D&D (2024) I have the DMG. AMA!

[mamba]

I means there's religions dedicated to ideas in the real world, so why no D&D?

because those guys do not get any powers from their belief in whatever

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think I see what you're getting at. Let me see if I can clarify.

On the one hand, you could argue that players agree to a set of rules when they agree to play any particular version of any particular game, be it Monopoly, Munchkin, or Mutants and Masterminds.

However, not every player is going to be intimately familiar with every rule in a more complex game like D&D.

By having the baseline rule in D&D be that the DM can't take away a PC's abilities without the buy-in from that PC's player is a good thing, IMO. There's a difference between passively agreeing to play by a set of rules in general and actively agreeing to play by a specific rule.

By making it so a cleric can potentially lose their power if they anger their god enough something that the DM has to introduce as a house rule, it makes it so the players have to actively and consciously agree to abide by that rule - rather than have it be something that is not even explicitly spelled out in the rules anywhere. (Do the OG 5e rules say anything about taking a cleric's powers away? I can't remember.)

Fair enough, I get you. My issue here is that they've gone from leaving these kinds of setting questions open to be determined by the DM and the group, to providing a default that differs from previous defaults and clearly favors the players, and don't even have the decency to do so in a new edition.

 

[mamba]

The fact it can be done IS the point.

sure it can be done, didn’t Eberron do this since 3e? Doesn’t mean everyone has to do it that way

 

[mamba]

You keep saying "you knew that when you chose the class", and yet the 5.5 DMG says you wouldn't know this.

Session 0, also I do not expect players to read the DMG

 

[Remathilis]

I never punished a cleric / paladin, and if I ever did there would probably be a long string of warnings that were ignored. I am mostly talking about the fiction as I see it, I am not arguing for a tool to yank the players around with

The problem is, there are DMs who do. A lot of those old "fiction" rules were wielded as clubs by DMs who were less skilled or benevolent. Paladin was the poster-child of "lets see how long I keep my character class THIS time" style of play, but clerics, druids, monks, even rangers were often targeted in the spirit of "role-playing challenges". Personally, I'd rather that chamber be unloaded by default and the notion added back in session 0 than to assume the chamber is loaded by default and lose my spells because the God of fire was upset I saved a child from a burning orphanage...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

And in 5e. From the 2024 DMG "Gods" section:

"Impersonal forces and philosophies can also fill the role of gods in a campaign."

So did 2nd edition, to the extent that FR had setting rules override the core rules.

 

[TwoSix]

sure it can be done, didn’t Eberron do this since 3e? Doesn’t mean everyone has to do it that way

Nobody ever has to do anything, so…

It’s all just guidelines.

 

[Vaalingrade]

because those guys do not get any powers from their belief in whatever

Neither does anyone else.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So did 2nd edition, to the extent that FR had setting rules override the core rules.

Most settings overrode those core rules at the time, to the point that their status as core rules is somewhat mysterious.

Of course, my core rules for D&D and its relatives have always derived from 1e.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Nobody ever has to do anything, so…

It’s all just guidelines.

That's not exactly how they are presenting it now though, is it?