Don Durito
Hero
To what end? To get what you want immediately? Perhaps, but the long term results will probably be different. If you intimidate someone that won't be left with a favourable impression. If you interact with them again, their attitude should be more negative.I'm not sure what to call it, but I see this mess all the time.
- Is it OK if use Intimidate instead of Diplomacy?
Acrobatics and Athletics are weird because they're partly redundant with each other, especially if you allow skills to be used with alternative ability scores. The key point here is you can't use Dex to initiate a grapple. That's specifically Strength. I would definitely not let a player roll Acrobatics as an attempt to get around rolling strength. In theory, you could roll Strength (Acrobatics) but that seems a bit weird. But allowing Dex for grappling is taking away one of the big perks of going strength based.
- Can I use Acrobatics to initiate a grapple?
Again for what purpose? They're the same roll so Arcana is only better if the player did not take proficiency with religion. So then the question is how does this affect what they know? I don't see why Arcana would let you know how the church of the god of magic works, or the minutae of the celestial court of that god. But sometimes they overlap. There's been a few situations where I've specifically said that more then one skill could be applied, eg Arcana or History, or Religion or Insight (in the latter case to spot a charlatan through mistakes in their knowledge or through their demeanour).
- I worship the god of magic. Can I roll Arcana instead of Religion?
Yeah. Why not? Tool proficiencies are mostly ribbons. A tool proficiency would let you do it without survival. I'd say the tool proficiency one would probably be better quality in the long run. The way I see it: ability scores > skills > tool proficiencies.
- If I scavenge some vines, is it OK to roll Survival instead of tool proficiency to make rope?
If a tool proficiency was going to be particularly useful in particular campaign for some reason then I'd upgrade it to a skill. (eg. In a pirate based game Navigators Tools would probably just become the Navigation skill.)
Generally no. The DC is the DC. I would use Advantage/Disadvantage rather then adjusting the DC. But of course a different skill may be applying a very different approach that might lead to a different DC. The DC for climbing a wall to break into a house will not necessarily be the same as picking the lock on the front door.Do you just increase the DC for using an "off" skill? Do you give the player a hard "no" when it's too preposterous? How do you go about adjudicating these sort of questions?
(Comic for illustrative purposes.)
I don't have any issue with a hard no I rarely need to, however. Usually, it's a case of asking the player "How are you doing that?". If the player can't answer that they basically withdraw the attempt themselves. If they can, there's usually no reason to say know.
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