D&D General A glimpse at WoTC's current view of Rule 0

[hawkeyefan]

Because it would invalidate entire encounters in droves, and led to an extremely asinine attempt at tactics repeating itself ad nauseum.

If players find a way to bypass encounters, you shoot them down?

Seems like clever use of an item to me.

Observe:

Yikes. I mean, I looked at the rules and it seems like the prty could probably fit. The rules these days don’t talk about suffocating or anything.

However it says that items need to be drawn from the bag. So no jumping out or being dumped out all at once. The kobold would have to use an action to draw one of the other PCs, and then wait a round to draw another, and so on.

Seems pretty risky to me.

 

[soviet]

It seems really odd that in a thread about rule zero we've now had two examples of player creativity - Odin and the bag of holding - shut down by GMs for being 'against the rules'.

 

[Xamnam]

It seems really odd that in a thread about rule zero we've now had two examples of player creativity - Odin and the bag of holding - shut down by GMs for being 'against the rules'.

I mean, here's the quote being discussed (which again, is specifically from a free, introductory adventure designed for new and young Dungeons & Dragons players):

Rule 0. Rule 0 of D&D is simple: Have fun. It’s fine if everyone agrees to change the rules as long as doing so means the game is more fun for everyone.

Regardless of if you agree with their specific stance, it's clear the people arguing against those instances don't agree and are not having fun with them .

 

[Oofta]

It seems really odd that in a thread about rule zero we've now had two examples of player creativity - Odin and the bag of holding - shut down by GMs for being 'against the rules'.

If the group is introducing a new house rule, everyone at the table has to agree to it. The DM is one of those people, right? Or is the DM the bad guy any time they say no to anything the players want to do, even things not covered by the rules?

Those darn power hungry DMs expecting people to play by the rules!

 

[KYRON45]

What is it that a baseball team wins when they do all their winning - or loses when it does all its losing, for that matter?

I could wax eloquent about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat etc. but I've a hunch it'd fall on many deaf ears here.

I’m not a sports fan but I believe they win trophies and titles and advertising deals and bigger salaries as well as the adoration of their fan base and a place in history.

Enjoy the game how you like of course. I’ve never seen it as a win or loose proposition.

Game on friend.

 

[Lanefan]

Because it would invalidate entire encounters in droves, and led to an extremely asinine attempt at tactics repeating itself ad nauseum. Observe:

A bag of holding has a mouth that is 2 feet in diameter, and the bag itself is 4 feet long. The bag weights 15 lbs regardless of what is stored inside it, and it's inside is an extradimensional space that holds about 500 cubic feet of things. Removing an item from the bag takes an item interaction, and you can use an action to just dump everything out of the bag that is inside it. If you only go by measurements, you can in fact fit three to four average sized humans into the bag with their heads sticking out. They would be uncomfortable, and they would take time to get into the bag, but they would fit.

I solve this (and a host of other potential exploits) by having the extradimensional space be a vacuum, magically sealed off at the Bag's neck. A living being in there would die pretty much instantly, and as each of your guys getting into the bag would have to duck inside to allow the next person to fit through the hole, I'd call this one solved.

BUT WAIT, I hear you say: There's two more inner keeps! Don't worry your pretty little head. Because there aren't rules that stop you from one of the Trojan Warriors inside the bag of holding with 50 Trojan Warriors having another bag of his own with another 50 Trojan Warriors inside of it, and one of them has another bag with another 50 Trojan Warriors.

Did 5e do away with the rule that says you can't put one extradimensional space inside another?

If no, then this can't work.

If yes, sigh.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Then the procedure in place is that the GM can veto player lore suggestions, if they feel it is necessary, correct? Not that they need to, but they can. Like I tried to say earlier in my post regarding blacksmith that you liked, as long as the GM can deny the suggestion, the situation is not significantly different regardless of what form the player's suggestion takes. Like if instead what you said, the player said something like "Hey GM, my character has travelled a bit, so do you think she could have visited this town before and would know a nice inn or tavern?" and the GM said "Sure," that would be basically the same thing.

Yes, but we're also talking about the idea of the suggested rule zero... that the goal is for everyone to have fun. So while the rules may say something is up to the DM, if it results in players being unhappy, maybe the rule needs to be examined, and possibly changed.

And yes, that would basically be the same thing. It would be the GM going with the player's idea. This is really all that's being suggested. Might there be times when it doesn't make sense to go with it? Sure, that's gonna happen. But can an effort be made to try and find a way to incorporate the player's idea? I would say absolutely yes.

What I feel would significantly alter things if the GM was not allowed to deny such requests. Because that's what @pemerton effectively implied when they called denying them railroading.

I think we all agree there may be times when it makes sense to deny such a request. However, I think it also helps to assume good faith by the players. If the players are the kind to see any advantage as something they can always exploit, you might need to be a little stricter about this stuff.

There may be good reasons to say no. There's probably even a few that almost all of us would agree on. But aside from those possible few, opinions and preferences will vary. Based on what we know of @pemerton 's games, we know that he expects a high amount of player input in determining the thrust of the game, and he's not a fan of secret backstory as being more important than player input.

I think that denying player requests in favor of the GM's ideas is certainly something that can be described as railroading. Thresholds for it will vary.

Oh. You don't see a difference between knowing a tavern or a blacksmith and establishing a way for a god to circumvent the game mechanics in a major way for you, in order to help you to obtain an item central to your main goal?
I think there is a teensy-weensy difference here; you might be able to notice it if you squint really hard.

No, I don't really see that big a difference. Sure, one's on a higher scale... but I think you're also overstating the assistance provided by Odin when I made suggestions about @Oofta 's example. And again, I suggested that it come with a significant drawback.

Finding an item is something that can be done by a lot of sources. It can be mundane or magical, local or planar.

I read the example as a pretty typical D&D style quest. Generally speaking, when someone describes the goal of play to find a macguffin, and that macguffin is hidden in some way, my expectation is that the PCs are meant to try and find it. So when someone comes up with an idea to try to find it, I'm going to try to work with that.

That the item was warded from scrying and all that... that's all fiction invented or injected to make the finding of it harder, right? So I'm assuming there were steps that needed to be completed to be able to eventually find the item. A lot of hoops to jump through.

I'm indifferent about that. I don't care about the hoops. if someone comes up with a good or flavorful idea, then I'm all for it. If that involves leveraging an established relationship for assistance, then cool... let's see if we can get that to work.

No, I don't really.

Yes, it would. Some places are meant to be explored and some things work better if no one has been in the place before.

Yes I would, and not every instance need to be denied.

Okay, cool. I don't think we're that far apart here.

You can have a narrative that is a mystery. But you cannot solve a mystery if you are inventing it as you go along.

Also, this applies to far more than to mysteries. It is about having objective world with objective facts that you can learn and leverage in your favour.

No one's solving a mystery, though.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There is a lot at play here - mechanics, consistency, stakes, DM willingness for added work...etc but also narrative opportunity. I do not have all the answers, I'd have to think how to make it work for my table, like i said before take into account TIBF and probably incorporating some of the limitations @hawkeyefan posted.
To be frank I'd also have a quick discussion with the players, particularly if the table was invested.

But say this was sprung on me, as a DM I'd be very interested in the narrative opportunity that could be explored.
I could figure out the limitations later and my table is pretty easy with me making house rules.

This is what I'm talking about. Taking these moments of play and, instead of seeing them as a nuisance of some sort, see them as an opportunity. Work together with the player to see if you can come up with something that works.

And by works, I mean something that is suitable to what we've seen in the fiction and otherwise sensible, and also satisfactory from a game point of view. This is why in my suggestion for the Odin scenario I stressed the importance of the cost. No one is suggesting just giving the player everything they want and then setting this up as their go-to move.

This doesn't need to be a codified thing... it can just be something that the GM and the player talk out and negotiate until everyone's on board, incorporating whatever rules or mechanical bits that are needed.

 

[pemerton]

Some players will use it as an "I win" button because I had a player like that. They may be rare but they do exist. You may not have had players like that, I have.

As (I think) @hawkeyefan mentioned upthread, this seems like a "problem player" matter, rather than a techniques matter. When I talk about techniques, I am assuming that the game participants are all broadly in agreement as to what counts as fun RPGing and what the game should be like (in general terms at least).

Depending on players it can cause issues with lore, setting and tone.

There seem to be to possibilities here:

(1) The player is careless about or indifferent to "lore, setting and tone". Which would be an odd fit for a campaign focused on lore, setting and tone.

(2) The player cares about lore, setting and tone, and doesn't see the same "issues" that the GM does. This is where I think it makes sense to work together, rather than have one participant unilaterally decide.

 

[pemerton]

You can have a narrative that is a mystery. But you cannot solve a mystery if you are inventing it as you go along.

Why not?

In my Classic Traveller game, the players, and their PCs, worked out who was behind a bioweapons conspiracy. At the start of the game, this was a mystery to which neither the players, nor the PCs, nor I the GM, knew the answer.