the idea that the player could be trusted to narrate only as color and not try to gain some advantage in the fictional positioning out of the narration. This last bit is often a sticking point, and it's also worth noting that handing narration off to a player who is in the fog of war and so doesn't have all the information risks accidentally doing fictional positioning that isn't merely color. This is why for example, Matt Mercer - who has very good players whom he trusts a lot - nonetheless rarely hands narrative control of a scene over to a player fully except on a death blow or the conclusion of a scene.