D&D General When to know a rule?

[bloodtide]

If for example I start out as a 1st-level wizard in year 1, then two years later someone in-setting develops this flashy new spell that in hindsight I could have built my career around, well tough for me.

I have never allowed any spellcaster to automatically know every spell in the Game Multiverse. That is just silly. A player can know the spell of any offical book used in the game.

I limit each spellcasting character to ones the player knows, local spells of where they came from, and spells from their background and or affiliations. And give the player a handout of selected spells. All the other spells are "treasure". The character has to find them somehow.

And I use the ancient 1E FR rules for unique, very rare, rare, uncommon and common spells.

Does seem like a lot, doesn't it?

It comes out to like 500-700 of spells per school. But often less then 100 spells per "type".

Fair enough. I tend not to put too much stock into the whole player/dm divide. We’re all playing the same game. Why wouldn’t we all have equal access to the rules of that game? Having DMs get creative with the rules in order to artificially inflate “challenge “ is far too common to be ignored.

But you can't play a game with everything out in the open? You can't tell the players "ok, up ahead behind the rocks on the left are some goblins" and expect the players to just have their characters keep walking as the characters don't know that. You can't even have an adventure if you just say "the Sword of Power" is right over there....so the player has a character just go get it and...game over.

Plus lots of DMs don’t have a firm grasp on the rules in the first place so expecting your players to automatically trust that you do might be a bridge too far for players who have been burned by this in the past.

Yea, but they have too....unless they are going to check everything in the game all the time?

 

[Scott Christian]

Ask them, "If Matt Mercer was DMing, and in the new area the PCs were visiting, he had his dwarves make new armor types, would they need a list of said armor before they visited the area?"

 

[Hussar]

But you can't play a game with everything out in the open? You can't tell the players "ok, up ahead behind the rocks on the left are some goblins" and expect the players to just have their characters keep walking as the characters don't know that. You can't even have an adventure if you just say "the Sword of Power" is right over there....so the player has a character just go get it and...game over.


Yea, but they have too....unless they are going to check everything in the game all the time?

"up ahead behind the rocks on the left are some goblins" is not a game rule. Apples and oranges. Note, I was very specific about game rules, which has nothing to do with what is happening in the game world.

I expect my players to check me all the time. I have no problems with that. My players often know the rules better than I do and I rely on them for that. I have zero problems with allowing the players to check the rules of the game for me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ask them, "If Matt Mercer was DMing, and in the new area the PCs were visiting, he had his dwarves make new armor types, would they need a list of said armor before they visited the area?"

I mean, is it something available for purchase, trade, commission, or some other form of acquisition? Then yeah, I'd like to be informed. That sounds like something I'd very much like to know, actually. I wouldn't go to the hyperbolic extreme of never ever visiting them without it. But if the DM already knows the rules for this new armor...and makes a point of mentioning that this new armor is there and available to be acquired somehow...then I'd kinda expect her to tell me what this shiny new armor does.

"up ahead behind the rocks on the left are some goblins" is not a game rule. Apples and oranges. Note, I was very specific about game rules, which has nothing to do with what is happening in the game world.

Absolutely. Rules =/= events. The rules are how you know whether, how, and why things work. I don't expect to be told every possible factoid about every possible place I ever visit. I do expect to know the rules.

I expect my players to check me all the time. I have no problems with that. My players often know the rules better than I do and I rely on them for that. I have zero problems with allowing the players to check the rules of the game for me.

Good to know. Being perfectly honest, I feel a little bashful sometimes about speaking up too much on rules stuff during our sessions, being a new player in this group. I doubt it's a problem (or, if it is, please tell me so I can correct it!), but I really do not want to be That Guy, especially as a newcomer graciously invited into an otherwise relatively long-standing gaming group.

 

[Hussar]

Good to know. Being perfectly honest, I feel a little bashful sometimes about speaking up too much on rules stuff during our sessions, being a new player in this group. I doubt it's a problem (or, if it is, please tell me so I can correct it!), but I really do not want to be That Guy, especially as a newcomer graciously invited into an otherwise relatively long-standing gaming group.

Heh. To be fair, that has backfired in the past.

I had a player in 3e who CONSTANTLY challenged rules. Which wouldn't be a problem except that he was wrong far more often than right. Like about 25% of the time his rules challenges were actually correct. It got to the point where we actually had a table rule that you couldn't challenge rules unless you had the exact page (or hyperlink) ready to go before you challenged. And, unless the situation was life or death of a PC, leave it to between sessions.

But normally? Yeah, I'm pretty relaxed about players asking for rules clarifications or challenging stuff. I tend to rule off the cuff in the middle of sessions, hoping that my rulings are close enough to the actual rules. Most of the time I've been fairly accurate. Where it gets problematic is when players start bringing in classes and stuff that I'm not all that familiar with and I trust that the players know their own character mechanics - had a Order of the Scribe Wizard who was convinced that you could substitute energy types of any spell, even if you had to upcast the spell to make it the same level. Wasn't until much later that I learned that this was VERY wrong. You can sub energy types of spells of the same level, but, only the same level.

Would have been nice to know that his "force balls" were not part of the game.

 

[ezo]

Players need to learn to let the DM be the DM. If they want to be the DM and know everything that exists in the game world, they should run the game.

An example of a rule is how to roll for initiative and what impact that has on the game (especially if you have a houserule on how you want to run it), not what the components happen to be for some homebrew spell the PCs are not aware of and have never encountered. Once the PCs encounter the homebrew spell, the players learn what the PCs do. If the players want to know more about a "new" spell, their PCs can try to find out more.

Custom homebrew is not rules. Custom houserules are rules. Big difference.

 

[DEFCON 1]

But you can do that without the insanely overwrought rules of D&D. Even the absolute simplest editions of D&D are orders of magnitude more complicated than what you describe as your need here.

You could get everything you want with a few sentences of rules. Not chapters, not pages. Literally something like:

• There is a Dungeon Master, who will tell you when something you want to do requires rolling to see if it works.
• When you roll, you roll an ordinary cube die (aka "d6.")
• If you want to do something easy but still with a chance of failure, you fail on a 1.
• If it's extremely risky, you only succeed on a 6.
• Most of the time, unless common sense (or the DM) says there's a good reason not to, you should succeed on any roll 3 or higher.
• The DM will tell you the consequences of failure if you don't roll high enough.

Frankly, you probably don't even need that much, but I like being specific. Six rules, done. No need for huge massive overcomplicating cruft like "hit points" and "AC" and "spell slots" and "saving throws" that are totally different from (but do exactly the same job as) "attack rolls" etc., etc. You literally don't need any of that.

Yep. But people at my tables enjoy D&D and they want to play D&D so we use D&D. We just don't get so ridiculously hung up on the rules of D&D like so many people here do.

D&D is not a board game and we don't treat it like we would a board game, so if the rules aren't airtight and balanced like Wingspan or Terraforming Mars... who cares? We don't play D&D to get an experience like Wingspan or Terraforming Mars. If we wanted that experience, we'd just play Wingspan or Terraforming Mars.

If other people want to play a game in the spirit of mechanical granularity like Terraforming Mars with just a light frosting of roleplaying and character work on top of it, that's cool, they are free too. But because D&D isn't designed to be that sort of board game (and the designers of D&D don't seem to have the slightest care or interest to design the mechanics of the game to be that airtight and balanced either)... I question those players of their desires to use D&D just like you are questioning me.

The difference though (it seems to me) is that others get way more upset that D&D isn't actually giving them the experience they want (even if they jump through the hoops to house rule it) than I do. If D&D has some bits that annoy me a little bit, I just make a few changes to my game to try and smooth them over. No harm, no foul. But I don't spend hours on end white-rooming all the math to prove my issues with it are true, and then hundreds of pages in various threads here complaining about the results and the fact WotC won't fix them to my satisfaction.

 

[TiQuinn]

Custom homebrew is not rules. Custom houserules are rules. Big difference.

Yeah, I get the feeling people are really talking past one another and assuming a level of antagonism that may not be warranted. Rules are knowing that different types of armor will have different armor classes. Knowing the dwarves have a different type of armor in this one location, and learn what it does, your characters have to go to that location and talk to someone selling that armor is something to be discovered the course of the game.

 

[mamba]

But you can do that without the insanely overwrought rules of D&D. Even the absolute simplest editions of D&D are orders of magnitude more complicated than what you describe as your need here.

You could get everything you want with a few sentences of rules. Not chapters, not pages. Literally something like:

yes you can, and many games do, probably a lot more than add anywhere near as much stuff as D&D, and yet most people play the ones that add a lot on top of your handful of rules. Maybe that should tell us something…

 

[SkidAce]

...and makes a point of mentioning that this new armor is there and available to be acquired somehow...then I'd kinda expect her to tell me what this shiny new armor does.

Before the characters ever went to that area and found out about the armor?