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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 6851331" data-attributes="member: 6778044">That sounds like they weren't to me. Kind of like "Meanwhile back at the ranch."This, to me, sounds like it would take a close examination to recognize they are not part of the set. The ranger did not examine them in this fashion.Again, I don't see any mention of runes on the gauntlets. Just that they were "made to look like part of the full set though the iconagraphy seemed different." I don't think he described it during the combat, and if they look as similar to the set as it sounds to me, it would not be noticeable in combat.He does state:but his description of the armor and gauntlets does not support this statement.Nothing here indicates he unbundles it, and my description of how one might bundle a suit of armor using rope is very plausible to me as to why the gauntlets, or at least the ring, is not readily visible. He notices the ring, not the gauntlets.I disagree. By my reading of the posts, the ranger did not know about the gauntlets or ring. It also appears that the player didn't know either. A player/character that doesn't know of something important won't be on the lookout for it. With an entire suit of armor bundled up with rope, it won't necessarily be obvious either. My suggestion that the DM made a mistake by not requiring a skill check of some sort was more for the ranger to detect the attempt at deception rather than noticing the ring itself. Jumping into a burning tree is something that is in-your-face and cannot be missed. A ring, on the finger of one gauntlet in a bundle of pieces of armor might be entirely missed. In an early thread about hiding (specifically about the halfling ability to repeatedly hide behind an ally), I had originally said that it was absurd that a halfling could repeatedly disappear. Once Mike Mearles suggested that after a couple of attempts, the Hide attempts would probably be with disadvantage, or the Perception checks with advantage, I got it. There's a possibility that the smith might be able to pull one over on the players. That possibility should have been determined by a die roll, possibly in secret, and possibly against a passive Perception. But it should have been made, and the possibility of this happening (since there have been many explanations as to how it could have happened) is reasonable. Should there have been more description? Well, I don't really know. Short of a video or audio of the game, we really can't ever know exactly what was said. Ask any police officer who deals with witness accounts. But I don't really care, we can still have a meaningful discussion about whether the scenario is reasonable, and how best to adjudicate such a scenario if you decide that it's reasonable for your campaign.Well, every event that happens may or may not be interesting. I don't see how the "verge of coming to an end" has anything to do with it. If your trips to sell loot is simply fluff to make it seem like you're doing more than asking the DM "how much do I get for it?" without the possibility of other things happening, then they are always very uninteresting.So, while I have responded to the posts about whether or not it's reasonable to consider a set of armor to include the gauntlets (I think it is, and that's also how they are described in the rules), that's not why I think the DM was fine here. My opinion is based on the chain of events, which happened to the characters, not just the players:1. The ranger never examined the armor himself.2. The barbarian never indicated that he was separating the gauntlets from the rest of the armor, nor did he or the monk tell the ranger to check them out at the magic shop. More importantly, the ranger went to the magic shop both before and after the smith. When he went after, he asked to have each individual item checked, but did not ask about the gauntlets then either. Obviously he had no idea that they had a pair of potentially magical gauntlets, or a ring. Nobody else caught it or questioned it either.3. It's clear that the DM allows his players to listen in on events that doesn't involve their characters directly (like the description of the gauntlets and ring), and also allows his players to chime in when their characters are not there (when they reminded him they didn't have money and should go to the smith first). The failure is not the ranger alone. It's the whole table who had multiple opportunities to mention that they were intending to keep the gauntlets.Because the player was not paying enough attention to know about the gauntlets, combined with the in-game sequence of events, I think it's extremely reasonable to consider that the character (ranger) just did not know about the gauntlets, and therefore was not paying attention when the smith was examining them. You seem to think that it's wrong that the ring could be partially or wholly concealed while bundled up, and others have said that the smith would have "laid the pieces out on the counter." But the assumption that the smith did something that wasn't described in detail is the same as the assumption that the ranger would not have done something he didn't want to. The game is based around the DM and the players describing the action.Is it possible that the DM didn't describe the scene well enough? Sure. But he also described the gauntlets in detail at least twice, and had a conversation answering questions one of those times. The fact that the player with the ranger didn't seem to have any idea that the gauntlets were potentially magical is a bigger failure on his part by not paying attention.In your example with the pit, if I describe the pit in detail to the table twice, and you don't pay attention to it and you still walk into it, should I stop you? Why? At what point should the player take responsibility and say, "Hey, I wasn't paying attention. My bad."?So I'm back to the only mistake I see that would have made it more fair would be to tie the examination and the question about whether he's selling all of it to one or more die rolls. The purpose of interaction type skill checks is specifically to determine whether the character picks up on little social cues and such. To a group that apparently has difficulty paying attention, the subtle clue may not have been enough. And I don't mean that it wasn't enough to give it away. It just wasn't enough to make them question what they were doing. Which is why a skill check would have been a better choice. I don't know how often he gives subtle clues, and how often they pick up on them. Is it an absolute "fail" because he didn't? No, it was a long time before skill checks were used at all for these types of encounters, and a great many people still don't use them. But in this case I think they should have been used, and that the DM can learn from this to use them in similar situations. Plus he mentions that he didn't think of providing a skill check, which is a miss on his part, but an honest one.Again, it doesn't say he bundled them up in front of the ranger. And it also says he reminded the barbarian of the gauntlets when he bundled them up:Saying that he bundles the armor up with rope is fairly specific, rather than a "table norm" which would probably be more general like "I take the armor." None of my reasoning is metagame. It's based on the actions of the characters, although the actions of the players themselves, and what they remember (and don't) supports that position as well.I also don't think he imposed any new standard. It's quite possible that the PCs had never run into a situation where they failed to keep track of something. So it may be that the "rule" wasn't clear. Without knowing how they generally keep track of stuff, that's hard to tell.If it was me, as soon as they asked about the gauntlets, I would have asked, "did anybody tell the ranger to investigate them?" "Did anybody separate them from the bundle with the rest of the suit of armor?"The concept of what constitutes a set may have been been different among them, but that's where the rules, which specify that chain mail and plate armor include gauntlets, along with the fact that you can't buy them separately comes into play. They might not like that they didn't know that, but it's right there.Also I think it's pretty clear that he was not motivated to be vindictive:From what he's written it seems very clear that he thinks they should keep track of their stuff. That's it. He does talk about not liking how they (for the most part one player) is always on their phone. But he says that this isn't a retaliation for that. Also, his standard is also that they keep track of their stuff. As he states, no issues have occurred in the past. But I don't think this is really an issue with them keeping track of their stuff entirely. To me it's more of a player communication issue. The barbarian thought the ranger knew what was going on. He didn't. It also sounds like they had more than one friendly discussion about it. So I don't think that the DM won't allow them to question him.</blockquote>

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