D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

[Bae'zel]

According to the advice of Gygax, if your players do that they are being overly cautious. So come up with new traps and ways to f*** them over! Instead of just discussing options about approach to the game, if they listen at doors use earworms that lurk in keyholes just waiting for the careless adventurers to listen in!

While we never played this way when we started to play, there were some very adversarial DMs out there and there were always ways to make the dungeon ever more dangerous no matter what precautions were taken.

I've met guys at a certain... forum... where this "old school brutalism" style is lauded as the ONE TRVE WAY and kind of turned me off of the OSR for a few years.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Show me who has said never

The 2014 PH background feature rules? According to the book they never don't work.

 

[Bae'zel]

Magic should ideally work the way you say, to some degree, but the players want easy and WotC wants their money.

Also, for my part I wouldn't say that PCs in my games nearly all have unique, nearly mythical abilities, at least none that any other character in the setting couldn't conceivably acquire.

Yeah for that kind of mood, which I also like, I'd use something else than D&D. Mythras (Runequest), for example, which has some amazing magic systems you can use to curate / create your world setting.

Some day I'll run my quasi historical Bronze Age of Heroes campaign. Sigh.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, if we ignore the things that make them different, then we can say there are no differences!



You know Spider-Man is pretend, right?

How is this not being rude and disrespectful towards the preferences of others?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The 2014 PH background feature rules? According to the book they never don't work.

My take is that if the answer exists in an available book, a sage will never fail to find it. But if the answer does not exist in available book they will never succeed in finding it.

 

[mamba]

many of the 2014 background features (and other "mundane" character abilities) at least seem to operate in more real-world ways, so they get more scrutiny

yes, if you want them to not get scrutinized, make them explicitly magical. Magic needs no justification, it is supposed to do the impossible, that is its point

 

[Micah Sweet]

That also true for the magic mechanics. The description of fireball says you cast fireball. It doesn’t say that you cast fireball unless you are in an anti-magic zone, or you are counterspelled.

You are applying a different standard to spells than to background features.

The game applies different standards. Magic follows its own rules (but it still follows rules).

 

[Bae'zel]

My take is that if the answer exists in an available book, a sage will never fail to find it. But if the answer does not exist in available book they will never succeed in finding it.

If I may interject; if the lore is particularly obscure, or directly related to the overarching plot, mystery or the big final boss, I may use that moment to trigger a quest to find the lore (eg, the Sage finds out that the book has pages torn out, or they only find an obscure map, or they realize that the only other Sage or Library with this info is in location X etc...).

I've used background features to provide adventure hooks and to move the plot forward. And the PC in question is the one to reveal this to the party and prompt the call to action.

 

[tetrasodium]

I’m not saying that the background features call for skill checks. I’m saying that the things they accomplish are typically accomplished by skill checks, not high level magic as you said, with whatever weird homebrew spell that you linked to.

These are not earth-shattering abilities we’re talking about. They’re ways for the PCs to interact with the setting. They’re not ways for people to win the D&D forever.



Well, except the PCs toss around fireballs, shrug off giant club hits from frost giants, and kill dragons.

But other than all that… yeah, same as a cobbler.



But who cares if it’s not part of the Iron Man film? If it doesn’t matter to the film, the n it doesn’t matter.

Persuasion/deception is not mind control. A skill check can not make NPCs with no reason to be willing to even spit on an adventurer if the adventurer was on fire or even pretend to know that adventurer. For that you need to alter their mind & that generally goesinto spells once sporting a tag like "[Evil]"

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If I may interject; if the lore is particularly obscure, or directly related to the overarching plot, mystery or the big final boss, I may use that moment to trigger a quest to find the lore (eg, the Sage finds out that the book has pages torn out, or they only find an obscure map, or they realize that the only other Sage or Library with this info is in location X etc...).

I've used background features to provide adventure hooks and to move the plot forward. And the PC in question is the one to reveal this to the party and prompt the call to action.

Indeed. The more obscure the information, the bigger library that will be needed. So off to find a rare book that will get us into Candlekeep.