I want my actions to matter

[Li Shenron]

That being said, if you tell a player, "this is a role-playing game. You can do whatever you want," that's going to set an expectation. Then there's the book, which usually says " you can do all these things! " Another expectation. Then the GM comes along and says (unfortunately), "no, you can't do that." Well, now it seems like the GM is being unfair.

So you walk a fine line between maintaining a consistent narrative and giving the PCs agency to affect that narrative/ game world.

Sometimes I think, that walking such a fine line is a mistake, like wanting to serve both fish and meat in the same dish. It might help to take a bolder stance on either way of playing the game, at least sometimes.

There are players who want to write the story, and there are players who want to solve the story.

When you have players-writers, then it pays to let their ideas shape the story as much as possible, in fact it's probably a good idea for the DM not to plan too much the narrative beforehand, since it is difficult to predict what the players will choose.

When you have players-solvers, then too much freedom can feel like there is really nothing to solve, as whatever you'll do it will eventually be fine. But these players perhaps want a game that makes them think as in a point-and-click adventure, where what matters is not your creativity/originality in coming up with something nobody thought about, but instead your intuition and logic to figure out the 'solution' of each challenge.

Effectively two different types of game, but who has the right to say one of them is wrong?

 

[Committed Hero]

So what is wrong with this? What exactly does a player want when they do something like this?

Assuming your not already playing Innkeepers and Guests RPG or such. So say your playing 5E D&D with a tabixi barbarian, half elf arcane archer, halfling warlock and human death cleric that have gone on five adventures so far. Then the players just randomly 'buy an inn'. So sure the DM sits back for a whole hour while the players do all sorts of stuff for their inn. And then after the whole hour the DM gets back to the "game" with a "ok, a message...". And this makes the players unhappy? were the players planning on just playing The Inn Game from now on? So like what...oh no dirty dishes...um...the barbarian will use their rage ability to wash the dishes? The warlock will light the candles in the common room at night? And so on? But the players don't want to switch games to Motel Six The RPG?

"When we started this game I gave you my expectation that your characters would be heroes and go on quests. You agreed, or at least indicated that this was acceptable. I'm not prepared to run a game set in one place from where you never leave. So either someone else needs to DM, or you have to tell me what kinds of quests would motivate you."

That final you can apply to the players, their characters, or both.

 

[tetrasodium]

If this was a game about athletes competing in different sports, then sure. But it is not. And athletic prowess generally is somewhat bundled together, these are not completely unrelated things. I know, I suck in all of it.

Also, in a game the skills should be actually even somewhat equally useful. During the 31 sessions of my current campaign the ability to swim has come up exactly zero times. Ability to climb has come up several times, as has ability to jump, and then there have been numerous athletic feats that do not neatly fit to a subcategory. But climbing alone as a standalone skill would still have been a really bad choice of skill in this campaing (though better than swimming) as compared to other skills it would come up so rarely.

So I am pretty fine in game of adventurers that routinely face wide variety of challenges (unlike professional athletes who can concentrate on training their chosen speciality) having rather broad skills that bundle related things together.

A sea going ship or pirate Corsair focused campaign is likely to involve quite a bit more swimming than climbing to the point that anecdote reversed even. The damage caused by this excessive combining of basically every skill impacts teamwork and adventure possibilities rather than just the verisimilitude @Ulorian - Agent of Chaos noted.

D&d doesn't need to be about athletes competing in sports for there to be valued in more distinct less generalist catchall skills because it's a game of specialist classes working together. Through working together they can cover each other's weaknesses with their own strengths. That is still true even with the many attempts at making it into a game of Mary Sue &Gary Stu telling their story while sitting at the same table. Maybe that time a water based issue comes up in a more landlocked campaign the party turns to the player with a PC who is awful in both swimming and climbing to use spells spells like water breathing after finding some scrolls & potions or go barter adventuring services to the fish people tribe for help with the water problem (perhaps in the form of the scrolls or potions of water breathing that they need). Alternately when the pirate/Corsair campaign needs to climb a cliff face to reach the summit of an Island like the real world "inaccessible Island"(honest Google it) they again use magic or go barter adventuring services with that tribe of harpies they met.

With the excessive clumping it's just captain mirrorshades saying "I got this" and everyone shrugging it off as a forgettable and pointless waste of time.

 

[Maxperson]

Is this true? I mean, I recently discovered that cycling, at least if it involves some climbing, can keep me in reasonable shape for running. So after not having run for about a year, maybe more, I was able to do three runs over a month (11 km, 14 km, 16 km) to prep for a successful 22 km run.

Yet in D&D running would normally be CON, and cycling DEX. And DEX covers everything from balance to deftness to reflexes to speed. So great jugglers are also great high jumpers.

The Athletics skill in 4e and 5e hardly seems like some weird outlier or proud nail in this respect. Especially as, it seems to me, someone who has the strength and endurance for climbing is likely to at least be a passable swimmer.

You can run forever and if you've never been on a bike in your life, you won't be good at riding it. You will need dex to learn the balance. You will need dex to turn the direction of the bike. Con will let you ride LONGER, but it isn't the stat you need in order to ride the bike. Dex is.

 

[pointofyou]

A sea going ship or pirate Corsair focused campaign is likely to involve quite a bit more swimming than climbing to the point that anecdote reversed even. The damage caused by this excessive combining of basically every skill impacts teamwork and adventure possibilities rather than just the verisimilitude @Ulorian - Agent of Chaos noted.

Except of course that sailors typically couldn't swim and tended to spend most of their time climbing in the rigging. Why let the facts get in the way though?

 

[tetrasodium]

Except of course that sailors typically couldn't swim and tended to spend most of their time climbing in the rigging. Why let the facts get in the way though?

Perhaps because we are talking about nautical d&d campaign gameplay rather than the nautical equivalent of a flight simulator?

 

[pointofyou]

Perhaps because we are talking about nautical d&d campaign gameplay rather than the nautical equivalent of a flight simulator?

And yet you want that flight simulator type of play for skills. At least until someone points out the errors in your presumptions at which point you fall back on gameplay. The idea that athletic endeavors possess mental aspects and might be adjucated using something like INT(Athletics) or WIS(Athletics) or just telling someone whose character is proficient how hard the climb looks by way of telling them the DC does not seem to exist in your "philosophy."

 

[tetrasodium]

And yet you want that flight simulator type of play for skills. At least until someone points out the errors in your presumptions at which point you fall back on gameplay. The idea that athletic endeavors possess mental aspects and might be adjucated using something like INT(Athletics) or WIS(Athletics) or just telling someone whose character is proficient how hard the climb looks by way of telling them the DC does not seem to exist in your "philosophy."

Not at all. I want skills that encourages PCs to have a niche they can feel proud of rather than hsn ones that encourage a chorus of "oh I'm proficient too". Climbing the rigging is not relevant to nautical d&d campaigns because it doesn't really come up due to the difficulty in tracking movement in 3 dimensions

 

[pointofyou]

Not at all. I want skills that encourages PCs to have a niche they can feel proud of rather than hsn ones that encourage a chorus of "oh I'm proficient too". Climbing the rigging is not relevant to nautical d&d campaigns because it doesn't really come up

The nautical AP I started featured a fair amount of climbing in the rigging. The campaign failed to thrive for other reasons mostly having to do with botching suspension of disbelief in other was.

I've never really seen people pile on the skill checks for physical skills in 5e but that may be a difference in the players I've shared tables with. Gating rolls with Proficiency helps some with the piling on at least in my experience. Both only allowing people with Proficiency to roll and not making people with Proficiency roll go some way toward making the choice feel as though it matters.

 

[niklinna]

Is this true? I mean, I recently discovered that cycling, at least if it involves some climbing, can keep me in reasonable shape for running. So after not having run for about a year, maybe more, I was able to do three runs over a month (11 km, 14 km, 16 km) to prep for a successful 22 km run.

Yet in D&D running would normally be CON, and cycling DEX. And DEX covers everything from balance to deftness to reflexes to speed. So great jugglers are also great high jumpers.

The Athletics skill in 4e and 5e hardly seems like some weird outlier or proud nail in this respect. Especially as, it seems to me, someone who has the strength and endurance for climbing is likely to at least be a passable swimmer.

Believe it or not, strength is required to have any ability to move at all, and so of course is dexterity (and so is some kind of metabolism indicating constitution). To break them apart cleanly into independent components is impossible. So, you can develop complicated formulas with weighted averages of the two for different activities (powerlifting, running, climbing, fencing, lockpicking), or you can lump some things together for expediency's sake. It might be a simulation for some, but practical matters of modeling and resolving actions are also important because, as somebody said early, it's also a game.

Of course, agreeing on how to lump and split things is where the rubber hits the road and the arguments over who's got the hotter hot rod begin.