The practice they were referring to is not to start the narration of a result with "You." That way you can avoid ever saying "You do this or that, or you think yada yada."
It didn't sound that nuanced; I'd prefer to let them speak for themselves on that matter.
If they had abstracted it out to just contact instead of specifying contact with exposed skin there would be less invitation to focus on the exposed skin exposure.
4e just has a straight fortitude save for poison attacks, so the exact contact method can vary narratively and you can either say it always hits and the subject resists or not, or the save represents being hit or not and the poison just works.
Here RAW is highlighting the narrative exposed skin contact issue. A lot of the explanations for close to skin contact such as breathing it in after glove contact stirred it up would work better without that specific detail being the default guideline to work with.
Right, but there's room for sidestepping this issue if you hold (not unreasonably, I'd say) that the die roll takes all of that into account rather than gloves adding an additional layer of consideration, which leads back into the DM adjudicating that via narrating what the PC does.
If we take it as a given that a failed save indicates exposure to the poison, regardless of narrative factors, then it's incumbent on the DM to set up how that works. In which case, something to the effect of "you wipe away an errant bead of sweat" makes the issue of the gloves irrelevant, because the PC has touched their skin after their gloves hands touched the contact poison, transferring it from their glove to their face. To that end, the entire issue of the gloves becomes moot, and instead what happens is that the rules have been fleshed out with a narrative scenario which accurately connotes what the die roll indicated.
Arguing that this violates a PCs agency largely strikes me as being a non-issue in this instance, because if PCs are supposed to accept the consequences for their actions, that fits, even if the GM needs to flesh out what they did.
It appears that you think this is silly, so here is why I think it matters: players have conceptions for their characters in mind, and they very often play out more game in their heads than is apparent at the table. The GM determining how they act or react, or what their emotional state it, is a problem for those players that like to inhabit their characters.
It's not that I think this is silly, it's that I think asserting that level of agency (which strikes me as extreme) is ultimately detrimental to overall game-play. In the scenario that I described above in response to
@Voadam the issue of wearing gloves or not doesn't matter, because the die roll has determined the result already, which the PC has tacitly consented to via sitting down to play the game. Having the DM narrate that in the manner described above doesn't seem like a bridge too far to avoid the issues of whether or not gloves
should offer some level of additional protection as well as issues of whether or not said gloves are present and whose responsibility it is to raise awareness of them, even if it infringes on the player's agency.
A little compromise, in other words, goes a long way, and saying that anything which abrogates the player's agency in their character is
verboten strikes me as being a detriment to game-play, rather than abetting it.
