D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Voadam]

Clearly written by someone unfamiliar with cold weather, while having a beer on the deck in mid-August.

The impacts of WotC moving from Wisconsin to Seattle were many and varied.

 

[payn]

To be honest, this is why I don't give a lot of weight to these kinds of traps in encounters.

Traps are basically a stationary monster that can be 'defeated' by not interacting with them, and if you do interact, it's all or nothing.

I feel people put way too much... I don't know... hope? Expectation? that the trap is going to go off and do something and when it's bypassed or obviated by direct action that other can have just as strong an expectation to do so, it's upsetting. They just add an element of greater chance someone's going to be annoy or upset when deployed this way.

I think there is a big difference between "I bought protective gloves to stop this..." and "hey wait! I think I have gloves... Wont that protect me???" Im cool with the former, not so much the latter, which is why I want a consistent ruling to rely on. Im fair, and dont get upset if folks have the right gear to stop or avoid traps, but I dont like the retcon skill play on either side of the screen. I dont put X traps in place because the party is ill prepared for them and will get screwed by it.

So I approach traps two alternate ways: a spice in a situation that doesn't hinge on them going off or working, or enmasse where some of them are going to go off and we're just in full death room mode. Usually these are set pieces that both sides fo the actual encounter can use to their advantage if they spot it or know about it.

There are a lot of ways to run traps and the above sound reasonable.

 

[Lanefan]

Players get to decide what their character's clothes look like. I'd rather let a few possibly convenient retcons slide than make everyone write out their outfits in detail and spend game time discussing day to day fashion choices, unless that's what the players want to focus on. Even many of the players who want to get into describing their characters sartorial choices probably generally don't want to do it in the form of some sort of arms race with the DM.

I'll do everything I can to avoid retcons of any kind, because that's a slippery slope best kept at a great distance.

If a legitimate retcon ever arises, as DM I take it as a slap in the face in that it means I've made an egregious error that just shouldn't happen, ever.

If a player seemed inclined to regularly abuse their aesthetic authority over their character to gain minor benefits I probably wouldn't play with them.

It's a player's job to look for exploits, and the DM's job to prevent them. No problem there.

But the DM has to be proactive. This thread provides a wonderfully simple example of such: if the DM had gone over the equipment lists ahead of time and filled some gaping holes (or even better, if the damn designers had got it right in the first place*), this issue cannot arise.

By the time it gets to the point of the DM having to be reactive, as happened here, it's too late.

* - I'll cut the very early editions some slack but surely someone had to have caught this during all the edition re-designs since.

But if extraneous factors led to me playing with someone who needed to be kept on such a short leash, I'd probably still let decisions about gloves slide, because I'd probably be babysitting that player more than enough on myriad other things that were more important and more the DM's business than how their character dresses.

Except when how the character dresses mechanically impacts the game, as in the OP's example, you've suddenly gotta ride shotgun on it.

 

[Celebrim]

Again, the type of game should be established up front. If not, then I'd use the contact poison as an opportunity to make it clear to everyone.

Generally speaking, I think 5e is ill suited for this kind of thing. I wouldn't bother with challenges like contact poison in 5e.

My impression of 5e is that the game it is going for, it doesn't matter if the gloves are present or not - you still call for the same saving throw.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I think there is a big difference between "I bought protective gloves to stop this..." and "hey wait! I think I have gloves... Wont that protect me???" Im cool with the former, not so much the latter, which is why I want a consistent ruling to rely on.

I don't really differentiate personally between the two. One is preemptive, the other is fridge logic that I think is still valid.

As for consistent rulings, I'd rewrite the poison rules to avoid this and actually take into account things like gloves and make it clear what happens one way or the other. Also have gloves exist, of course.

Im fair, and dont get upset if folks have the right gear to stop or avoid traps, but I dont like the retcon skill play on either side of the screen. I dont put X traps in place because the party is ill prepared for them and will get screwed by it.

I'm not saying to you. I think I know you well enough to think you don't. But there's an undercurrent of 'damnit, just eat the poison already' that I've seen here and tend to see in trap design where the trap is less there to be part of the encounter and more there to be a gotcha or a Skilled Play test and there's the feeling of making the player face the consequences.

There are a lot of ways to run traps and the above sound reasonable.

Thank you. I didn't use traps for a very long time because the suggested deployment when I started made them impossible to fairly use in an encounter because they get added to the XP budget despite being something the players might never know about, or that the players could never figure a way out of (I can't remember the name now, but I had this 3e book of traps that had things in it that were like a freaking MENSA test that killed you if you weren't a genius or min-maxed rogue with paranoia issues and a wand of dispel magic..

 

[Celebrim]

That is why the players stepped in to say wait, feel? What about gloves?

The DM assumed the player has no gloves so he described the greasy feel when the character touched the chest.

The set up though is there is nothing one way or the other about what the character was wearing. The DM could be mistaken in their assumption about a PC detail.

It can be run different ways but in my opinion preferably this type of thing would be something for the player to decide, not something to be imposed by the DM's narration.

Again, it's incumbent on the player to call out any pertinent information during his proposition of play. Otherwise, any reasonable assumption by the DM should stand and not require retcon.

You can't leave this up to the player to call out after the fact, otherwise you will end up with retconning everything as a standard process of play and the metagame will completely overtake the game.

"Wait, I assumed that I was standing behind the chest when I opened the lid."
"Wait, I assumed that I was crouching down and bear walking as I advanced up the corridor."
"Wait, I assumed that I was using my shield to provide partial cover as I advanced up the corridor."
"Wait, I assumed that I put on my blindfold before I opened the chest."
"Wait, I would have used my mirror when I said that I was looking around the corner."
"Wait, I would have assumed that I was using a listening cone when I leaned against the door. Do you have listening cone on your character sheet? No, but I assumed they would be part of the standard thieves' tools kit."
"Wait, I would have been still standing just outside the door when the rest of the party entered the room."
"Wait, I would have been still standing just inside the door when the rest of the party entered the room."
"Wait, I would have been wearing the leather armor that we looted from the assassin in the last chapter."
"Wait, I would have been using my prybar to open the door."

And on and on and on. You'll spend 15 minutes retroactively establishing the fiction after every resolution if you leave it up to the player to retroactively decide. Worse, you'll be teaching the player to be as vague, uncommunicative, and uninteractive as possible in order to leave more wiggle room for themselves to come up with reasons to retcon.

 

[iserith]

My character, getting geared up for adventure:

 

[J.Quondam]

No mittens in D&D 3e PHB. It's wool coat, linen shirt, wool cap, heavy cloak, thick pants or skirt, and boots. You get +5 bonus to Fort saves against cold weather exposure, but your hands freeze and shatter like the T-1000 I guess.

In 3e, hands are Tiny size, so you just buy Tiny sized winter outfits for each hand, at 1/2 the normal gp cost.
For +100gp, they can double as creepy puppets for bards.

 

[Celebrim]

But there's an undercurrent of 'damnit, just eat the poison already' that I've seen here and tend to see in trap design where the trap is less there to be part of the encounter and more there to be a gotcha or a Skilled Play test and there's the feeling of making the player face the consequences.

Thank you. I didn't use traps for a very long time because the suggested deployment when I started made them impossible to fairly use in an encounter because they get added to the XP budget despite being something the players might never know about, or that the players could never figure a way out of (I can't remember the name now, but I had this 3e book of traps that had things in it that were like a freaking MENSA test that killed you if you weren't a genius or min-maxed rogue with paranoia issues and a wand of dispel magic..

This isn't a problem with traps alone, although the sort of DM that loves traps is probably the sort that indulges the vice. The vice being fantasizing about how impressive your encounters are going to be and how much pain they are going to cause players. The same problem you describe occurs when a DM is reluctant to let the BBEG go down like a chump because of a few bad rolls or poorly accounting for player abilities on their part.

As for trap design, I have very definite opinions on it and probably would never use a "contact poison on a handle" trap in isolation because there is nothing that can happen with such a trap that I find fun. When I design traps, they are generally much more elaborate and intended to be group encounters in and of themselves, or else they exist to kind of warn the players that much more deadly traps lie ahead and they should be on their toes. I concur with you that there is a lot of terrible advice about traps out there, and I really hate "Grimtooth" and everything such a line of adversarial gotcha GMing leads too.

That said, good trap design feels to me like a tangential topic. Fundamentally, we are dealing with what I think is one the most complicated topics in traditional gaming - "What does it mean to search something?" What does it mean to search something hits at how we deal with abstraction versus reification and how we deal with player versus character skill. Typically, in order to speed the game along to get to the good stuff, we have a tendency to prefer abstract propositions over concrete prospositions, but this runs into big problems when the specific nature of the interaction with the fiction matters. Some systems deal with this by saying the specific nature of the interaction doesn't matter and can be inferred from the fortune. Others deal with this by having a proposition filter that rejects any proposition that isn't specific enough to adjudicate. But despite the fact that this is a hugely important aspect of the process of play, a lot of GMs ignore it or are inconsistent in how they handle it leading invariably to table arguments.

And that's before we get into players with anti-social habits who will gleefully abuse any ambiguity.

 

[payn]

I don't really differentiate personally between the two. One is preemptive, the other is fridge logic that I think is still valid.

As for consistent rulings, I'd rewrite the poison rules to avoid this and actually take into account things like gloves and make it clear what happens one way or the other. Also have gloves exist, of course.

I remember a thread many years ago here at ENworld about a vampire encounter. The party damaged the vamp heavily and it turned to gas and retreated into a decoy coffin. Inside was an illusion spell that the PCs failed their saves against. The PCs were convinced the vamp was dead. However, one player asked about the magic weapon the vamp had. It wasnt in the coffin. The player adamantly argued that there is no way the character would be fooled by the spell. I dont recall how it played out but some where on team logic.

I view these things as abstracted by the rules. I mean, it doesn't make a ton of sense for tiny goblin to be able to penetrate steel plate, but if they hit the right AC, they cause damage. Tons of things dont make a lot of logical sense, but the rules mechanics are there to account for them in a flash to keep the game from bogging down in minutia. Maybe the Gobo got the right swing, maybe the poison got through the glove, the magic changed the logic of your mind about the weapon, etc..

I'm not saying to you. I think I know you well enough to think you don't. But there's an undercurrent of 'damnit, just eat the poison already' that I've seen here and tend to see in trap design where the trap is less there to be part of the encounter and more there to be a gotcha or a Skilled Play test and there's the feeling of making the player face the consequences.

I had old school GMs so I totally get what you are saying here.

Thank you. I didn't use traps for a very long time because the suggested deployment when I started made them impossible to fairly use in an encounter because they get added to the XP budget despite being something the players might never know about, or that the players could never figure a way out of (I can't remember the name now, but I had this 3e book of traps that had things in it that were like a freaking MENSA test that killed you if you weren't a genius or min-maxed rogue with paranoia issues and a wand of dispel magic..

YW, this has been a nice discussion so far.