In regards to torture, I'd only allow it if it doesn't become a toxic element to the social aspect. If everyone's cool with it and no one's feeling pressured to take part in the evil deeds, then it should be fine to integrate that level of abuse into the story. But the second you notice someone from your group burning things in the park, shooting bbs at birds, and acting otherwise off, it's time to go back to Rainbow Puppy Land and teach villains the power of friendship.
> Tome of Unspeakable Power: The book glows visibly with arcane magic. Each page is inscribed with words of various languages, some forgotten. Anyone who reads from a page is unable to describe the spells contained within.
Really dark evil stuff can have adverse affects on the players outside of the game if it's normalized for hours on a weekly basis.
@Yuuki The book tells you how to gain Omnipotence, but the ritual for it is incredibly embarrassing and if anyone found out, they'd think you tried it.
@Axoren Oh it totally bit them in the butt later on. Word got around, and they found recruiting help was a lot harder and the kind of help they were able to get was the less reputable/dependable kind.
One time, our Paladin cut off a prisoner's foot because he wasn't talking... right before the Bard and the Warlock were planning to Dominate the prisoner and make him talk.
Let's just say, they never heard the end of the story of NoName-Five Toes.
@NautArch Somatic (S) Spellcasting gestures might include a forceful gesticulation or an intricate set of gestures. If a spell requires a somatic component, **the caster must have free use of at least one hand to perform these gestures.**
Honestly, to avoid things getting stupid, I'd ask your DM to reconsider his ruling going forward, or you're going to be doing stupider stuff to non-lethally subdue spellcasters.
Like using your Free Object Interaction each turn to hand them a Sword they don't want to hold to interrupt their spellcasting
There's this one evil monk who we have summarily stripped naked, robbed him of his magic items, frightened him into Dimensional Stepping away, convinced him to GIVE US all his magic items the second time we saw him, spied on him to keep an eye on the villain, and the list sort of stops being interesting at this point.
@NautArch Using H1 tags for the top line of answers is useful for screen readers for sure, but I don't recall V2 coming down on the side of web accessibility last time that came up.
yeah, there's nothing inherently wrong with it. I do worry sometimes when minor necroedits bring back to the front page a question which would now be considered off-topic, though.
@ColinGross Well, in regards to your attempt to thwart "Tell the truth", you actually broke one clause of the spell by not doing your best to obey. Your reply was an attempt at rebelling against your dominator.
At level 7, you can use your action to cast a cantrip and make one weapon attack as a bonus action.
@Yuuki Actually thats slightly wrong (maybe a printing difference?) I see "Beginning at 7th level, when you use your action to cast a cantrip, you can make one weapon attack as a bonus action."
@Rubiksmoose Part of this is just me soapboxing: I feel like too many GMs look for the specific rule from the PHB or DMG without first thinking about "step 2." But it may just be that I've had a long week and am cranky =D
@kviiri Curse you for introducing me to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. So many hours I have sunk into it over the last week, but still not enough to become annoyed and give up on it, which is usually what happens quite fast when I play computer games.
The worst thing is that dungeon levels are of a very convenient size. It's tempting to say “I'll stop after this level“, but then that goes quite fast, so one more is always possible.
@BESW Sorry... 1. Player narrates character's actions. 2. GM (decides how to) adjudicate the action. 3. GM narrates results.
So I feel like D&D gms, in particular, sometimes jump over the thought-beats "(a) should there be a roll here, (b) if a roll, what sort of roll should it be?"
This all came up in the context of someone asking about how much damage (HP) stomping on an interrogee's body part should inflict.
(Which presupposes--incorrectly, IMO--that HP, damage, and an attack roll are the correct tools for this adjudication.)
That's something different games have very different attitudes about.
D&D 3.5 seemed to be designed on the idea that every significant (here, usually defined as combative) narrative action should have its own unique mechanic which must be used whenever that action got narrated.
So someone coming from that RPG space would be confused by the idea that, if a mechanic corresponding to an action exists, you might not use that mechanic when the action is narrated.
This is why games like D&D 3.5 put so much emphasis on the GM as the primary master of the system: the first and often only form of adjudication is knowing what mechanic gets triggered by a narrative action, and how to implement it.
The "what sort of roll, if any" sort of adjudication only comes into play if there's no clear corresponding mechanic, or (rarely) multiple clear corresponding mechanics.
@ColinGross I didn't get pinged about this since you didn't username-mention me... but I don't edit old answers to fix the header formatting unless the question is already on the front page. (And as for "I don't recall V2 coming down on the side of web accessibility last time that came up." - I don't know if I was even on the site at the time it last came up. But that is in fact the reason I do it: because it was suggested in meta that it was useful for accessibility purposes.)
There's no such thing as a post that's too old to be improved, provided the improvement is non-trivial. I think a significant increase in accessibility, like the kind provided by header formatting, is non-trivial.
@ColinGross "Can you choose to take an action that the caster doesn't know how to do? E.g. could you have the target cast a spell?" - as Mike said, they could try and fail. A related Sage Advice about using Suggestion to tell someone to "Sleep": https://www.sageadvice.eu/2018/01/21/if-i-use-suggestions-to-tell-someone-to-go-to-sleep-do-i-have-an-8-hour-sleep-spell/ "The suggestion spell allows you to compel someone to pursue a course of activity. You could, for example, tell them to go to sleep. That doesn't knock them out; it causes them to try to go to sleep naturally. It isn't magical sl…
@V2Blast In the context of the discussion, I think it was more so "If you, the Dominator, doesn't know Spell X, but the Dominatee does, can you make them cast Spell X?"
If you're just giving it a command, it can do a thing that it knows how to do even if you don't. (Though I suppose telling it to cast a specific spell might not be a "simple and general course of action".) If you're taking total control, I'm not sure...
If you know that the creature can do it, then I suppose you could force it to cast that spell when you take total control
I can only assume that precise control is like interfacing with a mech. You didn't know how to jettison missiles from your forehead before you got into the mech, but now there's a mental command for it.
It would be quite impressive if you could fire those missiles without the mech, however.
Though Dominate Person doesn't give you that person's knowledge, so unless you've seen them casting that spell, you might need them to tell you if they know the spell before you command them to do it
otherwise you wouldn't know what they're capable of
