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

[Swarmkeeper]

How would I have handled it: I probably would’ve said with the alarm raised, and guards likely on their way, you’re going to have to make a choice: get away now without anything which would be easy to do, try to steal a little something from the chest which is harder but certainly doable, or try to take the whole chest, which is going to be a really hard roll for you. Now they could be caught but the outcome of that for me would still not necessarily be death - there’s still possibilities for escape; but the story at that point is you’re captured. Maybe you feel you did all of that. I’m just saying to me, it doesn’t read that way.

This is similar to how I'd run it, too, in 5e but would just describe the situation:

"The alarm raised, anyone in the vicinity of the large tent is now alerted to someone opening the chest. Indeed some members of the war band can be heard yelling not too far away and heavy booted footsteps can be heard coming your way. What would you like to do?"

I'd then let the player come up with how they would choose to handle the situation.

If I heard any of those options from the player, I'd ask for ability checks and give the DCs accordingly:

Flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth), DC 10
Grab some loot, then try to flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth), DC 15
Try to drag the whole chest out of there without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth), DC 25 at disadvantage due to the shrieker

Or maybe it would be a series of opposed checks:
Flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth) with advantage versus Wisdom(Perception)
Grab some loot, then try to flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth) versus Wisdom(Perception) with advantage
Try to drag the whole chest out of there without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth) with disadvantage versus Wisdom(Perception) with advantage

The player could choose a different tactic if they didn't like their odds. Given the incomplete ability to communicate perfectly, I don't play "no take backs" - the DCs are simply a reflection of the character's ability to assess the in-game-world difficultly of what goal they are hoping to accomplish.

Fail the check, the PC is spotted and the war band members tell the thief to "Stop and drop to the ground". What do you do now?

No jumping to death or capture quite yet. Maybe there's a chase. Maybe some parlay. The scene has changed and it's really in the player's hands to decide how to proceed.

Meanwhile, back the rest of the party so we are spreading the spotlight around...


@AlViking , do you remember how you ran the showdown with the thief and the orcs
in terms of rolls?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

And just as dead if you killed them to save another. If what is in your heart doesn't matter, killing to save another is just as bad as 1st degree murder

That reason, not intent. Not the same thing. If you kill to defend someone else, and that person does not die as a consequence, it doesn’t matter if you intended to do it or not.

 

[Maxperson]

That reason, not intent. Not the same thing.

Doesn't change anything. If only the act of killing matters and nothing else around it affects things, then the act of killing to save another is just as evil as 1st degree murder.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Doesn't change anything. If only the act of killing matters and nothing else around it affects things, then the act of killing to save another is just as evil as 1st degree murder.

It’s not “the act of killing” that is evil. But nor is the intent to kill - or the intent to not kill. Both of those are irrelevant. It whether the general weal is increased or decreased by the act that matters. And sometimes the general weal is increased when certain people are removed from the world, intentionally or not.

 

[Maxperson]

It’s not “the act of killing” that is evil. But nor is the intent to kill - or the intent to not kill. Both of those are irrelevant. It whether the general weal is increased or decreased by the act that matters. And sometimes the general weal is increased when certain people are removed from the world, intentionally or not.

Where's the objective measure of that? It sounds like you're saying that if I randomly walk up and shoot someone in back of the head, and it turns out to be a big time murderous gangster and drug dealer, it's a good act because the world was made a better place with him gone.

What if I do that and the person is secretly beating and molesting his children, such that you and the rest of the world doesn't know it was made a better place by my randomly shooting the guy in back of the head?

It's the intent that matters. The intent is what colors the action to be good, neutral, or evil.

 

[tetrasodium]

I think what @Thomas Shey is referring to is what my players often do, which is create a home village, including several of the NPCs and their roles in the village, as well as some relationships. Not just, "I came from a village with no name."

.... He could be but creating several NPCs and "a village" are different things. The phb does not give significant latitude to players wanting to create significant NON-Player Characters. From there it goes back to the bolded bits from my earlier post quoted below

I've rightly told players that they can't add "a village" or similar that they suggested simply because something about the village did not fit the region or was already basically the same as the one they wanted to add except the existing one was already tied to the world. Usually if the player doesn't care enough to go further than something like "a village" I'll suggest some existing places or offer to let them leave it blank and pick one for them when it comes up.

In those cases I declined the creation of "a village" I just didn't see any justification to weave into creation for no reason other than to extend the orphan sprung from Zeus's head trope of isolation one additional level

You could replace that underlined bit with NPCs if those are the thing a player is trying to create. A player wanting to add some NPCs they are related to or whatever is not out of the question, but it requires discussion and the gm might know of better places to put them than "a village" or even feel that having them in a nearby village would be unreasonable, those are all things that need discussion not mentioned and are not simply "a village"

 

[Scott Christian]

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.

Again, trying not to bait the whole alignment argument. However, orcs in the LOtR movies are evil. They are depicted as evil through their actions. They follow a leader who is evil incarnate. And they are explicitly designed to look evil. So go ahead and compare them to whatever you want, but your comparison is not analogous.

Just accept that the designers of the LotR movies wanted them evil. It's okay to admit that one creator wanted them one way, yet another creator (say Elder Scrolls or WoW) wanted them another. There is nothing wrong with that.

I'm hardly alone in that, and anyone who comes into this from Elder Scrolls or Warcraft is going to have similar thoughts. Given Skyrim's many releases and especially that one time they accidentally ripped off an existing module to try to do a Skyrim introduction RPG, its going to be far more common as time goes on.

I didn't say you were alone. I didn't say the majority don't share the views. I didn't say the tide hasn't changed like a King's Tide in the way people view orcs. I didn't say any of that. That is not what I claimed. Here is what I claimed:

Like I said, alignment discussion aside, you find it to be unacceptable for orcs to non-playable races. It doesn't matter what year we're in. You find it unacceptable. But for someone to say, "No, they're evil," has nothing to do with the era we're in, yet has everything to do with the way the DM expresses and explains it.

Then here is the claim in the same response bolded:

Which is why I specifically said the movies. Which, in truth, is much more widely known than the actual orcs in the books. And if we accept that, then we understand that a different setting doesn't have any trouble with orcs being "purely evil."

You are 100% correct in your assumption most don't view orcs that way. It does not make it wrong for a DM to have a world that does view them the same way the LotR movies does.

 

[AlViking]

This is similar to how I'd run it, too, in 5e but would just describe the situation:

"The alarm raised, anyone in the vicinity of the large tent is now alerted to someone opening the chest. Indeed some members of the war band can be heard yelling not too far away and heavy booted footsteps can be heard coming your way. What would you like to do?"

I'd then let the player come up with how they would choose to handle the situation.

If I heard any of those options from the player, I'd ask for ability checks and give the DCs accordingly:

Flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth), DC 10
Grab some loot, then try to flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth), DC 15
Try to drag the whole chest out of there without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth), DC 25 at disadvantage due to the shrieker

Or maybe it would be a series of opposed checks:
Flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth) with advantage versus Wisdom(Perception)
Grab some loot, then try to flee without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth) versus Wisdom(Perception) with advantage
Try to drag the whole chest out of there without being seen: Dexterity(Stealth) with disadvantage versus Wisdom(Perception) with advantage

The player could choose a different tactic if they didn't like their odds. Given the incomplete ability to communicate perfectly, I don't play "no take backs" - the DCs are simply a reflection of the character's ability to assess the in-game-world difficultly of what goal they are hoping to accomplish.

Fail the check, the PC is spotted and the war band members tell the thief to "Stop and drop to the ground". What do you do now?

No jumping to death or capture quite yet. Maybe there's a chase. Maybe some parlay. The scene has changed and it's really in the player's hands to decide how to proceed.

Meanwhile, back the rest of the party so we are spreading the spotlight around...


@AlViking , do you remember how you ran the showdown with the thief and the orcs
in terms of rolls?

There weren't really any rolls because the character didn't attempt to flee the scene. They did have to sneak in without being noticed, but once they found the chest they opened it up the shrieker went off with the volume of a loud car alarm and then he tried to drag the chest away. Dragging in 3e meant you moved 5 feet a turn, it was destined to fail which I made that clear to the player.

If I was to do it today? Hmm. Kind of hard to say, the difficulty is that they didn't do anything to check for traps. The search and finding it would have only been a DC 10 or so, it was just push a board into the rounded chest lid blocking the light to the shrieker, I wouldn't have even asked for a disable traps. Getting away though is a bit trickier because it would have just been a mad dash out of the camp dodging orcs because the tent wasn't at the edge of the encampment. So it wouldn't so much have been a higher DC, all the orcs knew something was up. The more treasure they tried to grab the more checks it would have been and I didn't have the entire camp's warriors mapped out so there would have been a die roll to see how quickly someone got to the tent.

At that point it would kind of go into chase rules - perception checks to see what direction the orcs are coming from, acrobatics checks to dive over baskets or slip under a tent, possibly checks to collapse a tent on pursuers slowing them down. The DC probably would have been fairly low, in the range of 10-15 with a failure not necessarily meaning they were caught, just that they were cornered and the next check was more difficult unless they did something clever or help arrived. When I do these chases I keep track of successes and failures similar to the way 4e did it, just with a little more flexibility. Hopefully that answers the question.

But a lot of this was improvised on the spot. I knew about the chest and the shrieker but the war plans left out in the open was the real prize. If they did go for the chest, I expected them to check for traps first.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You are allowed to, but your example left out too many details that makes the gm for hire and simple fact that the gm is allowed to say no relevant.

No, I don't think it is, because the examples I hit made no distinction. They simply didn't want anyone adding things of any substance to their game at all. They considered it out fo bounds.

 

[tetrasodium]

No, I don't think it is, because the examples I hit made no distinction. They simply didn't want anyone adding things of any substance to their game at all. They considered it out fo bounds.

You skipped over the part where you explain why not making that distinction keeps the example conflict from implying default assumptions.


The fact that you make no distinction is why it implies the default assumption is that the gm should be viewed as a paid service provider unable to refuse to allow a player at their table and/or not allowed to say no to things players want added to the world