this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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When the official latest D&D movie doesn't care about the rules (druid wildshapes into an Owlbear) why should the players?
If you follow the rulebook over the rule of cool, you're doing it wrong.
rule of cool to me means you bend the rules to make the players feel badass, it usually doesn't mean you disregard the rules completely and do whatever you want. At that point just run a systemless narrative storytelling game.
As for polymorph turning someone into an object, there is a spell that does exactly that: true polymorph.
I am by no means a rules absolutist, some of the best moments I've had in games were certainly not RAW, but from experience it feels really shitty to allow individual players to do things that their abilities specifically don't allow, because often that overshadows other players that either specialized into some abilities that are now obsolete, or might've had creative alternative approaches to the problem
Yeah when a player wants to do something stronger than the ability they have when that does exist in the rules, the DM needs to be wary of it. It's like saying "I cast Fire Bolt, but instead of hitting one target, it explodes in a 20-foot radius. Like, no you have to use Fireball to do that.
Isn't that what dnd is?
edit: I mean it is a game with a system, which itself allows parts of the system to be bypassed to pave way for the storytelling, which is the point of the game ,no?
Well...how about the whole quote?
Emphasis by me...
Or at any rate, a system more open to this kind of thing. GURPS or OpenD6 are much more narrative and rules light.
it is, at least for me and the people I play with, but it's still a game system, not just free-form improv storytelling. The rules give some guardrails to help with the process (and, mostly, to provide a way to do combat on even grounds).
The guardrails can and should be broken at times, but if you disregard them entirely, I think it's a better idea to start with free-form storytelling from the get-go. Which can be a great experience, but only if you're playing with a group you really trust to not descend into personal power fantasies
Exactly, it's right there in the name. It's both role-playing and a game, both parts are important. Rules create a common understanding of how the world functions and how your actions are going to affect it. Everyone at the table knows, to some extent, what you'd be rolling to try something, how good you'd be at that roll, how difficult it appears to be, and the likely consequence of success or failure, allowing the same kind of informed decisions sitting at a table in front of a character sheet and a pile of dice that you'd be able to make if you were your character living in the game's world. None of this inhibits role-playing, it enhances it.
Why even have high level spells if you can just "rule of cool" lower level spells into duplicating their effects? At that point just houserule that Wish is a cantrip. As soon as you start to powergame the rule of cool, you no longer deserve it.
Which I always find kind of hilarious since it’s basically expressed on the first page of the DMG.
I'm not saying that you should follow the sparse rules of 5e to the tee. But, who actually reads the DMG? It's absolutely non-essential for running the game, even though it has some really nifty Infos for the aspiring DM.
It’s like the PHB. You don’t need to read it cover to cover but there’s a couple of chapters you’ll want to read entirely up front and then it’s just a resource with suggestions on how to adjudicate various scenarios.