D&D General DM Says No Powergaming?

[Ruin Explorer]

No darkcvision in 5e is designed to obliviate the need for light. This just does not happen often & the vast majority of things that might make the passive perception matter tend to make the GM look adversarial & trigger player vrs gm. even 3.x darkvision was less reliable than 5e. 2e darkvision was pretty much ask your gm in the PHB & the DMG giving the DM some advice they can follow or not.

Eventually having magictorches that happen to be weapons & things is still torches.

LOL no.

1E/2E Continual Light has a 60ft radius. It's outright better than 60ft Darkvision, which gives you Disadvantage. Dead wrong re: 3.XE Darkvision. As a cold fact it worked better than 5E Darkvision. You can't even argue that lol, it's just a fact. Passive Perception is reduced by 5 in Darkvision, note, because of the Disadvantage.

There's no "eventually" about level 3 really either.

 

[Greg Benage]

Eventually having magictorches that happen to be weapons & things is still torches.

Not in the context of classic D&D, it's not, because it's not a resource that's consumed.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Not really, no. It’s proven that people on the internet will yell at you for saying it. People on the internet say it’s possible to do both. But people are incredibly bad at judging their own abilities, see the Dunning-Krueger effect. And people on the internet will say any kind of nonsense, see the flat earthers, NFT bros, and Elon Musk fans among so, so many examples.

Personally, I have yet to meet a single power gamer in real life who’s even halfway decent at RP. Most seem to think that a single line of in-character dialog once every third session is the height of good RP. I had one say that the best role-playing of the night was when they attacked an ooze with an axe. Their definition of good RP was simply not metagaming.

So, no, it’s not in any way disproven. I have yet to meet this particular breed of unicorn in the flesh, but people on the internet keep insisting they exist. So I won’t assume they don’t.

I fully believe you haven't played with power gamers who aren't good roleplayers.

I will say I used to have a group full of them. Three of the four players loved to pour over the rules to make the most powerful characters possible (and then they'd help the fourth player).

They were also amazing roleplayers! We had a whole campaign set in a prison city in which they chose to use diplomacy and negotiations (along with very targeted intimidation) in order to unite and take over all the prison gangs. The characters were also extremely powerful due to the players' love of power gaming!

So even if you have never experienced this, I definitely have.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Not really, no. It’s proven that people on the internet will yell at you for saying it. People on the internet say it’s possible to do both. But people are incredibly bad at judging their own abilities, see the Dunning-Krueger effect. And people on the internet will say any kind of nonsense, see the flat earthers, NFT bros, and Elon Musk fans among so, so many examples.

So, let me get this straight, you're directly comparing people who suggest powergaming and RPing are compatible to "flat earthers" and "NFT bros". Christ on a bike.

Wow that's really classy and not all unnecessary and incredibly insulting lol.

As for "overestimating their abilities", well, let's be real - most players aren't "good RPers", including people who do nothing but RP. So the incredible sneering about "say a line in character once every third session" really applies to about 50% of people who play RPGs, most them not powergamers. At a dead minimum. I mean, I guess it's sad that most people don't meet your standards, but dude...

 

[Dross]

Personally meeting one in real life.

ETA: Not saying hello to someone who claims to be that, but actually sitting at a table and playing with them and seeing it be an actual thing that happens in person.

Which begs why you even had the sentence about assuming it happens because others have said they've seen it? That answer implies...... a lot of things.

Give what I've seen, I doubt that you are the only person here that can identify a RP-ing powergamer.

 

[Oofta]

I love shareeing this little story... we would cast it on the inside of a scroll case then open one end to make it like a flash light

edit... it was a flash light

Bah, that's amateur night! Those of us who really cracked it had the light cast on non-functional braces. Want no light because you're sneaking? No problem, shut your mouth. Need light? Smiles everyone, smiles! No object interaction needed.

 

[FrozenNorth]

We can only imagine what a world would be like if there were real dragons, what I reject is this idea that no nation anywhere would arm and train their citizens. England has a ton of coastline and there was a long history of being raided, it makes sense that they would want most people to have an ability to defend themselves. Meanwhile France had relatively fewer threats from the outside.

I reject the idea that every barony, duchy or county would arm their peasants for fear of peasant rebellion. And Vikings did raid France, very often. You also don’t mention the German principalities, that were often at war with one another.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Ancient red dragon. AC 22. HP 546. Peasant with a longbow has a +0 to-hit, so needs a natural 20, which crits and deals double damage. Using the average, doubled, is 9 damage. For every 20 peasants one will hit and deal 9 damage. So it would take 61 hits to kill the dragon which would take 1220 shots to accomplish. Which means one round of attacks from 1220 peasants, two rounds of attacks from 660 peasants, three rounds of attacks from 440 peasants, etc. According to the DMG, a village is up to 1000 people. So yeah, a village of armed peasants can literally shoot an ancient red dragon out of the sky in about two rounds. That matches everyone’s fantasy, right?

Ranged attacks have disadvantage over a certain range. The dragon also does not have to attack in the bright light of the day but in the night.

So most probably it takes not 20, but 400 peasants for a single hit of 9 damage.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think the complaint is that RAW its even possible to happen.

I think it is a feature, not a bug. This way, there is a reason why men group up in villages and can still exist. Protection from wild animals has always been one of the reasons for grouping up.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We can only imagine what a world would be like if there were real dragons, what I reject is this idea that no nation anywhere would arm and train their citizens. England has a ton of coastline and there was a long history of being raided, it makes sense that they would want most people to have an ability to defend themselves.

Just to be clear, that wasn't at all the purpose of training people in longbows and maintaining that training.

At the time, most of Britain hadn't really been raided for hundreds of years (the South West is a slightly different story but longbowmen didn't tend to come from there). Further most of them were fairly deep inland.

The purpose of the edicts forcing longbow training was to ensure that a fairly difficult-to-maintain resource (at other countries did not possess in the same way) was maintained, which is to say, a supply of well-trained longbowmen. Not just the small standing army, but people who could be drawn upon when it was time to go shoot from Frenchmen. And that army was primarily used offensively, or at least outside the borders of the British isles.

You seem to be thinking of it like American "Minutemen" or something or Wood Elves sentries or something, who are there primarily to defend against what is perceived as a regular threat. That's the wrong way to look at it. This is the government forcing people to train so they'll be ready to fight in their wars, not to defend coastal settlements from Vikings who hadn't raided them for 200+ years.

Thus it doesn't really make sense re: dragons.

Re: dragons the government is going to make a sanguine decision - do they lose more people/houses/livestock/crops trying to fight off dragons, or just fleeing from dragons. If you can kill dragons with a few dozen or hundred men with bows, dragons will be hunted to extinction within generations, at least in populated areas. And there will be armies and expeditions going after the remaining ones, even in frontier areas. I mean, jeez, just look at how tiny or perceived threats are reacted to throughout history.

There isn't going to be any passive-ass "I guess we should arm everyone with a longbow in case a dragon comes". They'll hunt them to the ends of the earth.

If you can't kill a dragon with a bunch of guys with longbows, then suddenly we get a more D&D-like situation.