D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Voadam]

D&D 4e has a Fortitude defense which a poison attacks. A saving throw in D&D 4e would be something you roll at the end of your turn to end an effect a save can end such as ongoing poison damage.

That is correct. It has been a while so the 4e shifted terminology from saving throws to defenses and then using the term saving throw as a separate recovery mechanic was not front of mind.

 

[Reynard]

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.

I don't agree that the GM needs to include taking control of a character to adjudicate and describe the outcome of a die roll. If the PCs actions trigger that trap and the saving throw determines the outcome, the GM's job is to describe how the game state changes. "You failed your save so you take X poison damage/are poisoned/whatever." And if the GM really feels the need to get flowery, there are any number of solutions that require the GM to force the PC to take an action. The easiest of course is "the poison seeps through your gloves" because as we have established, the gloves, they do nothing.

"Reginald the Rogue heard the locking mechanism click open and exhaled. Consumed for a moment in relief, he wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. He looked at his glove, still slimy with poison, and opened his mouth to swear but it was too late." That's perfectly fine for a novel, but you aren't writing a novel.

If you really need more frosting on that cake, ask the player to give it to you. "Oops, looks like despite your precautions to ended up touching the poison. How did that happen?" "Crap -- I guess maybe I wasn't thinking and wiped a bead of sweat from my brow mid pick-lock." "Cool."

 

[Reynard]

So, tangent question for the DMs in this thread:

Would you allow the PCs to passively ignore traps and hazards purely through mundane means? (Not through magic or class features or even luck.) This thread presents the example of wearing ordinary gloves to automatically defeat contact poison traps, but I'm sure there are others.

Sure, if it makes sense in the fiction. In the example of the pit trap in the hallway, if some paranoid player always carried a 12 foot ladder with him and crawled across that ever 10 feet down the hall -- that would be horribly tedious but it would be out of bounds to still make them make that pit trap save.

Or, saying they are going to fight a medusa and the party decides to bag their heads before going in. It would be silly to just give them advantage. As long as the game state remained "heads in cloth bags" there would be no need for a saving throw. (This is different than "I avert/close my eyes", IMO.)

 

[iserith]

So, tangent question for the DMs in this thread:

Would you allow the PCs to passively ignore traps and hazards purely through mundane means? (Not through magic or class features or even luck.) This thread presents the example of wearing ordinary gloves to automatically defeat contact poison traps, but I'm sure there are others.

Yes, of course, whenever it made sense.

 

[tetrasodium]

So, tangent question for the DMs in this thread:

Would you allow the PCs to passively ignore traps and hazards purely through mundane means? (Not through magic or class features or even luck.) This thread presents the example of wearing ordinary gloves to automatically defeat contact poison traps, but I'm sure there are others.

I'm not sure I understand the question but maybe? Here's an old post of mine detailing how my group actually handled a trap. Reynard's example of using a ladder & pit trap might be another example It would depend on the trap & if the bypass is some proactive thing or a retcon after it's discovered.

 

[Voadam]

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.

This kind of works in 4e where the poison mechanically abstractly makes an attack and requires some narration to make sense.

In 5e this is not the situation.

The contact poison requires contact with exposed skin. If the player comes up with ways to not contact the poison then there is no roll.

I think the DM would be fine with a non-skin touch contact not triggering a save at all. If the unarmored mage used a mage hand to contact the chest, no issue, no save. I don't think most DMs would come up with a narrative reason that the mage hand splashed some contact poison on the mage no matter what just to get in a roll so that the poison save comes into play.

The issue here is the undetermined nature of the relevant detail, gloves or no gloves for exposed skin contact.

You could do a 4e style roll first then narrate, but that takes things out of order for the 5e mechanics and presentation and feels artificial, particularly when the DM was giving clues about the chest for players to skilled play off of.

 

[Celebrim]

So, tangent question for the DMs in this thread:

Would you allow the PCs to passively ignore traps and hazards purely through mundane means? (Not through magic or class features or even luck.) This thread presents the example of wearing ordinary gloves to automatically defeat contact poison traps, but I'm sure there are others.

I've already been down several 20+ page arguments about this, but well, obviously - yes.

The rules only exist to help me simulate a shared imagined reality. They don't cover remotely everything the players can propose to do. If the players propose to do something that logically mitigates a trap, then it is mitigated. For example, if there is a sensitive pressure plate trap then a character that is probing ahead by leaning on a 10' pole will likely activate the trap. If the trap is one that doesn't hit more than a 5' area around the pressure plate, then the trap would be discharged harmlessly. Even if the trap resets itself, the trap could be marked in outline by a piece of chalk allowing it to be easily bypassed. None of this really requires a skill check. It's "so easy a kid could do it" sort of things.

A perhaps better question is how you would possibly prevent players from doing things like this without ending any illusion that players have any agency.

 

[Alzrius]

I don't agree that the GM needs to include taking control of a character to adjudicate and describe the outcome of a die roll. If the PCs actions trigger that trap and the saving throw determines the outcome, the GM's job is to describe how the game state changes. "You failed your save so you take X poison damage/are poisoned/whatever." And if the GM really feels the need to get flowery, there are any number of solutions that require the GM to force the PC to take an action. The easiest of course is "the poison seeps through your gloves" because as we have established, the gloves, they do nothing.

"Reginald the Rogue heard the locking mechanism click open and exhaled. Consumed for a moment in relief, he wiped the beads of sweat from his brow. He looked at his glove, still slimy with poison, and opened his mouth to swear but it was too late." That's perfectly fine for a novel, but you aren't writing a novel.

If you really need more frosting on that cake, ask the player to give it to you. "Oops, looks like despite your precautions to ended up touching the poison. How did that happen?" "Crap -- I guess maybe I wasn't thinking and wiped a bead of sweat from my brow mid pick-lock." "Cool."

Again, this isn't a question of "need." I think that the scenario described above (in my previous post) works just fine, even if it doesn't "need" to be that way. There's room on the player's part for understanding that, in having failed his roll, he's going to be exposed to the poison. I suppose there's room for debating who should craft the specifics of the scenario (if they care to; plenty of groups don't feel the need to spell out how everything happens from an in-character standpoint), but I don't see it as being any sort of serious abrogation of the table's social contract for the DM to describe some mishap on the PC's part which makes that happen.

And the story of Reginald the Rogue works just fine for the game-table as it does the novel. Quite frankly, while it's a little flowery, that would work just fine for any DM adjudication of what happened when a PC fails a roll. Because, as some other people have put forward, sometimes the gloves do in fact do something, so something else must happen to get the contact poison onto his skin, because that's what the dice say happened. In that regard, the DM saying it was the PC's fault strikes me as being entirely legitimate, particularly since it strains the imagination how else it could have happened.

Quite frankly, making allowances for the fact that sometimes the DM will violate a player's agency strikes me as being the basis for trust around the table. Wielding that level of authority in a manner that's fair, in accordance with what everyone thinks of as "fair," is a far higher bar to meet than simply telling them never to cross a particular line. I think that making allowances for the idea that sometimes the DM is supposed to narrate what your character does, particularly for when it's an outcome you don't want to happen but which the game's events have mandated will happen, is an important part of what the DM brings to the table.

This kind of works in 4e where the poison mechanically abstractly makes an attack and requires some narration to make sense.

In 5e this is not the situation.

The contact poison requires contact with exposed skin. If the player comes up with ways to not contact the poison then there is no roll.

I think the DM would be fine with a non-skin touch contact not triggering a save at all.

Sure, the DM could absolutely make that call. But by that same token if they can see a way that the PC conceivably could be exposed to the poison (in a manner that everyone at the table considers plausible, rather than vindictive; for the purposes of this particular debate, we all seem to agree that's the case), then it can absolutely go the other way. If the PC is fiddling with the chest with gloves, then even leaving aside the issue of whether or not it can seep through them, there's room to understand that that alone doesn't necessarily obviate the entire issue of being poisoned.

 

[Voadam]

So, tangent question for the DMs in this thread:

Would you allow the PCs to passively ignore traps and hazards purely through mundane means? (Not through magic or class features or even luck.) This thread presents the example of wearing ordinary gloves to automatically defeat contact poison traps, but I'm sure there are others.

Of course.

An open pit is an invitation to figure a way across safely, magically or mundanely. It can be as simple as going down a different safe corridor to get past it. Convincing a kobold to show you the safe route that avoids all the traps does not necessarily require class features or specific magic, though both could also be used.

 

[iserith]

Sure, the DM could absolutely make that call. But by that same token if they can see a way that the PC conceivably could be exposed to the poison (in a manner that everyone at the table considers plausible, rather than vindictive; for the purposes of this particular debate, we all seem to agree that's the case), then it can absolutely go the other way. If the PC is fiddling with the chest with gloves, then even leaving aside the issue of whether or not it can seep through them, there's room to understand that that alone doesn't necessarily obviate the entire issue of being poisoned.

There's a pretty big difference between the DM telling a player their character now has a greasy substance on their gloves, perhaps asking what if anything they do about that, and the DM saying that the character rubs their eye or picks their nose and now must make a saving throw due to contact poison. In the former case, the DM is narrating the result of the adventurer's action of touching the chest with a gloved hand. In the latter case, they are further describing what the character is doing, which is outside of the role of DM. The DM controls most of the game - do they really need to control the character, too?