D&D General Just Eat the Dang Fruit

[AnotherGuy]

Cheat?

Save 4 half is so WotC. Those guys are so creative they keep releasing the same adventure with different covers.

 

[iserith]

The do-you don't-you drink/eat the poison is an unsatisfying method for me personally. It does not match up to what we have seen/read thematically. If something is poisoned, I'd prefer to gloss over the decision-making process and go straight to the required traitor's verbal exposition with the poison reveal and have the players make the saving throws for their characters. It would have to be an unassuming scenario and that way one can just skip ahead instead of planting the seed in the players' minds and thus thrusting them to choose between metagaming or roleplaying.

While it's not practical for players to call out every minute decision their character makes, I would think that deciding for them the one thing they could have done to avoid being poisoned would be perceived by the players as a "gotcha." I think that is a much graver sin than a player deciding not to eat the fruit because they saw someone else have to make a save.

 

[Hriston]

My fellow characters and I are exploring a lost city buried beneath the sands of a vast desert. Shortly into our first foray, we come across a well-appointed dining chamber and its occupant, a friendly and immaculately dressed fellow who invites us to partake of refreshment. He is joined by several servants who attend to us. Hospitality is big in the culture of this region, and though it's a bit odd that this dude and his servants are in this buried city, it's the first friendly face we've seen in a while.

Bowls of fruit and wine are brought out. My character, Brickyard Lot, has a flaw that reads: "If I see fruit, I eat it." This has notably gotten him into trouble before (and the party doesn't trust him with pocket goodberries). Anyway, naturally I'm eating the fruit before the bowls can be set down. "A wave of exhaustion washes over you," says the DM. "Make a Con save." I roll the dice and succeed, belching and happily continuing to eat.

The food and drink is offered to my comrades, of course, but having seen me need to roll a save, nobody wants to partake. Does anyone see any issue with this refusal? If so, what are the issues and how do you resolve them. If not, why not?

Let's consider another angle as well: Say my character has the aforementioned flaw, but isn't the first to eat the fruit. I witness another character make a saving throw after eating it. I then refuse to eat the fruit or drink the wine, despite the flaw. Does this change the calculation at all as to whether this is an issue that needs to be addressed?

No issues on either count. I hope the DM granted you inspiration in the first situation, and I think it's your choice whether to take it or leave it in the second.

 

[Charlaquin]

Really? That sounds absolutely bizarre to me. If you've already come to the table, refusing to eat the food is just a really odd thing to do--and in cultures where the guest right is of extreme importance, a guest being rude about your hospitality is a major no-no. (Consider the cultures where it is considered rude not to belch or break wind after a meal, because that's how you show you enjoyed it!)

I mean, it certainly might come across as impolite, and may well cause complications as a result. That’s a risk the players should be free to choose to take.

First: I don't actually accept that this action is reasonable, for the reasons given above. Blanket refusal without any reason given is, at the very least, something that should require an effort to save face or avoid giving offense. And unless they really do already have an honest reason for not doing it, passing off a fake reason sounds like some kind of bluff-type check to me. It's certainly not something I would expect to go unremarked.

It sounds like you’re saying it’s unreasonable from an in-universe social perspective, and fair enough. What I meant though is that it’s reasonable (or perhaps believable would be a better word) that the characters might make that choice, not that the choice is a socially appropriate one to make in the situation. I don’t think it’s my business as a DM to enforce the players to have their characters make socially appropriate decisions.

Second: I believe that intent matters with an action. Seeing someone else make a save and then suddenly everyone is putting as much distance as possible between themselves and that fruit? Yeah, that's kind of a dead giveaway that the only reason it's being done is because the players gained knowledge the characters couldn't possibly have.

I don’t think it’s at all clear from this example that the unwillingness to partake is sudden. The situation is sketchy from the jump; the saving throw may only be confirming preexisting suspicions. Moreover, so what if it is only being done because of knowledge the players have and the characters don’t? That may be why the players made that decision, but it doesn’t have to be the reason the characters do. I believe my job as DM is to determine the results of the characters’ actions, not to police the players’ motivations for declaring that their characters take those actions.

When possible, I prefer that such decisions have a reasonable relationship to character choices. That doesn't mean a perfect mapping, because we accept abstractions. (E.g., I have no problem with "daily powers" for non-magical characters, because I accept that that is an abstraction to enable useful game design space, and because I accept things like "bennies" and other meta-currencies.) But when one is very literally predicating a purely roleplayed action (such as eating or not eating fruit) specifically on the fact that a gameplay interaction occurred, that bothers me; unlike the meta-currency case, where there's at least a tenuous relationship involved, there's no relationship involved here.

Why does it matter to you that such a relationship exist? If there’s a plausible reason a character might do something, why does it matter if the player has a different reason for having the character do it? I mean, players are constantly making decisions influenced by factors their characters are unaware of.

Want to roleplay being eagle-eyed and trying to catch the signs that your friend had some gastric distress? Do so! Actually take the effort to give yourself a justification. That effort isn't hard, and odds are good at least one person in the party is more circumspect and chary-eyed than Iserith's fruit-eater. Just...don't pretend like "I saw <Player> make a saving throw! I don't want to do the thing that made him make a saving throw!" is in any way the same as, "I saw Binro nearly throw up for a moment before things settled down, I'm not sure I want to eat that fruit!"The former has no relationship between the input (<Player> made a saving throw) and the output (<My Character> refuses to eat), while the latter does relate its input (I-as-<My Character> saw Binro nearly throw up) to its output (I-as-<My Character> refuse to eat.)

But a player’s reasoning could very easily be that they saw @iserith make a saving throw and don’t want their character to do the thing that caused him to have to make it, while at the same time their character’s reasoning is that they saw Binro nearly throw up (though, probably not in the opening example, since iserith’s character was not described as nearly having thrown up. So instead, perhaps something more like “I don’t trust these people who seem to be living in a buried city but somehow have access to fresh fruit.”)

 

[Charlaquin]

While it's not practical for players to call out every minute decision their character makes, I would think that deciding for them the one thing they could have done to avoid being poisoned would be perceived by the players as a "gotcha." I think that is a much graver sin than a player deciding not to eat the fruit because they saw someone else have to make a save.

I just… would wait for the players to describe eating. If they don’t, I would assume they didn’t. Maybe I might have the host call it out if it’s appropriate, i.e. “your host asks, ‘are you all alright? No one but [Iserith’s character] has touched their food!’ What do you do?” That gives the players the opportunity to say “oh, I’ve actually been eating, I just didn’t think it important to mention,” or give their in-character reasoning in response to the NPC’s prompting. And it brings the social pressure not to insult their host to the forefront, in case that factor had escaped any of the players’ minds.

 

[AnotherGuy]

While it's not practical for players to call out every minute decision their character makes, I would think that deciding for them the one thing they could have done to avoid being poisoned would be perceived by the players as a "gotcha." I think that is a much graver sin than a player deciding not to eat the fruit because they saw someone else have to make a save.

That is one way to look at it and I feel that is the wrong way given how I described it as thematically linked to what we have consumed via media and literature when the protagonists/heroes are poisoned.

I'm not using the poison as the "gotcha" - I'm using it as an environmental hazard.
Think of it as part of the building the level of difficulty within encounter. Now it is not a gotcha moment but rather an aspect of the framing and challenge.

How often do we see the hero hampered by something that makes the fight unfair and yet despite the odds overcomes it. That is what I'm striving for. The "gotcha" is low hanging fruit.

 

[MarkB]

That is one way to look at it and I feel that is the wrong way given how I described it as thematically linked to what we have consumed via media and literature when the protagonists/heroes are poisoned.

I'm not using the poison as the "gotcha" - I'm using it as an environmental hazard.
Think of it being part of the building the difficulty of the encounter. Now it is not a gotcha moment but rather part of the framing and challenge.

How often do we see the hero hampered by something that makes the fight unfair and yet despite the odds overcomes it. That is what I'm striving for. The "gotcha" is low hanging fruit.

It may not be what the player is striving for, though. Rather than the tough guy who powers through such obstacles, they may want their character to be the smart guy who sees them coming and deftly avoids them, or the observant guy who picks up on anything that's out of place.

And there's a fine line between setting up a situation that's unfair to the character and setting one up that's unfair to the player - and they may see that line as being in a different place than you do.

 

[Charlaquin]

That is one way to look at it and I feel that is the wrong way given how I described it as thematically linked to what we have consumed via media and literature when the protagonists/heroes are poisoned.

But those other forms of media have authors who decide what the protagonists do. The central conceit of RPGs is that the players are the ones who decide what the protagonists do. For the DM to remove that choice from the players in order to insure the narrative they want (wherein the characters are unwittingly poisoned) is the most egregious class of railroading, and sure to be received poorly by any players who have not agreed to such railroading ahead of time.

 

[aco175]

I like to think that the PCs growing up in the world where there are actual monsters would learn some stuff about the world around them. In fighter's school they likely talked about using fire on regenerating monsters like trolls. They would have stories about taking candy or apples from old witches and strangers who might shang-hi them. It would be natural to be suspecting something in the desert, underground, in an abandoned city. I mean maybe if they walked past several lush gardens growing with all sorts of foods and some sort of aquifer system with a fake sun, but still.

 

[aco175]

Would it be bad form for the DM to place snacks on the table and see who takes a bite of one. Then say that you ate one and the PC needs to make a save? Asking for a friend.