You’re still ignoring feats, which are entirely possible to get at first level, either from variant human or custom lineage, or from backgrounds.
Yes I am ignoring feats. I've explained why I am ignoring feats, but I will continue to repeat myself.
You do not get a feat before level 4. There is an exception if you are a V. Human or a Custom Lineage, but as I have repeatedly stated, I am not assuming a specific race. Could you be a V. Human? Yes. You could also be a Fairy. Your attempts to force me to assume everyone plays Variant humans will continued to be ignored. There is an exception if you have specific backgrounds from Strixhaven. I'm not assuming you are playing in Strixhaven. So I am not assuming you have those specific backgrounds. Maybe you have backgrounds like Soldier or Entertainer which do not grant feats. I will continue to ignore your attempts to force me to assume everyone uses a background which grants a feat. I'll even acknowledge some people homebrew and houserule to allow feats at first level for everyone. But I will not be assuming that everyone uses that houserule. You can try and continue to force me to assume everyone uses that houserule, but I will not be.
So, are we done trying to force feats into this scenario? Or am I going to have to repeat this on every post?
I’m not shifting the goal-posts, I’m saying that the fact that this particular party lacking a specialist in perception is not a flaw with my DMing style.
The original point of the example was that your DMing style ignored the potential to use bardic inspiration to help the situation, which you acknowledged you would have put a stop to when they first proposed their original plan.
The party comp itself was not a critique of your style. The fact you feel the need to bully me into changing it because you don't like it really is starting to annoy me though.
I don’t disagree that Perception has disproportionately more utility than a lot of other skills, and would be open to arguments that it should accordingly not be competing with narrower skills for character building resources. Sounds like a good argument for the What’s Wrong with Perception thread.
Wish we could have that conversation instead.
That’s a bit hyperbolic. Without spending gold to get more bodies they can’t do everything. They have to prioritize and make sacrifices. They might prioritize safety over navigation, as you indicate you would do, or they might risk the possibility of getting surprised. Or they might decide that not having to sacrifice one or the other is worth the gold expenditure. That’s a meaningful decision, which to me is what the game is all about. What do you sacrifice when you can’t have everything you want? What do you risk when you can’t avoid risking something? These are the questions that reveal the most about the characters who make them and what they truly value, and are accordingly the questions I’m most interested in answering through play.
There is a far cry between "you can't have everything" and "being able to safely traverse a space requires a minimum of 6 people"
And it isn't really a meaningful decision in my mind. They are going to pick to spend money, as long as they have a enough (which isn't always the case) because you can't spend money if you are dead, and DnD money is a fairly empty and worthless thing anyways. And of course they will spend it on people who can fight, leading to increasing threats, because they will have far more bodies on the field.
None of this is what the game is about. The game is about the stories, and the story of needing to hire faceless NPCs to make sure they have enough eyes to not be ambushed every time they go anywhere isn't a good story. We can do far better than "do you spend money on faceless merc #3 or do you risk getting lost for an hour in the dungeon" in terms of meaningful decisions.
The advantage of my approach is that it makes the very act of navigating the dungeon a part of the challenge. The dungeon isn’t just a backdrop for encounters to happen in, it is a hazard in and of itself. And as I get at above, it creates difficult choices, which to me is the most interesting part of the game.
You know what I have found, more and more often? No one cares about the search. No one is excited by the search. They are excited by finding the item. That's when they get excited and engaged. Similarly, no one is excited by assigning a marching order and declaring their actions. No one cares. They care when something happens.
Sure, you've created a resource scarcity to make moving safely between the interesting bits harder. I suppose that is a sort of challenge, but... can't we do better than that? If you want to make moving through the dungeon harder and more of a challenge, can't we do it without making it something that is solved by hiring more people to cover more actions?
See, that to me sounds like a telegraph. I would describe something like that if someone in the party was looking for danger and the monsters failed to beat that character’s passive perception with their dexterity (stealth) checks. Of course, to even set up such an ambush, the monsters would need to be aware of the characters’ presence - perhaps because the party was traveling at greater than a slow pace and therefore couldn’t attempt to move stealthy.
Yeah, that sounds consistent with how I would run such a scenario.
Yet you believe it to be the case that looking for monsters preparing to ambush couldn’t detect one being set up on the other side of a secret door?
How could they? You wouldn't even check the monster's stealth against the player's passive perception, because they can't notice the door. I guess maybe you could have noises coming from inside the wall, but then you have still revealed the location of the secret door, which you said you would not do.
So how do you propose to alert the party to the prescence of monsters hiding behind a secret door, without revealing the secret door?
Ok, I see where the confusion is coming from. In the portion of that quote of mine that you bolded, I noted that “trying to find out if there are traps in the room” as the goal, not as part of the approach. You seem to be treating the goal itself as communicating information about the approach, where as I am treating them as entirely separate things. To me, “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” comes across as comparable to “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them,” in that neither seems to be an approach that could reasonably succeed at accomplishing the goal. You read “I try to find out if there are any traps by moving to the center of the room” as something like “I move to the center of the room while looking for traps” and treat the goal as implied; more comparable to saying “I shout at my shoes while trying to tie them.” When you clarified that you intended for “looking for traps” to be considered part of the approach, it became clear to me that there wasn’t enough information because “I try to find out if there are any traps in the room by moving to the center of the room and looking for traps” is redundant. Comparable to saying “I try to tie my shoes by shouting at them and trying to tie them.” The point of asking for approach as a separate item from goal is so that I can evaluate how you’re trying to achieve your goal.
Well what you said was “moving slowly and carefully forward while looking at the ground.” The reason my answer to that is different than my answer to “move to the center of the room” is that it conveys what you’re doing to try to find the trap. I can imagine that as you slowly move forward, looking at the ground, you might notice something on the ground that you didn’t when you first entered the room, which might reveal the presence of the trap; I could also imagine that you might not do so before stepping on the trap. Therefore, a roll would be necessary to resolve that uncertainty. On the other hand, simply walking to the center of the room? Well if you did that, you would trigger the trap, because as established in the example, the trap is triggered by standing in the center of the room. There’s no way that would result in you succeeding in your goal of finding the trap, at least not without triggering it, which I do agree with you is obviously counter to the intent.
Seriously? You thought a person looking for traps in a room wouldn't look at the ground? Man, I guess my highly trained killer, used to dozens of delves into dangerous places has encountered so many floating mid-air traps that they just stare straight ahead just in case. Maybe they closed their eyes before moving?
I know I'm being sarcastic and a bit rude, but seriously, where else would they look for traps if not the ground?! 90% of all traps are either on or triggered by the ground. This is the type of thing we talk about when we talk about assuming the PCs are professionals who know what they are doing. We assume when someone is looking for traps, they look where traps will be. This seriously blows my mind. "Looking for traps" isn't good enough, that's like shouting at you shoelaces to tie themselves, but "looking at the ground for traps" is perfectly intelligible and acceptable.
See, I don’t see any problem with that. What’s wrong with players deciding to wear plate gauntlets to protect from needle traps or opening doors with mage hand?
Because then all the interesting parts of the game are bogged down by the minutia of protecting themselves. It becomes and endless parade of hyper-specific intstructions with the singular goal of preventing any possible unforeseen circumstances.
They pull out the plate gauntlet before opening anything, make sure to have a wet-rag wrapped around their face for spores and poison gases, probably try to get a full-on gas mask, then they make sure to never touch anything directly, while never standing in front of anything in case it fires out further than a foot. It goes on and on and on and on. And none of it is interesting. It is just tedium, and it can all be trivially prevented by just assuming that the PCs are professionals.
Yeah, that’s a problem that can happen with this style, especially when the DM doesn’t make good use of telegraphing. When you don’t have enough information, you end up either having to blindly guess, or try to pre-empt any and every conceivable danger, which… sucks. This gameplay is at its best when simply by paying attention to the DM’s description, you have a good idea of what you need to be prepared for, and can come up with a good plan for how to deal with it. This can be difficult to capture in forum posts, because effective telegraphing requires a great deal of context that is simply lacking here. I can’t just pull out an example of it done well out of thin air, because doing it well relies on a great deal of environmental design and tutorializing. See my answer to
@Mort about how to handle the Stargate hidden door. I had to give four or five different possible clues, all of which would have to be sprinkled throughout a dungeon that made reoccurring use of such hidden doors.
Telegraphing is a fine line to toe though, because if you telegraph to the point people notice it, then how much difference is there between just telling them in the first place?
Honestly, I have strongly considered just telling players when they could a trap exactly what and where it is. Because if there is an interesting challenge, it would be in safely disarming the trap. Unfortunately, most traps are trivial to disarm if you are aware of them, which is why most trap design discussions are difficult to even have. Because any trap that is trivial to beat if you see it isn't actually well-designed, but a well-designed trap is HARD to figure out.
This seems to be leaving the goal out of the equation. For what purpose is the character playing a sad song on their viol? If they’re just playing it for it’s own sake, there’s no need to roll. Can you succeed in the goal of playing a sad song by using a Viol? Assuming you’re proficient with it, yes. Can you fail to do so? I guess, sure. Is there a meaningful consequence for that failure? No, not really, not if you’re just playing it for its own sake. No further detail is necessary, the action can just succeed without need to roll any dice. Now, if the goal is to entertain a crowd, then playing a sad song on the viol is an approach they might take to try and achieve that goal. Depending on the crowd to be entertained, the mood in the venue, etc. a sad song might or might not have a reasonable possibility of entertaining the crowd, which might or might not have meaningful consequences. In either case, it’s enough to know that the song the character is playing is sad; the time signature, key, etc. are unnecessarily specific details.
Their goal is whatever their goal is. It would be context specific and it truly doesn't matter what the goal is. The player thinks that playing a sad song on their viol is enough to achieve their goal, and if I don't understand what they are going for in the attempt, I would ask "okay, what are you hoping to accomplish?"
But the larger point is, must like "search the room" could have dozens of specific variations of action, so can "play a sad song". In fact, it could have even more, since I could ask which culture the song is from, dwarven? elvish? gnomish? That might make a difference, right? Except... no one ever asks that. No one wants the same level of detail they want for searching a room for playing a sad song. Because playing a sad song can't trigger a trap. There is no way that the player could say they play that song that leads to them automatically failing and triggering something bad. So no one bothers to ask.
