D&D 5E How do you define “mother may I” in relation to D&D 5E?

[pemerton]

what on earth does hermit's discovery do?

Doesn't it say "Work with your DM to determine the details of your discovery and its impact on the campaign"?

So the player is meant to work with the GM to work out what "unique and powerful discovery" the player has mind. I posted something similar back in 2014:

"Work with your DM to determine the details of your discovery and its impact on the campaign": this is about player authorship of campaign backstory. Even if your character shares the secret with all and sundry, it is still you the player, and not anyone else at the table, who got to make this a central part of the game.

That's different from getting food and drink or contacts, but it's a lot more than nothing.

The existence of game elements like the Hermit background feature is why I don't agree with the suggestion, made by a couple of posters upthread, that in 5e D&D the GM has sole authority over the setting.

 

[pemerton]

This is the argument for more crunchy systems: outcomes are less reliant on whether or not the final authority can imagine those outcomes, and more about the RAW (though in the example above about securing an audience, it seemed pretty RAW to me...)

Personally I don't see this as about degree of "crunch": I think the background feature is stated pretty clearly, as you say, and I don't see how it is consistent with the way it's written to treat it as a mere suggestion.

 

[Eric V]

Personally I don't see this as about degree of "crunch": I think the background feature is stated pretty clearly, as you say, and I don't see how it is consistent with the way it's written to treat it as a mere suggestion.

In this particular situation, no, it isn't about crunch. There are many others where the higher degree of crunch helps avoid MMI, though.

 

[Cadence]

Personally, I think I'd be a really annoying player if I knew the DM would always go letter of the rules no matter what and I thought a few of the rules were really poorly conceived.

DM: "And so, recapping from last time. You've taken the commission to get to Baron Chillingsworth, steal the royal charter he always carries with him, and make sure he's permanently indisposed. Unfortunately the Baron probably suspects a contract has been taken out on him, and given that you saw his agent Herringbone outside after your meeting, your names might be associated with it."

Players Discuss: "Well, Sir Buzz is noble and so can get an audience, and then once we're that close shouldn't be hard, right? Because 'You can secure an audience with a local noble if you need to.' and we need to. I can imagine he won't let us be armed, but we know fireball will be safe and not destroy the charter when Chandra nails him with it because it only 'ignites flammable objects in the area that aren’t being worn or carried.' I think we got this!"

Or can I not pass that off as just being "vibrant"?

Edit: If the DM or other players looked hurt and frustrated by that idea I would probably smile, back off, and come up with a plan that would work in a world where they had modified the rules.

 

[Campbell]

@Cadence

It would help if these examples people provide were not assuming players being absolute trolls. The answer to players being absolute trolls like that who do not meet the permissions by actually playing to the background should absolutely be talked to (and told to stop being trolls). As always the answer to anyone at the table playing in bad faith is to resolve it socially. Can we please talk about this stuff assuming everyone is acting in good faith?

 

[tetrasodium]

I guess the question to ask is:

Can people imagine a sort of world where being a noble means their is a certain nobility and grace that is instantly recognizable by everyone? Basically where the divine right of klngs is very real. I would contend that Middle Earth is such a place as a very prominent example. That Aragorn was the right person to rule because he was the rightful king.

"people" is a vague term that includes both players and the gm. Building running curating & managing the game world is the game role assigned to one of those subsets of "people", specifically the GM. It is not the role of a player does not include room for an outlook such as "why in a fantasy world does the GM need to shut down a part of my PC build just because their imagination isn't as vibrant as mine?" but players are given guidance in the book & abilities that imply such an outlook to be both reasonable and intended while the social contract & various changes within 5e specifically make it difficult for the gm to say no bad or employ soft power against it.

So I guess the first question is first why that task should be granted to an isolated player?

If the DM doesn't want to have players meaningfully interacting with the nobility, or they don't want to put a lot of work into developing noble society, maybe they should not allow the Noble Background.

Or perhaps they have developed it to some degree like my earlier valenar elf noble PC having player trying to pull rank with a dragonmark house example & the player just demands it be something else. That was describing an actual game not a hypothetical, it's even an example from a published game world

Spoiler: this is kind of a known set of problems 5e (re)introduced

"adventurer" as a social class existed with good reason, backgrounds like noble & folk hero ignore that. That bolded bit seems to be charging unreasonably deep into oberoni territory though. If these problems with mother may I backgrounds are simply to be handwaved away with"[the dm] shouldn't allow x background" has it not shifted from MMI to something more like "do as I say"?

 

[tetrasodium]

@Cadence

It would help if these examples people provide were not assuming players being absolute trolls.

I wouldn't call them "trolls" so much as victims of 5e's peculiar collision of natural language vrs inherited past edition technical writing. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some of my players suggest plans like that & often hear similar with a hint of outrage if I hint at things like changing rest mechanics because of $reason.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

@Cadence

It would help if these examples people provide were not assuming players being absolute trolls. The answer to players being absolute trolls like that who do not meet the permissions by actually playing to the background should absolutely be talked to (and told to stop being trolls). As always the answer to anyone at the table playing in bad faith is to resolve it socially. Can we please talk about this stuff assuming everyone is acting in good faith?

That taking the rule literally comes across as “trolling” might be an indication that it is meant to be a “soft” rule and is meant to be adjusted for context?

 

[Cadence]

@Cadence

It would help if these examples people provide were not assuming players being absolute trolls.

I was imagining myself if there was a rule that was seemingly a minor part of a d&d or adjacent game, but kept coming up and really grated against my soul.

----

But seriously, why in particular is either one of those (the audience or the fireball) a troll move though? What lets one tell when it's a "troll" move vs. just being "vibrant"? Who gets to do the judging?

----

I mean, buying in on HP and AC and basics of spellcasting seems like part of buying in on the game. So abusing that seems egregious. ("Why would someone be able to tell I just got out of a fight just because I lost 90% of my hit points - hit points don't mean anything until you get to zero and those hits don't even mean I was ever hit." would feel egregiously petty to me.) I can even not chafe against the "day" in 13th age if I've agreed to play the game because that's what I bought into.

Usually I try to play in character and make characters fit an idea instead of optimizing and using things that seem exploitative. But if there is a class or skill or spell options that seemed ridiculous to me that others at the table kept using because "it's in the rules"? I am 100% certain it would annoy me. And if talking about it didn't work, I would probably readjust my expectations and play exploits to the hilt once in a while too just to make a point.

And then later I would be enough of a grown up to just skip games run by certain DMs when they had certain types of players.

 

[Campbell]

So expecting the ability to work is written is not something I consider trolling. Playing a character who is falling to live up noblesse oblige is something I consider trolling. Like part of taking that background is the implication that your character should hold certain values. You are taking on a particular sort of fiction here - I think you should be expected to honor it or at the very least I have a very good reason for why your character would be so brazen.