It doesn't even need to be a sustained period - given how short 5e levels 1 and 2 can be in terms of encounters it's very straightforward for them to be obtained over a day or two for which we can account for all of the Wizards time. The point is that there are no rules as to what actions a wizard needs to declare in order to get their spells. And considering how time compressed 5e campaigns can be it seems a bit unfair to single out Wizards by claiming they need an (unspecified) amount of free time to obtain their class features.
D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.
- Thread starter Reynard
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Enrahim
Adventurer
It depends on the mindset of the players. While walking trough a labyrinth you typically only have 2-3 options in each crossing. A typical group will keep going trough the labyrinth as long as there is a new path - they will never consider going back trying one of the options they didn't pursue at first. However once they hit a dead end, all the paths they didn't chose before suddenly become much more interesting.
If you keep making paths forward in the labyrinth, none of the options left behind will ever be explored. However if you actually allow for a dead end, this suddenly present them with many more options than they are used to. Some groups however reject these, and keep insisting on finding a way trough the dead end. Others don't like it because they are overwhelmed by the number of options as they want a more directed experience. For others again, this is what they live and play for.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Not as a result of that move, no. This is among the rules that bind the GM--GMs are not free to just do whatever they want, whenever they want, no matter what. They are bound to respect the outcome of moves for the same reason that GMs are bound to respect the outcome of rolls in D&D.
The thing you're describing would be like a player unequivocally succeeding on a Perception check, e.g. getting a nat 20, and then the GM unilaterally deciding "nope, you actually failed because I decided that's what should happen". I'm pretty sure multiple people in this thread have already said that that would be unacceptable.
Not as a result of that move, no. And such a literally completely unpredictable, unforeseeable "gotcha" moment would be, I should think, considered really inappropriate GMing even for those who favor a "traditional GM" approach. Such an action would mean that the GM had set up the player for absolute unavoidable failure without any ability to know, predict, or react.
If a GM did this to me in a D&D game, we would have words. Possibly immediately, if the screaming cook immediately results in hugely bad problems.
But, if I may, let me give you an example from my own game, which shows how something almost like what you're describing--what I think you really want to describe, but did not here--very much can occur in DW.
In my game, Jewel of the Desert, my players had gone to some pretty extensive lengths to make sure they did in fact capture a criminal. He was a dragonborn, but also someone who had joined up with the Uyun al-Thuban, the "Serpent's Eye" gang--which is a front established by a black dragon trying to take over the city in secret. The ganger's name was Khabir al-Sadiqqi. Despite being captured, Khabir was supremely confident in interrogation. The group could tell that he wasn't gonna crack without actually torturing him, which the party wasn't interested in doing, so they decided to exploit his confidence--he clearly expected to be broken out by the gang, so they allowed him to get broken out, arranging for that breakout to be relatively painless breakout. Their target: use this little fish to lead them to a big fish--a gang "overboss" type!
Unfortunately, what they didn't know is that someone they relied on as part of their planning, a non-noble genie alchemist named Musa, may truly be actually a legitimate businessman...but one who is under the black dragon's control, albeit at several layers removed. As a result, although their plan went off well and they succeeded in many ways, their ultimate goal--capturing the "overboss"--was denied to them from the very beginning, because they had trusted Musa. Musa didn't actually rat them out, not intentionally anyway, but the black dragon watches Musa's activity and saw what they were doing. Not wanting its secrets to be revealed, but also wanting to keep the party in the dark as long as possible, the black dragon pulled out as many resources from the target warehouse as it could, sent away all but a barebones and ill-informed crew to keep up appearances, and had the "overboss" appearing via a powerful illusion, rather than being physically present.
As the party investigated, they found the place unusually low on guards (first sign that things weren't as they seemed), and then when they dug into one of the rooms, they found a lot of the boxes were full of just sawdust, or genuinely empty, the second bad sign. They didn't quite put two and two together until they reached the final room, where Khabir and the "overboss" (or, rather, his illusionary form) were waiting. The overboss had a relatively pleasant but disdainful conversation with them, and then revealed (even to Khabir!) that he wasn't actually there physically, and thus he would be taking his leave--leaving Khabir to his fate, punished for being so foolish as to bring the law down on this location and disrupting the gang's plans so badly.
It was still, overall, a victory. The party got a lot of good information, they still disrupted the gang, and the gang wasn't as thorough with their clean-up as they could've been, leaving enough traces of evidence behind to point to new things. But the overall goal was a failure before the mission even began, not because I had any plan whatsoever to make this happen, but because they relied on someone they shouldn't have.
The key difference, here, is that even though they didn't know not to trust Musa in this, they could have known. There have been plenty of hints that he isn't quite as squeaky-clean as he seems, and he has already deceived the party about where his loyalties lie once before. (Well, not so much "deceived" as "consciously avoided disclosure"--mere omission, and the party was terribly obliging by never asking a direct question!) There were ways for them to discover the magic being used, too, but they did not use those methods (in part because they feared doing so might alert the gang to their intentions, which was a slim but non-negligible possibility.) In comparison to your cook-watching-the-door, they very much could have prevented this from ever happening, or at least learned that it had happened before the final reveal--whereas your cook-watching-the-door as presented cannot be prevented, cannot be known in advance, and will always lead to a pretty substantial failure completely independently of the players' actions. That doesn't sit well with me.
As I said: my players were dealt a meaningful defeat here, and it happened totally outside the context of rolling or not rolling. They actually did very well on their plan's execution! They just trusted the wrong person, and that had ripple effects--not total 100% loss, but losing the grand prize and weakening the consolation prizes. The defeat was actually something arising from them making a bad move, not from the GM inserting a guaranteed-fail condition.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Do you make your players roll to choose which path they take in the labyrinth?
Because this seems a textbook example of something where you don't and shouldn't invoke mechanics. Just...have the players do the thing.
Enrahim
Adventurer
No? There was a dead end? There are no mechanics in the example? If you want to put mechanics into this example it would perhaps be the players searching the dead end for secret doors without finding anything? I do not understand what you are getting at here?
As an aside on the crumbling cliff thing - why would we narrate such a thing in the first place?
We know it's to provide a narrative reason to explain the mechanical failure on the check, but we've got a wide suite of reasons why to could be.
We could narrate that the climber's grip gave out, or their fitness failed them, or they misjudged a hold, or they had an attack of vertigo and they fainted for a moment. All are congruent with the only fact that we know from the roll - they failed to climb for some reason. So why not use one of these purely internal reasons? Why invent external facts about the world at all? Why attribute the failure to bad luck rather than incompetence?
I will note that (in a 5e context) we might be more comfortable narrating an incompetent failure on an untrained STR 8 Wizard as compared to a 18 STR trained in Athletics Barbarian, but due to the range of the dice it's very possible for the Wizard to actually beat the Barbarian on the roll even when they both fail.
I'd suggest that we generally prefer not to have characters who should be competent in our campaigns to appear to be incompetent and there's a general willingness to alter (or if we want to see it a bit differently, reveal previously unrevealed facts about) the world to avoid this. So our climber gets crumbling (a plausible but prior to this unnarrated possibility) handholds rather than an failure of their grip. The character would have succeeded, it's just they got unlucky.
We know it's to provide a narrative reason to explain the mechanical failure on the check, but we've got a wide suite of reasons why to could be.
We could narrate that the climber's grip gave out, or their fitness failed them, or they misjudged a hold, or they had an attack of vertigo and they fainted for a moment. All are congruent with the only fact that we know from the roll - they failed to climb for some reason. So why not use one of these purely internal reasons? Why invent external facts about the world at all? Why attribute the failure to bad luck rather than incompetence?
I will note that (in a 5e context) we might be more comfortable narrating an incompetent failure on an untrained STR 8 Wizard as compared to a 18 STR trained in Athletics Barbarian, but due to the range of the dice it's very possible for the Wizard to actually beat the Barbarian on the roll even when they both fail.
I'd suggest that we generally prefer not to have characters who should be competent in our campaigns to appear to be incompetent and there's a general willingness to alter (or if we want to see it a bit differently, reveal previously unrevealed facts about) the world to avoid this. So our climber gets crumbling (a plausible but prior to this unnarrated possibility) handholds rather than an failure of their grip. The character would have succeeded, it's just they got unlucky.
Enrahim
Adventurer
No, not as an outcome of the move. But as a narration on what happens when the thief immediately (and possibly implicitly) opens the door afterwards?
Do anyone have a problem with the player asking if something is there, the GM calls a perception check, we get a nat 20 and the GM informs "nope, nothing there that you can see" (Being aware of the assassins' superior hide check rolled in advance)?
Yes, and I could then have told you that in preparation for this heist scenario you hinted at they would be doing the last session, I mapped out the location and activity of each household member hour by hour. That the information about the typical bread delivery timing would have been readily available if you had decided to pay the local bakery a visit as part of staking out the target. And that indeed I had had in the back of my head how cool it would have been if you had been posing as the bread deliverer as a possible means of getting inside.
Would you have taken my word on it? Would you have demanded to actually see my physical notes (what if I told you I had just mapped it out in my mind)? Do you think most people would still think of it as an unacceptable gotcha? Or might it be that they actually would have appreciated the effort I had put into trying to make this an as realistic and genre appropriate heist scenario as possible?
clearstream
(He, Him)
In which light, it makes sense that you dislike it.
clearstream
(He, Him)
The rules don't require wizard players to narrate that, just as they don't require any player to narrate their character going to the toilet. But I picture characters do need to go to the toilet.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
But it's precisely a dead end caused by failing to clear a mechanical hurdle that is the thing I'm talking about.
Talking through a dead end purely within fiction is perfectly acceptable. Good, even--in moderation. I've made very clear here that it's about invoking mechanics where mechanics have no place. Pretty sure I've said some variation of the phrase "why would you invoke mechanics for this" half a dozen times already.
What I'm getting at here is that dead-ends which
(a) only occur because the characters failed to clear a mechanical hurdle
(b) add genuinely nothing to the experience other than "you spent maybe a minute and nothing happened, what now?" and
(c) do nothing to advance toward any kind of (local) conclusion
are something that should be avoided.
If it happens without invoking mechanics, sure, fine, whatever, knock yourself out. That's part of the conversation of play, and that conversation can have all sorts of things in it. Or, if it happens and invokes mechanics, but the result does in fact add something, anything other than "you wasted a little time, now what?", awesome, have at it--whatever was added is, necessarily, new information, or a new avenue of approach, or something which helps keep the game going. Or, if it happens, invokes mechanics, and doesn't add anything, but does inherently push the situation toward some kind of (local) conclusion, any kind of local conclusion, good, bad, weird, whatever, awesome, more power to ya.
But if all that's happening is the PCs are wasting their time and the players are wasting theirs, why on earth are we invoking mechanics for this? Just keep it in the fiction.
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