As a continuation of my semi-weekly updates about how my session of D&D Next goes, with my commentary about how the rules play, here is the next update.

As before, I am playing a dwarven Cleric with the protector theme.  This session, a significant portion of gaming was in a duegar underground market trying to establish trade, and my cleric's persuade skill came in handy a lot.  The way it worked for our session was that we role-played it out, and if the reaction was on the fence, I'd make a persuade check.  It wasn't needed for every single interaction.

Several of our battles this time happened at range, and the rules for range is something we focused on.  If your weapon has a range of 100/300, that means any attack from 100 feet to 300 feet is made at disadvantage.  This is new for us.  And for me, who had a sling, was a big impact.  Any range past 30 feet was at disadvantage.  Personally I think that's too short for a sling.  For a thrown dagger or ax, sure.  But a sling is pretty accurate at distance.  It really changed our tactics.

But now on to the highlight I'm focusing on: rulings vs. rules.  Basically, we had just defeated a small group of orcs and were immediately beset upon by another small group.  We wanted to take one prisoner, so we used temp damage to knock him out.  As we tied him up, another larger group of orcs started chasing us from about 100 feet away or so.  We tried to make our way back to the basecamp, but we knew we would get caught.  the prisoner was slowing us down, and we were low on spells and wounded.

So...my plan was this.  I turned around, slammed my warhammer on the ground and cast my thaumaturgy spell to cause the ground to tremor like a minor earthquake.  It doesn't have a mechanical effect at all; just makes the ground shake a bit.  I yelled at them in orcish that if they didn't flee, they would all die like their brethren.  My goal was to have them run away.  There really isn't a cut and dried rule for how to handle this.  The DM had me make a persuade check to get a baseline, and then added 4 to that number to account for the ground shaking as my hammer slammed into it.  I rolled a 12, plus the four, gave me a 16.  The DM used that as a difficulty number that the orcs would have to make wisdom check against or they would flee.  Most of them failed and turned tail as they failed the check*

IMO, this is an excellent example of how rulings, not rules, can work very well.  There are rules for persuade, but nothing on how to modify it based on other actions.  I think the DM's ruling was fair, and the game had a great moment as my character did something that looked big, but didn't do any physical effect and could have backfired badly for us.

*For those not familiar, most everything in Next has a DC value.  When you make an ability check, you roll the d20 and add the modifier for your respective ability.  If the result is equal to or higher than the DC, you succeed.

Sounds like fun was had. Perhaps other games would tie you down trying to work out how to implement an idea like that, but I think age and wisdom of the players had a large part to play too.

Next post is a purple-themed whine about immature players, other editions and codified actions for fairness of fun.

I digress. Nice to read how a simple framework and negotiation around the table worked in your favour. Things look hopeful for what D&D may eventually become.

It was fun, and for me, one of the great things about RPGs, especially ones that encourage rulings.  Creativity and imagination.  Now, I don't mean to imply that you can't do any of what I did in any other edition, including 4th edition.  However, more of a response to the group of people (who just so happen to be almost exclusively fans of 4e and 3e) who abhore anything where a DM interpretation comes into play.  You know the types, those who use terms like "mother-may-I" and "magical tea party".

In my opinion, it's a really sad thing to have a player not want to attempt something because there wasn't a rule for it.  Player creativity is what drives the best games.  It's one of the reasons why introducing new players can result in some of the best role-playing.  

In my example above, it wasn't just a "OK, I use persuade skill/feat/power to try to get the orcs to flee."  It was, "How do I envision this in the game, and what can I use to my advantage?  Oh!  Slamming my war hammer down on the ground like Thor while using a spell to cause minor ground tremors would definitely be awesome looking from their perspective, and hopefully their tribal suspicion to magic will make them fear my great power.  It's all about appearances; they don't need to know that that spell really doesn't do anything."

This sounds like a welcome change.  I had a similar experience moving to BW after a two-year 3e/3.5e campaign.  Rather than having an encyclopedia of likely situations (e.g. climbing, grappling, etc.), the GM just decides which stat or skill is appropriate.  I think all those special case rules invite a sort of rigidity - players who master them have an advantage (e.g. based on knowing the likely outcome of a given action), and are very reluctant to give that up.  I prefer my 'rule mastery' games to have much shorter rule sets (e.g. chess, go), otherwise there's rarely a level playing field.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;670690But now on to the highlight I'm focusing on: rulings vs. rules.

I think, the rule would have been to hand out (Dis)Ad instead of +4, because there is a rule on how to modify actions based on circumstances: (Dis)Ad.

Quote from: 1of3;670820I think, the rule would have been to hand out (Dis)Ad instead of +4, because there is a rule on how to modify actions based on circumstances: (Dis)Ad.

No, there really isn't a rule to handle the situation described above.  There were several ways to go:

* give the orcs disadvantage to their wisdom rolls
* give me advantage on my persuade rolls
* give a bonus to the DC the orcs would have to beat.  How that DC is determined would either be some number the DM comes up with based on the guidelines of difficulties, or like he did, used my persuade value.

There are really just guidelines, as it should be.  It's up to the DM to find out which option he or she prefers that works the best for the scenario.  Unless I've missed it, there isn't any clear rule that says "if PC is doing something to enhance something the might require an ability check, use disadvantage instead."

This is actually useful AP information!