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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 8031622" data-attributes="member: 6787503">This thread reminded me of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaKuQN-qvW4&list=PLAljjRE9gIPTcH-tWUEXTr1xamqa9XIk3&index=6&t=0s" target="_blank">this video of the D&D Next R&D team playing Lich-Queen's Beloved</a>. At about 54 minutes in, Greg Bilsland decides to have his character Blammo jump from some ridiculous height based on the fact that he knows he can take 20d6 damage. It takes over a turn for him to fall all the way down, so it's probably around 1,000 feet. He survives the fall, but the DM, Rodney Thompson, asks him for a CON save which I assume he failed because he falls unconscious afterwards. It also reminded me of a situation in my current game that makes me sympathize with some of the posters here who object to the player's decision on the grounds of "metagaming". The party had found a group of creatures that I had described as asleep and had set up an ambush around them. One of the players declared that he was going to strike with his melee weapon, initiating combat. I described the creatures waking up and asked for Initiative. The player then asked if his attack was going to auto-crit if it hit because he was assuming that his target would have the Unconscious condition. I told him it would have if the target had still been asleep, but that it had woken up. The player actually ended up quitting the game because of this call.Now, whether anyone agrees with my call or not is beside the point of my reason for bringing this up, which is that what I found annoying about this exchange was that by declaring that his character was attacking a sleeping creature, it seems the player felt that he had invoked a particular mechanical resolution, and that even when I described that the state of the fiction had changed because the creature had woken up, the player felt that I was somehow bound to honor this invocation. The impression it gave me was that the fiction didn't matter to this player, and that instead of playing the game by having his PC interact with the fiction I had presented, he, as a player, was interacting primarily with the mechanics.I think this is similar in a way to how even though the OP is clearly not about a Christmas special themed campaign in which the barbarian is a half-bumble, and therefore just bounces, there seems to be an expectation on the player's part that by interacting directly with the hit point mechanics and essentially paying in hit points to overcome the obstacle of the chasm, there's no obligation on the part of the player to explain in the fiction how that's supposed to work out because he considers it sufficient to have interacted with the mechanics.</blockquote>

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