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

[MechaPilot]

No. What's dishonest is this claim that awareness of time matters. So what if the PC is aware that 30ish second or a minute has passed. He has no idea how often he has hit during that time or how much damage he has done. Did he hit ten times for 1 damage each, twice for 5 points, or once for 10 damage. Hell, he doesn't even know he did 10 damage at all. All he knows is that eventually the enemy died.

If the PC hit ten times for one damage each, it took a minute to end that fight.
If the PC hit twice for five points of damage, it took twelve seconds to end that fight.

A PC, if we are treating them as having the same awareness as a real person, would be aware that one of those fights took significantly longer than the other one and exposed him to greater potential harm because of how long it took. None of that is in any way a meta-game concern. You can persist in calling the awareness of time dishonest if you please, but it's already clear to virtually everyone that ending fights more quickly improves your odds of survival and debunks your claim that the awareness of time does not matter.

 

[Kithas]

If the PC hit ten times for one damage each, it took a minute to end that fight.
If the PC hit twice for five points of damage, it took twelve seconds to end that fight.

A PC, if we are treating them as having the same awareness as a real person, would be aware that one of those fights took significantly longer than the other one and exposed him to greater potential harm because of how long it took. None of that is in any way a meta-game concern. You can persist in calling the awareness of time dishonest if you please, but it's already clear to virtually everyone that ending fights more quickly improves your odds of survival and debunks your claim that the awareness of time does not matter.

The main issue I have with this argument is that both of those scenarios can happen with the same weapon. Ignoring stat bonuses the weapons have so much variability in the damage you could have just gotten bad rolls that whole time. Unless you use average damage for the pc's damage rolls(which I've never heard a group do) you cannot say time is a good measuring tool, it gives too many false bits of data, and the average fighter can't fight enough enemies to get a real average. There are too many variables.

However it would stand to basic logic that a bigger sword hits harder.

 

[MechaPilot]

The main issue I have with this argument is that both of those scenarios can happen with the same weapon. Ignoring stat bonuses the weapons have so much variability in the damage you could have just gotten bad rolls that whole time. Unless you use average damage for the pc's damage rolls(which I've never heard a group do) you cannot say time is a good measuring tool, it gives too many false bits of data, and the average fighter can't fight enough enemies to get a real average. There are too many variables.

However it would stand to basic logic that a bigger sword hits harder.

Time is not a good measuring tool in single instances. However, it presumably takes a great deal of practice to go from non-proficient to proficient. Over repeated performances, especially against the same adversary such as a sparring partner, averages come out in the wash.

 

[KahlessNestor]

I'm also pretty sure that in a life or death situation, your sense of time is one of the first things to go. Adrenaline gets pumping, and 12 seconds or 30, you really don't know how long it lasted.

 

[MechaPilot]

I'm also pretty sure that in a life or death situation, your sense of time is one of the first things to go. Adrenaline gets pumping, and 12 seconds or 30, you really don't know how long it lasted.

Sure, with caveats.

1) Repeated exposure to dangerous circumstances results in less distortion as you grow accustomed to the danger.

2) It's not just life and death situations where the time comes up. Look at sparring, which is presumably part of gaining weapon proficiencies. Sparring is not life and death, and you would therefore retain more awareness of time.

3) A fight that takes longer results in being more tired afterward. The difference between twelve and sixty seconds when going all out can mean the difference between simply breaking a sweat and huffing and puffing while dripping with sweat.

 

[Kithas]

Sparring would be even harder to recognize differences, as sparring partners, both people growing in strength, also you are assumedly sparring with practice weapons or padded swords so the damage would also be different.

To be clear the amount of data needed to actually find that 1 average damage reduction would be in the 100s of battles with no other variables changing. Your str goes up 2 points? All data gone, you start fighting different enemies? gone. Etc.
One could get a feeling after a couple dozen fights, but that could just as easily be the wrong feeling.
Knowing the math and with modern calculations we can find averages quickly, finding them through data gathering and computation takes a long time, especially if you aren't that bright.

 

[Maxperson]

If the PC hit ten times for one damage each, it took a minute to end that fight.
If the PC hit twice for five points of damage, it took twelve seconds to end that fight.

That's not the math I get. PC number one killed his in 10 rounds. PC number two killed his also in 10 rounds. Both fights took one minute. PC two missed the first three rounds, hit in the fourth, and again in the 10th. No wait, he missed once, hit once, missed twice, hit again and finished in 5 rounds. No wait... No wait... PC two's fight could have been anywhere from 2-20+ rounds, depending on luck, enemy defenses and actions taken.

Knowing how long the fight lasts is worthless to the PC. He can't know every time he hits, since a visible miss can still "hit". He can't know how much damage he has dealt. He can't know if he missed when he impacted, because an impact can be a "miss". He can't know how many hit points the enemy has.

A PC, if we are treating them as having the same awareness as a real person, would be aware that one of those fights took significantly longer than the other one and exposed him to greater potential harm because of how long it took.

Which is irrelevant because they both could easily have taken the same length of time. There's nothing to say that damage was the key, whether the weapon rolled well or poorly, or whether one of them got lucky or unlucky.

 

[Maxperson]

Time is not a good measuring tool in single instances. However, it presumably takes a great deal of practice to go from non-proficient to proficient. Over repeated performances, especially against the same adversary such as a sparring partner, averages come out in the wash.

Okay. So the PC knows how long on average it takes to beat that one single person................after many, many fights. That does nothing to show the PC how long an average fight is with anyone or anything else.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm also pretty sure that in a life or death situation, your sense of time is one of the first things to go. Adrenaline gets pumping, and 12 seconds or 30, you really don't know how long it lasted.

It's also not exactly 12 or 30 seconds. Attacks cannot take 6 seconds since you can attack, move, do other things and so on all in one round. The PC might swing 2 seconds into the first round, take 7 seconds setting up his next swing and kill the enemy in the 10 second, ending fight prior to 12 seconds happening.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This seems a good a place as any to ask this...

I just recently started playing lots of games (on roll20) with various DMs. Before this point I had played only with a handful of other people, over a period of several years, and aside from that I've DM'd a campaign for a long time. I have a pretty good grasp of the rules, I think, even though my 5th edition binge just started a few months ago.

I like to know rules. If I want to accomplish a task (or one of my players does), I like to know how the rules say to do it and I'll try to accomplish it using existing rules before I start making up my own stuff. Something I'm starting to notice is other DMs and players don't seem to know (or use) the rules as well as I do. Like, not nearly as well. They'll say something about making a grapple using an unarmed attack, or not being able to use my mount's action to Disengage, then use its full movement, and use my own action to Attack, and I'm a little flabbergasted because I know that's not right, but at the same time I don't want to be that guy who always tries to tell the DM how to run their game.

What's the etiquette here? I don't want to be a "rules lawyer", as it's generally something used in a negative context, but if the DM says something like "you had a random encounter during your long rest, now you don't get the benefit of the long rest", should I be pointing out that the long rest rules specifically say you'd need to be fighting for at minimum 1 hour for our long rest to be interrupted, and a typical encounter is less than a minute? In some situations I imagine DMs are just houseruling things they don't like, but there are also times when I just feel that the DM is genuinely ignorant of the rules (or using the rules for an interaction that were right in a previous edition but are not right in this one).

I suppose part of the problem is that these aren't people I know terribly well, given we're playing over roll20 and I'm "the newbie". But what's the best way to bring these issues up to a DM, as a player? Or should I just be "rolling with the punches", as it were? Maybe other DMs would like to tell me how they'd like players to bring such issues up--because if I were a DM, I would want my players to point out whenever I make a rules-related slip-up. But then there is that negative stigmata of "rules lawyers" which makes me think that others don't feel comfortable being "undermined" as it were by their own players.

I agree with others, there's no perfectly right answer. FOR MYSELF as a DM I'm perfectly happy if a player brings up rules that don't seem to be getting used correctly. I don't GENERALLY houserule games much, and if I do I'll let people know up front. So, chances are 85% I just didn't remember the rule correctly, at my age and having played so many games I really can't keep all the details straight about fairly infrequent rules, and I'm not likely to look each one up, so if you say "oh, it should be like this" then my response will be "OK, lets do it that way, here's what happens..." and I'm happy. The other 15% of the time maybe I decided the situation didn't quite match up well with the rule or it just seemed like it wouldn't work well there, and then I'll be happy to explain that, and it doesn't bother me either. This might come up with any sort of rule that regulates 'DM' or 'World' stuff, I won't normally do it with PC stuff, not without stating myself that I'm making a ruling. I run mostly 4e too, so its usually considered more of a fine point of 4e DMing, maybe 5e games it won't need to be said quite as much, since 5e seems to leave a lot to the DM to figure out already.