It's an interesting example as it relates to this thread because it's the exact type of move where I'd expect different groups to have localised standards, set by the GM most probably and kind of fuzzy and unreliable in application. I don't see that as a problematic at all and is in fact a sign of functional group dynamics. The main issue with D&D is that it has about 6,000 of these exception based abilities and coming to a local standard is tedious for the DM.
I got into this a bit with
@Manbearcat but the central question is how comfortable the group is with unreliable currency, where it's placed and what the group actually considers reliable or not. Further complicated by how the GM is framing scenes and how the currency plays into their decision criteria and this of course travels all the way back up to what we're actually doing with our play and all of that stuff.
Your post took me back to these two Vincent Baker blogs:
In the second one, Baker says the following:
give the moment of judgment to a player who's strongly invested in getting it right, not in one character or another coming out on top.
Player 1 wants the game to have a reliable-but-interesting internal consistency, but STRONGLY wants Bobnar to have the high-ground advantage.
Player 2 wants the game to have a reliable-but-interesting internal consistency, but STRONGLY wants Bobnar to NOT have the high-ground advantage.
Player 3 STRONGLY wants the game to have a reliable-but-interesting internal consistency, and doesn't care a bit whether Bobnar has the high-ground advantage.
Which player should get to judge Bobnar's position? (Hint: Player 3 should.) . . .
for some groups, the GM solution works great. I strongly hold that it's because those groups carefully arrange their responsibilities and self-interests, and coordinate mechanical benefits with non-mechanical (but nevertheless entirely real) costs and risks - techniques, I'm talking about, that are available to game designers - not because those groups are magic.
In the actual play where
@hawkeyefan's use of Rustic Hospitality was hosed by the GM, the GM was not like Player 3. Rather, the GM
had a scene he wanted to frame - and so was an instance of Player 2, and then used his power as GM to hose the power.
From a game design perspective, this can be linked to certain features of D&D 5e: it tends to rely heavily on the GM introducing prepped situations/encounters in order for game to progress interestingly - or, to put it another way, it doesn't foreground alternative reliable means of achieving interesting situations and interesting play. (Not to say that 5e D&D
must be like this. I'm identifying a tendency, not a cast-iron necessity.)
The previous paragraph describes the third of
@hawkeyefan's possibilities in post 2701:
I think it takes one of three things.
Not realizing that overriding the ability has rendered a player decision moot, especially one that, outside of spells, grants the player a shred of authority over what happens in the game world. I think this is likely the most common reason.
Anger and or frustration at having to cede authority to anything but magic. That any rule in the game would simply just work without the GM's approval without the lampshade of "but it's magic" is simply unacceptable to a certain set of GMs.
Willful negation of the ability to further an agenda of some sort... some preferred outcome, some setting aesthetic, some predetermined element that is perturbed by the ability.
The second of those possibilities is also a departure from the Player 3 position, and is another tendency in some mainstream D&D play: the GM has an interest in maintaining control
in general - an interest that may be to a degree self-proclaimed, but that is also, to some extent, encouraged by the game rulebooks - and hence declines to allow the player to exercise control by deploying their ability.
Furthermore, to me, it certainly seems pointless to include unreliable currency in the game if a GM has already prejudged - as
@FrogReaver appears to have - that the conditions that enliven it are typically never available. I mean, it would be pretty odd to interpret a typical FRPG "higher ground" rule to require
being hundreds of feet above the battle field - as opposed to, say on a table, or a tree stump, or fighting downwards on a slope, as per Baker's example which clearly contemplate melee combat.
So likewise, deciding in advance that a D&D PC
being pursued ipso facto means they are a danger to the common folk, and hence that hiding them is ipso facto a risk to life, seems to make inclusion of the ability equally pointless.
It seems to me that, if Rustic Hospitality is an agreed component of a PC's build, the central
moment of judgement is
whether or not there are any common folk about (eg does the lizardfolk village, or the underground Drow city, count?). Once that has been established, the default surely is that the ability does what it says on the tin, unless and until the player declares an action that generates the risks and dangers the ability talks about.
Maybe trying to hide from Asmodeus, or a powerful dragon, also pushes things too far in terms of risk or danger. But given the way the ability is described, and the obvious trope that it draws on ("Folk Hero"), the evil vizier or sheriff's soldiers and spies clearly can't be ruled out from the start.
