Sorry about that, hope you get yourself a new game soon (if you want one right now). That "you can't question how I play my character" thing leads to very weird rigid set-ups.
On a lighter note, this is how they role-play on Alpha Centauri.
Happened in a Linux support channel I was in:
<Inky_> Yeah, I just need some way of keeping Python 3.9 out from under the OS's feet so that it only runs when I deliberately run it and the old version runs the rest of the time. When I tried to install it the normal way, it got itself into the PATH or something somehow and I had to resort to a system restore to get it out. <[R]> Inky_: things dont magically get themsvles into PATH <[R]> Inky_: but it sounds like pyenv is what you want * esselfe gets into [R]'s PATH * * Voxel exports esselfe *
Are you looking for the tag because you remember seeing it before? Or are you hoping to find questions that address a certain idea that you have in mind?
Doubling Rings:
When you wield a melee weapon in the hand wearing the golden ring, the weapon’s fundamental runes are replicated onto any melee weapon you wield in the hand wearing the iron ring.
Basicaly the question is, do I wield a Gauntlet, or just wear it?
Kickstarter: A Mending by Shing Yin Khor. A solo keepsake game about a journey to visit a dear and distant friend, using sewing, map-annotating, and story-building mechanics.
A scenario occurred in my game tonight where the wizard used mold earth to cause a scenario of my barbarian and an opponent to be trapped in a 5x5 ft space that was 15ft down.
We played it as normal, but the question came up if there'd be any penalties on the character trapped in this little aren...
Context
This question is about an online community campaign: we are around 20 players who play on a persistent universe where anyone can run a game as a GM. The system is Pathfinder 2e and players can have multiple character so that they can play on quests designed for different levels.
Among the...
@NautArch Cliques in a D&D party - potentially toxic stuff; sorry to hear it went down that way 😑 I was looking forward to hearing the further adventures of your PC.
@MikeQ Ooh, that's a good tag. I have run into a bit of a scaling problem with one group and I have decided that Wednesday is a 'two deadly' encounter day since they just finished a long rest. But the pacing is something that I am very hit and miss on, still.
@NautArch Chances are the player you are having friction with isn't trying to figure out if there is something they could have done differently ... well, that's the way I'd bet it in Vegas.
On the bright side, narratively, your PC can stop with all of the hard and dangerous adventuring work, and head on over to Asmodeus' palace and report in. "OK, you own my soul now, what's on the menu for today? Anyone I need to go and corrupt?"
Do you feel that in the next edition, the rules writers need to specify "don't cheat" as a rule? I am having trouble understanding where this question is coming from. — KorvinStarmast6 mins ago
@KorvinStarmast I think it's partly just some naval gazing of 'what is dice' y'know.
@RevenantBacon We had an old expression in the Navy that goes along the lines of "Nice, I guess you believe that 'buddy' is only half of a word ... " probably fits the situation
@RevenantBacon But, I suspect that Naut is concerned, from his view point, that he might have been perceived by more than one other player as having fallen for MGS ... and so his comment above on "how could I have done that differently" does feed the brain a bit on "how do I handle a rock and a hard place situation" like that?
@RevenantBacon I think Novak killed it, and Thomas presented a nice progression of reasoning on "here's how to think through this" - a good pair of answers there.
@ThomasMarkov oh geez, no.Not one of my DM tables, but the one table I was a player at.
@KorvinStarmast Yeah, I do feel like MGS may have been seen, but I really tried to show why it wasn't. And usually MGS creates a problem, this was MGS to create a solution.
And a solution that was offered by the DM.
There is a lot of 'my guy' type stuff at the table, which also made it surprising. Why was my action, which really only negatively effects me, a bridge too far, but another character gutting and disembowling and enemy was a-ok.
@NautArch I can certainly guess how it was rationalized by them. "Gutting and disembowling" an enemy has no actual consequences or effect in the game apart from what the party ascribes to it. in essence, they would view it as strictly RP, and probably rationalize it as not much worse than all the killing they're already doing
Meanwhile, selling your soul to stop (what I assume would have been) a TPK also has yet-unknown potential side-effects
Side affects that could in theory, adversely affect the other party members
I'm not saying I agree with them, far from it, but I do expect that that's close to the line of logic that they've followed to reach the current actions they've taken
@RevenantBacon Sure, but this is something that is actually part of the game, not something I just made up. While keeping things from a party member and ostracizing them is one way to handle that, I don't think that's what a group of friends would do.
I mean, we've all been fighting next to each other for awhile, if we aren't interested in helping in each other get through things, then what's the point?
Heck, they even rationalized the Nightmare because "they are treating it nicely"
So they can treat a Nightmare nicely, but not their party member.
I wasn't even attacking them. All I did was say let's stop and talk about what's happening and decide whether or not as a group of this is how we want to play at the table
but I think that they're doubling down and turning around one person's discomfort to make them feel bad does kind of show what type of people they are
at this point, I think it would just be awkward if I returned. But more importantly I don't want to stop them from playing the type of game that they enjoy.
Well, that's one point where we differ. I don't care about if it's awkward, I wouldn't return as a matter of principle until they apologized at the very least, because I have to much self-respect to go back to a group that behaves like that.
If they did apologize, I would certainly give them a second chance, but if it happened again, I would in no uncertain terms call them out on their behavior, drop them, and never look back.
I mean, if I was the DM in that scenario, I would be too. That 100% would not be acceptable to me if I was DMing.
Like, game would immediately come to a halt and there would be a stern talking too had about social contracts, and expectations of behaviors, and a "if you can't behave appropriately, then you're out"
I suppose "unhappy" would probably be to mild a description
Like, I don't have a problem with people keeping secrets from other people as an in-game kinda thing. I have a problem when half (or more) of the group takes it upon themselves to secretly meet out of character, and decide to specifically exclude another member of the group because of something that happened in character
That's my issue. If we had wanted to handle this at the table and have all that stuff come up...that's somewhat better. But going straight to that was my real problem. I have enough stress in life, I like tok now my adventuring group is trustworthy.
And that we're all working together at the end of the day.
@ThomasMarkov I think that Unholy Water question is a dupe, but it may be easier to let it sit as-is.
@NautArch If the other players can't have that discussion with you {in re the attack/defensive} point you made earlier, your call on "OK, this isn't gonna work" was probably the only one you could make.
@KorvinStarmast Yeah, that's what it felt like. And then they kept asking me to explain what other options they had or to explain why i'm attacking them.
@NautArch In happier news, our group in Saturday night looked at the holy water on a weapon Q&A you so kindly bountied a few weeks back, and they like it! 😁 The DM didn't have us use shape water, since none of us has it, but our rogue has proficiency with poisoner's kit so he ruled that it would work like poison for one attack if the rogue helped the paladin apply the holy water 'just so' to the paladin's blade.
@NautArch We had some prior intel that we might be dealing with a vampire as we explored a tomb (hooray for talking to NPCs rather than killing them!) and doing lore checks once we stumbled over a cleric's book case, since that is just who we battled. A vampire spell caster with a few custom flourishes that our DM applied ... heck of a battle.
@NautArch Lesson Learned: from here on out, I reserve two 3d level slots, or a 3d and a 4th, for counterspell. I stopped one but the other I didn't roll high enough and our cleric took 38 points of damage! Yikes!
Which also means that if we reach 8th, ASI goes to Charisma. Adding another point to that check is worth it, as are the other benefits.
@KorvinStarmast Nice! I actually like that better -it's just harder to say counterspell because everyone needs to just say "I'm casting a spell...anyone doing anything?"
@NautArch But I had to roll on both of them. I burned up the Vamp's legendary saves with Tasha's once, a vicious mockery when he was trying to hit our cleric again, and I think the Slow I threw at him.
@NautArch oh yeah, I totally like the unknown element. part of the fun.
@NautArch I also used two cutting words that prevented damage, and our paladin used her protection fighting style 4 times to turn a hit into a miss (three of those times it was for my fragile backside, 14 AC Bard) and once to turn a crit into a normal hit. Protection fighting style is under appreciated by the optimizer/min maxer school!
And I think I have figured out why. Protection Fighting style is something you choose if you want to optimize for a party, some of the other ones if you want to optimize for your individual character. My brother's paladin has had striking success with Protection Fighting style also over the past four months.
@NautArch All the DM had to say was "The vampire is casting a spell" and I just said "I'll coutner spell!" which meant no delay other than 'OK, so roll the d20, bard!'
@NautArch It was a homebrew 'vampire lord' who had some interesting features, such as a bunch of dead/dying souls in their lair who just hung around singing and such .... and that he could use an action to consume and regenerate a lot of his HP! 😮 Our Warlock guessed at that; it wasn't clear to me until after the fight when the DM explained how he was regenerating so fast in gaseous form when he'd float away through cracks in the doors and such ...
I think we ended up doing about 2.5 vamps worth of damage before we tracked him down to his coffin and the paladin and the cleric both staked him ... man, what a battle.
I was commenting the other night on how funny our group is: Warlock, Bard, and Paladin with charismas of 18, 18, 16. Cleric is the party face. Cha 11. 🤣
Heh. My old DM just posted "Primary goal of DM is to teach players life lessons" and a set of heart eyes after another person posted that they just killed half their party.
Different table then current issue, but that table had a lot of issues and taught me a lot of things to do and not to do at a table.
@Someone_Evil our Wednesday night sorcerer is dragonborn, not kobold, so I can rest easy not worrying about overpowering Scorching Ray. (By the way, pack tactics is a monster feature, I really dislike it on a PC race - as a class feature ( barbarian, wolf) I am OK with it).
@NautArch Races that don't exist in my setting for PCs: yuan ti, tiefling, kobold, gnoll, warforged and any changeling from Eberron. Having played an Orc PC (Battle Master up to 7) I'd like to tweak the racial bonuses on that one from Mord's - the negative on INT wasn't necessary. I'll probably posts a homebrew on it, and no, don't just say "Eberron orc" since Eberron orcs are tailored to Keith B's setting. (And I like where he went with that given the lore)
I'm running 5e on a grid with minis. The one thing that I hate is when sorcerers or wizards cast a fireball that perfectly hits enemies in the AOE. The player counts the squares on the grid to determine exactly where the fireball can hit and he knows the perfect way for the fireball AOE to take e...
@NautArch ah yes, I remember well the snide remark mxy made about my (and a few others') answer in his own answer, and all of the down votes. The good old days, I guess.
@ThomasMarkov I think there's a chance that this lands on the HNQ quickly, since my snarky answer (which I shall not post) to the title question is "check out BDSMSE, not RPGSE, will ask the mods to migrate" 😆 - we have had a number of odd questions over the years erupt on HNQ due to how the question is phrased in the header
@TylerH I seem to recall that user changing from having a name to using a number; my answer also garnered waves of negative energy since its approach seems to be similar to your take on their 'problem' -
maybe I was been snarky, I'll go and delete that comment.
@TylerH :) Yeah -I seem to recall that I got some heated comments under my answer for daring to tell a DM that they were seeing a non problem.
@TylerH Not my best work ever, but since I was at the time in a campaign where the DM didn't have any issues with fireball, and my brother used it A Lot (Gnome, Wizard) what I saw in that question was a DM sliding too far toward the DM versus Player side in terms of the tone in their rant question
Mainly what was asked above. I know that a melee attack can stun an opponent by reducing them to 0 HP instead of killing them, but can a monster somehow lay down in such a way that the blow is fatal?
@RevenantBacon truth be told mxy had a better feel for who was asking the question and why, having lived through 3.x and pathfinder, and I think that his answer on "OK, here are some tools you can use if that's what you want as a DM" is a sound one
I just don't think it fits a 5e approach as well as it fits a 3.x approach (not to mention 4e was by default grid based and I totally missed that).
@ThomasMarkov Thank you. As I read through it now, I think I could have written that more concisely, but I can also let sleeping dogs lie
@NautArch yes, and IIRC the comments I got from a couple of my stalkers (I think it was on that one) was "how dare you tell someone they are doing it wrong" or something like that. Been a few years but I recall some hard push back - I led with "this isn't a problem" and that seemed to offend a few of our users. On the other hand, mxy did later advise me that "yeah, frame challenges are fine, but be ready for push back when you do it" and he was right about that also.
@KorvinStarmast I'm not saying that the actual answer presented is bad or wrong, and I think it works out at least OK at worst. What I disagree with is the "counterpoints" that were presented to the people who disagree with them
@KorvinStarmast I mean I agree; if this were an IRL conversation I'd tell the OP "you're wrong, deal with it. Or change the rules since you're the DM here."
@TylerH Your comment captures a number of the things that I was thinking as I wrote my answer (which I put in at the tail of the answer, which is one of the organization things maybe I could have done better)
@TylerH And what's really interesting is how I saw something like that in one of our games, on how my brother ruled the first time someone used Evard's Black Tentacles in combat in one of our games. It caused some hard push back from a couple of the players; but we all figured it out once we discussed it - and in the end, I think his ruling 'off the cuff' was good enough, given that flameskulls can hover and float and fly and such ...
@RevenantBacon I love seven's final line regarding baseball pitchers: When I consider what highly-trained reflexes can accomplish in our own world, precise placement of fireballs stops threatening my sense of verisimilitude - a really good answer, that one was.
@ThomasMarkov It would appear that people like the answer, and find it useful. We should probably lbe careful in criticising voters
@TylerH what we discovered was "we have no idea how tall the tentacles are" when our elf wizard cast the spell for the first time. (RPGSE has a PF or 3.x version of that problem on this site regarding the black tentacles spell) - I looked at that and was still scratching my 5e head
You might want to be more open to answers and what they are saying. I'm experiencing something similar myself and trying to determine if I've fallen into the My Guy trap as well.
But generally, if your character and/or roleplay is making other people not want to play with you, that's My Guy.
You are more than welcome to disagree, but at some point, you may want to reassess your own views as you see multiple views from others coming in that are similar.
> My character is actually a 25 years old gnome: so basically a child but who still has more life experience than many adventurers. She gets serious when she thinks it is needed, but keeps a playful face (for example when casting a spell she would add silly incantations to make it sound like a lullaby). She often disagrees with other characters but I am extra careful not to make it disrupt the game's flow (I think I am doing well, even if that's hard to tell).
> My character is actually a 25 years old gnome: so basically a child but who still has more life experience than many adventurers. [I choose her to] get serious when she thinks it is needed, but [I choose to] keep a playful face (for example when casting a spell she would add silly incantations to make it sound like a lullaby). [I play her so that she] often disagrees with other characters but I am extra careful not to make it disrupt the game's flow.
I've got a player playing a young kid in one of my games, and he isn't creating issues like that. He's just a kid and is silly at times, but still is very much a contributing player and not creating table issues.
@Xirema It reads like trying to game the system in an obviously not kosher way.
While I agree that this could in theory be MGS, it's almost impossible to make that determination with only one side of the story, because there's a very good likely hood that something is being done that's irritating the others and is simply not recomgnized as being irritating
The reason I think it is MGS is because you seem to speak about the character as though you dont actually control who she is, and you dont offer "play this aspect of the character differently" as a potential solution.
Player has written their character to be immature. Player roleplays character to seem annoying because that's what the character is written to do. Other players do not like that the character is annoying. Textbook my-guy syndrome.
@RevenantBacon True, but we're also getting some good direct info from the person playing the character and their actions - as well as the reactions from the table (not wanting to play)
@NautArch I don't mind downvotes, in principle at least, but there's like three comments left by different people that are basically "why would you bother asking such an obvious question???"
Like, if I thought it was obvious, I wouldn't have asked, or I would have provided a self-answer.
Which I almost did, but when I was rereading the answer I had composed, it was nearly identical to Thomas' answer, and I was deeply unsatisfied with it.
@RevenantBacon I had a classmate who would write all their capitals by caps-lock. While also doing two-finger typing. He was assigned my pair in a typing test and performed faster than me.
@MikeQ Wouldn't MGS be more like "player character is written in a way that is not itself particularly problematic but that is played without compromise that yield to issues at the table"?
The joke being, he wasn't a good typer at all – he was an abysmal reader. Not in general, but he didn't know the names of many of the special characters in the test :-)
It's also relevant that, at my table, I do allow odd-sided dice (mainly for certain homebrewed weapons), so there is a practical concern about whether the base rules for 5e actually allow odd-sided dice in general or not.
@AnneAunyme But if you feel like your character is annoying, then that's not a great table option. Unless everyone is on board with an annoying character, but that's a session zero question.
So while he could type from a reasonably steady paced diction that I provided from the slip we were given, my time included a lot of downtime in the form of uh ah umm uhh the circle thing with uhhh.
(The test was completely informal and it didn't impact any grade.)
@AnneAunyme Not sure. The identifying feature of my-guy-syndrome is that the player prioritizes "staying in-character" even when it is a detriment to the overall group experience. That sounds like what you've described.
Even if everyone agreed to stick to their problematic characters as part of the group's social contract, it's still my-guy-syndrome if doing so makes the game miserable to play.
@AnneAunyme If you didn't want to listen to the answers to your question or to what we have to say in here, why are you asking? It seems like you've already made up your mind.
@AnneAunyme I mean... are you still disruptive? But trust me, I think you might also be a victim of bias here. Child characters and gnomes are both a popular target of certain preconceptions about being annoying.
I don't know the actual table dynamic. All I know is what's written in the question.
The question doesn't really detail any discussions between players about what is problematic, and doesn't mention any discussion about how to change or adapt to the character. I think those sort of conversations will be more productive than trying to adjust the character yourself without their inputs.
To me, the obvious question (to ask the other players) is "How do I adjust my character or playstyle so they are easier to cooperate with?"
Or move on to a new character and review that with the players. That way, the problematic concept is shelved and you can work with the other players to create something fun for all
@ThomasMarkov Right now we're still at the "I'm debating putting some points up for a bounty since I'm not totally satisfied with the existing answers" phase. 😉
I'm looking for one of three things from the answers that isn't there yet:
@Xirema I think that a couple of things should have been made clear in the original question: A) You're the DM, not a player and B) you already allow homebrew use of dice that exist outside the standard set, and C) it should have been phrased as a "should I allow this?" rather than "is this how it works?"
1. "No, Odd Numbered dice are explicitly prohibited, and here's the line saying so..." 2. "If odd-numbered dice were allowed, this specific feature would be irreparably game-breaking, therefore we can deduce that, for the rules to be consistent, they have to be disallowed" 3. "The rules don't explicitly disallow this. But I would not allow this at my table because..."
Alternatively, C) could be phrased as "I'm the DM and I'm thinking of allowing this. Is there a significant problem that could arise that I may have missed?"
@RevenantBacon Which are all things I wish someone had suggested at a time before doing so would have invalidated all the answers that were already posted.
@AnneAunyme literally every concession would be completely changing the character, which is in itself unreasonable. There's obviously a line you crossed, and maybe even if you've made enough changes, they may simply remember the distruptive past
@AncientSwordRage This is what I was thinking of. That the well is so poisoned, that the best option is to start fresh with a character everyone is on board with.
Honestly, I'm kind of leaning most towards Mark's answer, since although it doesn't fit the exact form I suggested with option 2, it is as close as I would reasonably expect to get to a real "Proof by Contradiction".
@NautArch Yeah, but in my heart, I'm a video game designer. I care a lot about the space between "things the rules don't say I can do" and "things the rules don't say I can't do".
One of the local estate agents, instead of putting up a post that says "House sold" next to a newly sold house, just have "Who's next", and it never fails to feel ominous.
The SM64 designers definitely didn't intend for their game to be played in five minutes by infinitely accelerating backwards to clip through doors and skip all the collectables (and we know this because they literally patched it out of the 1.1 version that only saw wide distribution in Japan), but today there's a healthy competitive scene around doing exactly that.
@RevenantBacon This is one of those cases where the double-negative I specified is actually important. =P
True, although video game design does consider a finite set of interfaces. In this case, the D&D interface involves a defined set of polyhedral dice, none of which contain an odd number of sides.
@ThomasMarkov Maybe, although in this case the crux of my question really boils down to "if I disallow this at my table, is it because I as DM disapprove of its use, or is it because the rules literally say you can't?"
Theoretically it's possible to hack a computer mouse or optical scanner to a N64, but that's beyond the scope of what SM64's designers would reasonably consider.
When I roll a d20, the PHB doesn't explicitly forbid me from throwing sand at my DM's face and then changing the d20 result while they're blinded, but that's not within the scope of the game.
I guess my assumption was that the low-stakes nature of the exploit would have tempered the negative response a little.
Reminds me a bit of when I was a kid, asking my mom what I was supposed to do if I ever found a counterfeit bill, and she immediately started grilling me like "DID YOU FIND AN ILLEGAL BILL?!?!?! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!?" and I'm like "... if I knew you were going to freak out like this I wouldn't have posed this hypothetical!" 🙃
Firstly, in the original X-Com game, all difficulty ratings were actually set to the same very easy setting. The developers didn't intend for that, but if it means you can beat the game on extra hard that is favourable to you
Secondly, u less I'm misremembering, there is a quest line with Jaheira in Baldur's Gate II, that was impossible to complete without using cheat codes/debug console
The developers likely never intended you to have to use that console, but doing so is more favourable to not completing the questline
Doubling Rings:
When you wield a melee weapon in the hand wearing the golden ring, the weapon’s fundamental runes are replicated onto any melee weapon you wield in the hand wearing the iron ring.
Basicaly the question is, do I wield a Gauntlet, or just wear it?
Mainly what was asked above. I know that a melee attack can stun an opponent by reducing them to 0 HP instead of killing them, but can a monster somehow lay down in such a way that the blow is fatal?
