Ah, alright, the fun stuff!
I do actually have my monsters drop weapons if they want to quick-switch! It's one of those things my players would call me out on if I didn't.
Only a few times, but in special situations. Typically I don't find ammo to be too much of a strain in my games.
I think I've always assumed they have it. I don't think I've had any players specifically target a components bag or a focus before.
lmfao I mean, if I asked my players that, I would totally do the same of myself. What skill would that fall under? Perception? Arcane? A Tool Proficiency? Would I get Advantage if I also knew how to use Carpenter's Tools?
I have, but I would say that, most of the time, they don't. I suppose I could say that, for the most part, it's from the players going after them rather than enemies coming for players. But it's probably something I should think about more..
Oh hell no. When I run enemy clerics, they only draw a weapon if you get close and use their shield the entire time. Forcing a dude to draw their weapon up close is a good way of stopping an armored-up cleric from tossing spells. It's also why I'm quick to take Warcaster whenever I play as a Cleric.
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Oh s#!%, wow. I feel like that's just bad stat-block writing right there. I'd definitely include that in there as a tool proficiency!
Sometimes they can be, certainly. But I also like that rules can make for interesting interactions and reactions. Sometimes getting caught with your pants down and not realizing you had to do something can make for an interesting situation, like sometimes enemies can play things poorly. In particular, I find things like movement restrictions or needing to use certain actions to not be too much of a strain or cumbersome. I think having too many checks can be like that, which is why I think the Weapon Masteries are not great. But I get that it can be different for different GMs.
Those bullet points weren't an accusation against any particular DM mind you, I knew if I said something so silly, I'd immediately get a post like this one with someone claiming "I totally obey all these rules, how dare you insinuate otherwise!". What I'd asked was if people had seen such things occur in play, which I totally have on several occasions, and even from people I wouldn't consider bad DM's.
When you're trying to run an encounter with enemy stat blocks, it's enough to remember how the monster's abilities work as printed, and easy to forget "oh yeah, there's a rule for that". One particularly egregious example I remember was from 4e's Encounters; I was playing an adventure loosely tied to the old Ghost Tower of Inverness module, where a recurring enemy were these ghost soldiers who were equipped with long swords, shields, and crossbows, and they were intended to switch between attacks as needed.
The idea of a ghost soldier just tossing their shield down to shoot at a wizard in the back row struck me as ludicrous, let alone the loss of action economy to do so, and once someone mentioned something, I could see the DM's eyes cross.
Or hell, one of the first Adventure League modules I played in, there was an enemy cleric who used Healing Word the same turn as a levelled spell and nobody seemed to notice. When I mentioned it to the DM, he complained about that being "a stupid rule", lol.
Players were still required to abide by it though!
One thing I've noticed over the years is that even a simple rule can present difficulties when there's enough of them; take for example the diagonal movement rule in 3.5. I had never even considered the ramifications of diagonal movement before, having played a lot of games that simply say "you move X distance on your turn" (most wargames, and even AD&D itself!). By itself, it wasn't a hard rule to remember, but I saw a lot of new 3e players afraid to even move on a battlemap because of having to remember how movement worked, what provokes opportunity attacks, and so on (and add one bit of difficult terrain and their brains completely shut down).
When 4e decided to remove this rule and make all areas squares (hence the infamous
firecube!), I was confused at first, but then I realized that gaming in a non-Euclidean world was a sacrifice I could make, since it made a lot of things easier to adjudicate and easier on newer players.
I used to dread entering the third dimension in D&D because of the different ruleset required, much the same way I dreaded "invoking the grapple rules" in 3.x/PF1e. If flying PC's are causing issues, I think there's a better way to handle that than making complex rules that aren't going to affect most PC's in the first place, since they tend to fly magically, which is generally superior to using wings.
TLDR; balancing the game with rules that are annoying to use tends to either result in a soft ban (players avoid the nuisance like the plague) or they find a way to go around said rules (say, magical flight).
