D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[JiffyPopTart]

Instead of hammering your personal interpretation & expressing frustration that your personal interpretation is not taken as a solution for all things why not explain how these abilities fit within the three steps of the playloop where they trigger outside of step2 without violating the purely mechanical playloop when the player interrupts the gm during step3 to nosell it.

Maybe some GMs don't procese every rule through the three steps of the game loop in regular play.

I don't.

 

[jmartkdr2]

New questions.

In your campaign can a character uncanny dodge a lightning bolt spell?

Rules say yes.

Reality says it takes the bolt .00015s to hit a target 60 feet away.

Is anyone here bothered by this gap in game vs narrative (which happens orders of magnitude timesat a table than counter spelling counter spells)?

Lightning bolt the spell =/= a lightning bolt the natural phenomenon. There’s overlap, but you simply can’t assume anything true of one must be true of the other.

For example, the spell has a range of 120 feet. A natural lighting bolt is like, ten times that.

 

[tetrasodium]

Hammering? My whole point is that there's more than one interpretation and that none of them is "right".

Like, I didn't say "anyone who can't figure out how to make the fiction work lacks imagination" or anything like that.

As for your question about the play loop, I think it's best to think of the play loop as determining the events of the game, but not necessarily as dictating the events of the fiction. I just use my broken imagination to allow more than just the actions dictated by play to happen in the fiction. Characters are doing more than Move- Action- Bonus Action- Reaction.

If that doesn't work for you, then again... the answer is Jello.

The playloop & violations of it are mechanical, you keep avoiding that. Should we just ignore the fact that the design is mechanically disruptive to a game that is constrained by the limitations of human communication & conceptual space in memory not existing as some form of multithreaded computer sim then go back to your personal neotrad storytelling interpretation?

Maybe some GMs don't procese every rule through the three steps of the game loop in regular play.

I don't.

uhh... step1GM describes the environment. Step2 players describe what they want to do. Step3 dm narrates the results of the adventurer's actions. Your proposed but not explained alternative is going to need a bit more depth in it's explanation before we can talk about that "maybe"

 

[AnotherGuy]

So we have been using @toucanbuzz 's rules for initiative for a good few sessions now. It provides a more dynamic and chaotic combat - both for DM and players. It's still turn based but the initiative is tighter (the dice used are not as variable as the D20) and everyone declares their action intention at the start of each round which carries consequences should you wish to opt out of your declaration.

As for counterspelling counterspell - should you nix that option - the rule should also exist for martial characters i.e. no reactions during your turn.

 

[Maxperson]

Lightning bolt the spell =/= a lightning bolt the natural phenomenon. There’s overlap, but you simply can’t assume anything true of one must be true of the other.

For example, the spell has a range of 120 feet. A natural lighting bolt is like, ten times that.

Natural lightning has a range in miles.

 

[niklinna]

If the game element that’s getting in the way of the fiction is “taking turns,” the only alternative is “everyone talking at once.”

And if we start going down that slope, we also need to harmonize how long it takes to say what you’re doing with how long it takes to actually do it.

But since, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to have a clear conversation where everyone speaks at once, we’ll need to keep taking turns and dealing with the inherent ludonarrative dissonance that creates.

Well, you could do a system where everybody declares what they are going to do before resolving actions, and different types of actions take different amounts of time to execute, and you could say you can abort your planned action to interrupt with an n-tick delay after someone begins an action you might like to interrupt, so that you can calculate whether somebody could finish their declared interrupt before the other person finishes the action being interrupted, or switch tasks to do something else (including interrupting the interrupt).

Whew. I'm exhausted just thinking about that. (Good thing CRPGs and MMOs can rely on CPU cycles to calculate all that crap.)

Or you could say everybody gets one interrupt (reaction) per round—spend it wisely—and allow that one level of nesting in spite of any absurdity because that's all you're going to get anyhow. If you want to blow your one reaction and a second spell slot (of the level of the spell you're trying to pull off, or better!) to counterspell a counterspell, I say go for it. Round-by-round combat has never been remotely realistic, so I am not going to quibble the physics of reaction times in that context.

 

[niklinna]

So we have been using @toucanbuzz 's rules for initiative for a good few sessions now. It provides a more dynamic and chaotic combat - both for DM and players. It's still turn based but the initiative is tighter (the dice used are not as variable as the D20) and everyone declares their action intention at the start of each round which carries consequences should you wish to opt out of your declaration.

Do you have a link to those rules for initiative? Sounds like the exhausting approach I sketched above, but made to work!

Edit: Found 'em!

As for counterspelling counterspell - should you nix that option - the rule should also exist for martial characters i.e. no reactions during your turn.

Yeah such a thing should be across the board.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I will admit that “you can’t interrupt casting a spell to cast another spell” is a convincing house rule. It limits counterspell cheese and just makes sense in terms of how I imagine casting to look.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So we have been using @toucanbuzz 's rules for initiative for a good few sessions now. It provides a more dynamic and chaotic combat - both for DM and players. It's still turn based but the initiative is tighter (the dice used are not as variable as the D20) and everyone declares their action intention at the start of each round which carries consequences should you wish to opt out of your declaration.

As for counterspelling counterspell - should you nix that option - the rule should also exist for martial characters i.e. no reactions during your turn.

The rule I would use is simply, "you cannot react to a reaction". Full stop.

 

[Mort]

Instead of hammering your personal interpretation & expressing frustration that your personal interpretation is not taken as a solution for all things why not explain how these abilities fit within the three steps of the playloop where they trigger outside of step2 without violating the purely mechanical playloop when the player interrupts the gm during step3 to nosell it.

You've linked to the playloop presented in the exploration chapter. As such, it comes off as a bit vague when combat comes around - but sure it can work.

BUT you have to fit more into step two and it doesn't finish until all actions that could happen on the players turn are resolved. Specifically, You have to fit in the your turn section of the combat chapter - which includes reactions.

A reaction is something that could happen on the players turn, until reactions are resolved (and insuring there aren't any is resolving them) then you don't progress to step 3. So I don't see how you say reactions happen outside of step 2.

Once the DM progresses to step 3, it's generally too late for reactions (barring newbie "oops I forgot I can..." and hope the DM is generous about it and backs up).