This is fine and good until you meet a player who tries to loot bodies mid-fight, they’ll just start looting everything mid-fight if all the shiny things aren’t on the bodies.
I tell my players that investigation of a fallen enemy takes about 1-5 minutes so if you want to stand there and loot bodies and do nothing else for multiple turns, be my guest. Never has been a problem
"You're under arrest, nothing you say can or will be used in a court of law. You have no right to an attorney. If you have nothing valuable on your person, you better tell me now, while I am still contemplating whether or not to kill you. Do you understand?"
Damn, now I want to have a Waterdeep SWAT campaign.
The "I barely know her!" joke format has roots that are difficult to trace precisely, but it is known to have been popular in vaudeville style productions in the early 20th century. One of the earliest documented references to a similar joke structure appears in the 1847 edition of "The Knickerbocker", a New York magazine from back then. Which... at least implies it was a relatively well known structure for jokes of the time.
My players want me to run a DnD game where they are the kingdom's ATF team. Thing is, they all hate the ATF, so I'm sure it'd be the most satirical campaign of all time. Anything even vaguely dog-ish would be doomed.
The only problem I see with this is you'd need all the players to sign on for a lawful, tactically-minded campaign, amd there are (for obvious reasons) not a lot of points of overlap between the SWAT-type PCs and the investigative PCs... and now I have an idea for a linked SWAT-social/investigative campaign.
There's an old d20 system called spycraft 2.0 that is essentially a no magic CIA dnd.
I've run a one shot in it, and it's fun as hell. One day, I'm running a campaign in it when I can convince 4 people to play it. I've read probably hundreds of cheap spy thrillers. I'm uniquely prepared for this.
If I ever do full clandestine ops gaming I'll be using a rewrite of the Amber diceless RPG I've had in mind for years. So great for a game where you can be at cross-purposes with your teammates!
Stack on the door, check temperature, look for trap triggers, guidance and resistance on the point man, audible count from five four… and bust through the door on four, just to throw off anyone expecting it on one.
The delay options already allow that. When there is a dungeon with a lot of doors and most of the rooms are empty or “apparently empty” working out a standardized stack saves a lot of time.
If the room was apparently unoccupied , in the case I was remembering, the standard procedure was for the point man to pick a corner of the room, move all the furniture from that corner to somewhere else, and then pile everything worthless in that empty corner and everything valuable either in the hallway if it was bulky or in the bags if it was small. Rear guard kept overwatch on the corridor if they weren’t needed inside. About one minute per room to do the search, and by standardizing the process as a group we could skip to the notable ones and there wasn’t any confusion about what everyone was doing.
I like the idea of a SWATerdeep type of game, focusing on urban combat and tactical operations.
Add a ranger into the stack, and you don't even need to keep it urban. For that matter I'm fairly sure you could game things like bounding overwatch into dnd,
What Delay option would you be referring to? Readying an action costs a reaction and has penalties to total attacks and possibly losing spells. There is no RAW action to delay a PC's initiative turn.
Grabbing the body and ruffling through it's pockets shouldn't take more than a single action. Dnd characters are superhuman, I think they can find items on the body faster than people irl could do.
On the same front, I don't think it would take 5 minutes to do a thorough search of a body unless they were wearing armour. As a pet peeve, I hate when dms force an investigation check when I'm willing to spend 10 minutes searching the body, and when I fail I can't simply try again. When I know and have seen them use a magic crystal they put back in their pocket, it makes no sense to not find it in 1 minute and them my character simply doesn't keep trying
This keeps happening at my current table. Granted it is an all-ages table and we have two kids under the age of 10 playing. One of them keeps collecting everything on the battlefield and running off while everyone else is fighting the monsters to do so. We keep gently reminding him we're a team but he's quite focused on his shinies. Thankfully we're a big group and we have a DM who isn't trying to kill us.
If there are no consequences to his actions he will keep doing it, it doesn't have to be a death obviously but there needs to be a consequence to stupid repeated actions.
There’s a ton of good suggestions on dealing with this in the other replies to my comment! In my case, I was the DM watching the party meat shield do this, but in my defence I was 18, brand new to DMing ,and DMing an after-school club for a party of 8 14-year-olds.
Like 'yeah yeah i know we're in an intense firefight, but first let me loot that med bag there might be a ledx in there!' While I'm reenacting Rambo shooting an SA-58 at 3 guys trying to push us.
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u/Lower-Ask-4180 Jul 30 '24
This is fine and good until you meet a player who tries to loot bodies mid-fight, they’ll just start looting everything mid-fight if all the shiny things aren’t on the bodies.