D&D 5E Do you let PC's just *break* objects?

[Lanefan]

Nobody's demanding anything, as stated above. I'll note that it was said upthread by Lanefan and possibly others that asking for clarity can mean the player might "metagame" or ask for "takebacks" if they become suspicious as to why the DM is asking for clarity. Now I don't care about these situations, because I neither care about "metagaming" or "immersion"

Given the last clause I don't think I'd last long at your table.

(rather I care about game pace and flow), but Lanefan if not others care about it enough to immediately race to resolving the action even going so far as to effectively say "too bad!" to the player if they object.

You paint it in a negative light, but if the player doesn't give me details it falls to either me-as-DM or the dice to fill those details in.

That seems quite a bit more adversarial to me than what little I ask of players.

Guilty as charged. I don't see adversarial DMing - as long as it's done fairly - in the same negative way that many others seem to.

 

[greg kaye]

Right, and feel free to discuss the upsides of not asking for "how" or only occasionally asking for it. You mentioned "characterization" previously, but that can be achieved by saying how you smash the vase, too, via active and/or descriptive roleplaying. You also said "freedom" but it seems to me that not saying how you smash the vase, in Bacon Bits' approach which you endorsed, actually cedes your freedom to determine how your character acts and thinks to the DM. That suggests the player has less freedom to me, since they're no longer determining what their own character is doing. Thoughts?

My thought is that you are unable to give it a rest and that you will interrogate anyone that deems to disagree with you. Here's one ref among many.
If you want to police the way people interact at your table, that's your choice.
I vier to the view that people can choose how they interact.

 

[Lanefan]

So, about giving a Bane Bat-breaker to a battleship...

...a battleship that is in fact an illusion covering a fragile vase...

 

[Lanefan]

Fully agree - but there are folks in this thread who have stated or otherwise agreed that asking for clarification tips the player off that something may be up, leading to "metagaming" and "takebacks." So they try to avoid that by establishing for the player what their character does, which can lead to conflict. It's this approach for which I've shown the downsides. The upside to my approach is that the player does this up front so there's rarely a need to ask for clarifying questions, and since the expectation exists for all action declarations, this mitigates against "metagaming."

So in your game if the player states they insert the key into the lock and you come back and ask which way they turn the key (which, let's face it, is well beyond the level of detail normally expected in any action declaration!), the player will never metagame the situation and say in response "I don't turn it, instead I withdraw the key slowly and carefully"? This after having already declared the action of unlocking the door via using its key?

Because that sort of attempted takeback is likely what would happen here a very high percentage of the time, and only because I asked that question; and IMO that's bad faith play - as is all metagaming. To proactively prevent it, in this specific example I'd likely give the key-user a saving throw of some sort, with failure meaning the key got turned the wrong way and success meaning either they key got turned the right way or the character noticed something amiss at the last moment and stopped.

 

[Oofta]

Asking a clarifying question does create the opportunity for the player to metagame, if that’s a thing you care about. It also creates a break in the narrative to answer that clarifying question, rather than providing that clarity up-front. These things may not be a problem for you, and if so, that’s fine and dandy. But if you want to know why I prefer players to provide that clarity ahead of time, that’s why.

We've covered this before. The players have a ton of opportunities to metagame, I simply ask them not do do so. I rarely ask any clarifying questions, in most cases it's just clarifying the scene. It's them saying they're jumping out the window when I'm being sure they understand that they're on the third floor. I can't remember the last time specifics of how they did something really mattered.

If I'm setting up a visual narrative it could be something like this:
PC: I smash the vase
DM: With your battle axe?
PC: Yep
...
Not particularly disruptive. Then again I probably wouldn't even bother with that. I'd probably just describe a bit of noise and what, if anything, was inside the now broken vase. Details of how it was broken don't really matter. And that's where I'm struggling ... I can't think of a good scenario where it would matter.

I don’t generally like traps that depend on the characters’ position being that specific; unless you’re using a map and minis, and ask the players to move their minis exactly where their characters stand, but that’s a degree of granularity I don’t care for.

Smashing vases aside, you've been short on examples of where the extra clarity was helpful. The examples I gave way back (one was using Message to talk to a guard) didn't have any "goal" stated on my part. I don't know what other "approach" I would have needed to add, if any.

Can you give any examples? How would it matter to the result?

Again, that degree of specificity might be needed in something like the Tomb of Horrors wherein traps have such precise triggers. That’s generally too much specificity for my tastes. I just ask that players be “reasonably specific” in stating their goal and approach. “Reasonably specific” is like the Reasonable Person Standard in US law - it’s ultimately subjective, but there’s generally a common understanding of what constitutes “reasonable,” within a tolerable margin of error. If a player’s action declaration is not reasonably specific in my view, I’ll ask them to clarify. Since reasonable specificity is an expectation I set up front, this means such questions generally don’t raise any suspicion of danger, since I’ll ask them whether or not danger exists, and players who don’t have a clear sense of where the range of “reasonable specificity” lies will generally develop one pretty quickly based on when such clarifying questions are or aren’t asked.

If I were to run something like Tomb of Horrors, I'd be making it fairly clear that something was unusual. I rarely do anything like that, when I do I just give people free skill checks as appropriate. But the problem is that "reasonable" is so much in the eye of the beholder. I think "I smash the vase" is a reasonable level of detail. You don't.

It also doesn't address the "goal" part of things. If a PC states "I cross the road" while they've been polymorphed into a chicken, I don't care why the chicken crossed the road I just have to decide if there's any risk to crossing the road or anything triggered when they get to the other side. It is something that comes up rarely, that the player seems to be floundering a bit trying to achieve a goal so I'll ask them.

 

[iserith]

The player choosing to not care about the details, and not specify them, is still a choice - if they choose it, it isn't the GM taking that freedom away.

In my post, I say not that the DM has taken freedom away, but that the player ceded it. They've given their freedom to choose away. Which they're free to do. It just may result in clarifying questions, which some posters suggest has some downsides.

 

[iserith]

I just want to say that I've played and watched people play multiple RPGs for decades, and I have never once experienced anything remotely approaching this amount of existential turmoil over something as simple as breaking an object.

It just ain't this complicated, folks.

Agreed! The player saying how they smash the vase is pretty simple in my view, and sometimes a necessary detail to determine if the action succeeds, fails, or calls for a roll of some kind.

 

[Lanefan]

It is uncertain how the character smashes the vase.

And the player has every opportunity to fill in that uncertainty while declaring the action. If they so desire they can go into excruciating detail - it's all fine.

But if that opportunity is passed up or ignored then by doing so the player has ceded the right to fill in that uncertainty over to some combination of the DM and the game system (i.e. dice); and thus has no grounds for complaint when the DM and-or game system does that filling-in.

 

[iserith]

Given the last clause I don't think I'd last long at your table.

To be fair, you could choose not to "metagame."

You paint it in a negative light, but if the player doesn't give me details it falls to either me-as-DM or the dice to fill those details in.

I would say it's up to the player and no one else, unless the player delegates that role.

 

[iserith]

So in your game if the player states they insert the key into the lock and you come back and ask which way they turn the key (which, let's face it, is well beyond the level of detail normally expected in any action declaration!), the player will never metagame the situation and say in response "I don't turn it, instead I withdraw the key slowly and carefully"? This after having already declared the action of unlocking the door via using its key?

Because that sort of attempted takeback is likely what would happen here a very high percentage of the time, and only because I asked that question; and IMO that's bad faith play - as is all metagaming. To proactively prevent it, in this specific example I'd likely give the key-user a saving throw of some sort, with failure meaning the key got turned the wrong way and success meaning either they key got turned the right way or the character noticed something amiss at the last moment and stopped.

If you imagine a game where every action declaration comes with the expectation that you state your goal and approach, then questions about details that may arise are normal. Since they are normal, they are less likely to raise suspicion than at a table where there is no expectation that the player state their goal and approach, or where clarifying questions are rarely asked to get at that information. The suspicion is raised because what the DM is doing is unusual. Which isn't the case at my table because such interactions are the norm.