Fleetwood C. DeVille
Explorer
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With the preface that I am absolutely in support of groups playing their game their way, I do not see rules as completely ambiguous in that way. The sentence construction and words have meaning. Taken as a whole the expressed mechanics lend themselves better to some meanings than others.Yeah, at a certain point, the rules leave off and the role of the DM necessarily kicks in to make a ruling and that's going to come down to preference. So while you, and Max, and I can explain why we would make the call we would make in play and pemerton and robus and others can explain why they'd make a different call, these are all matters of personal preference and not up for debate, at least in terms of being correct or incorrect.
Where Jumping is ill-defined is on the DC for Athletics checks for stunts and unusually long distances. Probably the designers intended DMs to choose a difficulty class.
i dunno 300+ posts seems like a mountain.
Are we really just arguing about action adjudication? or are we arguing about the jumping rules? Every time i think we’ve settled on the former a person on the other side says no, you can’t jump beyond the limit prescribed in the book without some approach other than sheer effort. Basically that the rules say there’s a hard limit on pure jumping: guaranteed success followed immediately by guaranteed failure.
Which is it for you?
5e is very much about rules. It's the most sophisticated and in many areas the tightest rule system D&D has ever had.
However, in this case we are simply debating a literal meaning. "Up to" in games means that a player can choose any value from the minimum to the maximum. It is used by experienced designers for casing mechanics, where it is necessary to be clear that a player can choose a value lower than the maximum. WotC designers in particular use it as part of their vernacular.
Or to put that another way, where is a check stipulated under jumping, when you want to jump exactly your Strength in feet? If, as one might believe, a check is required, it is perverse to not discuss that check in that rules section.
I think it's a mountain created around a molehill and that most people just make a ruling on and move on.
It's a molehill.
Yes. That's why it's often uncertain that a PC will jump as far as s/he can, which therefore suggests that rules that set a certain distance (ie the rules on p 64 of the Basic PDF) aren't rules that set the furthest a PC can jump!
That second sentence is unwarranted. A player delcaring "I jump as far as I can!" is (i) not asking to make an atheltics check, and (ii) is not forcing the GM to play his/her character. S/he is forcing the GM to decide whether or not it is uncertain that the furthest the PC can jump is more or less than the width of the chasm, but that's what the GM gets paid to do!
As for the first sentence, would you care to give an example or two?
And that’s really all there is to it. We have talked circles around it for days, but ultimately this is what it comes down to.
When I say "Probably the designers intended DMs to choose a difficulty class" I am thinking about the location of the mention of stunts and unusually long distances in Athletics, under Ability Checks, in the same chapter where Difficulty Classes are detailed, below the words "The Athletics skill reflects aptitude in certain kinds of Strength checks". I think one can say for sure that the designers intended a check to be made against DCs guided by those listed on the table, for jumping unusually long distances. Or to put it another way, if that's not what they intended, they took the most remarkable steps to obfuscate their meaning.I can't say for sure that's what the designers intended. What I can say is that in order to arrive at a DC, a DM needs to judge an approach to a goal. A solid approach to a goal might garner automatic success. A terrible approach to a goal might garner automatic failure. Somewhere in the middle are varying degrees of difficulty that are uncertain.
The Using Ability Scores section goes to a lot of trouble to lay out an approach. It's a method that is at the heart of 5e. "An ability check tests a character's or monster's innate talent and training in an effort to overcome a challenge. The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results. For every ability check, the DM decides which of the six abilities is relevant to the task at hand and the difficulty of the task, represented by a Difficulty Class. The more difficult a task, the higher its DC. The Typical Difficulty Classes table shows the most common DCs."The rules cannot set forth what that might be as it only mentions a goal, not an approach. The player adds that part when describing what he or she wants to do so that the DM can make a judgment as to uncertainty and, if applicable, a DC. Different DMs will make different judgments as to that.
That's hugely amusing! I was responding to an assumption that I thought you were making, which is that a check would be needed to jump say Strength in feet (being a value included in "up to Strength").I was under the impression that we were debating what is meant by jumping an unusual distance under the athletics section. The jump section just helps define the parameters of what is usual and what is unusual. During that discussion, you made an error with RAW and I helpfully corrected the mistake is all.