Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7879237" data-attributes="member: 18">Don't they though? I've been running 5E for a few years now and a couple of the players still regularly get confused about whether spells automatically provoke attacks of opportunity. Adding to the confusion, one of them has Mage Slayer and the other doesn't. Ranged attacks not provoking also still causes confusion, albeit less. I've also seen confusion about how two-weapon fighting works.The biggest "ugh forgot that rule" in 5E though is clearly concentration, and honestly, come 6E, it needs to be thrown on the trash-heap of history. I forget about it. The players forget about it. We have to look it up when we do remember, and it feels almost unfair to enforce it, because I think we forget about it slightly more often than we actually remember it!Hit dice are the next on the list for forgettable-ness. The players regularly entirely forget they have them, or forget they can spend them on short rests, and even I forget that you only get half back on a long rest until I re-read the rules fairly recently.The problem is two-fold here though:1. A lot of us play in games where players do actually ask for Advantage/Disadvantage for other reasons than just the main mechanical ones, so we know that it absolutely can happen, and if there's a reason it isn't happening, it's most likely to be down to some kind of dynamic with the DM.2. And the dynamic it's most likely to be is indeed most likely to be a variant on "Mother may I?" simply because of the SPECIFIC situation involved. This isn't something you can shrug off as people being mean or "labeling" or whatever. This is a very specific scenario - essentially players are having to come to the DM to ask for Advantage/Disadvantage - that leads directly to putting the weight of the issue mostly on the DM, one way or another.You say it's "often not the case" that the problem is down to the DM/"Mother may I?", but I don't think that's really true, unless "often" means like, 20%, which I guess it could. I would say with this specific issue (not all issues, this specific one), easily the vast majority of cases will be down to one of two basic things:1) The DM is just not prone to handing out Advantage for doing cool stuff, or really anything that doesn't specify it in the rules. That's fine, but it is on the DM there.2) The players aren't even thinking to ask about it, not because the DM is averse to it, but because they haven't even considered it as a possibility. That's still on the DM to a significant extent, because he is in a position to communicate that they can do this.Interestingly, I play with another DM who is much keener than I on handing out Advantage for cool stunts and so on, and I can see the other players who are in both our games respond to that. People will say "Do I get Advantage for this?" but I usually only hand it out when there's a clear, um, advantage ("You can't win, Anakin. I have the high ground!") whereas he will if it's just plain cool enough (which is awesome), and so that strengthens my feeling that this is on the DM.</blockquote>

Verification