C. writes:
Someone on Twitter posted a meme suggesting that players can’t do anything creative in D&D because the DM won’t allow it. What’s your reaction?
Okay, so the hypothetical GM in this meme is clearly a bad GM. Anyone who has had anything remotely resembling a positive experience playing an RPG can look at that dialogue and know instantly in their gut that there’s something deeply wrong about it.
The more interesting question, I think, is exactly why this GM is bad. Where did they go wrong? And what should they have done?
Player: Can I say “Hello” to the barmaid?
DM: No, that’s not a rule.
If you think a PC can’t do anything unless there’s an explicit rule allowing you to do it, then you have misunderstood the core identity of an RPG and also misapprehended the primary function of the GM, whose mechanical role at the table is at least 90% making rulings about stuff not explicitly covered by the rules.
That’s the first place they went wrong.
The second place is the most prima facie: Their first reaction to player creativity is shutting it down. If all you’re interested in are players interacting through rigid mechanical structures, play a boardgame or a wargame. RPGs literally exist for the sole purpose of NOT doing that. There’s a reason that Default to Yes is a fundamental principle of effective GMing.
And it’s not like this is some kind of big secret. The 5th Edition Player’s Handbook explicitly tells the DM that this is what they should be doing:
IMPROVISING AN ACTION
Your character can do things not covered by the actions in this [Combat] chapter, such as breaking down doors, intimidating enemies, sensing weaknesses in magical defenses, or calling for a parley with a foe. The only limits to the actions you can attempt are your imagination and your character’s ability scores…
When you describe an action not detailed elsewhere in the rules, the DM tells you whether that action is possible and what kind of roll you need to make, if any, to determine success or failure.
(PHB, p. 193)
And, in addition to ability score checks, 5E gives the GM some very powerful tools for making rulings. Despite this, I am continually amazed at the number of people running the game who ignore:
- Group checks (PHB, p. 175)
- Contests in Combat (PHB, p. 195)
- Improvised advantage/disadvantage (PHB, p. 173)
- Improvised damage (DMG, p. 249)
With these tools in hand, let’s take a quick look at how our hypothetical GM could have easily resolved these proposed actions.
SHOVING BOOKCASES
Let’s start with the easiest one:
Player: Ok, so what if I try to knock over that bookcase over there, trapping the bandit underneath?
This is pretty obviously a contest in combat. It’s going to be some kind of Strength check for pushing over the bookcase (probably Athletics) opposed by some sort of Dexterity check by the bandit (probably Acrobatics or a Dexterity saving throw).
What effect would this have if successful? Well, the bandit would obviously be knocked prone and I’d probably rule that they need to succeed on some kind of Strength check to shove the bookcase off before they could get up.
Alternatively, if the PC was going to try to actively hold them down (perhaps standing on the bookcase), I might instead resolve the whole thing as a grappling attempt with the bookcase granting advantage on the check.
LIGHTING SWORDS ON FIRE
Player: Can I light my sword on fire?
This one is a bit trickier, but that’s mostly because we don’t have enough information. So I’d start by asking them exactly how they were planning to “light their sword on fire.”
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the player has some oil and they want to douse their sword with it and then light it on fire with their torch.
Our ruling will again boil down to resolution and effect.
I don’t think any kind of check is actually required here. So, in terms of resolution, the pertinent question is really: How long does it take? Well, this is an object interaction: Dousing the sword is one interaction. Lighting it is another. Your first object interaction on your turn is free; your second costs an action.
And then what’s the effect of lighting the sword on fire? Well, this seems to boil down to two questions:
- How long does it burn for?
- How much damage does it do?
In terms of duration, I’d say 1d6 rounds. Maybe you’d say 1d4 or 1d8 rounds. But it’s not like a sword is really designed to hold a lot of oil, right?
And how much damage does it do? Well, we could look at the Improvising Damage table (DMG, p. 249) and figure that this is pretty similar to “burned by coals,” in which case it would deal 1d10 fire damage. On the other hand, we might consider the fire to be equivalent to an improvised weapon, which would suggest 1d4 fire damage. Something in that range feels reasonable.
For more on burning oil, check out Running the Campaign: On the Efficacy of Burning Oil.
STABBING PEOPLE IN THE EYE
Player: Can I aim for the weak parts of the monster? Like stabbing it in the eye?
Adjudicating this one requires some subtlety. The player is requesting a called shot here, and I discuss these in more detail (and give a framework for resolving them) in Untested 5th Edition: Called Shots, but here’s the short version.
First, if their primary goal is to “stab them where it will do the most damage,” then we have a mechanic for resolving that: It’s the attack roll. Literally any time you make an attack in D&D, you’re trying to hit your target in a vulnerable spot and deal the most damage possible.
Second, when making combat rulings like this, something you should double check is whether or not there’s a reason that the PC wouldn’t do it every single time.
- Our bookcase ruling passes this test, because you can only do it when there’s a bookcase.
- Lighting your sword in fire for some extra damage is nice, but you have to pay for the oil (in both gold and encumbrance), plus our ruling included an action cost to get the sword lit in the first place.
But “I stab ‘em in the eye for more damage” fails this test because there’s no reason you wouldn’t just say that every time you make an attack.
With all that being said, however, if the player has some other goal in mind than just dealing damage – e.g., they want to temporarily blind the monster — then there are ways to handle that (and you can check out the article linked above for more details on that).
DESCRIBING YOUR ATTACKS
Ain’t nothing wrong with that.
In fact, letting players describe their successes is a great technique that can be developed in a lot of different ways. You may find it profitable to set it as the expected outcome at your table, or you may find it most appropriate when applied as a spice for significant moments (e.g., “Describe how you finish off this bandit!”)
You can even take this a step further by decoupling 0 hit points from death and instead, when that threshold is met, prompting the player to tell you what the defeat of the NPC means. Do they
- Kill them?
- Take them prisoner?
- Knock them unconscious?
- Send them fleeing for their lives?
But at this point we’re probably drifting a bit off-topic. What are your favorite examples of players getting creative at the table, and how did you resolve them?
I think that DMs defaulting to NO! is a problem that arises due to fear of allowing something that would “break” the game: “This bookcase maneuver seems very effective, what’s gonna stop my players from using it all the time? What if they come up with ways of employing it with other objects? All combat scenarios will become too easy!”
The thing is, and this is the opinion of an internet rando, a lot of online discourse seems to focus on game balance without really understanding that a laser focus on balance also breaks the game in a way: if your pretty simulation of a world can’t withstand out of the box thinking because that isn’t covered by rules, that’s already a broken game.
Now, this part here may be entirely off base, since my group and I still play D&D 3E, but maybe the presentation of rules in 5E isn’t quite cutting it? I’ve heard some friends who enjoy 5E claim that it’s very rules-light, and the DM gets to make the calls when unexpected situations come up, but maybe a more solid rule set might help beginner DMs deal with that?
@Nayann Martinelli: 5E is rules light(ish) outside of combat, but relatively crunchy when battle begins, which often leads to those “the rules don’t cover that” interactions once the system tightens up.
At least some of the problem (in my view anyway) with these kinds of improvised creative maneuvers is that combat has been explicitly balanced around players not doing them and instead playing efficiently with the action economy. Thus, some of what’s described here as bad DMing might also be chalked up to panic: “Oh my God this stupid owlbear fight is going to cause a party wipe because nobody wants to do things that chunk this guy’s hit points.”
I think D&D is a game that is specific to its participants in the moment it is being played and I don’t think that’s recognized enough as being a driver of these rules arguments and metagaming accusations whatnot.
Bad DMs and bad players are more often poorly-matched game groups than actual competency gaps, in my opinion. I think having a session zero helps, but it’s not enough. There must be actual chemistry between players and dms for the game to work. I think you need to be friends and have a relationship outside the game, too.
The game environment is too complex for people to play with strangers or even casuals and expect a great or even good experience. It’s not pick-up basketball. But Justin has provided us with the pick-up basketball version of D&D — the humble dungeon crawl.
I think it’s worth playing devil’s advocate here: this is a legitimate issue among GMs but I think it’s also one that is perceived to happen more than it actually does. And the extremeness of the straw GM in the example leads me to believe the original author may be in that situation.
As you say, the GM wants to default to Yes but also doesn’t want the kooky gambit to suddenly become the default attack: so some consideration of balance needs to be made. And I’ve definitely had players who want to get “creative” with every single attack.
Player: I want to try to slide my sword between the plates of his armor to damage the vulnerable flesh underneath!
GM: Ok, so you are attacking with the intent to successfully harm him…so make an attack roll.
Player: No, he shouldn’t get his armor because I said I’m attacking in a way to avoid the armor! You’re stifling my creative spirit! (sigh) Guess I’ll just auto-attack if you’re not going to let me be clever.
Is it possible this is the result of coming to pen-and-paper RPGs after video games and thus thinking about everything in the rigid terms of “this was intended by the developers, this wasn’t intended by the developers”?
@Dmitry: I find that viewpoint to be less prevalent in the combat space and more prevalent in the way players want to interact with skill checks, *especially* anything to do with persuasion. In video games, persuasion checks almost always are an “I win this encounter” button, and I’ve had players be very confused when I do not have my NPCs turn on a dime into the character’s best and most helpful friend.
You have done a remix of Dragon Heist, do you plan to do the same for Tomb Of Annihilation?
I tend to feel that people should play more game systems, even if they only dip into them and always return to the same one for longer campaigns. Experiencing other rule-sets goes a long way to expanding your expertise in these on the spot rulings.
I think a big part of this is the mindset that comes from prepublished adventures where peace is never an option, and many encounters are with enemies who attack until dead because they are supposed to use up X resources.
Also, things like Adventurers League do a terrible job of allowing DMs and players to do these things, and virtual tabletops also limit spontaneity imo, because you have so much hardcoded prep to do, changing the map is hard, and it’s easier to get fixated on My Perfect Encounter.
This is probably the strongest part of Feng Shui, the fact that it has tons of specific rules, but it explicitly says to go wild with letting players make up props for stunts that fit the location. You don’t need to wonder is it in the DMG or PHP either.
Other ‘stunt’ systems in relatively crunchy games never did that much for me
Reminds me of an organized play session I went to, where one of the players made a point of saying that he was drawing his sword or something while walking through the woods, and then tried to argue for some benefit (I think it was advantage on initiative?) when combat broke out, because he had declared that. To be fair, this was a ~15-year-old kid. But yeah, I think the out-of-context called shot (as well as the kind of thing RatherDashing is describing) would, if GMs allowed it every time, lead to *less* creativity and more formulaic “declarations” of things by players.
I’ve also developed a pet peeve recently: when people use the term “Rule of Cool” to mean that they’ll let players “try things that aren’t on their character sheets” (like, for instance, pushing a bookcase over onto a bandit). It annoys me because, to misquote the Angry GM: “THAT’S LITERALLY JUST ACTION ADJUDICATION!” (He was talking about something else at the time, namely diplomacy-type skills. But the principle is the same: player declares action, GM adjudicates action. This is the default, not some special additional thing they’re doing.)
One consideration I give players who want to do something that benefits them and, if allowed, can be done always, is: “The rules are both for you and your opponents — what if I allow your opponents to do the same thing?” It is one thing for a player to stab a kobold in the kneecaps to take away a kobold’s ability to move — it is a whole other thing if your six kobold opponents all try to stab YOU in the kneecaps.
Another reason to disallow something is when a player tries to do something for which they lack the ability according to the rules, but which another character actually has. For instance, if you want to stop an opponent from moving, spellcasters may have that ability via certain spells. If I allow a fighter to stop opponent movement by stabbing in the kneecaps, I am taking away something from the magic users.
If they want to do something cool with a feature that makes this battlefield unique, you should default to yes. You’ve gone to some effort, hopefully, to make this fight different from every other fight, and it’s *good* when the players lean into it.
If they want to do something they’ve never done before, and it seems cool and doesn’t tread on something that should be another character’s specialty, probably default to yes.
If they’ve done it before and/or could do it any time, you can be skeptical. Narrate it as color, maybe, but it’s probably a standard attack roll. It’s kind of a system of *anti*-precedent. Having gotten away with it before makes it *less* likely you can get away with it again. Feel free to let the gods enforce a desire to be entertained, if you like, and tell the players that that’s how it is. If you have players who are inclined to try to argue they haven’t done it “exactly like this” before, the meaningful standard is whether the other players are reacting like “oh, cool!” or just “is my turn yet?”