D&D 5E NPC Ability Checks and Stunting or...Ogre Smash

[CrashFiend82]

Isn't the ogre knocking down the tree by definition showing its training or ability. Why would he have to first commit some other act to demonstrate his ability. It was mentioned that most classes don't grant expertise in athletics but again the rules for building, advancing, tweaking monsters don't follow character creation rules. Let's say they do though and for these purposes you gave a level of barbarian and he is raging, so he has advantage and increased strength. How would a character have any in world knowledge that this isn't normal for an ogre? Unless he had fought a handful of ogres previously, and even then wouldn't the characters first instinct be simply, after seeing the rest of strength, assume that this ogre is just stronger than average? Isn't the listed stats in monster manual for each creature an average of the kind? Not all humans have the same strengbt, why would ogres?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Is that really so dangerous?

The rules can be a bit different without upending all expectations.

The rules can be different, as long as they exist and are knowable. Otherwise, it's just the DM making stuff up and expecting the players to go along with it, when they have no way of knowing what makes sense or not.

Whether an ogre can knock over a tree, or not, can't just be a matter of genre convention. Different people have different expectations about how the the world should work, and the rules in the book exist so that we can all be on the same page about what exactly makes sense for the world. Without some sort of rules to cover this situation, the player can't play their character, because they have no idea what sort of world they're living in.

 

[S'mon]

Are you asking if new players distrust their new DM, or if they have no reason to trust their new DM?

I'm asking if you believe either or both of those things? I get the impression you distrust your GM by default, but I don't think this is a common viewpoint especially among new players. And I think
5e is built around an assumption of GM trust and GM empowerment, probably as a reaction against 3e.

 

[S'mon]

Again this gets back to the prospects of incoherent adjudication of uncertainty and/or the application of an incoherent (and inevitably inconsistent) mash-up of earth-physics-based process sim and genre logic (which likely also contains cognitive bias to boot). That will appear adversarial to an invested player and thus looks like a GM begging for a dysfunctional table to me.

I don't think 5e is designed for the adversarial player. It seems a lot closer to 1e & 2e AD&D (probably closest to 2e frankly) in its design approach. 3e was designed for the adversarial player & IME it's that very design which leads to an adversarial feel at the table. Which I feel is much more dysfunctional than "Trust the DM. The DM is your friend" (PARANOIA reference).

 

[S'mon]

Well, looking at the ogre should tell you plenty....watching it knock down a tree and then converting that into a required STR score and then determining how that compares to a PC's STR score and then using that to determine the threat level to the PC based on character level...that's all very meta. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't know if I'd worry too much about ruining such meta concerns for the player.

The 5e DMG advice specifically warns against metagaming. Players shouldn't be using their knowledge of 5e monster stat lines like this. If the ogre is performing a feat of strength beyond that of a normal ogre in-world then the GM should either tell the players this directly or have them make a knowledge/INT check to spot this.

 

[pemerton]

This thread has really taken off, and I've only read up to post 20. So apologies if these response are behind-the-times!

Pushing over a tree would be somewhere between Very Hard and Nearly Impossible for an average person, therefore the DC is in the 25-30 range. (DM discretion applies here.)

Have you seen the strongest man completion? It would not surprise me in the least of one of those dudes knocked over a small tree.

To my mind, there are two things going on here.

One is about the fiction. What sort of tree are we thinking about? For a tree to do significant damage falling on PCs, it has to be a reasonably sized tree (not just a sapling). When I think of the big oak trees in the Victorian-era civic gardens around my suburb, I find it hard to imagine a normal person pushing them over - not just "Very Hard", but not possible. Maybe serious weightlifter/strongest man types could - I don't know - but it still seems a bit unlikely.

Which moves to the second issue - this doesn't seem to lend itself well to a d20 check. For those who can knock over the tree - like those who can tip over the car, or do 50 chin ups in a row, or whatever - success is largely automatic. Whereas for more puny individuals such as myself, success is impossible. But in a d20, bounded accuracy system you have to set the DC at 21 or thereabouts to give me no chance, at which point the ogre, even with advantage, has around a (4/5 ^2 = 16/25) two-thirds chance of failing.

It is impossible to reach DC 25 with only +4 on the check, with or without Advantage. The outcome is certain, and no roll is required.

I think this gets the order of operations wrong according to the rules [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] cited. You have first assigned a DC, then computed certainty/uncertainty. Whereas in the stated procedures, one first decides certainty/uncertainty, then assigns a DC in the event of uncertainty.

Those are significantly different procedures.

if the DM wants the Ogre to knock over the tree, make the tree old and rotted at the base, or anchored in weak soil.

Well, I was going to post something about "Schrodinger's tree roots", cats and dogs living together, etc, but others beat me to it!

(Not that I'm against it. But I've been through enough threads where many posters attack "fail forward" resolution, so-called "dissociated" mechancis, etc to know that what you propose will be controversial. It's also not clear how it fits into the official rules procedures that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] cited.)

 

[pemerton]

This is a really provocative insight. You could say the same thing about PC advancement and 5E combat. With few exceptions, 5E PCs get better at either (1) combat, or (2) making "ability checks". But ability checks aren't a capability, they're just an ill-defined resolution mechanism to be used when the DM demands one, so do players consequently feel more entitled to combat than to exploration or social interaction?

Corollary: Would players feel more entitled to make ability checks if the PHB had the same information on trap lethality/damage and detecting/disarming traps as the DMG?

Always happy to provoke!

In Burning Wheel, which is the system I was renferencing, all abilities (skills, weapons, resources, circles (= a "contacts" ability, a bit like the yakuza in original OA), health (= recovery from injury), steel (= morale, which PCs as well as NPCs have), etc) are on a common progression chart.

With very few exceptions, making a check is enough to meet the requirements for advancement (ie it doesn't matter if the check succeeds or fails). But if the GM just "says yes", because nothing is at stake and so - as part of pacing/drama management - the GM just wants to move things along, then the player doesn't get the check.

This is why, even for even really easy stuff, if there actually is something at stake in the event of failure, the GM is obliged to grant the check - so that the player can get the "tick" for advancement. And flipping that around, players have an incentive to push the game into a direction where dramatically salient things are at stake, so they will get the checks they need to build up their PCs. (From experience, I can report that it's an interesting dynamic. It puts a very different spin on a system that, if you just looked at the PC sheets or the core resolution rules, would resemble Runequest or Rolemaster or similar long-skill-list, ultra-sim games.)

I haven't thought about how it would generalise to D&D. In my 4e game, I use the XP rules in the DMG, the DMG2 and the RC, which means - to put it simply - that as long as the players are actually engaging the game (via combat, or skill challenge, or free roleplayijng that isn't just faffing around) then they earn XP, at a rate that boils down to about one-tenth of a level per hour or so of play (high level combats are complex enough that they put a bit of a drag on this pace, but not too much). A consequence of this is that shifting a 4e game from the default XP rules to "milestone" advancement probably won't make a very big practical difference. (And that is how I'm planning to handle the 4e Dark Sun campaign that I started fairly recently.)

I'm not 100% sure about your corollary. My feeling is that if you make players "chase" XP (ie some strongly non-milestone, non-pacing-based system - like, say, AD&D's XP for gp) then player will probably feel ripped off if the GM deliberately "blocks" the chase. So in AD&D, the GM can't just handwave the treasure total. Maybe in 5e, this creates pressure on the GM not just to handwave combat, if XP are earned by actually engaging in it and beating a certain CR.

If there was a skill-challenge style system for non-combat XP, then players might feel entitled to engage that system rather than have the GM just handwave it (and thus deprive them of the XP they are chasing).

I'm not sure if the last couple of paragraphs are connecting to what you were thinking, or if I've completely missed your point!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think this gets the order of operations wrong according to the rules [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] cited. You have first assigned a DC, then computed certainty/uncertainty. Whereas in the stated procedures, one first decides certainty/uncertainty, then assigns a DC in the event of uncertainty.

Those are significantly different procedures.

I disagree. Determining certainty or uncertainty is fundamentally no different than determining the DC... with poor granularity. If I say that flying requires a DC 50 Athletics check, or I say that it's impossible to fly by flapping your arms, then those statements are effectively identical unless you somehow have +30 to Athletics. Note that the example of an impossible check is literally shooting the moon; it's not something you need to evaluate carefully in determining the DC in order to know that the DC is unreachable.

If something is impossible, then that just means the DC is so high that there's no point in rolling. If something is automatic, then that means the DC would be so low that there's no point in rolling. Any attempt to determine certainty or uncertainty by another method is prone to introducing inconsistencies, where the DM says the outcome is guaranteed and the game mechanics would disagree.

For example, if a door can be automatically kicked down by someone with Strength 20, but someone with Strength 10 cannot possibly kick it down, then that's a situation which is inconsistent with the mechanics that would otherwise apply. Effectively, you would be creating DM fiat as an entirely separate mode of gameplay, rather than having it work together with the ability check system, and the outcome of any situation would depend on which ruleset the DM decides to invoke. (Which goes back to the players not knowing what the rules are, and the game being unplayable.)

 

[pemerton]

I think the best way to treat ogre & tree is 4e style, as a set move, ideally written up pre-battle, probably with auto success for the tree-pulling and reasonable attack & damage numbers pre-set as part of the ogre CR. This is basically the 'cinematic' approach - ogre gets to pull up and use tree because it's a cool dramatic vignette that is integrated into Gamist play.

Steel yourself for a shock - I agree with this!

In one of the threads on monster stats that was a precursor to this one, though, the improv ogre-and-tree move was being advocated as an alternative to 4e-style statted moves. And I think this is part of what triggered [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s thread: how easy is it to make the move from the ability check/stunting rules, as presented in the books, to an ogre pulling up a tree?

I'm a bit dismayed that "if the GM says the ogre knocked down a tree it happens and that's ok" isn't something that just well, goes.

The resolution mechanics disagree that Ogres are capable of that in this edition (in fact they're grossly ill-equipped). So how does "saying yes" to OGRE SMASH interface with (i) the Ability Check system in general (specifically "natural language" and setting DCs, the baseline, and determining uncertainty) and (ii) players with similar SMASH archetypes making like genre logic action declarations for their PCs (eg are those same GMs determining there is no uncertainty and thus "saying yes?")?

I don't think Manbearcat is against "saying yes" or having ogres do awesome things, in general. (I've been GMed by him - he likes to bring the awesome!)

He's trying to tease it out in the context of the 5e rules, though. And one of the things he's linking to is - does it reciprocate to PCs? (And I'm guessing, in asking this, he's also got in mind the "DCs above 30 thread" from last year.) [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] asked the same question.

must we assume that ability checks...and all of the rules that go along with them...are meant to be applied the same to monsters as they are to PCs? Is a 19 STR the same in all ways for a PC as it is for the ogre?

There's nothing in the rules as written to say there is a difference, I know, but I would think a difference would apply. Most likely I'd base this on size....say that carrying capacity and other facets of STR (i.e. STR checks) are greater for larger creatures. Surely a large ogre can carry more than a human, right?

<snip>

Ultimately, the only reason we see an ogre as having a STR score that is actually within the reach of a PC achieving is to maintain combat numbers...to hit and damage figures, right?

<snip>

Obviously, that may not work for everyone. I think such a ruling might come into question when the players know the ogre's stats. Because that number in the STR listing indicates a parity with the PCs. So players may assume that they could then knock over a tree (which should likely be nigh impossible for them)

This is an interesting take.

As far as the ogre/PC reciprocity is concerned, PCs can become large via spells, potions etc so I'm not sure that solves all the issues.

But the idea that an ogre's STR stat is there only to manage combat stats is interesting. It's almost the inverse of AD&D, where an ogre's 18/00 STR didn't inform it's combat stats at all (attack as a 4+ HD monster, for 1d10 or weapon+2) but did inform it's out-of-combat abilities. One reason AD&D could go for ogre/PC parity in this respect was because it used non-linear bonuses (eg via Bend Bars or "open wizard locked doors" chances) and because very few PCs could get to 18/00 STR without becoming enchanted beings by using wishes, magic books and/or gauntlest/girdles. In other words, letting an AD&D character roll the chance to force a wizard locked door as the chance to knock down a big tree won't create any issues, because only those with STR 18/91 or better have any chance at all, ogres only have a 2 in 6 chance, and there are no retries.

Bounded accuracy + linear bonus progression changes all this. And so creates this pressure to divorce the ogre's capabilities from its ability scores. Which is what 4e did, by locating a lot of this stuff in "powers", and by using "genre logic" rather than "objective DCs" as the gateway to improved stuff.

I find that when I roll behind the screen (or hide rolls because I use Fantasy Grounds), my players don't mind at all. In some ways, they even get more into the fiction of the situation. I guess, I've gained credibility already so it isn't an issue.

I don't think this is ultimately about players trusting or distrusting GMs. From Manbearcat's point of view (as I understand it) it's about transparency of GMing procedures, which feed into how much players are driving things vs being along for the GM's ride. And relating this to [MENTION=8900]Tony[/MENTION] Varga's post somewhere around no 21 upthread: talking about GM empowerment and the like as a solution to Manbearcat's question seems to me to be shifting a lot of control over resolution to the GM.

I think I have a lot of trust from my players, but I roll dice on the table so everyone can see what is going on. As far as getting into the fiction - in my experience, there's nothing like rolling a crit to make a player feel the pain his/her PC is feeling! Or picking up a big handful of dice to roll damage, to make a player groan along with his/her PC (or to feel the whiff of the near-miss, if I as GM roll 6 dice and 4 of them come up 1 or 2).

 

[pemerton]

I disagree. Determining certainty or uncertainty is fundamentally no different than determining the DC... with poor granularity.

I understand that this is how you prefer to play the game. But it doesn't strike me as consistent with what the rulebooks actually say.

Page 77 of the SRD says

The GM 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 GM decides which of the six abilities is relevant to the task at hand and the difficulty of the task . . .​

That sets out a clear order of operations:

(1) Determine certainty/uncertainty of action;

(2) If uncertain, frame action as ability check, including (i) determing ability to be used, and (ii) setting difficulty.​

Your procedure reverses the order: first do steps 2(i) and 2(ii), then use that to settle (1).

Putting to one side the question of which procedure is preferable, to my mind they're quite different procedures. For instance, on your procedure the ogre can probably never push over a tree; whereas on the rulebook procedure the ogre can if the GM decides that it's not uncertain (eg because dramatically appropriate!) and hence doesn't engage the ability check rules.

I just whittle the who thing down to an improvised weapon. It just so happens that after the attack is resolved there's a tree on the ground as a side effect.

This is how Marvel Heroic RP handles this sort of thing. But I think it's a bit more contentious in a system like 5e, which has STR scores and DCs for STR checks and the like.

I mean, should we be worried that the ogre can push over the tree as part of an attack but not as part of a systematic forestry team? (Or if the ogre can push over trees all day long, but the ability score rules say that it can't, then what are those rules for?)

To me, and following on from my reply just above to Saelorn, I wonder what the criteria for certain/uncertain are meant to be.

if the rules for NPCs are different, then looking at that ogre tells me nothing, because I have no frame of reference.

<snip>

If I have Strength 20 and training and can't knock over a tree, then this ogre must have a Strength of at least 30 in order to do that, which means it should be absolutely terrifying to fight and I should probably run away.

Well, 4e handled this through metagame conventions (around genre, "tiers of play", DCs by level, etc). That's how most "cinematic"-style games work, I think (qv Dungeon World, Marvel Heroic RP, Maelstrom Storytelling, HeroWars/Quest, off the top of my head).

Task: punch a bound-and-gagged adult human into unconsciousness in less than a minute.

A Str 16 guy will succeed in this task very reliably. He does 4 points of damage per hit and averages about 38 points of damage over the course of a minute, more than enough to knock a regular 6-10 HP human unconscious.

A Str 6 guy will totally fail in this task. He does 0 points of damage per hit, and will never knock out the human with unarmed strikes. (If he picks up a chair leg as an improvised weapon, he could inflict about 12 HP of damage after two minutes--but the task is specifically to punch the victim unconscious.)

If you want a non-combat task with a steeper curve than a single ability check gives you, you need to use multiple rolls.

This came up on an old thread - maybe the DCs above 30 one.

On that thread I made the point that 5e combat doesn't use bounded accuracy in the same way as ability checks do, because hp and damage both scale dramatically with level. So it is easy to set combat tasks which a 1st level character has almost no chance at but a 20th level character is almost guaranteed to succeed at (eg beat up a hill giant - I haven't run the maths, though on the old thread I remember running it for a pit fiend - I'm just relying on intuition here).

Although 5e is meant to hark back to classic D&D, in some ways it is very much it's own creature - it lacks the non-linear progression of AD&D, but also lacks the non-bounded DCs of 3E and 4e, and lacks the default tiers of play/genre logic of 4e. Bounded accuracy plus single-check resolution with linear bonus progression is a curious thing.

It seems a lot closer to 1e & 2e AD&D (probably closest to 2e frankly) in its design approach.

To me it doesn't feel all that close to Gygaxian AD&D. But it feels very close to 2nd ed AD&D "disregard the rules when they get in the way of the story"!

I think this has always been a tension (maybe not quite the right word?) in D&D: is 18 STR on my PC sheet primarily a mechanical statement (to help resolve actions) or a descriptor that the GM should keep in mind when narrating what happens? Free-wheeling tree-pushing ogres seems to prioritise the STR entry in the stat block as a loose descriptor than a mechanically robust entry (except when we come to combat proper, eg to hit and damage bonuses, where as [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] pointed out the maths for some reason gets all precise!).