D&D 5E How cognizant are you of the rules of the game?

[Maxperson]

You're not the first to disagree with me about that, and I doubt you'll be the last. However, I would argue that the difference that you describe is a relative corner case. The cleric I described can still effectively lose the use of her weapon if tied up, and the cleric you described losing her weapon for more than a single round also seems pretty rare given the way that I understand disarms work by default in 5e.

You walk into a feast held by the King. No arms or armor allowed. You are the only one who is unaffected. There are hundreds of situations where you will be unaffected and the other cleric will be. When arrested. When going into restricted areas. People generally aren't allowed to wear arms and armor into fine dining places. It goes on and on.

 

[Maxperson]

To be perfectly fair, the real world accounts for many more factors than D&D does. When it comes to melee weapons in D&D, all other things being equal, the one with the higher damage die is clearly the most effective choice.

To who? Damage being variable and hit point being abstract, how is the PC going to be able to tell how much damage any weapon really does?

DM: The swordsman swings his short at you and at the last second you luckily avoid having the strike go through your neck. Take 5 points of damage.

It would be impossible for that PC to know that the longsword would have done 6 OR that he took any damage at all.

 

[Kithas]

Actually, he is probably not going to use it, as plate mail is highly customized and would completely change his fighting style. Look at The Hound or Oberyn Martell. Or even Syrio. None would be as effective weighted down with some random kill's platemail, especially if it's a piece of crap loke most monster armor is supposed to be.

I was assuming he already was wearing heavy armor, and that he got it modified by a smith to fit him. No I don't see him throwing it on in the dungeon, but I don't see him leaving it there either.

I may be a dirty dirty powergamer but calling someone out for using a d6 weapon when they could use a d8 is just stupid, rude, and unnecessary. 1 point of average damage is really negligible.

 

[Psychometrika]

I used to play primarily Pathfinder, where there are a ton of options and you can minmax to your heart's content. With bounded accuracy and relatively few customization options the whole concept of optimization is pretty shaky in D&D 5e. Outside of maxing your primary stat and picking the obvious go-to feats, what else can you do? Even multi-classing, outside of a few known cases, puts you behind the power curve in most cases.

I voted "Mostly", but there is so few options and the scaling is so flat, that I see little practical difference between optimized and non-optimized characters in 5e. This is not necessarily a bad thing as Adventure League is much less of a Munchkin fest than Pathfinder Society ever was. In fact, things were getting so out of hand in PFS that they started a "Core Mode" which limited players to only using the core rule book for building PCs. Sometimes less is more.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Bilbo was wearing chain mail...

Anyways, you can't just throw classes at an old story and assume that it counters his point. His point is correct that a seasoned warrior would make optimal choices if the choices were available to him and he had knowledge of how they worked. However this only works to a certain extent, for instance a sword and shield defending expert may never have the idea to take a pact from a demon to get extra hp when he drops someone. It's not in his knowledge set. However you better believe if he finds a set of plate on the ground he is going to use it.
It goes both ways, the rp backs up the mechanics, and the mechanics back up the rp. Both are necessary and good parts of the game.

One also has to assume that there are simply things that matter which are beneath the level of granularity that is covered by game rules. Things that would be too tedious and boring to keep track of in the rules. Plate armor is hard to maintain, uncomfortable to wear, hot, etc. It might be a little bit better in the middle of a fight, but then again, maybe not. Depends on whether you want to move fast or resist a lot of blows.

4e was good in this regard, there was always a trade off, always another way to get some better defenses, and always some OTHER defense that might serve better than a point or two of AC. It kind of subs in for the unwritten things that matter, so in the end the guy wearing plate armor in that game DOES have a bit better AC than a guy wearing leather armor, but its not some huge gulf, unless one character is simply built ignoring all defenses. If the rogue and the paladin each follow sensible practices, they'll each have a pretty good AC, and where the paladin's AC is better, he'll lack in some other respect like speed or reflex or something.

The other thing is, if you have a game where narrative aspects are important and play a role in the game, then many characters simply acquire the abilities that they find a need for at the time and place they get them, or that are easily available to them. Its not like CHARACTERS have access to the rule book to know that the sword they chose isn't as good as some other hypothetical sword. Again, this is an area that 4e was nice about, since you could retrain most choices later on. If you don't have a bastard sword RIGHT NOW, but you DO have a +2 magical longsword, well, its better to specialize in that than gain proficiency in the more effective weapon that you don't even own. Next month you may find a nice bastard sword and retrain into that.

Obviously all these considerations can go out the window if you're making a 'blank sheet' character and just want to be a perfect fighting machine or whatnot. There's nothing wrong with it, go to town, and at that point a 1% better at something might as well be taken, sure! OTOH I really doubt the characters can tell the difference at such a fine level. IN GAME there are probably endless arguments about whether its more ideal to learn to hit harder or parry more effectively. Just like in the real world each will have its proponents, even though it may be possible to prove one to be universally superior if you can perform a sophisticated enough analysis. There's always going to be different levels of skill in each, and its not like CHARACTERS know what level they are either, so they're never going to be exactly sure what beats what, because they only have what they observe, noisy data. So non-optimum choices to the player, knowing the mechanics, can't be attributed to stupidity of the character.

 

[hejtmane]

I would say I am in the middle. I have a concept and I want to make it fun but workable at the same time (optimize what he has). I may not have the highest damage of the group as a fighter but I also do not want to suck. Hence I am not worried about being top dog; I want the concept to be enjoyable,fun and not be a burden on the team.

I generally DM for young guys

 

[MechaPilot]

Your unarmed attack would cause more damage, at level 1, than a monk; and assumedly scales as you level.
You changed your modifier to charisma (which, assumedly, your character has).
You have the same armor modifiers as chainmail when unarmored.

....and you don't think this is a feat?

You assumed incorrectly. The unarmed attack does not scale: it simply replaces proficiency with all weapons. It is not intended to be superior to what it replaces, unless you are talking about being superior in the sense that it is more enabling of the concept of a cleric who is more like a divinely gifted prophet than an armored religious warrior.

Regarding using the Cha mod instead of another stat mod for the attack, you are not getting the whole picture because you have not been fully informed. In groups that I have played with or DM'd for, we commonly allow players to pick what we call a "fighting style" (we used the term before you did 5e). Your fighting style determines what stat you use for attacking and damaging foes. For example: we all know Str and Dex for the brutal and agile styles. However, Wis can be used for a Zen-like meditative combat focus, or Int for the analysis and recognition of patterns in the movements of an enemy, etc.

Regarding AC from the divine grace when unarmored, this is rather situational. I'm not going to pretend that my experience is the standard that everyone experiences, but I must give deference to the experiences that I have had because they have proven to be the standard for me and those I've played with. In my experience, being unarmored and it mattering is a corner case. Does the character have an AC benefit that others don't when she attends a function at a nobleman's estate? Sure. Does that benefit actually mean anything if combat is never threatened or entered into during that function? No, not in the slightest.

 

[Mephista]

I'm highly cognizant of the rules. I feel you should be if you're going to GM and make any houserules - one of my biggest pet peeves is someone who's trying to hack a game, but clearly doesn't udnerstand how the mechanics work, or, worse, one of their "houserules" is actually how the game works - they didn't bother reading everything.

As a player, however, I detest optimizing. My concept is decided by what kind of story I want to tell, not what mechanical combination I want to mix together.

 

[MechaPilot]

You walk into a feast held by the King. No arms or armor allowed. You are the only one who is unaffected. There are hundreds of situations where you will be unaffected and the other cleric will be. When arrested. When going into restricted areas. People generally aren't allowed to wear arms and armor into fine dining places. It goes on and on.

You walk into a feast held by the king, you have the benefit of being armed and armored despite not having any armor or weapons on your person. Nothing violent happens or is even threatened. Man, what a huge benefit you had over others.

Plus, if no arms are allowed why would anyone who can infinitely cast damaging cantrips be allowed to enter?

 

[MechaPilot]

To who? Damage being variable and hit point being abstract, how is the PC going to be able to tell how much damage any weapon really does?

DM: The swordsman swings his short at you and at the last second you luckily avoid having the strike go through your neck. Take 5 points of damage.

It would be impossible for that PC to know that the longsword would have done 6 OR that he took any damage at all.

You've used that argument before in this thread and it doesn't hold up because of time. Whether damage is described as being physical or not simply does not negate the fact that less average damage means more required hits to kill, which means more rounds of combat risked, which means more six second increments of time.

Over the time it takes for someone to actually become proficient with both weapons it's reasonable to think they would realize "for some reason it just takes me longer to beat my enemies with this short sword than it does with a long sword."