D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Micah Sweet]

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 argue for going by history and physics all the time. So do my players. I can't tell you the number of disagreements I've had with my wife at the table over rules minutia that doesn't match her or my sense of reality.

 

[tetrasodium]

This is a good example of why losing the old - 2/+2 gm's best friend was swas such a loss with 5e's (dis)advantage as the only tool. With (dis) advantage these sort of "buy wait" disconnects feel wrong because they are just a pleading to retry a bad failed roll hoping to roll better than five next time or simply bypass the roll entirely with the gm bullied into allowing it by the social contract. With the +2/-2 it's a simple shrug and ok followed by "sure but plus two only brings your 6 to 8... And that still fails" or "sure that plus two brings your 14 to 16 and you barely squeak past the dc15 that you needed". However it adds up nobody feels like anyone's being unfair to them & the whole peer reviewed deep dive into equipment loadouts is averted.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But, more importantly -- if you are going to rely on saving throws, then the dice are telling you something about how the situation played out.

So are the rules. And if there's a CON save for that poison, that's something that should come after establishing that the poison was touched.

versus: The chest has been smeared with an almost imperceptible, deadly contact poison. Any creature touching it must make a saving throw versus poison or be killed instantly.

In the second example, i would suggest the result of the saving throw could potentially inform us about the presence and efficacy of gloves. Are the worn from battle and adventuring -- that makes sense if they failed their save despite wearing gloves.

Didn't you tag this thread "5E", not 1E or 2E? If so, what on earth is a "saving throw vs. poison"? I'm guessing this means a CON save but...

I could see this case being made for the approach to saves in 1E/2E. It's not perfect, but I kinda see it because those saves so extremely abstracted.

For 3E and onwards? Nah. I can't see it at all. I could see maybe some kind of separate, novel saving throw or check added in for what you're describing, basically a "luck save", before we move on to the CON save. This is how a lot of saves work in wargames.

As a DM, I'm never going to say a player did a thing they didn't say they did. I might like, get them to be very detailed, and walk themselves straight into the problem, but, I don't think there's any need to go further.

I mean, players are idiots already. Even smart players are idiots. No-one is going to convince me otherwise when 34 years of experience and every single podcast, YouTube, and story about players (going well back into the '80s) supports this. You don't need to gotcha them. You don't need to revise what is going on contrary to what they're saying. You didn't get them that time? They'll get themselves in 10 minutes dude.

This is what I don't get about a lot of the people rushing to get in the gotcha here. Why? Who does it really help? You're going to get them real good sooner or later. Okay they wore gloves this time, noted, that's why use a poison needle trap, not contact poison.

(As a total aside, long-lasting contact poison is just a really dumb and implausible idea generally. Virtually every kind of slimy medium which could hold a poison is going to either dry up, slide off, evaporate, or all of the above, within like, hours to days. And if you want the trap to be magic, just say it's magic, don't try and sell me on a non-magical goo that does none of those things! I basically never use it because it's so implausible. I don't like traps that make no sense at all, and that couldn't last. Any trap that's finicky or fancy like this would need maintenance. There'd probably need to be a kobold round every 24 hours to re-paint the poison on it, and there'd be signs of that and so on. I always think every part of a trap's lifecycle through.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think the above points refute this statement enough without further comment.

I don't agree at all lol, and I think you've singularly failed to refute them. All you've done is come up with scenarios not described. We're dealing with a slimy contact poison specifically.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean I think we can all agree the 5E equipment list is maybe the single worst equipment list D&D has ever seen.

The first serious homebrew I ever did for 5e involved heavily modifying the gear list.

 

[Voadam]

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.

So from the setup we don't know if they were fiddling with mechanisms on the chest or just lifting a chest lid open.

Taking gloves off to fiddle with mechanisms can be reasonable. Not taking gloves off to lift the lid of a chest is also reasonable.

All we have here is the DM assumes the PC is not wearing gloves and narrates as such, and the PC interrupts to ask about gloves as part of their traveller's clothes that they are wearing. Which the PHB does not define to that level of detail.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I agree that it is one the design flaws in the game. These things are not spelled out and left to the DM or player to come up with why or how people make saves. The barbarian could be fast taking off his gloves, or only started to touch it before pulling away and saying, "I must have missed the Perception check to notice this stuff on the chest." He could say that his PC is like Wolverine and he pushes out the poison. He could pull a Hulk and yell at the poison to back off.

All silly, but there is no mechanics to figure all it out. Most of the time, I do not describe what happens on a save or a missed attack unless the players gets into it. We just move on.

Sure, but @Reynard has now upped the stakes to "instant death".

I think it requires a bit more than shrug-and-move-on as an approach to the saving throw.

 

[Alzrius]

I am flabbergasted that you don't see a clear distinction between "This is what I do" and "Okay, this is what happens."

This entire thread is predicated on that distinction being unclear. It's very often the source of such disagreements with regard to "but that's not what my character did/would have done," which is an argument over agency, even if it's being used to try and avoid consequences.

Presuming the game has a mechanical thing called alignment that is defined as being determined by the actions of the PC, then forcing an alignment change (again, mechanically) is not a violation of player agency any more than the player having to suffer the effects of a cursed backbighter because they weren't careful about picking up magic spears.

And yet being able to define a character's moral/ethical outlook is self-evidently one of the most fundamental aspects of a player having agency over their character (i.e. it goes to the heart of them saying who their character is). Likewise, the aspects of what constitutes an alignment, let alone changing it, aren't mechanically delineated (though I've seen plenty of third-party supplements try to do just that), hence why there are so many arguments about what constitutes an act being in accordance/violation of a given alignment.

That said, changing an aspect of a character against the player's wishes strikes me as being a violation of their agency, even when that violation is well-earned and supported by the game rules. "Violating the player's agency of their character" isn't a definition that only applies when done wrongfully on the DM's part; it's baked into the game rules at various aspects of play, hence why you can't call a PC failing a save against a fear spell "an exception."

A lot of these discussions about agency you are bringing up is what I call "wheedling." The player isn't worried about their character's free will, they are worried about suffering the consequences for their actions.

Sure, but that makes them no less germane to what we're talking about. There are times when it's both right and expected for the GM to override a player's control regarding their character, which to my mind is necessarily an aspect of violating their agency, and that's understood as being part of the central premise of the game. Slicing that between "consequences" and some other distinction (which I think you're making with regard to "wrongful" violations in that regard) strikes me as being artificial in nature.

 

[Celebrim]

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

I don't. I ask, "What does your character sheet say you are wearing?", and if I can't find some definite evidence of gloves then they aren't wearing gloves. Simple as that.

Because your objection is really pathetic, because if I can't tell the player that their PC is not wearing gloves then I also can't tell the player that they are not wearing gloves, in which case we are reduced to a Schrodinger's fiction where the PC is or is not wearing gloves only after they find out whether or not it would be useful to be wearing gloves.

Gloves are a basic medieval essential.

You won't be able to sustain that with evidence either from manuscripts or paintings. As a matter of actual evidence, the medieval didn't paint themselves ubiquitously wearing gloves. You are now well into the rules lawyering stage.

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.

So now you are at the rules lawyering stage where you are arguing since the rules don't support you, the evidence on your character sheet doesn't support you, and the evidence of history doesn't support you, that the rules are wrong and you are appealing to "common sense". Only, if the consequences of wearing the gloves were negative and it was the DM arguing that his common sense told you that you were wearing glove, you'd be vigorously citing how the absence of gloves on your character sheet, the absence of gloves in the rules, and the fact the medieval painted peasants working in the fields without gloves to be evidence your character wasn't wearing gloves.

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!"

I'm not even going to count the logical fallacies in that, it's such an absurd argument.

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.

Basically we just have a player here that is waiting for you to disclose metagame information before they decide what they are wearing. As has been previously discussed, there are processes of play you as a DM can use to get around a player doing that, but fundamentally the issue is that even if the DM hasn't been clever and this issue has taken them by surprised, at the point that they imagine the scene with the player not wearing gloves the player must have some positive evidence of the gloves before they can demand as drastic of an action as a retcon.

Players often have very specific visions of what their character is doing that is not necessarily expressed...

The <insert profanity of your choice here> they do. The player typically if they have a specific vision of what their character is doing expresses it. Much more typically, the player begins by offering a rules proposition like, "I check for traps" or "I search the room", with absolutely nothing like a concrete idea what that looks like because they are engaging with the rules and not with the fiction. And most of the time that's often sufficient to adjudicate the scene which is why DMs let it pass and why players get in the habit of not concretely imagining things like what they are holding in their hands (leading to the ubiquitous problem of all PCs having five arms), or what they are doing with their hands. It's really rare that you have any player who imagines things like, "Well, since I have a sword in one hand and a lantern in the other, I sheath my sword before walking over to the desk and opening the top left drawer, holding the lantern up so as to get good light." It's only when prompted by something that they start trying to reify the situation.

, 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.

None of which has a thing to do with what is on your character sheet, nor am I going to listen to an argument that requires me to count the number of fictional portrayals of characters with or without gloves. Again, in this situation the character is wearing a suit of normal clothing that does not explicitly mention gloves. Therefore, the GM is perfectly valid in thinking that gloves are not present or that if gloves are present they are knitted or fingerless or otherwise not intended to provide physical protection. If you thought gloves were so important, you'd have written "kid skin gloves (worn)" or "heavy leather work gloves (worn)" on your character sheet. There is nothing gotcha about adjudicating the situation using the most concrete information that the DM has available. And a gotcha GM wouldn't design the trap this way. A gotcha GM would have a curse that went off if you touched the chest while wearing gloves and/or boots, because the chest was a sacred reliquary that required the clergy to open it unshod and with bare hands.

 

[Charlaquin]

In 39 years of playing this game, I've not once had someone describe their normal clothing bought out of the book as having gloves. They will either specify that they want gloves for some RP reason, or the armor comes with it. I have several times had players try to make up reasons for why they shouldn't have to make the saving throw. It's a natural reaction to bad stuff happening.

Traveling gear would not come with gloves, so they don't have gloves unless they tell me they have them or they automatically and explicitly come with what they are wearing.

Why would traveling gear not come with gloves? That’s incredibly standard outdoor equipment.