D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Lanefan]

Opportunity attack PH Page 195

"You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach. To
make the opportunity attack, you use your reaction to make one melee attack against the provoking creature. The attack occurs right before the creature leaves your reach."

It is not when they are "moving" out of your reach, it is when the creature moves out of your reach.

If they are within your reach, that is within your reach and before they move out of your reach.

That is my natural language reading of this 5e rules section

If you hit them with a grapple they are restrained and do not actually move out of your reach.

That's very poor wording in the PH. A simple amendment to read "...creature that you can see attempts to move out of your reach..." ("begins to" or "tries to" work just as well) would make it all make much more sense both in the fiction and as a series of sentences.

Except in the fiction reaction spells are just as quick as fighting style interrupt actions. Blocking someone's blow with a quick defensive spell seems as fictionally genre appropriate as blocking someone's swing with a fighting style bodyguard type interrupt action.

Which is all fine except when the blocking tries to happen after the swing has already been declared to have hit, because that declaration makes it too late to undo. Ret-con effects like this really are awful* design.

* - believe me, I'd use much stronger words here if Eric's Grandma wasn't listening...

 

[Vaalingrade]

Right, just dummy up and don't establish the fiction until the damage or effect is applied. Easy peasy.

Agreed.

However, it's really easy and tempting to jump the gun and describe things as they happen in game time rather than as they're actually happening in universe.

That just doesn't work in a game with Reactions and triggers and such. The game works on declaration -> Response -> resolution and ignoring that loop is where you get to these kinds of arguments.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes.

That seems inherent in making them interrupt type reactions.

Martial interrupt-style reactions I could almost get behind, if I squinted at them from the right angle. Spell-based interrupts, not so much; if only because an important means of reducing caster dominance is to a) make spells take at least a bit of time to cast and b) make them difficult or impossible to cast while in melee.

 

[Celebrim]

Actually, I can avoid it just fine. I can craft obstacles that don't rely on details which haven’t been clearly established. Or if I find myself in such a pickle, I can simply let the player say they have the item in question and move on with the game.

But then you abandon a naturalistic approach. Instead of crafting the world according to what might be in it and things persons in it might do and build, you are making a world that is constrained to be like a game. Instead of setting your players loose in the imagined environment, you'll handwave them through sections and lay rails over all the troubled and dangerous ground. And that's not always bad, but when you are forced to do that the game suffers. It's like one of the several reasons Mass Effect 1 is so much better than Mass Effect 2. In the first game, the environment was natural, the levels crafted according to verisimilitude. Monsters could jump out at you anywhere - in a staircase, in an empty room, even while you were in a haven talking to NPCs. But in Mass Effect 2 they embraced a game focused combat system, and then combat could only happen in arenas designed for it, and so even before combat happened, you could look into the next room and go, "Yeah, that's a combat arena. Looks like combat is going to happen." Emersion was broken. The game was more limited. A lot of people liked Mass Effect 2, so it's not like there aren't other ways to play, but the problem is that if you play your TTRPG that way, you become strictly inferior to a video game. I can make the video game with the two paintings puzzle, one of them trapped, and there is no ambiguity. So now you have a TTRPG that sacrificed the one thing that gives satisfaction no video game really can, the truly open world.

I’m not interested in the characters becoming collections of best practices accrued over years of play, slowly progressing down a corridor and tapping everything with a ten foot pole.

All the time? Certainly not. Two hours of Indiana Jones in the trap filled tomb that opens 'Raiders' would have been too much especially if it came to the exclusion of the rest of the movie. But I don't want to sacrifice that sequence either. It's as iconic as the first scene of A New Hope where the Star Destroyer fills the screen, and I don't like the idea that there are some thing I just can't do in my TTRPG.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But then you abandon a naturalistic approach. Instead of crafting the world according to what might be in it and things persons in it might do and build, you are making a world that is constrained to be like a game. Instead of setting your players loose in the imagined environment, you'll handwave them through sections and lay rails over all the troubled and dangerous ground.

No, I won't do that. Deciding not to craft an obstacle that involves vague game mechanics won't send me off into a spiral of railroading and softballing. The leap from one to the other is rather extreme.

 

[Voadam]

Which is all fine except when the blocking tries to happen after the swing has already been declared to have hit, because that declaration makes it too late to undo. Ret-con effects like this really are awful* design.

* - believe me, I'd use much stronger words here if Eric's Grandma wasn't listening...

That's fine. Tastes vary. I love interrupts in D&D combat.

It makes the fight a little more active and dynamic than discrete chunks of individual turn round resolution without the problems of not doing individual turn round resolution.

I played a 4e ranger with a lot of interrupts to move out of the way and to interrupt attack and it was a lot of fun for me at the table.

Playing a 5e paladin with the protector fighting style to declare I was giving an attacker's attack disadvantage against a companion was thematically awesome. The at the table timing of it is awkward enough that I am switching to the Tasha's interceptor one to mechanically reduce damage after a hit, but in game it was making me feel like a protector and the other PCs said they viscerally felt protected around my paladin which was fantastic.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Obviously. But it's how I'd rule if someone broke the assumption and said a character specifically wasn't trying to dodge or avoid a fireball or similar.

That'd be weird if it happened but, also, is not what was being discussed.


What we were discussing: the DM taking narrative control of a PC when describing the results of a successful save.
Some people care about this and avoid it.
Others don't care about it.
And at least one other poster apparently doesn't even think it is a thing at all, despite literally describing doing it.

 

[Celebrim]

No, I won't do that. Deciding not to craft an obstacle that involves vague game mechanics won't send me off into a spiral of railroading and softballing. The leap from one to the other is rather extreme.

Searching a room, literal physical investigation, is "vague game mechanics"? You are the one that wrote, "I can simply let the player say they have the item in question and move on with the game." That leap is far more extreme than any I proposed.

 

[Voadam]

That's very poor wording in the PH. A simple amendment to read "...creature that you can see attempts to move out of your reach..." ("begins to" or "tries to" work just as well) would make it all make much more sense both in the fiction and as a series of sentences.

Be that as it may, it is the wording of the PH.

So by the PH when they move out of reach they trigger the attack which resolves before they move out of reach.

 

[Lanefan]

Agreed.

However, it's really easy and tempting to jump the gun and describe things as they happen in game time rather than as they're actually happening in universe.

That just doesn't work in a game with Reactions and triggers and such. The game works on declaration -> Response -> resolution and ignoring that loop is where you get to these kinds of arguments.

That sounds far too M:tG-like for my tastes.

The game works (in any edition, even if not codified as such) on a basic declaration --> resolution --> narration loop.

There's rarely if ever any need to add much complication to that, but WotC - steeped as they are in their M:tG background - have insisted on doing so in each of their editions, ending up with more of a declaration --> [reaction? --> resolution? --> [narration?]] --> [reaction? --> resolution? --> [narration?]] --> [resolution?] --> [narration?] multi-loop system where the declaration is (in theory) certain to occur first and it's uncertain at what point or in what sequence resolution(s) and-or narration(s) will occur thereafter.

Trying to map that to the fiction - which in theory is what we're trying to emulate here - gets needlessly messy.