Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bill Zebub" data-source="post: 9809777" data-attributes="member: 7031982">re: Combat vs Non-CombatI often see the argument, "We don't require players to know how to swing swords, so why should we ask them to know how to pick locks?"Well, we also don't try to resolve combat with a single roll.  "Give me a DC 18 Combat check.  If you win the dragon dies, if you fail you die."Rather, combat involves a bunch of decision-making on each player's (and the monster's) turns.  Where should I move?  Who should I attack?  What is the best use of my turn?  Should I trade some defense for offense, or vice versa?  Should I expend this limited resource now, or save it?  Which spell will be most effective in this situation?  And while the dice-rolling adds some unpredictability to the whole endeavor, player knowledge about the relative probability of those actions also contributes.  "That monster has really high armor class, so Advantage would not be as beneficial as straight up +hit..."So the reality is that even though we don't expect roleplayers to know anything about actual sword fighting, RPG combat depends on a lot of player skill...skill at the game itself...to make the right decisions.In other words, "player skill" doesn't have to mean actual knowledge about the subject being roleplayed.  It means "skilled at making decisions within the rules of the game."The problem is that, outside of combat, most game systems don't have sophisticated rules that allow a player to develop "skill". So we tend to resort to either:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Use game rules by making a die roll based on a character skill</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Let the GM decide based on what the players propose.</li> </ol>Some people lean toward #1, others lean toward #2.P.S. Although I have heard (on the internet, not IRL), "Your 1st level character wouldn't know about trolls and fire" or "Your barbarian wouldn't know how to solve that puzzle", I have never heard of somebody making a smart move in combat based on the game rules and the GM saying, "Your character wouldn't think of that."  YMMV, but if that actually happened to me I would never play with that GM again.</blockquote>

Verification