Confirmed: Magic items and summoned monster stats in PHB

[Celebrim]

Those other things aren't minutiae, IMO.

Fine. That can be your opinion. But until we establish why your criteria is for minutiae, we don't know very much about your opinion.

As for the main topic of the thread, any item a player needs to adjudicate and/or refer to should be in the PHB. I'm 100% behind the idea of putting magic items and summon monster stuff in the PHB.

My opinion is slightly different. I don't think that the player 'adjudicates' anything, in the literal sense of 'acting as a judge to settle disputes'. That's not the players role in the game. I do however think that the player does need to be provided with any information that his character would have, and you can make a reasonable case that a summoner would know something of the abilities of the creatures he's summoning. I think however you can make a reasonable case that this isn't necessarily true. It's easy to imagine a summoner without alot of actual knowledge who doesn't understand what he is summoning, and in fact this is a standard trope of fantasy.

I personally prefer the line between 'what the DM is responcible for' and 'what the player is responcible for' to be very clearly drawn, and that distinction is increasingly being blurred with the result of making D&D more and more a tactical skirmish game and less and less of an RPG. Someone accused me of encouraging 'adversarial gaming'. I'm not entirely sure what he means, but the claim that players need to control the creatures that they summon strikes me as meeting my definition of 'adversarial gaming'.

The days are long since past where you could try to keep your players from owning or reading the DMG or the MM in order to keep them in the dark. Most of the people I play with have been playing ar DM'ingfor so long it's foolish to even try.

I don't think that's remotely the issue. I'm pretty good at keeping them in the dark even if they have a DMG or MM open in front of them. What I was arguing against was the notion that player control explicitly or implicitly extended to any of the NPCs in the game.

 

[hong]

Right - there was one fight with wargs before the Fellowship reached Moria in which Legolas retrieved his arrows (except for one) after the battle.

In Moria, he was shooting arrows up to the point that he ran from the Balrog. Also no mention of running out of arrows at the Pelennor Fields, or the earlier battles with the Haradrim (although he probably did not need to fight much as the Dead did most of the work there).

Legolas does a lot of talking about running out of arrows, for someone who is pretty much never depicted as actually doing so. Paranoid player.

 

[Celebrim]

Right - there was one fight with wargs before the Fellowship reached Moria in which Legolas retrieved his arrows (except for one) after the battle.

Well, rather off target, but, yes.

In Moria, he was shooting arrows up to the point that he ran from the Balrog.

But he was implicitly not shooting alot of them either. It was too dark for good shooting, and the narration implied that the quarters were generally too close for archery work, which meant the humans with the swords were doing most of the fighting. His recorded kills in Moria aren't much higher than the halflings.

Also no mention of running out of arrows at the Pelennor Fields, or the earlier battles with the Haradrim (although he probably did not need to fight much as the Dead did most of the work there).

Again, there is no mention of him firing any arrows either.

 

[hong]

Someone accused me of encouraging 'adversarial gaming'.

They did?

I'm not entirely sure what he means, but the claim that players need to control the creatures that they summon strikes me as meeting my definition of 'adversarial gaming'.

The first step to a non-adversarial gaming atmosphere, grasshopper, is full disclosure.

 

[hong]

Well, rather off target, but, yes.



But he was implicitly not shooting alot of them either. It was too dark for good shooting, and the narration implied that the quarters were generally too close for archery work, which meant the humans with the swords were doing most of the fighting. His recorded kills in Moria aren't much higher than the halflings.



Again, there is no mention of him firing any arrows either.

Are we arguing about whether Legolas was a spray-and-pray archer, or something else?

 

[kennew142]

Bold type is mine for emphasis.

I personally prefer the line between 'what the DM is responcible for' and 'what the player is responcible for' to be very clearly drawn, and that distinction is increasingly being blurred with the result of making D&D more and more a tactical skirmish game and less and less of an RPG.

We have the winner. The new talking point for the anti-4e crowd is: 4e edition is not an RPG, it's a tactical game.

I'm calling D&D is too much like pinochle for the next line of attack.

EDIT: A good role-player will role-play in whatever edition. Someone interested only in tactics and combat will not role-play in any edition. The divide has been with us from the beginning. Any argument that the new edition will be less of an RPG just because it provides good rules for tactics is simplistic at best.

 

[FireLance]

"Wait a minute... keeping track of ammunition isn't ridiculous either. There are some very good reasons for keeping track of ammunition."

Now that isn't something that I would disagree with. However, I would disagree that keeping track of ammunition (or other minutiae) is necessary for a good story or a good game.

Perhaps it was the term "minutiae" that was off-putting. An alternative word like "details" probably wouldn't have elicited such a negative reaction from me. "Minutiae" carries with it a connotation of "unimportant" which, almost by definition, means that tracking it is more trouble than it's worth.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I find it a really gross misrepresentation to claim that "trust" is in any way remotely related to people's enjoyment of a more simulationist style game.

Indeed, and I think that Celebrim nailed it in his response:

Or in other words, those groups have players who consistantly keep track of arrows, encumberance, food, and every sort of 'realistic minutiae' that solely by tracking is to thier disadvantage, but who on the other hand are fine to hand wave any minutiae which by tracking exactly would be an advantage to them. That would indeed be a 'high-trust' environment​

Moreover, IME, if all else is equal, a game with a higher degree of verisimilitude will always draw more players than a game without. I have found this to be universally and overwhelmingly true throughout almost 30 years of play in two countries (USA and Canada), including play in Wisconsin, Indiana, Virginia, California, Lousiana, and Missouri. Given a choice between a good DM who cares not a whit for verisimilitude, and a good DM that carefully includes verisimilitude, the second DM will always have more than double the player base than the first DM. Again, this is IME, and YMMV, but it does seem to me that there is a much greater desire for verisimilitude among D&D players than WotC seems to believe.

The difficulty, of course, is that is it inherently harder to carefully include verismilitude than it is to ignore it. This may be especially true in 3e, where players and DMs have a much larger group of numbers to monitor than they did in previous editions. However, like many things, what you get out of it is often directly related to the effort you put into it.

Again, IME. YMMV.

RC

 

[hong]

Moreover, IME, if all else is equal,

Well, yes.

 

[Celebrim]

Now that isn't something that I would disagree with. However, I would disagree that keeping track of ammunition (or other minutiae) is necessary for a good story or a good game.

Then we don't actually disagree all that much.