D&D (2024) Disintegrate Reverted to Old Wording

[UngeheuerLich]

Disintegrate should go through orc relentless endurance. So I am glad they reverted it.

The main problem: druids in wild shape was fixed by using temp hp there.

Death ward specifically also protects from instant death effects. So this still works. So probably the revision is intentionally.

 

[ezo]

The main problem: druids in wild shape was fixed by using temp hp there.

Just curious, what problem is there here??

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Just curious, what problem is there here??

High level druids that wildshaped had only a few hp. That messed with spells slike sleep or disintegration. It was probably never intended to instagib druids with full druid hp and some extra HP from wildshape at that level

Take a level 20 druid: 150/150 druid hp transforming in a brown bear with 30hp.

So disintegrate could just kill a creature with 180hp.

Now a level 20 druid might have 150/150 hp and 20 hp from wild shape. Tht protects them from being killed instantly.

For (half-) orc abilities: i think a level one (half-) orc should not survive a disintegrate spell. So the revised wording was problematic.

 

[ezo]

Take a level 20 druid: 150/150 druid hp transforming in a brown bear with 30hp.

See, I always interpreted the "any additional damage" part was applied to the 150 hp of the druid, so disintegrate wouldn't turn them to dust when their wildshape form went to 0 hp.

The druid was never reduced to 0 hp, their wild shape was, so they reverted. There is no wild shape to be "dusted" because it was gone as soon as it went to 0 hp.

So, I never had that issue. I could see how others might not view it that way.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

See, I always interpreted the "any additional damage" part was applied to the 150 hp of the druid, so disintegrate wouldn't turn them to dust when their wildshape form went to 0 hp.

The druid was never reduced to 0 hp, their wild shape was, so they reverted. There is no wild shape to be "dusted" because it was gone as soon as it went to 0 hp.

So, I never had that issue. I could see how others might not view it that way.

Ok. I also did not have those problems. But this is how I interpreted the reason for the change back then.

 

[occam]

Is this actually ambiguous in any specific case? If we look at a few specific examples:

Death Ward says "The first time the target would drop to 0 Hit Points before the spell ends, the target instead drops to 1 Hit Point" (emphasis mine) The words would and instead clearly describe a situation in which the target never actually drops to 0 HP; thus, no disintegration.

Same for the zombie; Undead Fortitude says "If damage reduces the zombie to 0 Hit Points, it makes a Constitution saving throw (DC 5 plus the damage taken) unless the damage is Radiant or from a Critical Hit. On a successful save, the zombie drops to 1 Hit Point instead." Again, instead dictates that if the zombie makes the save, it never actually drops to 0 HP; no disintegration.

As for the orc, though; Relentless Endurance says "When you are reduced to 0 Hit Points but not killed outright, you can drop to 1 Hit Point instead." Obviously the Disintegrate spell kills the orc outright at 0 HP; the inclusion of that conditional overrides the later instead, or the conditional would have no impact. Neither Death Ward nor Undead Fortitude include a conditional like that. There's a sequence here:

1. Are you reduced to 0 HP? If yes, continue.
2. Are you killed outright? If no, continue.
3. You can drop to 1 HP instead.

Disintegrate stops this sequence at step 2.

All of these seem like clear rulings to me. Are there others that are less clear?

 

[Bacon Bits]

No it is not. It was errata'ed because it was somewhat wrong and should not be solved by the DM. DM has a lot to think during the game, if something should be resolved by the DM then it should just not be written in the book in a way that causes this kind of problem.

No, I don't agree. I don't even agree that that's the formal intent of errata or rules changes. I think those kinds of changes happen for people that specifically demand them. I think WotC only does it to shut up that very small, extremely vocal minority of people. I don't think most DMs bother with errata. I think most DMs do what the game already tells them to do: Make a ruling, move on, figure it out later.... and then most of them never do the follow-up. The night is over and it doesn't matter anymore. The ruling made in the moment works fine.

No TTRPG that's made from 900 pages of rules is going to be totally consistent. Most people understand that and don't expect it. The game costs $50-$150, not $15,000. It took a year for 12 people to make. It's not Baldur's Gate III, with over 2000 people, six years of development, and a budget of $100 million USD. TTRPGs don't pull that kind of money.

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Please unpack that last bit. A DM making a ruling is usually a corner case where trying to detail out the rules to be that specific is a losing battle for complexity. Here's a case where they have already made the choice that this comes up enough to have errata, what about 2024 changes that, so that it should be left for the individual DMs in the heat of the moment?

Yes.

I think the DM knowing the context of the moment is going to have a better idea for what should happen in the game world. Better than designers that aren't at the table. Certainly better than a rulebook.

I don't think it's particularly difficult to make the easy ruling and just side with the PCs.

I am someone that enjoys talking about or arguing rules. I don't think there's anything particularly sacred or virtuous in adhering to RAW. I think the rules are primarily talking about general cases, and that the game is explicitly already written and intended by the developer for you to waive or overrule them.

The rules do not run the game. The DM and players do.

And do you think that the majority of DMs, including the new ones, would prefer to be on the hook for making that call or rather have the rules clear already?

I think DMs need to learn that TTRPGs are zebras, not horses. In most games, the objective of the game is to execute the rules prescriptively to reach the end where a winner is determined. To follow the procedure. To put your time and dice into a box, shake them up for a couple hours, and fun comes out the other side.

TTRPGs aren't like that. You're told to make the game yours. You're told to change and modify the rules as you see fit. You're told that the rules secondary. They're more like guidelines than actual rules. More than that, the objective of the game is not to execute the rules and procedures in order to determine a winner. It's to keep the game going indefinitely. The only way you can lose a TTRPG is for the story of the game to end.

If you don't want to play that way, that's fine. But the culture of the TTRPG hobby is not about blindly following the text, not thinking about the rules within context, or stopping games because the rules are a little confusing or contradictory. I would call learning to make the game yours an essential skill, and that means learning to make rulings, learning to be wrong, and learning to not sweat mistakes or weirdness because a die roll can't replace a conversation.

Perhaps more directly, I think if a new DM were going to stop running the game because there wasn't a deterministic and objective answer to how Distintigrate interacts with an Orc's Relentless Endurance, then I don't think they're ready for this hobby at all. They should go back to fully synthetic games like Chess, Magic: The Gathering, Tetris, and Baseball, where the rules are safe, rigidly inflexible, insist that you follow them, and not remotely interested in telling a good story or creating a realistic game world.

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Oh, but don't you see, the language is natural! Natural language is just the best. You'll love it. Everyone will play and know what words mean, because it's the words everyone uses, and they're just the best words, these natural words. You'll understand so much, you'll be sick of understanding.

And once we have keywords it'll be way better! See, that's why the interaction of the Light weapon property, the Nick mastery property, and the Dual Wielder feat's Enhanced Dual Wielding benefit was so easy to resolve, and everyone interpreted it the same way! It was written with keywords and the fact that each one is almost willfully blind to what the others were saying made them independent and easy to parse. Why, they didn't even need to give us any examples. It was clear and straightforward and not at all confusing.

And look how easy keywords made designing the Carrion Crawler. Using keywords for Paralyzed certainly didn't cause any problems there! Thank goodness it's so easy to remember rules that are not on the same page as what you're reading.

Keywords just prevent confusion and design errors all over the place. There's never any need for a simple statement of what the designer's intent was. It's all crystal clear from the keywords. What an immediate improvement.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Is this actually ambiguous in any specific case? If we look at a few specific examples:

Death Ward says "The first time the target would drop to 0 Hit Points before the spell ends, the target instead drops to 1 Hit Point" (emphasis mine) The words would and instead clearly describe a situation in which the target never actually drops to 0 HP; thus, no disintegration.

Same for the zombie; Undead Fortitude says "If damage reduces the zombie to 0 Hit Points, it makes a Constitution saving throw (DC 5 plus the damage taken) unless the damage is Radiant or from a Critical Hit. On a successful save, the zombie drops to 1 Hit Point instead." Again, instead dictates that if the zombie makes the save, it never actually drops to 0 HP; no disintegration.

As for the orc, though; Relentless Endurance says "When you are reduced to 0 Hit Points but not killed outright, you can drop to 1 Hit Point instead." Obviously the Disintegrate spell kills the orc outright at 0 HP; the inclusion of that conditional overrides the later instead, or the conditional would have no impact. Neither Death Ward nor Undead Fortitude include a conditional like that. There's a sequence here:

1. Are you reduced to 0 HP? If yes, continue.
2. Are you killed outright? If no, continue.
3. You can drop to 1 HP instead.

Disintegrate stops this sequence at step 2.

All of these seem like clear rulings to me. Are there others that are less clear?

If this were Magic: The Gathering, then "would" or "instead" indicates that it's a replacement effect that happens as an effect resolves and can prevent normal triggers from firing, while effects that say "when" alone are normal-triggered effects.

The problem is that D&D doesn't have codified language for resolving complex interactions. It doesn't have timing rules. It doesn't have layers. It's not that kind of game. The game isn't built around ensuring the game state is 100% deterministic. Nobody writes rules that precisely without also providing the codification of those language rules. There is no codification of the language rules in D&D, ergo you can't assume the phrasing in indicative of hidden timing rules.

 

[billd91]

As for the orc, though; Relentless Endurance says "When you are reduced to 0 Hit Points but not killed outright, you can drop to 1 Hit Point instead." Obviously the Disintegrate spell kills the orc outright at 0 HP; the inclusion of that conditional overrides the later instead, or the conditional would have no impact. Neither Death Ward nor Undead Fortitude include a conditional like that. There's a sequence here:

1. Are you reduced to 0 HP? If yes, continue.
2. Are you killed outright? If no, continue.
3. You can drop to 1 HP instead.

Disintegrate stops this sequence at step 2.

Yeah, that conditional on the orc's relentless endurance is the key to indicating relentless endurance is not as powerful as death ward. It'll save you from having your hit points whittled away but not the massive damage rule, disintegrate, or a mind flayer's brain slurp.

 

[Blue]

I don't think it's particularly difficult to make the easy ruling and just side with the PCs.

Then why not just make that the default in the rules?

I am someone that enjoys talking about or arguing rules. I don't think there's anything particularly sacred or virtuous in adhering to RAW. I think the rules are primarily talking about general cases, and that the game is explicitly already written and intended by the developer for you to waive or overrule them.

The rules do not run the game. The DM and players do.

"The rules do not run the game" is sophistry.

Can we run a roleplaying game without any rules whatsoever? Absolutely.

But looking out there, it seems we prefer having rules.

Rules are a shared understanding of the "physics" of what happens. They describe the mechanical aspects of what is happening. When some of the people are expecting things to happen based on that agreed-on shared understanding and others change it willy-nilly, that doesn't sit well.

If as a player I said "no, while that check hits my AC, I feel like I dodged so I won't take any damage", that's "The DM and players running the game" instead of the rules. And that doesn't fly at the majority of tables.

This is in the D&D forum, so I won't go off on other systems where the GM can "cheat" if they don't follow the rules laid out before them, but even looking at 5e what you have allowed in the DMG is rulings - corner cases where the rules are silent or incomplete (because there's a cost to complexity) where the DM makes a ruling. And not enshrined in the rules are house rules, but those are changes made in advance, so they are part of everyone's shared understanding.

A player or DM who was inconsistent about following the agreed-on shared rules hurts the table as a whole.

I think DMs need to learn that TTRPGs are zebras, not horses. In most games, the objective of the game is to execute the rules prescriptively to reach the end where a winner is determined. To follow the procedure. To put your time and dice into a box, shake them up for a couple hours, and fun comes out the other side.

TTRPGs aren't like that. You're told to make the game yours. You're told to change and modify the rules as you see fit.

No, actually, you aren't. At least not as a universal. Again, 5e has specifics in the DMG, where the only thing that is allowed by the rules is:

"The rules don't account for every possible situation that might arise during a typical D&D session. For example, a player might want his or her character to hurl a brazier full of hot coals into a monster's face. How you determine the outcome of this action is up to you. You might tell the player to make a Strength check, while mentally setting the Difficulty Class (DC) at 15. If the Strength check is successful, you then determine how a face full of hot coals affects the monster. You might decide that it deals ld4 fire damage and imposes disadvantage on the monster's attack rolls until the end of its next turn. You roll the damage die (or let the player do it), and the game continues."

This is what new gamers for the past decade have been learning from -- claiming culture allows you to ignore it all is ignoring how that selfsame culture is maturing and changing as the number of RPG players explode.

And here, since you're using TTRPG and not just D&D, I'll point you to PbtA games where what the GM has very specific rules, guidance, agendas, and what you are supposed to do since there is a lot of player authorship in those games -- as opposed to the "god mode" of D&D.

Perhaps more directly, I think if a new DM were going to stop running the game because there wasn't a deterministic and objective answer to how Distintigrate interacts with an Orc's Relentless Endurance, then I don't think they're ready for this hobby at all. They should go back to fully synthetic games like Chess, Magic: The Gathering, Tetris, and Baseball, where the rules are safe, rigidly inflexible, insist that you follow them, and not remotely interested in telling a good story or creating a realistic game world.

This is more than a bit insulting to new DMs. A hope that easy and known fix -- something alrady errata'd -- is included in the rules means they shouldn't even play the game at all according to you? Ugh, that's a fairly repellant position.

Heck, I've read through errata and Sage Advice and was glad for others giving thought and correction to issues, that being a sign that we should give up the hobby is just...

I think I need to end it here, the more I think on your position that they shouldn't be in the hobby at all, the less what I want to write contributes to a productive discussion.