Artificing with your DM in DnD 5e
In DnD 5e, Artificer has one of the loosest job descriptions of any class. Depending on both your playstyle and your DM’s, this can lend incredible flexibility or cause a decent amount of strife. To ensure things go as smoothly as they can, there are a few things you should keep in mind.
How experienced is your DM?
DnD 5e is complicated and has a lot of rules, and the information in the core books is not well-indexed for finding specific mechanics or rules. If your DM is not thoroughly familiar with the mechanics of 5e, you may need to help them figure out the intended interactions of specific pieces of your kit.
Having the information about these interactions on hand will prevent having to pause the session while your DM digs around to find it. If your DM is very new or not at all familiar with the mechanics of 5e, you may want to reconsider playing artificer in their domain until they become more experienced.
What’s your DM’s style?
You need to know how your DM likes to build encounters, and what kind they like to build. Do they favor combat or roleplay? Open-world exploration, or dungeon crawls? How much will they railroad the party into the plot? How open are they to unconventional solutions for plot problems? These are all extremely important, because they determine how your DM will expect you to work with them.
5e does not have a hard magic system!
If you don’t know what hard and soft magic systems are, Wikipedia has a short section on it here.
To put it bluntly, the magic system in DnD is not internally consistent. The real world reason is likely decades of technical debt, and I’m not enough of a scholar on DnD to know if there’s an in-universe reason. Because of this, it can be difficult or impossible to extrapolate out rules to their logical ends in the same way that hard magic systems or science do. (Much to my dismay as a science enjoyer.)
If you’d like to extrapolate out consequences like that, or you want your campaign to have magic closer to a hard magic system, then you should talk to your DM about it. Together, you can agree on certain rules for internal consistency, specific logical consequences of rules as written (RAW), or even strike down inconsistent things from RAW. No rule is immutable, as long as the DM agrees.
Your DM and your party are your collaborators, not your enemies!
Players are not their characters
When playing any tabletop RPG, it’s extremely important to mentally separate the players from the player characters, and the NPCs from the DM. For an artificer, there is one especially important reason for this: You can surprise characters, but you should never surprise your DM or other players! (There are a few exceptions, but it must be done very, very carefully.)
Roleplay games are collaborative
Roleplay games are a collaborative effort between everyone involved. Everyone is there to have fun and create an entertaining story. For it to remain fun for everyone, and especially for it to remain collaborative, all of the players need to be in on the plan, with very few exceptions. It can be easy to assume that letting the other players know about the plan will take away the impact of your character’s brilliant on-the-spot improvisation, but I promise that it won’t. Besides, a brilliant improvisation involving the other people in your party can go so much farther!
Provide your tools to the party
Returning to the topic of playing artificer, there are a few specific reasons you want everyone to be clued in. First, you want your shenanigans to be cleared with the DM before you enact them. Having to stop and wait for your DM to approve your shenanigans, or worse, arguing with them about it, can be a real mood killer. Secondly, your tools are not just for you! As an artificer, your job is to provide your tools to the party!
Your job is to provide additional methods of problem solving to the party, and they can’t use them if they don’t know what they are. Additionally, telling your party about your tools lifts the burden of being the one who has to remember when to use them. If only you know about your tools, you have to be constantly alert for opportunities to use them. Informing your party lets them make use of your abilities in situations or ways that even you may not have thought to use them.