Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6628628" data-attributes="member: 6787650">And I share that concern, frankly, which is why it's all the more disconcerting when he jumps to conclusions in a thread like this.Rules are really important to me because they are the source of player agency: the ability of a player to deliberately steer the game world in a desired direction (i.e. act effectively) is predicated on his ability to predict the results of his actions. I almost never make a house rule without running it by my players first; the only ones I make unilaterally are ones that are game-breakers for me to the point where I would quit the game without them. (E.g. RAW vision rules are totally bonkers, I've replaced them with sane ones that allow you to see a man holding a torch even if you're 200' away in darkness. By PHB RAW he'd be able to see you because he's in a lighted area and therefore not "blinded", but you couldn't see him. That's crazy and undoubtedly unintended by the designers.)So I get this concern over player agency and rules, I really do. But there aren't any rules that say dragons are cubic, and there are rules both in the text of Forcecage and elsewhere indicating that you probably shouldn't expect to be able to cage dragons (see the first few posts of this thread), and so it strikes me as a bit off if someone shrilly jumps to denouncing everybody else as "playing cops and robbers" because they don't share his desire to houserule dragons' actual size as being equal to their controlled space (a viewpoint which the PHB explicitly disavows) in order to derive actual size from the MM stats. Sorry, dude, the MM just doesn't list actual size for non-giants any more than it lists other important stats like monster organization, ecology, spoor, diet, and lifespan. If you capture a ghost and have it try to age orcs to death, guess what? the DM is going to have to make a judgment call. If you're looking for signs of ghouls in the area, guess what? the DM has to decide not only what there is to find but what spoor could possibly be found. It would be nice if the MM had these stats, but it doesn't.As a gamist, he probably doesn't care about how big a dragon really is so much as he cares about whether Forcecage works on it. As a simulationist, my primary concern is what it's really like to the characters in the gameworld (including how big), and whether Forcecage works on it is only a secondary concern: if it can't work, the wizard will know it and will cast something else instead. Different people get different things out of D&D, and that's okay as long as you respect other people's views instead of hysterically denouncing them.And if I played with a DM who made bad rulings, or even just rulings that I didn't agree with because they came from a different paradigm than I use, guess what? I would leave that game. It's not hard.Well, peace to you Sezarious and happy gaming.-Max</blockquote>

Verification