D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[Majoru Oakheart]

This principle can't really be given practical application until you decide at what level of detail the player has to declare an action.

I suppose. But the level of detail can stay about this same during the entire game. I tend to use combat in a game as the baseline of the "amount of detail" needed. In the case of D&D, you need to declare where/if you are moving, which abilities you are activating, which weapon you are attacking with, and which target(s) you are attacking. Often, we use the shorthand "I attack" to default to "I attack with my weapon using my 'standard' attack routine on the same enemy I hit last round." But all of that technically needs to be specified.

In the adventure I was talking about in the OP, we actually rolled for initiative and I was asking for actions in turn order with action economy intact since we were trying to see whether the PCs could stop the jumping lightning before it zapped anyone else.

Upthread [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and I discussed whether or not "I flee" is a sufficienty detailed action declaration. In a 4e skill challenge I think it probably is.

I think this is one of the reasons skill challenges always rubbed me the wrong way. It is also, I think, one of the ways the player in question was trained to believe he didn't need to do any thinking on his own. He really started playing in 4e and was used to playing skill challenges where he had to declare absolutely nothing. Most of our skill challenges went:

"You need to disarm a complex magic trap. What do you do?"
"I use Arcana!"
"Alright, you do whatever Arcana does and you partially disable the trap. One success."

I allowed this because it's what the rules suggested you should do, but it always rubbed me the wrong way. I wanted people to describe WHAT they were doing and then let me suggest which skill they'd use to do that. But whenever I'd ask people to describe what they were doing, my players would get mad at me because that wasn't a requirement of the rules. They just wanted their character to figure it out for them.

This kind of game is simply no fun for me. It's just an exercise in looking at your best skill and rolling a die.

The player in your OP impicitly declared an action - "I think hard about this situation and work out what is going on". And then he wanted to roll the dice to find out how well his PC went at this task. But you didn't regard that action declaration as being sufficienty detailed.

Yeah, to me, action declarations are saying what your character DOES, not what he/she thinks about. You get to think FOR your character.

If someone said to me "my character thinks about this problem and the best way to solve it" my response is "great...then what do you actually DO?"

To me:
Int=Ability to remember and have the DM give you free information to help you make your decisions
Wis=Ability to perceive better and therefore see things that will give you more information to help you make your decisions
Cha=How well the people around you will react to the things you say

None of these things allows you to actually MAKE better decisions. That's left up to the players.

 

[billd91]

Yeah, this player has been known to search for loopholes in the rules and abuse them whenever possible. In this case, I heard him mention that being able to do part of your move, attack, then take the rest of your move was stupid and would cause problems.

That's what his character was attempting to do. He would leave the darkness, attack the enemies, then walk back into the darkness. He was counting on the fact that the DM would never go out of their way to ready actions to attack him.

I just looked over the warlock again and all he really had to do was take the devil's sight invocation. Then he could have stayed in the darkness and seen right through it, never being affected by the blinded condition because of the darkness. I take it he wasn't willing to do that?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I just looked over the warlock again and all he really had to do was take the devil's sight invocation. Then he could have stayed in the darkness and seen right through it, never being affected by the blinded condition because of the darkness. I take it he wasn't willing to do that?

He really wanted another Invocation and didn't want to give that one up to take Devil's Sight. When I pointed this issue out to him his exact response was "Now I'm going to have to change what kind of Warlock I am just to get around this. That's stupid." Which, given his later discussion of Devil's Sight means that is precisely how he plans on fixing it. I'm fairly certain his Invocations are the False Life one and the adding your Cha bonus to damage with Eldrich Blast one. He points out to every DM(since this is an Adventurers League character) that he stops at the end of the False Life duration and immediately recasts False Life no matter where he is or what he is doing so he always has temporary hitpoints.

 

[pemerton]

I believe if an NPC has real leverage over another NPC that a good Persuasion of Intimidate check isn't going to suddenly make NPCs open up. During the same adventure the player in question would spend most of his time complaining that members of the thieves guild wouldn't admit to being members when he made good Intimidate checks. The thieves guild kills anyone who admits to being a member. So, they all had good reason to stay quiet.

Isn't this, in effect, opposed Intimidate checks?

On the principle that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, a sensible thief might run the risk of being killed later by people who are somewhere else, in order to avoid what appears to be a greater threat of being killed here and now.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Isn't this, in effect, opposed Intimidate checks?

On the principle that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, a sensible thief might run the risk of being killed later by people who are somewhere else, in order to avoid what appears to be a greater threat of being killed here and now.

Perhaps I could have done it as opposed Intimidation rolls. Though, I don't know what the Intimidation modifier for an entire guild filled with deadly assassins actually IS. Instead, I just considered it a raise in the DC to what I felt was the new, appropriate, much harder DC. Around DC 20.

In this case, I decided that the people in question had actually heard stories of people being killed by the thieves guild for blabbing. They worked for the thieves guild and the guild knew where they lived. Their livelihood was within the city. If they betrayed the guild they knew they'd have no where to go and nowhere to hide.

The PCs, on the other hand, had a reputation throughout the city for saving a bunch of people's lives. They were the "Heroes of Baldur's Gate". They were afraid of the PCs because they were big, strong, and immediately in front of them. However, they figured they could get away with lying to them instead. Plus, they had just an inkling that the people renown throughout the city as heroes likely wouldn't ACTUALLY kill them.

 

[Neonchameleon]

That's where you are mistaken, as it is still up to the GM. If he has determined previously that there are no illegal guns on a planet, a player's roll cannot change it, nor can the player force a GM via a roll to allow there to be illegal guns even if the GM hadn't previously decided so, though this might seem egregious.

Which is the case in Fate - and just about every GM'd Indy Game I can think of.

There are only three common positions I am aware of. And Traveller switched between two of them.

1: There is no GM. Everyone is equal. This is almost exclusively modern Indy-games and sticks out like a sore thumb. If there is no GM then questions of GM authority are a moot point and can safely be ignored.

2: The players have the right to establish things subject to a GM veto. This is the case in Fate. It is also the case in [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s example of Classic Traveller. If the GM does not have a veto they are not in any meaningful sense the GM. And offhand I can't think of any games with a demi-GM in this way.

3: The GM is the only person with establishment rights. This is the case in [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s case of Megatraveller.

If you are objecting to Fate where the player may spend a Fate point to establish things subject to GM veto (and that relate to relevant aspects) then you are objecting to Classic Traveller where the player may use the Streetwise skill to establish things. It is exactly the same level of DM authority and expected behaviour.

There are different advantages to the three approaches. Approach 1 is very different so we'll put it to one side. Approach 2 is generally a very good low prep approach for games where roleplaying and story are paramount and player skill is a minor consideration. Approach 3 on the other hand is good for old school roleplaying where player skill is vitally important, metagaming is a sign of skilled play, and everything has been mapped out in advance almost to Harn levels of detail.

It's also carte blanche to ignore any and all rules. Later editions don't carry that level of GM fiat.

Oh yes they do. Made explicit as Rule 0. Indeed 2e from memory encouraged outright fudging as well.

I think players should have SOME input into the game world and the background. However, I think that this input should be moderated by the DM and preferably done between sessions rather than during.

I find during play to be generally more fluid but YMMV.

For instance, I really like the players to suggest organizations, NPCs that have a relationship with them and possible reasons their character might be involved in the adventures. However, I really see this as an extension of the principle that players have control over their own characters. If their character's background requires an NPC to exist, by all means make them up. If the player needs to have some event happen in history in order to make his character work, then make it up or at least ask the DM for an appropriate event that already exists in their world.

This. A thousand times this. People have a context. Without a context, characters become two dimensional cardboard cut-outs. If you don't want me to tie details to the setting you are literally asking me to play someone with no backstory. Which is a ... limited ... range of possible characters.

However, this power should ALWAYS be phrased in the form of a question or at least should be submitted with the assumption that it is a request and it can be denied for any reason the DM feels like. In the end, the DM has the final say on basically everything.

In the end the DM has veto authority, agreed.

For instance, I literally had a player get angry at me when they tried to convince an NPC who was mind controlled by the bad guy to do the exact thing the enemy told him not to. The PCs didn't KNOW he was mind controlled.

Mind control is a very dangerous thing because looked at objectively the players have a lot less information than the characters. Take a film (preferably a good one) and turn on the narration track. Then turn off the screen.

You understand the subtle details of the film based on just that? This is about the level of information even a good GM gives out. Changing the rules on them (as Mind Control does) just makes things a whole lot harder.

Different editions require different levels of DM fiat to run smoothly. There are simply some common questions the older editions (and now apparently, 5e) leave to the DMs judgment.

No edition permits or allows for any more or less DM fiat.

Some encourage more than others - but right on the nail.

Just like Battlestar Galactica, where you don't know who the deep-cover Cylons are until way along in the series. I like it!

I don't. In BSG you have an entire cast and their body language to worry about complete with directing and costuming. In a tabletop RPG your information is limited to what the GM can convey and as all the information you get comes through the narrator (i.e. the GM) you must be able to trust that narrator. The only way I see that working is as a moderately large scale LARP or with a group that knows each other very well.

 

[KarinsDad]

I don't know what you mean by common. But it came up at least 5 times in the past couple of months.

Plus, I think that mind control/charm/brainwashing is a fairly common theme in fantasy and sci-fi. Succubus charm men and drain their will, mind flayers permanently change people's personalities, wizards can make you believe what they want to, vampires turn you into their slaves, sirens lure you to die, and so on.

I'm really not sure what would make someone put a mental block in that prevented them from ever expecting an NPC to do it to another NPC. Heck, a large number of adventures with puzzles that I've played in have involved a plot thread involving some sort of mind control as the reason why certain information is not readily available. Or at least had an NPC who was under an illusion, secretly a spy, or being blackmailed or coerced.

There are quite a few reasons why NPCs won't tell you what you want to know, is my point. And I believe if an NPC has real leverage over another NPC that a good Persuasion of Intimidate check isn't going to suddenly make NPCs open up. During the same adventure the player in question would spend most of his time complaining that members of the thieves guild wouldn't admit to being members when he made good Intimidate checks. The thieves guild kills anyone who admits to being a member. So, they all had good reason to stay quiet.

No doubt.

But, there is something that you are missing.

I've spent about one third of my time being a player over the decades and two thirds of my time being a DM. In that time, I've noticed that as DM, I have this vision of what is going on in the campaign world. It's fairly complete in my mind with all types of details.

As a player, I'm pretty clueless about what is going on. Sure, I get what the DM is telling me, but I often do not connect the dots.


I'll give an example. We started a game as "0th level PCs", shipwrecked on an island. No food. Limited clothing. No tools. We had to survive. We eventually managed to get a fire started and it got a bit out of control due to the wind. So, some vegetation got burned. The DM described the burnt vegetation as sweet smelling.

I don't know what the other players were thinking, but I was thinking that the plants might be poisonous. So, I avoided them. The rest of the players ignored this little clue as well. Several gaming sessions later once we got off the island, the DM asked why we did not try to use these plants as food since "cooked vegetation" that smells good tends to be edible and we were starving.

Never entered our minds. The DM had this idea of what was going on and we all just sat there clueless.


This happens all of the time in games. The DM knows what's going on, hands out clues, and those clues just fly over the heads of the players.

So yes, sometimes as a DM, you have to just say "The person is obviously mind controlled". Of course DMs like to give hints and let players figure things out on their own, but sometimes, that just isn't going to work. Players really do not always know what the DM is thinking and even very obvious clues (from the DM's perspective) can be very obtuse clues (from the player's perspective).

As a DM, you need to understand this so that you do not get frustrated with your players. They are not necessarily being pitas, they are just not getting it and as a result, they may be getting frustrated with you. And sometimes as DM, no matter how good of clues you thought you gave out, if the players need the information, you are going to have to spell it out for them. If they do not need the information, then you sometimes "out of character" need to make it clear to them (as you did try to do in your one example) that yes, their assumptions would normally be correct, but they are not correct in this case, no matter how good they roll on the dice.

 

[Mort]

No doubt.

But, there is something that you are missing.

I've spent about one third of my time being a player over the decades and two thirds of my time being a DM. In that time, I've noticed that as DM, I have this vision of what is going on in the campaign world. It's fairly complete in my mind with all types of details.

As a player, I'm pretty clueless about what is going on. Sure, I get what the DM is telling me, but I often do not connect the dots.


I'll give an example. We started a game as "0th level PCs", shipwrecked on an island. No food. Limited clothing. No tools. We had to survive. We eventually managed to get a fire started and it got a bit out of control due to the wind. So, some vegetation got burned. The DM described the burnt vegetation as sweet smelling.

I don't know what the other players were thinking, but I was thinking that the plants might be poisonous. So, I avoided them. The rest of the players ignored this little clue as well. Several gaming sessions later once we got off the island, the DM asked why we did not try to use these plants as food since "cooked vegetation" that smells good tends to be edible and we were starving.

Never entered our minds. The DM had this idea of what was going on and we all just sat there clueless.


This happens all of the time in games. The DM knows what's going on, hands out clues, and those clues just fly over the heads of the players.

So yes, sometimes as a DM, you have to just say "The person is obviously mind controlled". Of course DMs like to give hints and let players figure things out on their own, but sometimes, that just isn't going to work. Players really do not always know what the DM is thinking and even very obvious clues (from the DM's perspective) can be very obtuse clues (from the player's perspective).

As a DM, you need to understand this so that you do not get frustrated with your players. They are not necessarily being pitas, they are just not getting it and as a result, they may be getting frustrated with you. And sometimes as DM, no matter how good of clues you thought you gave out, if the players need the information, you are going to have to spell it out for them. If they do not need the information, then you sometimes "out of character" need to make it clear to them (as you did try to do in your one example) that yes, their assumptions would normally be correct, but they are not correct in this case, no matter how good they roll on the dice.

Absolutely.

One of my least favorite scenarios is one that degenerates to "guess what the GM is thinking."

This usually occurs when the GM has a specific outcome in mind but for fear of "spoiling it" or "making it too easy, " provides vague or too subtle clues.

This is often further exacerbated by the DM only allowing solutions he himself has thought of.

IME the above two situations, often in combination, lead to more player dissatisfaction than just about any other issues.

 

[Mark CMG]

(snip)

We can discuss a lot of things about the way any particular rule is written but always bear in mind that for an RPG versus a storytelling game it comes down to player authorial control which further comes down to the player affecting the world through the character (the player's role) or affecting the world directly as a player (authorial control over the setting). A skill is used as part of the character resource pool and a Fate point is used as part of the player resource pool, the character has the skill but the player has the Fate point. When the player utilizes the character skill, he is affecting the world through the character but when using a Fate point it is directly being used to affect the setting, things normally outside control of the character). You're mischaracterizing a character skill as a Fate point. It's understandable since the skill in question is poorly written in such a way that it leads to a false interpretation that the player can, in extreme circumstances, demand a setting be changed to suit the player's needs but, aside from that being incorrect, a skill is used so that character, not the player directly, can affect the setting. It's the same bottom line in the paladin calls his warhorse branch of the discussion.


I don't mind being brought back into the discussion, since I am planning to jump back in after a some folks have had to discuss the hypothetical questions I proposed earlier. Please take them to heart and answer them as you would have if they happened to you. The two scenarios, essentially, happened to me at game tables and I had to react to them in a reasonable manner. Any answer that involves name calling or stone walling wasn't really an option, though I can imagine it feels like an option some GMs might have wanted to choose. As I say, I don't mind being brought back into the discussion but understand that my position on what rules design core understanding made a (trad?) RPG and what rules design additions branched off storytelling games can largely be boiled down the above distinction. So, if you're making an argument to convince me, and I am open to any collegial discussion along those lines, I'll likely refer back to that core discussion point.

 

[Hussar]

We can discuss a lot of things about the way any particular rule is written but always bear in mind that for an RPG versus a storytelling game it comes down to player authorial control which further comes down to the player affecting the world through the character (the player's role) or affecting the world directly as a player (authorial control over the setting). A skill is used as part of the character resource pool and a Fate point is used as part of the player resource pool, the character has the skill but the player has the Fate point. When the player utilizes the character skill, he is affecting the world through the character but when using a Fate point it is directly being used to affect the setting, things normally outside control of the character). You're mischaracterizing a character skill as a Fate point. It's understandable since the skill in question is poorly written in such a way that it leads to a false interpretation that the player can, in extreme circumstances, demand a setting be changed to suit the player's needs but, aside from that being incorrect, a skill is used so that character, not the player directly, can affect the setting. It's the same bottom line in the paladin calls his warhorse branch of the discussion.

I think you're drawing a pretty fine distinction there. The player in the Paladin example, is quite obviously adding things to the setting that weren't there before. Just as the player in the Traveler example is adding things that weren't there before. That it is veneered over with an in game explanation doesn't really matter to me, to be honest. The point is, the player is changing the game world. You can post hoc justify anything. Like I said before, "Oh, hey, I didn't notice those boxes there" is a perfectly fine justification for the appearance of boxes in the game world.

The DM describes a tool bench with tools in a work room. Nothing specific, just that there is a tool bench with tools. The player declares that he picks up a hammer from the tool bench and hits an NPC in the head with it. Now, has the player exercised authorial control or not? Note, the existence of DM veto does not change the answer here.

I don't mind being brought back into the discussion, since I am planning to jump back in after a some folks have had to discuss the hypothetical questions I proposed earlier. Please take them to heart and answer them as you would have if they happened to you. The two scenarios, essentially, happened to me at game tables and I had to react to them in a reasonable manner. Any answer that involves name calling or stone walling wasn't really an option, though I can imagine it feels like an option some GMs might have wanted to choose.

I would really like to hear more about these scenarios, because, from your description, they sound anything but reasonable.