D&D 5E Rogue Advice

[TheCosmicKid]

Why would anyone ever have inherent trust in an authority figure, for any reason, in any context?

Authority does not automatically generate trust.

Um... context is pretty important here. He's not telling you that you must love Big Brother, he's saying that professional expertise is a thing. Do you second-guess everything your dentist does? Probably not. That's trust. But if your dentist starts screwing up in noticeable ways, the trust erodes, and you stop going to that dentist, because "trust" is not the same as "blind faith". That's the story @FrogReaver is pretty clearly telling about Crawford, and I'm willing to bet that as a basic epistemic approach you agree with it. You are both rationally anti-authoritarian. No soapboxes are required in this conversation.

So the question is merely: has Crawford screwed up here? And as it turns out, after checking his page citation, FrogReaver and I were wrong. The "on its turn" restriction is there on MM p.11. I think in hindsight Crawford would be the first to say that it's not as explicit or as well-placed as it could be, but its intent is clear enough. So that's it, the matter has been settled. Nothing more to argue about, everybody move on.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Um... context is pretty important here. He's not telling you that you must love Big Brother, he's saying that professional expertise is a thing. Do you second-guess everything your dentist does? Probably not. That's trust. But if your dentist starts screwing up in noticeable ways, the trust erodes, and you stop going to that dentist, because "trust" is not the same as "blind faith". That's the story @FrogReaver is pretty clearly telling about Crawford, and I'm willing to bet that as a basic epistemic approach you agree with it. You are both rationally anti-authoritarian. No soapboxes are required in this conversation.

So the question is merely: has Crawford screwed up here? And as it turns out, after checking his page citation, FrogReaver and I were wrong. The "on its turn" restriction is there on MM p.11. I think in hindsight Crawford would be the first to say that it's not as explicit or as well-placed as it could be, but its intent is clear enough. So that's it, the matter has been settled. Nothing more to argue about, everybody move on.

Regardless, it is unreasonable to expect a professional to never change their professional opinion on something, and insulting (and foolish) to tell people that they don’t understand how the thing works because they don’t share your read on it.

 

[FrogReaver]

Regardless, it is unreasonable to expect a professional to never change their professional opinion on something, and insulting (and foolish) to tell people that they don’t understand how the thing works because they don’t share your read on it.

Didn’t say he couldn’t change his mind - only that doing so - especially in the way he did so - does legitimately cause one to wonder if any of his other rulings will be like the terrible shield master fiasco.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Didn’t say he couldn’t change his mind - only that doing so - especially in the way he did so - does legitimately cause one to wonder if any of his other rulings will be like the terrible shield master fiasco.

It apparently causes you to do so, sure.

 

[Esker]

Didn’t say he couldn’t change his mind - only that doing so - especially in the way he did so - does legitimately cause one to wonder if any of his other rulings will be like the terrible shield master fiasco.

I really don't understand why you felt injured by this. He changed a ruling. Some people still use the old ruling. Fine. Other people changed how Shield Master works at their tables. Nobody is really any worse off for it, except that players might need to check with their DM how they are handling it before building a character. But they have to do that about plenty of other things anyway.

If something like that did happen again... :: Accept it and move on, or reject it and keep doing what you were doing. As far as I know, there haven't been any other instances like that.

In any case, as @TheCosmicKid pointed out, the case of multiattack actually is handled in the text. Not extremely well phrased, but still. So for the purposes of the tangent on the tangent of this thread, monsters with multiattack who ready attacks frequently due to a familiar have effectively been debuffed with a sort of poor-man's Slow effect, making the familiar a tremendous asset to the party.