D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Lakesidefantasy]

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.

Do you have underwear on your characters' equipment lists (with secret pockets sewn into them), or do your characters go commando?

 

[iserith]

Looking back


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.

I think you're misreading the situation somehow, but trying to parse your posts is difficult sometimes, so I can't pinpoint exactly where you may be going awry. The player is portrayed as believing the gloves make them safe from whatever it is they touched on the chest, so they raised their existence when the DM called for the Con save. The player is acting within their role. It would have been better perhaps if they said "I put on my gloves before I touch the chest," but the player may have simply believed the gloves were always on.

Where the DM would be stepping outside of their role is, as some suggest, the DM agrees the player has gloves, but presses on with the saving throw anyway because the roll will determine whether the character rubbed their eyes or picked their nose or whatever. That is the DM establishing what the character is doing which is not in the DM's role.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

I think you're misreading the situation somehow, but trying to parse your posts is difficult sometimes, so I can't pinpoint exactly where you may be going awry. The player is portrayed as believing the gloves make them safe from whatever it is they touched on the chest, so they raised their existence when the DM called for the Con save. The player is acting within their role. It would have been better perhaps if they said "I put on my gloves before I touch the chest," but the player may have simply believed the gloves were always on.

Where the DM would be stepping outside of their role is, as some suggest, the DM agrees the player has gloves, but presses on with the saving throw anyway because the roll will determine whether the character rubbed their eyes or picked their nose or whatever. That is the DM establishing what the character is doing which is not in the DM's role.

There are a million thing or characters do that we don't expressly narrate. How could we?

When is the last time your character went to the bathroom? For my characters, the answer is whenever they want to, I'm not going to keep track of that minutia. And, if the Dungeon Master says a snake bites my character in the ass while in the Jon, then so be it.

 

[J.Quondam]

Interacting is interacting to me. I dont differentiate a pit trip, poison dart, contact poison, etc.. If you trigger it it happens. Yes, you always get a chance to spot before hand and you get the save afterwards.

Yeah. To my mind, the gloves issue is basically a red herring. The procedure for a trap is something like :

1. Detect - This opportunity to notice the poison was covered by "telegraphing" in the OP, but also might ave been expressed by search, passive perception, etc.; possibly followed up by some careful inspection (eg, Investigation or magic or whatever) to discern the precise nature of the "greasy substance."
2. Disarm/Bypass - This is the point where the PC, having successfully detected the poison, tries to circumvent it. This is when the player decides on how their PC will attempt to safely open the chest. A player might mention gloves, a spell, rinsing off the chest, and/or whatever. Depending, GM might impose some rolls for success; or just decide "Sure, sounds good."
3. Trigger - If the Disarm was successful, then no poison was transferred to exposed skin. If Detect or Disarm were unsuccessful, then the poison got on exposed skin.
4. Effect - roll Con save versus poison.

Point is, the discussion about gloves would happen during the Disarm stage, not at the Effect stage. But in this scenario, there was no Disarm phase because the Detection (telegraphing) apparently failed and the procedure skipped straight to Trigger. So as GM, I'd personally operate on the assumption that, because the Trigger for a contact poison is "touches exposed skin", then that is exactly what happened, the PC's clothing notwithstanding. It's up to the player and GM to determine how/why that happened in the context of the fiction.

I just don't see a need to add any more complication relating to undefined features of incidental PC equipment, when the basic procedure seems to be enough. For this specific case, tbh, it seems like the bigger issue is just that the Detect stage of the trap was somehow missed.

 

[iserith]

There are a million thing or characters do that we don't expressly narrate. How could we?

When is the last time your character went to the bathroom? For my characters, the answer is whenever they want to, I'm not going to keep track of that minutia. And, if the Dungeon Master says a snake bites my character in the ass while in the Jon, then so be it.

I would say that for the purposes of this snakebite scene, the player would have to agree that their character was in the outhouse or whatever before the scene can play out. The DM can certainly propose it though and see if the player okay with that. This would all be in the DM's role. If they're not, no big deal - the DM can have it happen in some other situation the player puts the character in.

As I said upthread, plenty of DMs are happy to describe what the characters are doing, and many players are happy to let them. Until they're not. This situation is not only easily avoided by just staying within your particular role, but best avoided in my view.

 

[Quickleaf]

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 don't think the problem is coming from the player or the GM. Player's assertion is completely reasonable. DM wanting rules clarification is completely reasonable.

The problem is how contact poisons are handled in D&D adventures – typically an object in a dungeon is smeared with contact poison (exactly like your chest example). Any sensible adventurer is going to wear gloves in a dangerous dungeon environment. Duh. So the contact poison (as typically presented) becomes a non-threat..... unless the contact poison rubs off on something or there's enough of it to seep through gloves..... but in most cases a non-threat.

Adventures using contact poisons as a legitimate threat to PCs need to do one or several of the following:

• Incentivize removing gloves during exploration. For example, maybe the secret passages in this dungeon are only detectable through slight changes in stonework of the walls, like a dwarven or mindflayer braille writing system that can only be read by touching bare-handed.
• Present situations where there is a risk of losing/damaging gear like your gloves. For example, rope burn during a fall tearing through the glove's palm/fingers.
• Present situations where the wearing of thick leather gloves would impact the difficulty of the situation. For example, picking a lock or even social situations where thick leather gloves are a faux pas.
• Get clever about where the contact poison is applied and the situations it is applied to. For example, contact poisoning the inside of a set of gloves/gauntlets, contact poisoning a ring, contact poisoning thieves' tools or other delicate instruments, contact poisoning the floor of an area where there's a riddle whose answer is "barefoot before the gods", etc.

 

[iserith]

I don't think the problem is coming from the player or the GM. Player's assertion is completely reasonable. DM wanting rules clarification is completely reasonable.

The problem is how contact poisons are handled in D&D adventures – typically an object in a dungeon is smeared with contact poison (exactly like your chest example). Any sensible adventurer is going to wear gloves in a dangerous dungeon environment. Duh. So the contact poison (as typically presented) becomes a non-threat..... unless the contact poison rubs off on something or there's enough of it to seep through gloves..... but in most cases a non-threat.

The question seems to be how much are we willing to assume about a character's sensibility and how much should be left to the player's skill as part of playing the game? How often is it just okay to say "Well I would have done X because I'm an adventurer in a dangerous dungeon environment" when you didn't declare it? Each group will have to work that out for themselves.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'm not familiar with "infinite dragons," but I think that kind of determination is more than "just" getting some damage on the PC.

It's the idea that there's no point for the DM to 'try' to kill the players because they have infinite dragons to do it with.

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.

That's why I like rules instead of rulings. Rulings tend to be terrible.

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.

Pretty much. And then they tried to go back to the thing that didn't work.

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.

This is why I hate niche protection so much. Oh good, I suck at this important aspect fo the game so a class no one in the party is playing can shine. Goodie.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Fun fact!

It turns out gloves didn't exist in my system either!

Now both traveler's and cold weather clothes have them explicitly and the RP section mentions accessorizing.

 

[Quickleaf]

The question seems to be how much are we willing to assume about a character's sensibility and how much should be left to the player's skill as part of playing the game? How often is it just okay to say "Well I would have done X because I'm an adventurer in a dangerous dungeon environment" when you didn't declare it? Each group will have to work that out for themselves.

Yeah, I get what you're driving at. My response is still: "GMs and adventure writers, level up your work. Rely less on cheap gimmicks. Design harder. Do this, and many of these 'basic logistics' questions fade into the background – rather than becoming needless points of contention – and when they do come up they're actually interesting moments, rather than being a ho-hum string of gotchas."