Or really, just the D&D Thief problem, where before the Thief, anyone could try to hide or open a lock, but once there was a class to do just that thing, a lot of people felt that meant non-Thieves couldn't even try.
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D&D (2024) Do you plan to adopt D&D5.5One2024Redux?
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
Aldarc
Legend
Sorry, but this is just the pot calling the kettle black. Maybe you should keep this in mind yourself. You are very much coming across as incredibly dismissive of people disagreeing with you in this thread.
Oofta
Legend
I've repeatedly stated that other ways of playing are fine and that I'm talking about my personal preferences. Yes, I have a strong opinion about what I want in my game.
I have never told anyone that if they don't play my way that they're playing wrong, that people are a railroading controlling DM and that if I were only creative enough that I could find a way to make it work. Meanwhile I've been told repeatedly that I'm just randomly shutting things down for no reason other than to ensure my players don't have fun.
We all have different approaches to the game and different preferences. I'm not an always say yes DM and I don't want one. If that doesn't work for you, then we're just not a good fit and that's not a negative reflection on either one of us.
DarkCrisis
Reeks of Jedi
Aside from adopting the new books, I may just start using D&D Beyond exclusively.
UngeheuerLich
Legend
Yes. I just had this in my 5e Zeitgeist game... one player said, we don't have a rogue to disarm and find traps...
I looked at him and said: anyone can find traps and try to disarm them... but we also have an artificer who is especially good at it.
I think that it's worth extending the spotlight to cover shenanigans that allowing it would create.Yeah, I'm going to call shenanigans on a fighter(or any other PC) knowing the natural frequencies of every ooze they come across, and how to apply just the right amount of force to set up a resonance.
I'll stick with my ruling of not being able to prone a thing that has no up, down, left or right.
People keep raising increasingly tenuous what if examples of how someone could gain the benefit of using "trip" on an ooze, but I think that most of us can 100% agree that it would immediately return to being trip rather than some kind of stir splatter or frequency based supernatural ability the instant they want to trip a humanoid on a narrow plank/spotty rope bridge over a thousand foot drop.
Also holy crap this thread gained 20 pages in like a day
Potentially yes. That player should have bowed out gracefully if they couldn't accept dm rulings like that and are spreading negativity or causing a disruption that forces the GM to tell them they need to find another table.
I introduce farrr too many newbies to d&d for such a player to demand my game change to fit their rules lawyering efforts over a badly worded bit of cruft that somehow survived pruning of the larger subsystem
I know people who insist that the Rogue not having niche protection is a good thing, but I don't think that "being the trap/door/sneaking guy" is enough of a niche to build a class around. The skills may be vital (well, not so sure about sneaking- it's been a long time when I felt like skulking about was going do to more than just earn me a solo encounter in a game), but that's like saying only the Wizard can be the guy who knows stuff and only the Cleric can heal. By that logic, why isn't the Fighter the only guy who can murder things in melee?
In my last game, my Wizard had the Thieves' Tools proficiency and the best Dex and Investigation. And the Monk/Rogue was our Perception guy, with Expertise. We still fell for traps and I didn't always bypass them, but that had more to do with bounded accuracy and cruddy die rolls. (Seriously, when the DC's tend to start at 15 and you only have a +5, yeah, you're going to fail a lot, lol).
The game is better when everyone has a specialty, sure, but not when that specialty gets siloed off so only a very specific character can succeed at it!
Hriston
Dungeon Master of Middle-earth
This isn't true. I've advocated for no such thing. In a previous reply I believe was in response to one of your posts, I stated I don't know what you mean by "the feature always working" because that sounds like the criminal would be constantly sending messages, one after another, 24/7/365, and said that would be weird, which I believe you glossed over in your response, if you had one.
It's also unclear what you think the part of my post you quoted has to do with supporting your false claim. How exactly does my refutation of the idea, repeatedly and incorrectly put forward by @Oofta, that some of the features have an unstated prerequisite that it must be established at the table independently of the feature that the PC knows or is known by a specific person or people before the feature can be used by the player lead you to the erroneous conclusion that I "advocate for the feature always working"? My position on this is simply the language which it has been claimed the rules contain isn't there and that this claim has been made to mischaracterize the background features in an effort to disparage them. If you think I'm wrong, it should be a fairly easy task to show me where it says this.
I've argued about the Ravenloft example because I think it's a crap example, as I pretty much stated as soon as it was brought up by @Oofta, because it posits a situation in which the PCs know nothing, which puts it too far outside the bounds of usual D&D play to be useful as an example for discussion and of which I'm highly skeptical. This is why I've asked for actual play examples of the problems with the background features that have been claimed to exist, but no one seems to have any.
What I have tried to advocate for is the features working when, and only when, the players use them by making action declarations that invoke their features, as long as the described actions fall within the game's genre considerations and their PCs have the fictional positioning to take the described actions. If both conditions aren't met, something has gone wrong with the table's consensus on the established fiction and a discussion needs to take place to get everyone imagining pretty much the same thing. Hypothetical examples of dysfunctional play where this step is not being taken don't show there's anything wrong with these features.
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UngeheuerLich
Legend
So in short: you agree with me.
I think DCs starting at 15 is where the problems begin. I'd like to have 3 successes against DC 10 checks before 3 failures instead of 1 DC 15 check. Gives a way better distribution of successes vs failures for differently skilled characters.
mamba
Legend
I glossed over it because it was such a weird take that I did not think it warranted a reply.
If you are really having a hard time with understanding what else ‘always’ could possibly mean, let me help you out. I meant ‘every time’ because that actually does make sense, as you noted ‘constantly’ would be entirely nonsensical…
first of all, the feature does say that, there is nothing unstated about it, your denial does not change that. Second, by removing that prerequisite you are removing the cases in which it would not work, which leaves us with a feature that is working every time…
I have no idea what play was dysfunctional, as far as I can tell your stance is ‘when the player says so, that is what it is’, so working every time
Give me an example where the player declares it, the GM rejects it, and you side with the GM, I cannot think of one… and no, the two disagreeing does not make the game dysfunctional, that is just your cop out to not have to address this case
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