D&D 5E Dying From Exhaustion While Petrified

[EzekielRaiden]

If anything, the problem is that the condition and keyword aren't property defined, not that they used natural language.

But that's precisely what "natural language" means in 5e. Don't define your keywords. You don't need to! Just use natural language and everything will be fiiiiiine.

Spoiler alert: Everything was not fine.

This is exactly like the problem in 3e where "dead" doesn't say you're incapacitated, and "dying" ends at -9. So, RAW the only drawbacks to being dead are that you can't benefit from healing and that your soul has left your body. But nothing stops you from taking actions, because they didn't tie the synthetic conditions together correctly. The problem isn't natural language. It's the synthetic language.

They also weren't promising natural language would fix these problems. 5e did promise that. Again, that was the whole point. Saying that the synthetic part could be dispensed with entirely.

It's also the same problem why, RAW in 5e, you can't wake up from a long rest. The game says you go to sleep, and that means you're unconscious. But the unconscious condition says you can't take actions while unconscious. So you can't wake up, because waking up is doing something! The problem is in the keyword's synthetic definition is incomplete not the natural language. Just because it's written in English doesn't mean it's natural language.

According to the 5e designers that's exactly what it means.

Like, I'm sorry, but that's what they didn't like about synthetic language. You had to define everything down to the last little detail, and it was extremely easy to miss some normally self-evident assumption when you do that. That's why too many keywords doesn't work.

Uh.....okay. That's not at all what anyone, ever, complained about. The problem wasn't the detail. The problem was that there were keywords at all.

4e's keywords work great as keywords. I challenge you to give me a single one that isn't clear and effective at describing what it means mechanically. The thing people hated was that it was synthetic at all.

It's difficult to untangle and difficult to imagine all uses for every keyword. Magic The Gathering says, "forget verisimilitude, I want determinism." TTRPGs don't do that. They say, "verisimilitude is king and the rules can't cover everything you could imagine, so we put a referee at the table at all times precisely to deal with what happens when mechanics and verisimilitude conflict."

Verisimilitude has nothing to do with it. I genuinely have no idea why you mention it. People almost exclusively complained about keywords because they were any form of jargon at all.

Natural language is, "Light works like light works. You can't try to hide when someone can see you.

Except sometimes you can, and "how light works" is actually super complicated without rules clarity. Consider, for example, the weird and not very verisimilitudinous case of Warlock darkvision. If you're a human or dragonborn and you take Devil's Sight, you have crap vision in dim light, but as soon as it becomes pitch-black, you can actually see better than an elf! Even the elf experiences some of this, as their darkvision radius doubles as soon as the light is completely gone.

You can see what's in your line of sight.

Unless you can't, because there are times that that isn't true. For example, the Frightened condition. It does not stop applying simply because a creature closes its eyes, turns away, or in some other way avoids attempting to view the target, even though that (by definition) means the Frightened creature does not actually have line of sight at that moment; the mere potential that it could is enough, even if it isn't using that potential right this second. However, it does stop applying if the creature that caused that condition becomes invisible; the mere theoretical potential that the creature could be looking at the one that frightened it is irrelevant, only the actual, physical ability to see it matters. Both of these cases have been defended by Sage Advice answers as coming from a plain, common sense reading of the term "line of sight," but they conflict. They even leave open a clear conundrum: what happens with a victim creature is afflicted so, the causing creature goes invisible, but the victim creature has opt-in ability to see invisible things?

You can use an Arcana check to see if your character knows something about magical lore. You can use a Survival check to find food and fresh water in the wilderness." That is natural language. The only synthetic thing there is the word "check" and the names of the skills.

Hide, line of sight, Arcana, Survival, and check are all synthetic terms here. Arguably, "magical lore" is as well, since I've no idea what counts as "lore" or not, it would need to be explained. They all have to be actually defined, without that they're meaningless fribble. Line of sight is a borderline case, I'll admit, since that's about something that almost verges on how a real world thing works, but I count it because (as noted) it actually isn't as simple as that, due to how it interacts with other rules.

 

[Seramus]

Does this actually happen?

Because I don't actually think this happens. I think rather the reverse. Vague terminology encourages rules-lawyers to hound for exceptions and to force favorable interpretations of unclear statements. Having clear, precise rules that mean exactly what they say and say exactly what they mean leaves the legalist with no defense; you must simply accept the rules as they are, or dispute the system itself, which...is not likely to be effective with very many DMs, who IME take a dim view of "but...but...that's stupid and I should get what I want instead!"

For better or worse, it is my repeated experience that precise wording requires increasingly lengthy rules to account for multiple situations. And the result of such long blocks of precise wording is TL;DR mental blue screen of death for increasing amounts of players.

The holy grail would be short precise rules, but those are very rare in gaming.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For better or worse, it is my repeated experience that precise wording requires increasingly lengthy rules to account for multiple situations. And the result of such long blocks of precise wording is TL;DR mental blue screen of death for increasing amounts of players.

I mean, I would say that that's what having a glossary of precisely-defined terms is for. You shunt all the verbiage to the glossary, which can be consulted at need, and keep the individual rule expressions much shorter. That's pretty much the reason for developing vocabulary specific to some practice, so that you don't need to spell it out every single time. Same as mathematical notation. But such special vocab or notation is precisely what makes things like QM and "legalese" so infuriatingly impenetrable to outsiders--hence, it should be used in gaming with care and attention, and tested, to ensure that it really does actually achieve the goal for which it is designed.

As folks learn the lingo, they become better at play. Eventually, it becomes second nature. We must, however, be on guard to avoid allowing that "becomes second nature" thing to make us forget that new folks still need to learn.

"Hit points," as natural as they may seem, are not inherently obvious to every player. The "casual gamer" revolution, typified by things like the Nintendo Wii, proved quite clearly that there's a large and interested market of gamers who have zero prior knowledge or understanding of the established terms and patterns used by gamers. Bringing them in, making the terminology accessible without flattening the systems that depend on that terminology, has been the ongoing challenge of video game design for years. The exact same thing applies to tabletop games.

The holy grail would be short precise rules, but those are very rare in gaming.

Certainly. That's just another part of why serious, rigorous testing is so important.

 

[Seramus]

I mean, I would say that that's what having a glossary of precisely-defined terms is for. You shunt all the verbiage to the glossary, which can be consulted at need, and keep the individual rule expressions much shorter. That's pretty much the reason for developing vocabulary specific to some practice, so that you don't need to spell it out every single time. Same as mathematical notation. But such special vocab or notation is precisely what makes things like QM and "legalese" so infuriatingly impenetrable to outsiders--hence, it should be used in gaming with care and attention, and tested, to ensure that it really does actually achieve the goal for which it is designed.

As folks learn the lingo, they become better at play. Eventually, it becomes second nature. We must, however, be on guard to avoid allowing that "becomes second nature" thing to make us forget that new folks still need to learn.

"Hit points," as natural as they may seem, are not inherently obvious to every player. The "casual gamer" revolution, typified by things like the Nintendo Wii, proved quite clearly that there's a large and interested market of gamers who have zero prior knowledge or understanding of the established terms and patterns used by gamers. Bringing them in, making the terminology accessible without flattening the systems that depend on that terminology, has been the ongoing challenge of video game design for years. The exact same thing applies to tabletop games.


Certainly. That's just another part of why serious, rigorous testing is so important.

Having a glossary of precisely-defined terms is exactly what PF2E did, and look how many people bounce off that. I literally can't get enough people interested in playing, and the sheer density of the conditions list is among the reasons why. And that's while having a waiting list of more than a dozen people who want into one of our 5E tables.

But in general I agree with you. It's a worthy goal to keep working towards the perfect balance of precise and simple rule phrasing.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Another reason to prefer PF2E: fewer of these weird arguments.
----------
Petrified per PF2E: You have been turned to stone. You can't act, nor can you sense anything. You become an object with a Bulk double your normal Bulk (typically 12 for a petrified Medium creature or 6 for a petrified Small creature), AC 9, Hardness 8, and the same current Hit Points you had when alive. You don't have a Broken Threshold. When the petrified condition ends, you have the same number of Hit Points you had as a statue. If the statue is destroyed, you immediately die. While petrified, your mind and body are in stasis, so you don't age or notice the passing of time.

There aren't fewer of these weird arguments. You either get pretty broad language that requires DM interpretation, or you get specific language, that also requires DM interpretation.

Specific example: in PF2, a Champion of the goddess, the Redeemer Queen, cannot be a Redeemer Champion. Why? The Redeemer Queen is a CN deity, which means that she can only have CG, CN, CE or N champions, and a Redeemer Champion must be NG.

Second example: in PF2, you can Feint, without a penalty, while knocked prone. You can't Crawl away without risking an attack of opportunity, you can't Stand Up for the same reason, but your ability to Feint (which makes the enemy flat-footed to you but doesn't help in getting away) is unimpaired.

Meanwhile, in an actual game, no one would claim that a character died from exhaustion because they were petrified and were unable to eat while petrified.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Having a glossary of precisely-defined terms is exactly what PF2E did, and look how many people bounce off that. I literally can't get enough people interested in playing, and the sheer density of the conditions list is among the reasons why. And that's while having a waiting list of more than a dozen people who want into one of our 5E tables.

I can't imagine why having "fatal" and "deadly" mean different things would cause casual players to bounce off the system.

 

[pnewman]

What if every rock in the world was actually a living creature, or part of a living creature, that had been Petrified? They all died of lack of food and water and that is the only reason rocks are not alive.