D&D 5E Was I in the wrong?

[Reflected_Shadows]

The reason you are wrong is because if the DM had re-framed for clarity during the point of sale, there would have been no confusion.

"Ah! You made a mistake!" Really? I am out of the game right now then. Better hope it wasn't me you depended on for snacks and drinks.

"We are here to play a game about fun and adventuring, not inventory and notekeeping and spreadsheeting. Furthermore, you DO NOT want us to be petty and pedantic, halting every turn to write an essay of "my intent is... my intent is also to not...." for every action."

It also doesn't matter if or when the DM reminded them - the DM "helped" in the wrong moment.

The right moment to have reminded them would be when the smith looks over the set. In that moment, you as the DM, have to make an adult choice. You can "teach a lesson" with a "Gotcha" - or, you can be a real man and let it slide. Unless you want your games full of debates and bickering and players who don't trust the DM because they are always waiting for the next "Gotcha", you let it slide. As for defining "The Set" and whether or not it includes the gauntlets - even asking this question certainly begs for trouble. It is just a cop-out justification.

 

[TheLoneRanger1979]

.....
"We are here to play a game about fun and adventuring, not inventory and notekeeping and spreadsheeting. Furthermore, you DO NOT want us to be petty and pedantic, halting every turn to write an essay of "my intent is... my intent is also to not...." for every action."

.....
The right moment to have reminded them would be when the smith looks over the set. In that moment, you as the DM, have to make an adult choice. You can "teach a lesson" with a "Gotcha" - or, you can be a real man and let it slide. Unless you want your games full of debates and bickering and players who don't trust the DM because they are always waiting for the next "Gotcha", you let it slide. As for defining "The Set" and whether or not it includes the gauntlets - even asking this question certainly begs for trouble. It is just a cop-out justification.

This.

Also, i think a simple "what is it that you want to sell me?" question by the blacksmith would have been enough to announce player intent. Or, "do you have any items to sell". And if the player said, "this armor", the smithy could have asked "what about the missing gauntlets"?

 

[Maxperson]

(As an exception: some posters seem to think that the ranger PC plonked down a sack of stuff and didn't remove the gauntlets or ring. In that case there is something occurring in the fiction that corresponds to the "precision wording" requirement that has been imposed. But this is what makes me ask whether or not the NPC purchaser had a ring of X-ray vision. If not, how did he see inside the sack without the ranger also getting to see?)

You don't need a ring of x-ray vision. Do this experiment. Take something and put it in a bag. Now take that bag, open it, and look inside while someone else across say a counter is standing there. That person will not be at an angle to look inside the back with you. A bag large enough to hold armor is also large enough for the blacksmith to reach inside and move things around to look at various pieces. Alternatively, he could have been removing pieces like vambraces, the breastplate, and so on and seen the gauntlets and ring inside the bag. Being shady, he would not have taken those out, but instead just asked the question he did.

 

[pemerton]

Take something and put it in a bag. Now take that bag, open it, and look inside while someone else across say a counter is standing there. That person will not be at an angle to look inside the back with you. A bag large enough to hold armor is also large enough for the blacksmith to reach inside and move things around to look at various pieces. Alternatively, he could have been removing pieces like vambraces, the breastplate, and so on and seen the gauntlets and ring inside the bag. Being shady, he would not have taken those out, but instead just asked the question he did.

So, to be clear: when the GM was running the player through this scene, although - as far as we can tell - there was never any description along the lines of the armour rummages through your bag and looks at various pieces without taking them out, that's what the player was supposed to imagine happening?

Or, alternatively, the whole armour set was out on the table, but for the gauntlets and ring still in the bag, yet the PC didn't notice that the bag had not been emptied? This is what the player was supposed to imagine?

Try this experiment: take a bag of stuff to a second-hand/bric-a-brac shop and offer it for sale. I think you will find that in the majority of cases (perhaps the overwhelming majority) the would-be purchaser will empty out the bag or take out the pieces and lay them out to inspect them.

I don't think the OP has ever actually stated what is supposed to have happened in the fiction such that the ranger missed the gauntlets and ring being sold. All the focus seems to have been on the semantics of various action descriptions ("bundling up" the armour and gauntlets/ring, saying "I sell the armour", etc). Your post-hoc accounts of how the scene might have played out so that the ranger never noticed what was going on further reinforce, to me, that the issue is nothing to do with a mistake by the players in engaging the fiction, and everything to do with the GM (perhaps unilaterally? that's less clear) imposing a "precision wording" requirement on action declaration which has nothing to do with the fiction at all, and leaves the fiction quite ambiguous and unexplained (the possibility of low-plausibility post hoc redescriptions notwithstanding).

EDIT: Your own post 482 is an instance of this. You focus entirely on the semantics of action declaration - and favour the GM's interpretation over the player's intended interpretation of those semantics, for reasons that aren't clear to me - but with no reasonable account of what actually took place in the fiction such that the purchaser was able to notice the valuable gauntlets and ring were there while the ranger PC did not.

 

[FrogReaver]

I could be wrong but the only time other than the players getting the loot that the dm claimed they were part of the set that was sold to the blacksmith was after the players first objected to them no longer possessing those items.

Maybe because they knew it was a set and intentionally bundled them as a set, then the DM REMINDED THEM of the ring and gauntlets being part of the set at a later time. Later on they sold the set that they knew prior to, and were reminded at least once prior to, contained the ring and gauntlets. If that isn't absent minded, absent minded doesn't exist.

The players screwed up not once, but twice and they lost out. That's on them.

 

[FrogReaver]

I could be wrong but the only time other than the players getting the loot that the dm claimed they were part of the set that was sold to the blacksmith was after the players first objected to them no longer possessing those items.

Double checked. They bundled them up as a set.

I'm fine with the set referring to all the armor pieces. I concede that point.

So what it comes down to is expectations. I tend to believe and play in a manner where part of the Dms job is to ensure the players are on the same page as their character. As such it would be a dm error in my games of the dm failed to make sure the player understood any information about the scene that his character did. (At the very least in my game dm needed to make sure player understood character recognized possibly magical gauntlets were present in the transaction). In my game if the dm wanted to deprive the character of such knowledge he would need to include in scene justifications for why the character wouldn't know.

Now in other games it's up to the player to remember the important details to avoid having their pcs doing dumb things. In this kind of a game it wouldn't be a dm error.

 

[Yardiff]

So which games are you talking about and how are they different from D&D?

 

[FrogReaver]

So which games are you talking about and how are they different from D&D?

i see what you did there. Good joke. Very amusing.

 

[Yardiff]

I was actually serious.

 

[FrogReaver]

I was actually serious.

Wow.