CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
"Selling it" was a poor choice of wording on my part...sorry about that. The goal is to help me, as the DM, understand what the character is attempting to do, so that I can assign the proper ability check to it (if a check is even necessary), that's all.And, there's nothing really wrong with that, but it (not you, personally - but the method in general) has a few points to note:
1) Sometimes the thing the player wants doesn't "look like" anything. What does using Insight to get a read on an NPC "look like"? How many different narrations of getting a read on NPCs should we make players come up with over time?
2) Presumably the character with a skill knows how to use the skill. The player however, may not. An archetype here is use of Persuasion - a character with it knows what to say to persuade, but the player may really not. Indeed the GM may not either - most of us GMs are not high-end negotiators, and able to survive in the wilderness with just a penknife, and experts in alchemy all in one person, right?. So, we can end up gating character success on whether the player gets the GM's concept of what should work.
3) The character is supposed to be able to do stuff. Why does the player have to "sell it" for the character to be able to succeed? What if the player's not really a salesman (or, really - narrator)? Do we really want to link character success to player narration skill?
Really, that's all.
Some folks don't want the DM to do that. Maybe they want to "call the shots" themselves, maybe they want to use their optimized stats as often as possible, maybe they don't like the way their DM runs the game, etc. I think that's really what this debate boils down to, and why this is historically a touchy subject: it sits on that fine line between "following the rules" and "telling me how to play."