D&D 5E When a rule is clear but leads to illogical efffects

[Ath-kethin]

So we have all seen, ad nauseum, discussions of situations where vague or non-specific rules can make rulings challenging or complicated (how do characters with the Alert feat react to invisible creatures who are standing motionless?). But something that came up in my game last night that called attention to a different kind of issue: rules that are clear but don't necessarily make logical sense.

Specifically, the party rogue was attacked by a swarm of spiders. He poisoned his weapon and attacked the swarm the same as he would any other foe (he is using a subclass form the Primeval Thule Player's Companion that applies poison to his weapon as a bonus action). He hit and rolled his weapon damage (which was cut in half because of the swarm's resistance). He also rolled his poison damage, which was not reduced because the swarm is not immune or resistant to poison damage. Additionally, the swarm failed its saving throw and therefore suffered from the poisoned condition.

There is no ambiguity over how any part of the encounter should function by the RAW. But basically, the rogue killed dozens or hundreds of tiny spiders, crawling on his body, with the swipe of a poisoned sword. Those who survived the blow were somehow very sick. A round or so later, his brother the barbarian killed the last of them by striking them (again, the tiny spiders crawling all over the rogue) with a morningstar.

Truly, this is a fantasy roleplaying game.

Anybody run into any similar experiences?

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[iserith]

I can't tell if it's the poisoning of the spiders or the killing of them while on the body of another PC without harming said PC is the thing that bothers you. As to the first, it seems reasonable to me that poison works on spiders. As to the latter, nothing in the rules requires describing the spiders as crawling on the PC's body. They just occupy the same space.

 

[Werebat]

I think it's really a problem with 5E simplifying swarms to the point of silliness.

 

[ccs]

Well, swarms aren't immune to poison here in real life. I've got a can of RAID on the basement shelf that's been very effective vs swarms of yellow jackets & wasps.
Some fell out of the sky dead (failed save obviously). Others survived bur were definitely affected (I guess they passed the save & only took 1/2?). The ongoing effect took care of those "survivors" a round or two later....

Your rogue just has an odd dilivery system for his poison - slinging it over them bubble-wand style....

Now the barbarian crushing enough of them with a morning star as they swarm over the rogue?
I guess that could happen, but I can't imagine it'd be good for the rogue.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[ThePolarBear]

Also, "dead" for a swarm - and for any creature, really - mustn't really need to mean dead. A swarm could disperse, creatures hit by the blade might be so sick that are unable to move coherently and no longer be a threat. Said spiders could very well be feasting on the bodies of their fallen poisoned comrades or be sickly because the little sploshes of poison on the ground affects them when crawling trough them.

Rationalization? Pretty much. It's also quite possible that while the mechanical effect of the swing are those described, the spiders dead from said swings are exaclty 0 in the fiction while the bodies of the fallen are made via stomping and squishing.

It is quite surprising when you look at how an action would work in real life, but that action does not need to be described strictly as what the action implies most directly.

Instead of swinging the sword, the sword was used vigorously "patting" the poisoned sides of the blade on the body of the rogue, crawling with spiders, leaving a noxious remain on the dress, sickening most of those not killed outright and still climbing. Poisoned flyswatter (well, spiderswatter) blade!

... And yes, it happens all the time, expecially when you play with very very very improvisation prone people

 

[Oofta]

As others have said, "killing" a swarm just means that you've done enough damage that the swarm goes away. I also don't see why poisons would not work on spiders.

Narrating exactly how the swarm is getting smashed? That's a bit weird. The rogue is using the flat of his blade, the barbarian is brushing them off (ala Indiana Jones wiping the spiders off the back of the woman in one of his movies) and then smashing or stomping on them.

What's really odd is the elven ranger firing an arrow in such a way as to damage swarms. That is just weird.

But the issue is, how could you change the rule to be better and more fun? If you want to have swarms in your game, you need some way of defeating them.

I've debated options and honestly I've never come up with a better option. If you say that they can only be killed by area effect, then at lower levels non-magic users can use flasks of alchemist fire or acid but at higher levels it's ineffective.

For example

• swarms are immune to piercing
• resistant to slashing and attacks have disadvantage as people use the flat of their blades
• resistant to bludgeoning
• if you miss the swarm with an attack, risk hitting any person caught in the swarm
• you can take an action to brush the swarm off yourself or someone else

Is that better? More fun? Maybe, and it would be fine as a house rule. But it's also more complex and I'm not sure it's adding enough to the game to make it worth while.

 

[Celebrim]

Swarms were given more realistic rules in 3e. The result of realism however is that swarms become very difficult for martial combatants to deal with, while being reasonably trivial for arcane spellcasters to deal with. Later editions have wanted to try to balance the game without assumptions about party composition, reduce the number of finicky exceptions to the rules, and as a result the rules for swarms in 5e are clear and balanced but have poor verisimilitude.

In 3e for examples, swarms of fine sized creatures ('tiny spiders') were flat out immune to weapon damage. As a result, you couldn't fight them with a sword or a morningstar, much less poison them with one. A rogue swinging a poisoned blade might kill a few dozen or a few score spiders, but doing so would cause no meaningful harm to a swarm since it was assumed to be composed of thousands of individuals. Each 'hit point' of the swarm might represent hundreds or even thousands of individuals. In order to effect a swarm meaningfully, you had to come up with some sort of area of effect attack - such as flaming hands or a hurling a bottle of flaming oil.

While it is true that a swarm in 3e is destroyed when it disperses, and so in general, a 'dead' swarm might still have hundreds of living (but no longer swarming) members, this fact doesn't help us with verisimilitude at all. We still are going to have problems of believability with dispersing swarms of 10's of thousands of tiny bugs by patting them with a weapon. The implications of coloring the attacks as believably dispersing the swarm remain absurd and remain disassociated from the mechanism in the fiction. For example, mechanically, a morningstar is more effective as a 'fly swatter' for smashing large numbers of spiders in 5e if it is sharper and pointier. But if you actually imagine this in the fiction, it becomes clear that a sharper and pointer morningstar is the last thing you'd want to use to scrape spiders off of your threatened comrade. Meanwhile, if you tried to devise a more effective tool with the terms of the fiction - say a spatula or a frying pan - mechanically as a tool that does less damage than a Morningstar, it would be less effective at killing spiders and no more likely to accidently harm your comrade.

This shows us the inherent problem with trying to solve mechanics disassociated from fiction by coloring the fiction to make them associated. Instead of associating the fiction, we tend to actually just raise more questions. If for example we try to color the poison damage as the thief smearing poison on his clothing, causing the spiders to become poisoned, should not the thief then ask why the poison does not do continuous cumulative damage from round to round? It's not like the spiders would be carefully wiping off all the poison. Could not the thief simply pour the poison himself or on the ground to be even more effective? And is the thief actually now risking poisoning himself with his own poisoned clothing? In short, these sorts of handwaves of the fictional positioning to justify the mechanics are only really effective if you aren't prioritizing the fiction over the rules in the first place.

This leads us to an important observation. Using the very same rules set, we expect to find two very different types of tables playing very different games.

Table #1 sees the fiction has having priority, and tries to use the rules to adjudicate what happens next based on the fictional positioning and the players proposition. This table considers the fiction to be firm but the rules to be flexible. Propositions are given in terms of what the player sees his character doing, and the rule that best fits that proposition is chosen as the means of resolution.

Table #2 sees the rules as having priority, and tries to use the ambiguity of fictional positioning to justify what happens next. This table considers the rules to be firm, but the fiction to be flexible. Propositions are given in terms of the rules, and then the fiction that best fits the rules is chosen as the means of resolution.

I consider this proof of Celebrim's Second Law of Roleplaying, "How you prepare to play the game and how you think about the game is more important than the rules."

The question then is, how do you choose to respond to edge cases like this?

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*