Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 6766044" data-attributes="member: 71699">That's a good point about meta-gaming. It highlights an underlying issue I found earlier where the rules - mechanically cogent as they are - are not gelling with some posters' mental construct (picture of what the rules represent). For example, for me your assassin is not meta-gaming in the situation you discuss, because under my mental construct rolling initiative represents something tangible and visible about a creature's state. So in my game our assassin sees that her target is on-balance, possibly looking wary or at least not flat-footed. Something always true of characters with the Alert feat! Or she sees that her target is caught up in introspection, not wary, flat-footed... physical signs that outwardly confirm that they won/lost initiative.In your game, I'm supposing that you don't picture that rolling high initiative represents anything visible. The argument I want to suggest is not that initiative has to represent something visible, but rather that a group can use a construct that maps to the rules, which are themselves mechanically cogent. That's an alternative to house-ruling.At one point I wanted to frame that in terms of a formal fallacy that I was going to call "Deciding what happens before rolling the dice!" Meaning interpreting the rules to produce the outcome that our construct demands, rather than developing our mental construct from what the rules produce. The initiative case is a good example of that, because one can decide that there is no way an assassin can judge the readiness of her target or one can follow the rules and say yes, that must be what happens.</blockquote>

Verification