D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

EzekielRaiden said:

Well, I would try to communicate with the DM about it, with the expectation that they could offer me more than "just trust me bro". I don't expect to be made privy to all possible information (I don't even think the DM could do that, if they wanted to!) But I expect something more than "I cannot give you anything at all, you just have to trust me, otherwise the game doesn't work." I expect something given back. It would be great to be given examples of ways DMs here have resolved their conflicts, for example.

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For me as DM, if a player asks me about something like that, my answer will depend on what's going on.

Sometimes it's because they have all the information, but just didn't consider something. So I will explain my reasoning and they will not and say something to the effect of, "That makes sense."

Sometimes it touches on other things that would be ruined if I explained right then and there, so I tell them that I will explain later, since I can't explain now due to other things that would be affected by the explanation. Once we are past that point, if they still need an explanation(sometimes play reveals the answer), I will explain. And will again get some sort of, "That makes sense." in response.

On rare occasions I just can't explain and have to say, "Trust me. I've thought this through." and since my players know from the above that I do think things through and they are based on reasoning, they instantly agree and we move on.

pemerton said:

I'm not talking about what the character does or doesn't know. I'm talking about what the player can know, as the player of a game.

I mean, if my PC is 5th level, then I the player know that even if the blacksmith picks up their hammer and clocks me with it, I can't be killed in one blow. (Because I have too many hit points.) And that knowledge, as a player, helps me make rational choices about what actions to declare, what risks to take, etc.

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That's not true. If the blacksmith clocks you with it, you're at 0 hit points and down and dying. Prior to that, he didn't clock you with it. He "missed" or had some sort of minor glancing blow that took away hit points. The major strike(clocking) doesn't happen until an attack drops you to 0.

5e PHB page 197

"An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious."

If you were in my game and the blacksmith swung a hammer at your PC's head and you told me that you just stand there and take it, because you have 40 hit points, you'd be down at 0 with that strike, having forgone your hit points by standing there and taking that direct strike.

hawkeyefan said:

Stakes is a very interesting answer... and one of the reasons I was asking. Something more about the game than just about the fiction.

I would likely approach it this way, too. What's at stake in this situation? You're describing ways to handle it in Stonetop, so I won't go into that.

With something more like 5e D&D... it depends on context for sure. But this kind of thing is generally about what it may cost the PC. In old school D&D, the attrition of mundane resources and even others like hit points. But in 5e, gear matters less, and certainly things like rations and the like are not often tracked. Hit points are trivially regained.

So given all that, is this situation with the cliff meaningful to play in any way? Like if whatever impact it has isn't lasting at all, then what's the point? Why bother with it?

If the cliff is just part of some larger encounter or situation, then okay, it may make more sense.

In an OSR type game, if the PC takes a tumble and loses 6 hit points, that may be meaningful because it could take days to heal, or force someone to use a spell or a potion. But in 5e? It means next to nothing unless you're heading right into another situation or encounter.

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One of the ways I prefer OSR games to 5e, there.

AnotherGuy said:

Max implied that providing the DC numbers for the climbing example may give away more information than he prefers.
Maybe it is the meta of it maybe not, but providing the AC number the opponent successfully attained with their attack roll allows one to determine whether the Shield spell, which provides a +5 to AC, will work. Both are giving away numbers.
It would be hypocritical to give a way one set of meta data but be uncomfortable with giving away another based on some notion of realism. Particularly with these specific examples since they are so similar.

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I will say this as well. I'm not a fan of 5e Shield at all. 3e's method of casting the spell and just having the extra AC for 1 minute, which covers a fight, was great. The idea of turning a hit into a miss after the fact bugs me, but because of how 5e balances the game, having that extra +5 to AC for the whole fight would throw off balance by a lot.

Bedrockgames said:

Not knowing how useful a spell will be just strikes me as one of the risks of being Vancian spellcaster. Certainly that is a risk. And maybe you opt for the Shield spell and it is a waste. It isn't the end of the world. Also you can certainly make an educated guess about whether the risk is worth it. Presumably you know a little bit about what is happening around you. By the same token you could cast fireball and the enemy may be immune to fire.

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A better example would be casting suggestion on an enemy and that enemy rolling a successful save. The spell slot is gone and the caster got nothing out of it. Casting shield in effect makes the "DC" for the enemy, AC+5. If the enemy rolls over that DC, you are hit and the spell slot is gone.

What is also being overlooked by @EzekielRaiden is that the +5 to AC lasts until the caster's next turn, so it works against all other attacks until then, potentially causing other would be hits to miss.

Paul Farquhar said:

And if you trust the DM, then these are not remotely a problem. And if the DM is not trustworthy, then concrete rules are much easier to bend and exploit than simple good faith.

If you are not prepared to trust, then you are quite literally on your own, in any situation.

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I have been saying quite a lot that these things are not about trust.

Like, when combat breaks out, I don't think to myself "oh, here's the part where there's no way I can trust the GM, good thing there's all these rules!"

Are combat rules about trust?

I would think that what they're about is creating uncertainty. For the players, yes... but also for the GM. No party involved in this part of the game is going to just decide how it goes.

Many folks like that to be the case not just with fights... but with other interactions, also.

Appeals to trust seem misplaced.

The Firebird said:

It's the opposite imo. If I'm just rolling, then it doesn't matter much what I say or how I interact with the scene; I just roll and find out. If the DM rules consistently, then I can make a persuasive argument or take advantage of the blacksmith's personality to succeed. That gives me more agency.

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Unless the GM has decided ahead of time that the blacksmith cannot be swayed!

AlViking said:

I suspect that most people who think that you can just look at a cliff and always know how easy it is to climb have never actually gone rock climbing. If you're at the bottom of a cliff that could potentially be a difficult climb there are many times you can't just look at the rock. You may have to interact with it and start climbing to know what type of rock it is. I remember an article about a pair of rock climbers who went to Antarctica to climb some mountains no one had ever scaled. People had seen the mountains from a plane but once the pair got there and started to climb realized that the rock just crumbled as they climbed. They had spent thousands of dollars and wasted tremendous effort to realize the mountains could not be scaled. Even if you are at a cliff face the rock at the bottom can be completely different from the rock 50 feet up, the type of rock in one layer may be easy to climb but the next may not support your weight.

Then there's simply the possibility of there being no handholds, the cliff face may be too smooth to climb or a much higher DC than anticipated unless you're Spider-Man. If you're looking at tall enough cliff, if it's relatively smooth and steep you have no idea if there are handholds all the way to the top.

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When I was a teenager I went to Yosemite with my family and a good friend of mine. We decided to hike up to Vernal Falls, which has a relatively easy path up. On the way up my buddy and I found a small path that also went up, but broke off from the main trail. We took it of course, being kids, and about a thousand yards or so up, the path began to narrow. My buddy went back down and then up to the main trail. I decided that I didn't want to have wasted my time, have to go back down, and then rush to catch up to my family, so I continued on.

Not to much farther up the path narrowed to about a hands width, angled slightly down and then just vanished. If you've ever hiked to Vernal Falls, you know the path in question borders the river that is full of boulders. Falling in would be death. Being young and stupid, I did the dumbest thing of my life and looked up the cliff to the main path. It was only 12-15 feet up and there were handholds and footrests all over. The cliff, though, was not straight and what I did not realize until after I had climbed halfway up, was that the cliff smoothed out for the second half of the climb.

So here I was hanging off the side of the cliff and those hand and footholds I used to come up were very small, so going back down meant I was likely to slip and if I slide onto the hands width that was angled down, off I would go. Looking up again I notices some grass growing here and there in the cliff face. I grabbed one tuft of it and pulled. It held and seemed like it would support me. So being that immortally stupid teenager, I held that grass and used the remaining body length of hand holds as foot rests. I'm here typing, so the grass held. When the foot rests ended I was at a point where I could reach over the top of the cliff and I pulled myself up to the main path.

Bedrockgames said:

I think I was following you quite well. I see no point dragging this to the ground. But That wasn't the problem. The problem is we have covered the same ground endlessly (and I don't think this is due to a lack of understanding: myself and others have addressed each of the concerns you have raised--but we keep going back to the same points; you not being persuaded by my or others responses or ignoring some of them, doesn't mean the issue is on me).

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I wasn't going to respond to this, because as you say there's little point in going over it again... but I want to clarify.

I am not saying it is entirely your fault. Clearly, there was a communication issue. I was asking a question and requesting specific examples for answers. You repeatedly provided broad answers, largely the same ones. Clearly this may have been either of us, or more likely both of us. So I attempted to clarify. You offered the same information again. And you also complained about repeating yourself.

So then I worded it more directly. You then read that as me telling you what to do and classified my attempts at getting through to be an interrogation.

So, just to be clear, please never feel required to respond to me. If you think I'm simply repeating myself with no point, then just move on. If you respond and say something like "I don't understand why you're asking this again..." or similar, then I am likely to try and explain what I'm doing. Which is going to keep the back and forth going... which seems to not be what you want.

Maxperson said:

This is also incorrect. Interesting and realistic are not mutually exclusive things. You can have something that is both. It's when interesting would be unrealistic that it's a no no to go with it in our playstyle.

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I think a communication issue is here around “realistic”.

We’re (we being this loose confederation of narrative game enjoyers) generally using it to means “within the boundaries of plausibility and causality”. The living world proponents are generally using it more strictly to mean “purely derived from sim-style heuristics, with no consideration for narrative concerns.” Using narrative considerations to drive play is generally frowned on in living world play,

hawkeyefan said:

I would think that what they're about is creating uncertainty

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It’s easy enough for the DM to control the outcome if they choose too. Fudging rolls, adding additional enemies or allies, choosing foes that exploit a party’s strengths or weaknesses, etc. If you don’t want that you have to trust the DM not to cheat. Because cheating is easy. In any game, not just D&D. Last time I had to play Monopoly I cheated, since its such a boring game and I wanted to get it over as quickly as possible.