iserith
Magic Wordsmith
I leave that to the readers to decide and to frame their points with or without that assumption as needed.
D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?
Ok. But it is actually relevant to the question of whether the player was right to say "I'm wearing gloves" as a defense. This might have been the first instance of contact poison, but if this was ongoing dungeoneering, the nature of the relationship between GM and players was surely already established. To whit: if this is a game about going in holes and trying to come out alive with loot, my response is best summed up as "Write down gloves next time."
TheSword
Legend
This sounds very much like you’re just being assertive and not very convincingly. Leather absolutely is a fabric for instance.
In my experience leather isn’t waterproof (the interweb agrees) and even things that are waterproof often don’t stay waterproof when they come into contact with chemicals… like say a contact poison which is designed to permeate skin (which is essentially what leather is).
I think you’re approaching this from the wrong angle though.
[Edit: realized I was replying to a comment many pages back. Boy this thread moved fast!]
Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
As I stated, any DM who accepts such an argument from a player has ONLY themselves to blame for letting their own bad judgement destroy their own game. Hey, if the DM wants battlemechs in their D&D - I believe that's like Warhammer, right? Go for it. Game on and be happy. But, "Gauntlets and gloves don't exist because they're not listed for sale?" "My PC has everything I SAY they have because I want it that way at the moment?" Good luck with that as DM OR player.
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
It is the obligation of the player though to record their equipment on their character sheet regardless. So I'm not sure it really changes the calculation at all here. This contact poison might just have easily been on something in a noble's bedroom in a heist scenario as a classic dungeon crawl. As long as the DM reasonably telegraphs the threat, then we're not really in gotcha territory, and the player can be mistaken as to traveler's clothes having gloves in either scenario.
hawkeyefan
Legend
Doesn’t the fact that boots were actually on the equipment list in AD&D make it at least a little bit different?
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Small-clothes are assumed to be included with any clothing kit. If they want to add the secret pockets, that's up to them.Do you have underwear on your characters' equipment lists (with secret pockets sewn into them), or do your characters go commando?
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Yeah, I've gone that route; and while I've found a fair number of images that very much suited characters past and present, there's still a bunch of characters for whom I either have to accept something that's only very vaguely in resemblance, or can't find a thing.
This probably isn't helped by the fact that my Hobbits and the modern D&D Halflings don't look at all like each other, and there's very few pieces of Gnome art out there that aren't silly. Oh, and there's not all that many pictures of Elves that don't have mainsails for ears - I keep having to search for Half-Elves in order to find decent Elf portraits (and have found some good ones!) but they often look too Human.
There also seems to be a penchant these days for portraying Fighters of all species as either covered in tattoos or covered in scars, neither of which is appealing.
Celebrim
Legend
Not in terms of resolution. At most, it just reduces the number of times I have to make assumptions about what the shoes are like. But there is typically in D&D a notable lack of rules concerning what clothing actually means or how it helps. How much of a difference does high hard boots make versus low soft boots anyway? Things like that I've been dealing with for 40 years.
Fortunately, most players make it easy be dressing appropriately for style reasons. But imagine in any edition how you deal with someone who wears leather armor or elven chain, but insists on wearing a closed great helm, heavy leather gauntlets, and high hard steel toed boots. That's the sort of thing you have to think about when DMing if players are going to insist gear matters.
Almost everyone in the thread has focused heavily on how the gloves/boots or whatever are inherently an advantage. And they just aren't if you are playing a more general skill-based game with a variety of challenges. You'd probably be happier barefoot on wet flowstone than you would be in a hard soled boot. Low boots fill with mud and become worse than being barefoot. High hard boots are hard to be stealthy in no matter what clothing you are wearing, etc. Which is one reason why the sudden appearance of hitherto unmentioned gloves is so awkward, because even if you did have gloves there is absolutely no guarantee that they'd be useful in this situation or that they wouldn't have been worse than useless hitherto in all the situations prior to this.
Another signal to me here is the assumption that you don't have to record gear very much assumes you don't play in a science fiction setting where often gear acts like magic items except that its fairly cheap and readily available. If you let players call out "I got that" in a setting were science is sufficiently close to magic, they would literally always have the solution to everything all the time unless you put some limits on things. (Heaven help me when my players figure out that they can buy makers that make other things in setting, which I'm surprised they haven't realized given how much most of them enjoy playing with 3D printers.)
Now, you don't have to use a process of play where gear matters to the resolution of the game, but as soon as the player goes, "But poison can't effect me, I have on gloves!" you have a player insisting that we have a process of play where gear matters (with some cause, it's not wrong to call out gear especially if you are leaning more toward game as simulation).
Fundamentally, it's the players responsibility in pretty much every system I'm aware of to call* on their gear as part of the proposition. Even in a Nar game without explicit gear, useful gear needs to be called on before you get to a resolution or fortune step - how you use your gear to gain extra dice, how your profession might apply to this check. Then the GM can rule on that. Wheedling the DM in retrospect because you didn't make a call is always bad play, even if it was an honest mistake. (Which 9 times out of 10 it isn't.)
*Call: To mention pertinent aspects of the fiction especially those that pertain to your character when making a proposition to ensure the DM makes the right decision because you both have the same mental image.
Failure to call is like a DM that describes a room, fails to mention the gaping hole in the middle of it, and then tells a player he's fallen into the obvious pit because he offered a proposition that implied crossing the room. That's not the player's fault. "Oh, didn't I tell you, there is a gargantuan dragon snoring in the room. You should have assumed that even though I didn't mention it. It wakes up and attacks". Everyone recognizes that's a problem. Well, this guy with his unestablished gloves that aren't on his character sheet and he claims he assumed he was wearing because "Traveller's Gear" is doing the same thing, and it's not the GMs burden to fix that. This whole situation goes differently if the player just asks, "What sort of gloves came with my Traveller's Gear?" Do that first, and you might just get gloves. Do that afterwards, and you don't.
There is such a thing as good play by players as well.
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...and half of them will be labeled Rouge.
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