D&D (2024) Do you plan to adopt D&D5.5One2024Redux?

[Faolyn]

Ahh. Not seeing his posts, so, I was confused.

Why am I rolling anything? I have this background. There's no roll. I just get the passage. What's the stakes here? Is he not going to let me book passage for some reason? Why on earth should I bother making a roll? There's zero chance of failure and no consequences. I want passage, I get passage. Done.

Again, it's the DM throwing up roadblocks for zero reason. Oh we have to have a challenge here. No thanks. Throwing in superfluous skill checks for zero reason.

At least tell me you're not one of those players who gets angry when other players want to roleplay. Because I've played with a few people like that, back in my college group, and my gods they could be utter killjoys.

I honestly don't get why you wouldn't want to roleplay in a roleplaying game, especially when there's no chance of failure, because it means you could make your character sound as awesome as you want them to be and not have the dice betray you.

But if you want a mechanical reason, here's something that happened in one of my games, we befriended the local weaponsmiths via roleplaying and yes, a roll or two. Because of that, when we wanted to buy new weapons, the DM decided to pull out some cool magic weapons they had in stock. We took a boat and bonded with the crew. Because of that, we got a chance to learn some new skills/tools/languages/weapons during the travel downtime. Those paths wouldn't have been open to us if we had just treated them as a no-stakes-why-bother? encounter.

 

[Faolyn]

There's something wrong with this statement. Characters often have capabilities their players lack. I'm not a swordfighting expert, but my Fighter is. I don't know the ins and outs of magical theory, but my Wizard does.

I might have an Int of 14 irl. Does that mean my 18 Int Wizard is limited to what only I can conceive? At that point, why have ability scores at all?

Again, I said imagine.

Ever see a movie or TV show where the characters had some cool fighting stunts or used magic in a cool way? Ever read a gaming book that included martial or magical abilities that you wish were in D&D? Ever just daydreamed what sort of badassery your character could do?

Congrats. You've imagined something.

If you literally cannot imagine how your character may find a ship in a port, however... well, I can't help you with that.

 

[Oofta]

Again, I said imagine.

Ever see a movie or TV show where the characters had some cool fighting stunts or used magic in a cool way? Ever read a gaming book that included martial or magical abilities that you wish were in D&D? Ever just daydreamed what sort of badassery your character could do?

Congrats. You've imagined something.

If you literally cannot imagine how your character may find a ship in a port, however... well, I can't help you with that.

Whether you mean it or not, it comes across as "If you don't play like I do you're doing it wrong."

The reason people don't use background features has nothing to do with lack of imagination. It's not because characters are not allowed to do cool things.

Why don't you just accept that some people have different styles and preferences?

 

[Faolyn]

To be fair - it's hard to get cheaper than "free". I'm not supposed to have to pay for passage.

But, yeah, that sort of thinking get's right under my skin. "Oh, well, there's these nice loopholes in the description where I can insert monkey's paws" is not conducive to getting players to try anything other than spells.

Again, I fail to really understand why DM's seem incapable of just saying, "Ok."

So I threw in the possibility of Persuasion and other checks because people were complaining about the ability being an insta-success.

But you're also complaining that I'm making them into not an insta-success.

It's true; you can't please everyone.

 

[Faolyn]

Whether you mean it or not, it comes across as "If you don't play like I do you're doing it wrong."

The reason people don't use background features has nothing to do with lack of imagination. It's not because characters are not allowed to do cool things.

Why don't you just accept that some people have different styles and preferences?

Well, I'd like to point out that this particular sub-thread started when I was talking to someone else about roleplaying their features--and how if a player doesn't want to RP, that's on the player, not the feature--and you decided to say that requiring RP here was stupid and pointless (because you could RP as a chimp, remember?).

So why couldn't you accept that my style and preference were different than yours?

 

[Vaalingrade]

There is no emergent shared storytelling here. For there to be shared storytelling, the player needs to have any level of authority in order to be able to share in story telling. But, there's no shared authority. Just the player endlessly being required to jump through arbitrary hoops until the DM is satisfied.

According to the game, I have the authority, as a player, with this background, to declare that X is true in the game. Whatever that X is, doesn't really matter. Maybe it's a safe place to stay for the night, or sending a message, or booking passage on a ship. That's my authority for taking this background. Now, that authority has just been rejected by the DM who has decided, solely based on whatever he or she feels is "appropriate" and in return, I now have to jump through whatever totally arbitrary hoops that DM has decided to plonk down.

Again, there is zero emergent story telling going on here. It's 100% artificial. I MUST now negotiate with the captain (why the captain? Because the DM says so. I have zero input into who I talk to to book passage on the ship) and I MUST succeed on a persuasion check to use the ability that I'm supposed to automatically succeed with.

No, there's nothing "emergent" here. This is the DM roadblocking for his or her own benefit and has absolutely zero to do with me.

I'm just explaining why you might want to talk to side characters.

Obviously the player should be able to take the background and use it. There's very little value in denying that aside from 'verisimilitude' and desire to exercise traditional authority as DM, which is equally without value.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Again, I said imagine.

Ever see a movie or TV show where the characters had some cool fighting stunts or used magic in a cool way? Ever read a gaming book that included martial or magical abilities that you wish were in D&D? Ever just daydreamed what sort of badassery your character could do?

Congrats. You've imagined something.

If you literally cannot imagine how your character may find a ship in a port, however... well, I can't help you with that.

He has a point though. Playing int 18 or 20 characters is not easy for most of us. As they are expected to solve some riddles. At some point you need to make a decision: include riddles for players or characters.
Once in a while, a riddle is nice to challenge your players. In AD&D the riddlemaster had a neat ability: they always had twice as much out game time or one extra chance to solve a riddle. I try to do it a bit like that. If the players can't solve a riddle I let them roll investigeation etc to give them some hints or even just give them the solution.

 

[Faolyn]

He has a point though. Playing int 18 or 20 characters is not easy for most of us. As they are expected to solve some riddles. At some point you need to make a decision: include riddles for players or characters.
Once in a while, a riddle is nice to challenge your players. In AD&D the riddlemaster had a neat ability: they always had twice as much out game time or one extra chance to solve a riddle. I try to do it a bit like that. If the players can't solve a riddle I let them roll investigeation etc to give them some hints or even just give them the solution.

This isn't anything close to what I was talking about though.

 

[Scott Christian]

In what way am I challenging the DM here? The DM is forcing a scene upon me that I clearly have zero interest in playing out. So, I'm supposed to what? Smile and eat my veggies because the DM knows best?

This is the point that people seem to be missing. Sometimes the players just aren't interested in playing out that scene for you. They really aren't. At best, they're doing it because you've forced it on them. Instead, why not skip the scene and get on to the stuff they ACTUALLY came to the session to do?

Because the DM is not a computer. Maybe they have preferences too. I have played with DMs that really don't like the roleplay pillar, but love the exploration and combat pillar. Yet, they still use the roleplay pillar because their players like it. They certainly would never ask the players to just skip ahead.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

This isn't anything close to what I was talking about though.

@James Gasik did however.