D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Bill Zebub]

In the early days of the hobby, the DM was referred to as a referee, and like a referee sometimes they need to make a call that the player can't do something with their PC, no matter how much they want to.

I’m trying to think of scenarios where sports referees (I assume that’s what you’re referring to) preemptively tell players they are not allowed to do something and I’m struggling to think of an example.

 

[Alzrius]

I’m trying to think of scenarios where sports referees (I assume that’s what you’re referring to) preemptively tell players they are not allowed to do something and I’m struggling to think of an example.

What, you've never seen the ref blow their whistle and yell "ILLEGAL MOVE!" during a competitive chess match?

 

[jgsugden]

I think this is on the DM. When there are traps to be found that require specific things, you need to think like the trap maker and set up a circumstance where the PCs will trigger it specifically. Then, set up the PCs to specify the action that triggers it. It is also best to give them some hints as to the elements of the trap in advance, like encountering the poison elsewhere in an inert state before they encounter it in active use.

DM: "As you scout the room you approach the chest ... (checking passive perception and investigation and finding them insufficient to find the trap). You see an oily film on the chest similar to the last one. However, this one has a bluish tint to it where the last one had a red tint. On a close glance, it has the same series of disguised bumps on it hidden in the oily substance."

Player: "OK, I do that same thing as last time - I remove my gloves and slide my finger along the trim and count the series of bumps."

DM: "As you run your fingers along the oily substance you encounter bumps like before, but they seem smaller, as if worn off by more use. It is harder to read them. You can either give mre a sleight of hand or a perception roll."

Player: "18 Sleight."

DM: "The bumps do not make sense to you as you move your fingers ... but you realize it may not just be the chest. Your finger is going numb. Roll me a sweet, sweet Constitutaion Saving throw. Poison effect."

Player: "%@#. 9."

DM: "You find the entire hand has gone numb and your arm is following suit. (Pause for framatic effect and to give the PC a chance to call out if they desire - they do not think to do so.) Within seconds you feel your legs go to jelly and you collapse to the floor, paralyzed. Then, the chest sproute legs and opens to reveal two arms that wield blades. The chest leans over your collapsed form and begins to attack."

Player: "%@#. Does anyone hear anything from the other room?"

DM: "You're down a hallway and behind a closed door. DC 25 Perception. Anyone?"

Other players: "Nope. Sorry."

DM: "One crit and one hit. 7 piercing and give me another Consitution Saving Throw for the crit ..."

Player: "9?"

DM: "36 poison more. 4 piercing for the other blade. Another Constitution saving throw?"

Player: "9."

DM: "17 poison more. As the blades sink into your helpless body you feel your heart struggling to beat. How many hps do you have left?"

Player: "13. Do I get another save?"

DM: "This appears to be a similar poison to the vial you found earlier. As you discovered then - no. Once they fail the save, the paralysis sticks for around a minute. However, the PCs get another perception check."

Other PCs: "No 25s."

DM: "It attacks again. Two hits. More than 13 damage. You lose conciousness."

*****************

This, of course, doesn't always work. Sometimes the players blurt out something before I can set it up. If that happens, I give the players the benefit of the doubt when they tell me they wore gloves and I take a note on what I think I might have been able to do to avoid the overstep in the future.

 

[Plaguescarred]

I'd say despite not being part of common cloth set, there's gloves in D&D and if they aren't written in your equipment list, you don't have any and cannot try to had one after experiencing contact poison. Feel free to get a pair of gloves the next time you visit the city market.

 

[DND_Reborn]

In short, how does this get resolved at your table?

If the player says they imagined having gloves, I say sure.

BUT that doesn't negate the poison. If anything, I allow the player to make the save with advantage, but they ARE making the save since they touched the chest.

FWIW, fine clothes, traveler clothes, and cold winter clothes would typically include gloves IMO so I assume they are there.

 

[Celebrim]

You use a lot of loaded terminology like "mechanism for dealing with game failure," and "violates the social contract," and "flimsy pretense." You don't get to declare that everyone is doing that.

I don't see why not. Afterall, I am speaking from experience here. This sort of thing happens say every five or six sessions with particular players, and pretty much never with most of them. There is always that one player who, when anything bad happens to them, throws a bit of a temper tantrum and tries to argue their way out of it on some grounds. These arguments are invariably in bad faith, because unlike the occasional arguments offered up by other players - there is not some immediate and substantial point. Again, this is a very different matter if the player can actually point to the gloves on his character sheet and isn't trying to rules lawyer up some previously undiscussed gloves from an entry on clothing that makes no mention of them.

The player(s) that I have had to fight this fight over and over with are always the same ones that cheat with the dice, and almost always the same ones that are all the time getting into trouble because they are so used to relying on their cheating and metagaming to get them out again that it's harmed their actual ability to learn to be a clever player. Why think of gloves beforehand when you can invent them after wards, or sit at the far end of the table and tell everyone you rolled an 18 or 19 with every meaningful roll?

This behavior doesn't need defending. Rather, it needs called out in case someone out there is like, "I don't see why demanding a retcon if I can imagine a defense based on the absence of evidence is bad, after all no one has ever said I don't have gloves." It's as dysfunctional as heck. It's childish.

I can easily envision a game where the DM says to the players, "Hey guys, if you can come up with something reasonable after a fact has happened that would change that fact, go for it. Even if it's making up something on the spot like wearing gloves."

That's a playstyle. It's part of the style of how they are playing the game.

OK, point. If for some reason it was an openly disclosed table rule that all the players could invent into the fiction before you resolve the fortune, then it would cease to be dysfunctional. The trouble being, I can't think of any published game that actually encourages that because it totally destroys most of the aesthetics of play you could have in exchange for just a potential minor increase in fantasy and expression that in practice I don't think would be realized because as I pointed out before, the ability to inject fiction after the secret is revealed discourages the player from being specific, interactive, or communicative before the reveal since anything you introduced before the build would limit your own control over the narrative later. Any reasonably imaginative player allowed to gain control of the narrative like that should overcome any problem with ease, or at the very least always get at least one call on. So while you could play that way, I don't think anyone does. Because it's so obvious that control over the narrative is powerful enough to resolve any situation, I think that games that go that route instead start with the reveal and ask the table how they overcome the obstacle, "There is contact poison on the doorknob. Explain how you overcome it." In other words, they drop the procedural methodology, set the stakes first and then do fortune at the end - which is the narrative methodology I described earlier. In that game, how you do things is vastly more important than whether you can and your clever plans can never do more than influence the scene.

So sure, there is a game in which there is a social contract that anyone can invent fiction after the fact to earn a retcon or at least a modification to the fortune, but importantly that universe isn't the one described by the OP. Because in that game, the thing doesn't require a ruling and doesn't need to be raised as a question on the boards.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Unbeknownst to an unarmored character and despite the DM's sufficient telegraphing, they touched a chest that has been smeared with a dangerous contact poison. The DM describes the greasy feel of the poison and asks for a Constitution saving throw.

"Wait just a minute!" exclaims the player. "I imagine my character is wearing gloves. They have traveler's clothes on."

The DM considers this. There is nothing in the rules that says any clothing set comes with gloves, nor any armor for that matter except scale mail, chain mail, or plate which come with gauntlets at least (none of which the PC is wearing). There are no gloves in the equipment section to purchase, and the character has no magical gloves.

Is it reasonable that the player believed the clothing set they have comes with gloves that they are wearing even though it's not specifically listed on their character sheet? Does the timing of establishing this fact - after touching contact poison - matter to resolving this issue? Do you as DM side with the player's seemingly good faith belief that the character is wearing gloves or are they making that saving throw?

In short, how does this get resolved at your table?

I mean, what you don't do is tell the player that their PC is not wearing gloves.

Gloves are a basic medieval essential. They're some wacky modern invention. They're not something barely anyone owns. That the equipment list is missing them, and the outfits don't describe them is a hard strike against 5E, not against the player. None of them describe hats, either, but the idea that everyone is walking around bare-headed is absolutely laughable! The closest you can get to owning a hat in 5E, if you follow the descriptions, is you can have a cloak with a hood. It's obviously down to 5E's terrible equipment section.

A lot of the DM suggestions here are basically of the:

"I get out of bed"
"GOTCHA! Take 1d6 damage!"
"What why?"
"You didn't say you took off the blankets first, so you got tangled up in them, fell over and hurt yourself!"

DMs who would tell a PC they weren't wearing gloves are basically "GOTCHA!!!" DMs. If you asked the player beforehand what they were wearing, and got into to specifics, and there were no gloves, sure, but they'd know that too, and they wouldn't argue.

Players often have very specific visions of what their character is doing that is not necessarily expressed, and just trying to overrule that for the sake of a "GOTCHA!!!" is... well it's not good DMing. These visions are often informed by fiction. In fiction, thieves/rogues/etc. are typically portrayed as wearing gloves. Why? Because it makes sense that they would be. If they're doing stuff like climbing, handling sharp weapons, maybe poisons, being out in the night (which is usually cold) and so on, they'd want gloves.

Similarly the idea that the PC is poisoned, and they have to work out why is ludicrous, and defies the basic approach to fiction that 5E has. It would absolutely fine in a lot of RPGs, which operate in a much more abstract mode, and where players are expected to operate that way? But for D&D, silly at best.

The best answer was given almost immediately - the outer layer of the gloves are now poisoned - and that's going to have consequences down the line.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

BUT that doesn't negate the poison. If anything, I allow the player to make the save with advantage, but they ARE making the save since they touched the chest.

So like, the poison eats through leather? Fine if it does, but otherwise why make the save?

This is D&D. Saves are specific. This isn't a generic "luck save", which would be absolutely 100% justifiable. Some games have them. D&D should probably have them, but it doesn't.

With D&D this is going to be a CON save. But that means you got the poison into your bloodstream. And that makes no sense if you were wearing leather gloves or the like.

 

[Alzrius]

I mean, what you don't do is tell the player that their PC is not wearing gloves.

Gloves are a basic medieval essential. They're some wacky modern invention. They're not something barely anyone owns. That the equipment list is missing them, and the outfits don't describe them is a hard strike against 5E, not against the player. None of them describe hats, either, but the idea that everyone is walking around bare-headed is absolutely laughable! The closest you can get to owning a hat in 5E, if you follow the descriptions, is you can have a cloak with a hood. It's obviously down to 5E's terrible equipment section.

I dunno if getting into medieval realism is the way to go. I mean, leaving aside the entire issue of reliance on history to inform us about how things function in the game world (which is something that people seem to argue against rather than for most often these days), the issue of how much that helps this particular argument strikes me as sketchy.

For instance, this website says:

While the existence of weather-proofing mittens predates medieval Europe, gloves started to come to the forefront of fashion between the 12th and 16th centuries in Europe and the British Isles.

Early gloves were offered in two styles, three-fingered and five-fingered.
Three-fingered gloves were only worn by working class men and never by women.
In the Luttrell Psalter of the early 14th century, there is a man and woman shown weeding with just the man wearing gloves.
A similar version in a fur-lined form is shown 100 years later in the Robert Campin painting, "The Nativity".
In Fairhold's Costume in England, three-fingered gloves are called "country man's gloves".

According to the book, Dress in the Middle Ages, "Furniture inventories and builders' account books confirm that sheepskin gloves were worm by masons and other workers using dangerous tools or corrosive materials."

Five-fingered gloves were also worn by working class men on occasion but never by women.

Prior to the 15th century, there are few depictions of anyone wearing five-fingered gloves.

So maybe the PC was wearing three-fingered gloves, in which case it wouldn't have made a difference, since his other two fingers touched the contact poison.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I dunno if getting into medieval realism is the way to go. I mean, leaving aside the entire issue of reliance on history to inform us about how things function in the game world (which is something that people seem to argue against rather than for most often these days), the issue of how much that helps this particular argument strikes me as sketchy.

For instance, this website says:



So maybe the PC was wearing three-fingered gloves, in which case it wouldn't have made a difference, since his other two fingers touched the contact poison.

I mean, this pedantry of the silliest kind, isn't it?

Did the PC specify three-fingered gloves? No. Were five-fingered gloves available? Yes. Even the Romans had five-fingered gloves, btw.



Also maybe don't use a glove shop as a historical source lol? Just a suggestion.

Either way, if this is a real problem for you, let's say "classic medieval fantasy" then. And we're back to gloves being ever-present. On top of all that, if we're being real, most PCs are dressed, armed and so on in such a manner as to be basically 1400s or later in most settings.