D&D 5E Guidance...

[Paul Farquhar]

A couple of observations that I find interesting relating to that. The first of course is that a model should contain less information than the thing it is simulating. The choice of what to include depends on goals: RPGs have converged around attack chances, hit points and such like. So as you point out handedness is excluded.

Intriguingly, unless someone at the table added left or right handedness to the fiction, that literally doesn't exist. It's not in the model, and it's not in the fiction. The ogre only exists to the extent to which it is articulated... because we don't need a real ogre to have a fiction about an ogre. Therefore the ogre handedness can't possibly exist unless we describe it. I don't claim we couldn't describe it, or even that it's not part of our ideas about ogres, but it does not exist in our fiction at the table until we call it out. Smell likewise, and so on.

None of this is relevant. Every player has a mental image of the ogre in their head. For some players the ogre might be holding the club in it's left hand, for other players they might have a mental image of an ogre with a club in it's right. Since it has no gameplay effect the DM didn't mention it, but if you could look inside every players head you would see they are all watching slightly different TV shows.

None of that matters until the player tries to do something that involves interacting with the environment. For example "I try to jump over the ogre's head to get behind him". The rules cover how high a character can jump, and the player should know how tall their character is, but the DM suddenly needs to decide how tall the ogre is and how much clearance there is between the ogre's head and the ceiling. They need to do so in a way that is as consistent as possible with all the different mental images that the players have.

 

[clearstream]

None of this is relevant. Every player has a mental image of the ogre in their head. For some players the ogre might be holding the club in it's left hand, for other players they might have a mental image of an ogre with a club in it's right. Since it has no gameplay effect the DM didn't mention it, but if you could look inside every players head you would see they are all watching slightly different TV shows.

None of that matters until the player tries to do something that involves interacting with the environment. For example "I try to jump over the ogre's head to get behind him". The rules cover how high a character can jump, and the player should know how tall their character is, but the DM suddenly needs to decide how tall the ogre is and how much clearance there is between the ogre's head and the ceiling. They need to do so in a way that is as consistent as possible with all the different mental images that the players have.

Possibly you think I'm arguing something that I am not arguing. Of course everyone has details in mind, and everyone has details that are omitted. In background study on cognition the extent to which the brain accepts incomplete representations of a thing as the thing, is well established. For example, we assign things in our peripheral vision colour, but our sensitivity to colour drops off with the angle of vision. There are other examples: when it comes to ogres, the version in our minds will be just-complete-enough to be accepted as its representation, even though we omit a lot of details. The colour of the soles of its feet would be an example.

It's true we can fill in those details: my claim is that they do not exist until we do. Also, we're not capable of filling in every detail of an ogre. My claim is that there will always be omissions.

The more important claim that I make, however, is not about that. It is about the mapping between an intentionally less-complete model (simulations are necessarily incomplete) and the partially incomplete and progressively sketched-in fiction. I don't think you are arguing against that. The 1d4 for guidance then is at the model level - we don't imagine that the guided ogre stops and rolls a d4! But it does model something that is intended to exist at the fiction level - we do imagine that the guided ogre feels guided. And the model tells us things about that - it tells us that the ogre can tell when it could be guided.

What I believe one would need to be arguing to not believe this, would be that there are modelled things that have no mapping at all to the fiction. (Notice the directional arrow there.) Say there was a thing in the model that gets a player to roll a d12... but that doesn't translate into anything at all in the fiction. Just... roll a d12. Okay, good, let's move on shall we...

 

[Todd Roybark]

Casting guidance in social settings always has negative implications. and can certainly initiate combat. This is known by the players and never comes up. They might cast it right before a social encounter to get a boost on the first roll if it makes sense

I have been in real life negotiations that have become tense and had the other party step away, say a prayer, calm down and start the negotiations again...more centered.
In no way did I want to initiate violence.

Prayers before, during and after major negotiations is common in many cultures, especially in antiquity. It is Good to have the gods on your side

 

[FrogReaver]

I have been in real life negotiations that have become tense and had the other party step away, say a prayer, calm down and start the negotiations again...more centered.
In no way did I want to initiate violence.

Prayers before, during and after major negotiations is common in many cultures, especially in antiquity. It is Good to have the gods on your side

It's more that when spell casting is real and you are casting a spell to sway a social situation - that's likely either looked down upon or viewed as hostile.

You are not simply imploring a higher power to do something for you when you cast guidance (at least not in most games).

 

[Stalker0]

Do your players ask to make or declare they are making ability checks (for which you usually say "Yes")? Or do you just ask for a lot of ability checks as DM as per "Rolling With It" (DMG, p. 236)?

Do you take into consideration the duration of the task when it is declared? If you do, does it make sense to you that a task that takes longer than one minute should benefit from the guidance spell?

My players make a lot of investigation rolls and knowledge checks. Most of these are within the 1 minute limit. Most of the time they ask, but the asks are usually reasonable.

 

[Stalker0]

Well, what I see is that layered buffs readily push character checks above the range of difficulty classes. Above "nearly impossible" - which can become fairly likely. It feels like a design disconnect. A flat +1 shifts the range in an uninteresting way.

To me, 30s are not uncommon, at my table they seem to be the normal order of business. I mentioned before that my group really likes to use skills. Between a lot of expertise users, a myriad of ways to get advantage, and guidance, I expect several 30s a game. DC 35 to me is the real "nearly impossible"

 

[Charlaquin]

To me, 30s are not uncommon, at my table they seem to be the normal order of business. I mentioned before that my group really likes to use skills. Between a lot of expertise users, a myriad of ways to get advantage, and guidance, I expect several 30s a game. DC 35 to me is the real "nearly impossible"

When you say you have a lot of expertise users, do you mean a lot of rogues and bards, or do you use those expertise feats from the old feat UA?