D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Lanefan]

It looks like you fundamentally distrust the player here then. I would see "I have gloves on" as no different than "I cast shield" when the orc hits you. The attack would have hit, but now it doesn't. Is shield a retcon?

If the player already knows whether the attack is a hit before casting Shield then yes, it's a retcon, which in my view makes it a terrible design. Ditto for anything else - including meta-currencies - that can alter die rolls/results after the fact.

If the player knows the attack is coming but does not yet know if it's a hit or miss when casting Shield, then all is cool.

Whether or not the character actually has gloves on would need to be worked out, since it's not explicit in the rules,

Indeed, whether gloves are actually being worn in the moment is the stickier bit to determine; if undeclared by the player up front I'd put this down to a die roll of some sort, separate from any save vs poison etc.

Determining whether the character has gloves available to wear, however, is much more easily sortable ahead of time.

 

[Celebrim]

That's fully within the player's role. Now it's a matter of figuring out if the player actually has this resource.

Ahh, OK. Yes, that is the essence of it. As I've said from the beginning, if there is actual evidence of gloves, then the DM is wrong and should retcon. If there is no evidence of gloves, then the DM is not wrong and the player should immediately drop their protest.

 

[iserith]

The thread exploded, so I'm skipping a lot of pages, but...

This changes my view of the initial question a bit. If it had been a contact poison on a chest in a dungeon, I would absolutely believe the character should have been wearing gloves. However a hatbox suggests an indoor setting, perhaps in a bedroom. In that case, I would not believe the character was wearing gloves if they were present in normal circumstances (perhaps at a party, and they're sneaking around the house).

On the other other hand, if the group is burgling a mansion in the middle of the night, wearing gloves might be believable again. However if that were the case, I'd also expect them to be wearing something other than standard traveling clothes; perhaps something like the "dark common clothes" mentioned in the Criminal background.

Overall, I'd have no problem believing the character had gloves, no matter what the outfit. The only question is whether it's believable for the character to be wearing gloves in whatever circumstances han finds hanself in. In most cases, this seems like it should be an easy call.

It may not matter to your point overall, but the situation in the adventure I was reading ("Kill Bargle" in Dungeon #150) and this hatbox appears in a closet in the ruins of Castle Mistamere (Area 6). I believe that the adventure is meant to be an expansion on the original adventure in the Basic set, though I don't have the Basic set to look at what's different.

 

[Lanefan]

What if we flipped the situation a bit... what if instead of contact poison, the trap was caltrops? Would anyone ask "do you have boots written on your character sheet?"

As my equipment list goes into details such as hard or soft boots, yes; I'd ask what they were wearing (if not already in armour that would by default include such), and hard boots would in this case provide benefits soft boots would not.

 

[Alzrius]

3e had the search skill which took a full round active action to search a 5x5 area. So no passive check as a default.

Also it only allows people to notice traps with a search DC of 20 or less unless they have a special ability like the rogue class to notice higher DC traps or the Dwarf stone stuff.

The default trap search DC is 20, but it can be bumped up by modifying the trap cost and possibly the CR.

Yeah, a lot of that was an attempt at niche protection, as I recall. The idea was that the rogue was supposed to be the skill monkey who had a lot of non-combat functionality. How well that worked is going to depend on how much people liked that idea, but I think in practice it was a source of more frustration than anything else. It ran counter to the current trend of trying to make a class simply be better at its role than other classes, as opposed to having those other classes be expressly worse at those things; a subtle distinction, but one that a lot of players seem cognizant of.

I don't find it valuable for the DM to be making this kind of determination just to get some damage in on the PC or keep the player from doing something. Infinite Dragons and all that.

I'm not familiar with "infinite dragons," but I think that kind of determination is more than "just" getting some damage on the PC. When you play under the auspices of "rulings, not rules," these kinds of things become de facto house rules, where the DM needs to anticipate unintended consequences. That can lead to a conservative mindset on the DM's part, and so it's understandable that they'd be less than permissive.

I'm reminded of an old anecdote (which I can't source) about how TSR once put out a survey asking how DMs felt about Basic D&D and Advanced D&D. They were shocked to find that more DMs found Basic D&D to be difficult to run, despite its relative lack of rules compared to AD&D. On further examination, it turned out that having fewer rules put more of a burden on the DM to adjudicate things; having the books do the proverbial heavy lifting was something that DMs appreciated.

What we have is that the DM telegraphed it, which could honestly mean everything from having the room full of ungloved skeletons to describing the chest as covered in a delicious-looking honey glaze.

3e is a big sinner here as half the time you had to have the right class to notice the trap at all, or you might be a class that isn't allowed to have such luxuries of skill points or a spot check. The barbarian is better off just licking ever surface they come into contact with while raging.

Well, as mentioned above, that struck me as an attempt at niche protection. You can say that it didn't work, but the attempt was at least understandable, even if the results were less than stellar. The barbarian wasn't supposed to be the guy whose critical eye discerned the cleverly-disguised trap. He was supposed to be the guy who powered through it, took the hit, and kept going.

 

[Lanefan]

Please don't make me touch the poison trap in front of all my friends.

You'd rather touch it in front of all your enemies?

 

[Celebrim]

What if we flipped the situation a bit... what if instead of contact poison, the trap was caltrops? Would anyone ask "do you have boots written on your character sheet?"

Doesn't really change anything. In 1e AD&D footwear was explicitly part of equipment and players were implicitly encouraged to pick the sort they preferred with the same sorts of considerations that they might pick gloves of different thicknesses and types. In later editions, footwear is generally implied by the sort of armor the player is wearing, or else it's explicit because it's on the character sheet and worn by the character ("Boots of Striding and Leaping", for example). In the case of the above scenario, "Travelling Clothes" explicitly list a sort of footwear as do other sorts of clothing kits.

As a DM, it would be up to me to define what sort of protection - if any - different types of footwear provided against caltrops, or green slime, or whatever, and conversely what sort of penalties applied to wearing soles that were thick and stiff enough to provide such protection if the character was in a situation where thick soled boots might be a disadvantage. If the character was unarmored and the sort of footwear he was wearing was vague, I'd generally not assume that it provided substantial protection from attacks of any sort including caltrops in very much the same way I'd assume it provided no substantial penalties.

 

[tetrasodium]

It looks like you fundamentally distrust the player here then. I would see "I have gloves on" as no different than "I cast shield" when the orc hits you. The attack would have hit, but now it doesn't. Is shield a retcon? Whether or not the character actually has gloves on would need to be worked out, since it's not explicit in the rules, but otherwise, the player isn't stepping out of their role.

no I'm saying that it does not matter if I trust them or not. The player took an action with their own character. The player was given a roll to check/save which the player failed.

The GM narrated the results of the action the player failed at. The GM is not "wanting to establish the player's character did something" & does not need to because the player chose to do it themselves when the player had their own character interacted with the chest.

What's next?... "Oh those caltrops couldn't have affected me because I imagine my character wearing geta"?

 

[iserith]

no I'm saying that it does not matter if I trust them or not. The player took an action with their own character. The player was given a roll to check/save which the player failed.

The situation as described doesn't have the player rolling. They raised the matter of gloves after the roll was called for, but before any roll took place. What are you referring to here?

 

[tetrasodium]

The situation as described doesn't have the player rolling. They raised the matter of gloves after the roll was called for, but before any roll took place. What are you referring to here?

Looking back

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 player chooses to interact with the chest. The player is told what happened and given details about the thing they are making a save for making it too late to retcon in butbutbuts. D&d is not like fate or something where you can spend some kind of resource to declare things into existence. "I would have stopped had I known there was a truck" doesn't change things while screeching towards a car crash because it's too late. Even with fate's declarations players & GM can't simply nosell something completely after it's presence has been established. D&D once had a subsystem that would have allowed this sort of retcon to function as something other than straight up nosell the poison that got "sufficient telegraphing" but that subsystem is not in 5e.