D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[Bae'zel]

Dragonborn don't exist in my game so if someone wanted to play one I'd ask why. Is it cultural and identification with dragons? Then you come from a culture that reveres dragons. I'd probably also consider something about having a dragon patron, although the dragon may not have shown up for a century because dragons sometimes take really long naps in my world.

Mechanical benefits? Some individuals from that group are considered Dragon Blessed, and from a young age undergo supernatural rituals to gain all the benefits of a dragonborn. Perhaps they gain some some minor features or just use cosmetics but they are still identifiably as the same species as the rest of their group.

That to me is compromise. They aren't dragonborn because those don't exist. They're human (or whatever species you want from my list) but have been chosen to be imbued with the best features of a dragon. Of course they have to forego the normal benefits they normally would have received. There would be more details of course and we'd have to discuss lore but that's all campaign specific.

I like this approach, and I suggested something similar to my players once. Most liked it, but one person really just wanted to be a lizard-dragon person. They were disappointed and changed their mind, going with a different character concept. Oh well.

 

[AlViking]

I like this approach, and I suggested something similar to my players once. Most liked it, but one person really just wanted to be a lizard-dragon person. They were disappointed and changed their mind, going with a different character concept. Oh well.

I got the same reaction when I did the tortle. A tortle in everything but name but it still wasn't good enough because it was tortle or nothing.

Funny thing is I've offered this to my players since 3e and only one person has ever even wanted to discuss it as an option. It worked fine, had some fun twists that I could add to the ongoing story and we all enjoyed it. I don't understand the obsession with one specific vision and that specific vision only.

 

[Remathilis]

Mechanical benefits? Some individuals from that group are considered Dragon Blessed, and from a young age undergo supernatural rituals to gain all the benefits of a dragonborn. Perhaps they gain some some minor features or just use cosmetics but they are still identifiably as the same species as the rest of their group.

So something like the Original, 3e version of Dragonborn?

I start as a human, am part of a special magical ritual where I'm blessed by the Dragon God and gain draconic elements (scales, claws, horns) to my appearance as well as the regular Dragonborn species traits?

That's fair.

 

[AlViking]

I was going to ignore this and didn't want to respond right away because it's a pretty pointless argument but I wanted to set the record straight.

Serious with a small sprinkle of snark.

Let's review where this conversation stemmed.

Let's review what was actually said.

A poster declared that in his game a tabaxi would be lynched by locals who think he is related to a raksasha. Another poster made a comment that if they went to lynch him, they would burn the village down. Which lead to another poster stating in his game, both that powerful agents of the government would hunt that PCs down for the arson and presumably murder, and that locals would shun them and sent armies to stop them. My retort was that immediately the world somehow instantly knows it's the PCs who did it and the world reacted in concert to punish them. Which is what lead to a series of questions:

While I didn't give a detailed response to the first post which was a single sentence, I've clarified what I would do in my home campaign which you are ignoring. I would base any response to burning down a village on several factors. I should also note that I don't care why the village was burned down and I assume that not ever single individual from the toothless grandmother to the newborn baby residing in the village is responsible for the lynching.

1. How did the knowledge get out. Somehow, one or more people witnessed the event and were cognizant enough to gather the PCs names and faces, and then spread the word far and wide faster than the PCs can travel. Do they use magic like sending?

Why not? Magic exists and it would be logical for someone important in the village to have a sending stone to contact someone else in case of emergency or vice versa. If it wasn't magic, when the PCs started burning the village did they kill everyone in the vicinity and there's no chance of someone escaping? If so, how? Unless the PCs have a small army of hirelings, I see no way they could have stopped everyone.

2. When the word comes out, it's automatically believed. By peasants and lords alike. Does the adventurers not have a reputation? Have they not earned and good will saving other villagers or helping the local Lord? (I guess not, considering a village was willing to lynch a member for his species.) Why would they believe it was a group of adventurers and not local raiders (goblins or orcs or gnolls)? We have plenty of examples of someone being accused (creditably) of a crime and people refusing to believe it because they have a good opinion of that person, for good or ill.

Unless the group somehow massacred everyone in the village, everyone working in the fields, everyone who could possibly know what happened, why would people would let others know what happened. Why wouldn't it be believed? Traders stop by the town and see the smoking ruins and ask what happens - survivors tell them what they saw would be one logical way for the word to spread. Communities are connected by ties of family, friendship, culture.

I grew up in a small town and there was a bank robbery before I was born. Several people were able to give detailed descriptions of the robbers and their vehicle because everybody knew everybody and strangers stick out like a sore thumb.

3. Once the PCs are declared guilty by the community, all stops are removed to punish them. Armies, powerful NPCs from the government, etc make it their job to hunt them down. Where were these people when the PCs were wandering around doing adventures? Why are the suddenly available to hunt down the PCs when they weren't there to stop goblin raids or fight dragons or whatever the adventures were doing prior to the lynching? If they are powerful and civic minded, why aren't they arresting the BBEG?

I clarified my response on this because I wasn't clear in my initial one line response. Depends on the details of where the village is, what the local government it like, what the resources are. Word will likely spread and I'll judge the response based on that. Best case scenario for the PCs is that people are likely to recognize them as murderers or at least with suspicion - after all how many heavily armed small groups are running around the countryside? Depending on the area there may be wanted posters or the government may hire someone to track the group down and bring them to justice.

There are a lot of factors here and variance but it wouldn't be unreasonable for things to escalate to the point where a small army is hunting down the PCs. They may be powerful but I'm not going to limit the response to what I think the PCs can handle, I'm going to make the response fit the crime and the region. It could be anything from getting a bad reputation to being forced to pay a weregild (GP paid in compensation for the crime), jail, being hunted down, nothing at all. It will always be something that I judge logical for the crime and the region.

What players can't do in my game is assume that their actions have no consequences or that the consequences of their actions will always be something they can handle.

My reason for this of course is that the crime had a witness: the DM. The PCs are guilty of disrupting the campaign. First by playing the tabaxi who is hated and feared and second by retaliating against them in a destructive manner. The DM saw. The DM judged. The DM found them guilty and now the world in unified whole will carry out the sentence. And will do so until the DM feels justice is served. The crime cannot go unpunished and space and time will bend to make sure justice is served.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with disrupting the campaign. It's called having a living world that reacts and responds logically to the player's decisions. While it's only happened a couple of times and the players had plenty of warning of probable consequences, characters in my campaign have been hunted down tried for murder and even executed because they thought they could ignore the laws and get away with whatever they wanted. They have quite a bit of leeway most of the time but there are limits.

Player decisions change the course of campaigns all the time but they still live in a world where they can't assume they an get away with whatever they want to do.

It's a tale as old as time. The more a DM has invested in his world as an extension of himself, the more likely the world is going to act as one to punish the player who dared touch it without consent. And it's my experience that the more not focused the DMs vision is, the more severe the punishment for players who upset the vision.

Same old accusation that has is not true now and has never been true.

 

[TiQuinn]

It has nothing whatsoever to do with disrupting the campaign. It's called having a living world that reacts and responds logically to the player's decisions. While it's only happened a couple of times and the players had plenty of warning of probable consequences, characters in my campaign have been hunted down tried for murder and even executed because they thought they could ignore the laws and get away with whatever they wanted. They have quite a bit of leeway most of the time but there are limits.

Let me ask this: when this happened in your campaign, was this acceptable to those players after you told them that you thought their actions would end up resulting in them being pursued for murder and possibly executed?

Did they want that outcome to be the arc for their PCs, and it was mutually agreed that was how they wanted their character’s story to end?

 

[Maxperson]

The only orcs shown in the movie are enemy soldiers. In most war movies hostile combatants are depicted in the same way. Are they “always evil”?

What do you mean by “purely evil”? Evil is defined by actions, ergo if a being has not done anything, they cannot be evil.

Evil is also defined by intent, which while we out here can't judge it as we aren't mind readers, a setting cosmology based around alignment can.

 

[Maxperson]

While I didn't give a detailed response to the first post which was a single sentence, I've clarified what I would do in my home campaign which you are ignoring. I would base any response to burning down a village on several factors. I should also note that I don't care why the village was burned down and I assume that not ever single individual from the toothless grandmother to the newborn baby residing in the village is responsible for the lynching.

Yeah. I got the response that the Tabaxi would be acting in self-defense and almost responded with...

1) What you just said about all of them not being responsible, yet the whole village killed.
2) The Tabaxi might be considered a monster, which would mean the mob would be the ones acting in self-defense as far as the law is concerned.
3) Any Tabaxi capable of massacring an entire village is also capable of getting away without killing anyone, so the murder is a choice and not self-defense in any case.

...but really didn't want to get into that argument.

Actions have consequences and the consequences described in these posts are not an attempt by the DM at punishing the player as has been incorrectly claimed here.

 

[AlViking]

Let me ask this: when this happened in your campaign, was this acceptable to those players after you told them that you thought their actions would end up resulting in them being pursued for murder and possibly executed?

Did they want that outcome to be the arc for their PCs, and it was mutually agreed that was how they wanted their character’s story to end?

The scenario was pretty straightforward. The player's character was a kleptomaniac and stole something even though they knew they were being carefully watched. They ran for it and I rolled to see if there was a guard and if they could stop the PC which they did. That should have been the end of it - pay a fine and be walked out of town - but instead the character stabbed the guard. Things escalated, another guard arrived, there was a chase scene and the character was arrested.

I let the player know how I ran the game so they were fine with it. Sadly, they decided their next character was also a kleptomaniac and tried to steal a chest from an orcish encampment where it was clear they were way outnumbered. The chest was trapped with a shrieker, the character was caught (he tried to drag the extremely heavy chest away instead of running) and unfortunately only one character survived when they tried to rescue their companion. It didn't help that this was early on in 3e and when one of the players that ran to the rescue triggered double attacks of opportunity and I rolled double crits that did 4x damage or something ridiculous.

The next character the player wrote up was not a kleptomaniac, the wizard that survived by running away became the leader of the new group and the campaign continued on for another year or two. As far as what they wanted for their character arc? I will work with players to see if we can make character arcs work, safety is not guaranteed.

There have probably been a couple other incidents over the decades like the player who decided to fireball a store because he didn't like a deal he had made. I didn't really play that one out because the party was pretty aghast at what he had done.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeah. I got the response that the Tabaxi would be acting in self-defense and almost responded with...

1) What you just said about all of them not being responsible, yet the whole village killed.
2) The Tabaxi might be considered a monster, which would mean the mob would be the ones acting in self-defense as far as the law is concerned.
3) Any Tabaxi capable of massacring an entire village is also capable of getting away without killing anyone, so the murder is a choice and not self-defense in any case.

...but really didn't want to get into that argument.

Actions have consequences and the consequences described in these posts are not an attempt by the DM at punishing the player as has been incorrectly claimed here.

No it's a solid point. Not only that it's pretty much one that pretty much came up earlier with actual gameplay example the gm expected to kill off by level 5. More than once that character waled into town in chains or stacked high with the results of "everyone give me your pack to carry like I'm an important hireling".

Sometimes working with the gm to fit the setting means that you own the identity the setting expects and spend a lot of the PC's effort making it look clear that your PC is one of the rare exceptions that is important to the party of adventures often capable of depopulating the town it's entering.

 

[TiQuinn]

The scenario was pretty straightforward. The player's character was a kleptomaniac and stole something even though they knew they were being carefully watched. They ran for it and I rolled to see if there was a guard and if they could stop the PC which they did. That should have been the end of it - pay a fine and be walked out of town - but instead the character stabbed the guard. Things escalated, another guard arrived, there was a chase scene and the character was arrested.

I let the player know how I ran the game so they were fine with it. Sadly, they decided their next character was also a kleptomaniac and tried to steal a chest from an orcish encampment where it was clear they were way outnumbered. The chest was trapped with a shrieker, the character was caught (he tried to drag the extremely heavy chest away instead of running) and unfortunately only one character survived when they tried to rescue their companion. It didn't help that this was early on in 3e and when one of the players that ran to the rescue triggered double attacks of opportunity and I rolled double crits that did 4x damage or something ridiculous.

The next character the player wrote up was not a kleptomaniac, the wizard that survived by running away became the leader of the new group and the campaign continued on for another year or two. As far as what they wanted for their character arc? I will work with players to see if we can make character arcs work, safety is not guaranteed.

There have probably been a couple other incidents over the decades like the player who decided to fireball a store because he didn't like a deal he had made. I didn't really play that one out because the party was pretty aghast at what he had done.

Man, I read this post and I’m not sure how it sounds to you in your head as you’re typing it out but I’m hearing someone who either doesn’t like this player or doesn’t like this player’s character.

“Sadly, they decided their next character was a kleptomaniac”

This reads as a very judgmental approach to viewing other people’s characters. For years, the rogue was a thief. Thieves in D&D steal things. Is that really being a kleptomaniac? Why does that judgement have to come into your campaign at all?

Like, how am I to believe that you run your table without a predetermined position about how you’re going to treat PCs?