D&D General When do you overrule RAW?

[Clint_L]

I think once you start asking melee characters how they effectively fight giant monsters, you've effectively hamstrung them. How far a stretch is it from "how do you stop Godzilla's movement" to "how do you actually hurt Godzilla with your puny weapons?".

"Nah, bro, you can't use Menacing Attack on the Dragon, he's too badass to be scared."

"I know the power says you can move them 5' back, but come on, he weighs 100 tons!"

I would cheerfully overrule both of those.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I think my players would all say I'm pretty loosey goosey. The caltrops thing was a rare case of me having an objection.

Yeah, I feel you. It's entirely possible that there's something that would make me object. I just can't think of it off the top of my head. Though I suspect that it would be something where the rules say that something that I think is perfectly reasonable is IMPOSSIBLE, and I would allow it to be possible instead.

I would much rather have a cinematic and cool adventure, rather than turning into a simulationist grind, but I still have a nebulous boundary things have to stay inside.

I sympathise.

 

[Clint_L]

If a DM pulled a stunt like that, it would be my last night at that table.

Wow. I value my friendships and the years we've invested in playing together a lot more than that.

And if I ever got a chance to play with Matt Mercer, I am not walking out because I don't like a ruling.

 

[James Gasik]

Because they are different things. Fighter maneuvers are not supernatural constructs, and there should be a possible explanation for how they work. I don't want mechanics to override the setting.

D&D Fighters routinely do the impossible, as I referred to in my original post, they can actually fight, harm, and kill creatures of immense size, to whom a sword might as well be a toothpick. If anyone should be forced to give an explanation here, it's the person who wrote the Sentinel Feat, not the player who took it, as the Feat merely refers to you have mastered a vague fighting art.

How could anyone other than the designer be asked to describe how it works, when only the designer presumably knows?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

How could anyone other than the designer be asked to describe how it works, when only the designer presumably knows?

Not even them, necessarily. I can see the designer saying, "However a fantasy fighter fighting a fantasy monster does what they do."

 

[Mort]

What? The Fighter stopping the monster?

The fighter would run in the way and the monster would probably stop to smash the fighter instead of going wherever the DM had originally intended. Aside from DM's intentions, there's no reason that the fight needed to proceed the way the DM wanted it to.

Why did the monster do that? Because the fighter was THERE. Made themself a more obvious target than whoever they had thought to go after first. Pissed them off. It depends really on what the REST of the scene looked like, both before this incident and after it.

Yes.

In these situations, I think putting the player on the spot - forcing them to justify the ability - is exactly backwards.

The ability works, and the DM should quickly figure out a way to fit it into his idea of the fiction.

Heck, Mercer describes the actions of his players all the time (at least he did for the first and what I watched of the 2nd campaign), easy enough to do it here.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I remember caltrops being slow, or take damage, which'd've worked fine... ...too may editions....

 

[James Gasik]

When RAW just doesn't give a plausible result, similar to Mercer's complaint. (That said, I think I could have justified the attempted action, as both a player and a DM. A level 20 hero knows a lot about how to use weapons to get the effect they want in combat.)

Most recent example: In a play by post game I'm running, the PCs scattered caltrops on the floor. An animated suit of armor came marching through to attack them. By the RAW, the caltrops should slow it, which -- to my mind -- requires it to be slowing down from pain. But animated suits of armor are basically crude magical robots. They will certainly get damaged by the caltrops (a little), but they're not smart enough to go "ow, this sucks, I'm going around a different way."

Similarly, caltrops by RAW should slow oozes or swarms, which is hard to picture.

So I ruled that caltrops don't slow the armor and wouldn't slow other creatures where it was hard to make the logical case for it, even if, from a game standpoint, they would.

Guess they should have used marbles or ball bearings instead! But I will point out, when the player bought the calrops, they had only the description of the mechanics in the book to go off of when they made that decision- you basically changed the rules for the item after the fact, when you were presumably fine with them being purchased- which isn't entirely fair, unless you believe that "any reasonable person would know a caltrop wouldn't work against certain foes".

If you think about it, caltrops shouldn't work against a lot of things PC's face, yet the designer of the caltrop rules didn't bother to even mention that possibility- that's not the player's fault!

 

[Tony Vargas]

It's not the designer of the caltrop's fault, either.

If a monster should be immune to piercing damage or difficult terrain or whatever, the bloke designing the monster should put that in it's block....
...since DMs routinely re-design monsters....

 

[James Gasik]

It's certainly true that everything in the game is negotiable by the DM- you are not bound by any rule or line of text in the game. What I find objectionable is the arbitrary nature of such rulings- the player is told what resources they can use to make a character. They select options based on what the mechanical text of those options says that they do.

Then the DM comes in and says after the fact, "oh but that doesn't make any sense to me, you know? And since I decide what makes sense in the game, it doesn't work now."

This is punitive to the player. If there was a time to ask "hey does this make sense to you?", that discussion should have come up long before the player attempts to use the tactic in a life or death battle at the table!

Now could Kaiju monsters have a trait that says "immune to effects that reduce their speed"? Certainly. And players should have a chance to know such things in advance. Certainly, their characters should know if Sentinel won't work on Kaiju, right?