Are you as DM saying what the characters do? If you are, then I would say you're overstepping your role as DM, according to how that's defined by the game. Whether or not you care is up to you.
See, I don't like blanket statements like this.
If the player says they use their axe to threaten the merchant, and after they roll I say "You raise your axe menacingly" then I am telling the player what they did, and according to your statement I am overstepping myself as a DM when I do that.
But... I'm not. That's just normal DMing.
What about if the player says "I intimidate the merchant" And I ask "How? Are you going to threaten him with you axe?" and the player responds, "Sure, that sounds good".
Am I overstepping? I gave the player the idea after all. It might as well have been me just saying that's what happened.
What if they respond with, "I don't care, just something scary. I'm a dwarf barbarian covered in entrails, I'm sure I'm intimidating enough" and I decide they use their axe?
See, I don't really care to argue with you, but a statement like "If you ever say what the character does, you are wrong" just makes pointless lines in the sand. It doesn't mean what you seem to want it to mean.
I don't actually care what you or your players do in your game. I'm only saying what the rules say to do. That does not include players asking to make ability checks and DMs saying what the characters do. Make of that what you will.
You don't care, except to constantly point out that we
cannot do it. That in doing so we are not playing the game. That is doing so we are using rules from older editions that have no place in this game. Constantly.
But you don't care.
Right.
I'm not saying you can't play dumb only that you don't have to, nor do you have to justify your knowledge by asking to make checks or asking the DM for permission to act on your knowledge.
Why do I not have to justify myself in knowing something my character might have no reason to know?
By this exact line of reasoning, if I had run an adventure path, and knew the secret password into the vault. Then I have no responsibility to justify that knowledge. I can simply act upon it and the DM is obligated to allow it, because they cannot say my character doesn't know secret information.
Sure, this plan would clearly fail, because the DM would immediately change the password to something else and giving a false password would do something horrible to us, but that shouldn't mean that I wasn't doing something out of line by utilizing knowledge I have little reason to know, without clearing it with my DM.
You don't have to have played D&D 3e or 4e to play D&D 5e as if you are playing those games. It's common enough to have picked it up from others. My position is that games work better when we play them as the rules tell us to play them, not that games are unplayable if you don't.
I am taking this in the best possible light, but I want to point out a negative interpretation of your assertion here.
If the game works better, then that means my way is lesser. You are implying that my game is lesser than it could be, because of WORD CHOICE.
Not that our actions run differently, not that we are playing under a different style, but because of the order of the words we use in the sentence.
You understand that taken from that direction, which I am sure is not your intent, you sound incredibly elitist?
You don't care what we do, you just want us to be aware it is lesser than the way you do things.
That just plays into my point: You decide what your character thinks and how he or she acts. But making assumptions can be risky for many reasons, so it's a good idea to take steps in-game to verify those assumptions before acting on them.
Taking in game steps... like asking to roll a knowledge check? The very thing this entire series of arguments has stemmed from me saying I do?
Oh, sorry, that's doing it wrong. I should ask "To call upon my studies of arcane history for mention of *insert fact here*" instead of saying I'd be rolling a knowledge check.
Why do they want to “roll Perception”? Shouldn’t they want to find out if there’s an ambush waiting on the other side? If that’s what they want, I would think listening at the door or peering through the keyhole would be a more effective approach than “rolled my perception.”
Why do you insist on assuming that by asking for perception they are not listening at the door, peering through the keyhole, and smelling for the odor of blood and iron?
The approach of asking for perception is only less effective if you refuse to acknowledge what the character would be doing. Rolling perception isn't gibberish that needs decoding. There are clear ideas of what that means.
Apologies, typing quickly and I forgot a section. This entire example was based off this argument that failing a roll should be worse than not attempting the roll in the first place.
So I should have added "add they fail the roll" to the part about rolling perception. That is my error.
Ok, let’s break this down. *Snip the obvious*
So, does anything change as a result of listening at the door and not hearing the monsters on the other side? Yes, actually. If they don’t check, they don’t know if there is anything on the other side or not. But if they try and fail, then they have gained new information - that they did not hear anything.
And from what I was given to understand in [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION] 's post, you are wrong. That is not enough of a consequence to call for roll. If failing the roll is no worse than not rolling, you should not call for a roll.
Most players are smart enough to consider silent monsters, considering there are a large number of them in DnD. So, failing to hear anything does not mean they will feel safe.
Also, you have cut your players options in less than half. By having them say they listen at the door, you are only considering what they may hear.
They will have to give you an entirely separate action and resolution for if they see anything by looking through the keyhole.
And then another for feeling the door to see if there is a temperature differential. Or whatever else they may try.
That gives the players the ability to make an informed decision. Do they take the risk? Do they cast Gidance or spend Inspiration to mitigate the risk? Do they decide the risk isn’t worth it and try a different approach? It’s up to them. Now they are succeeding or failing based on their decisions, not based on the whims of a d20 they had no choice but to roll.
So, who says they couldn't mitigate the risk with guidance and the like anyways? Who says they "have no choice" especially since they are asking to roll. Who says they can't try other approaches to give them better chances?
You make assumption at your own risk.
I don’t think that moniker is particularly representative of my camp, but I don’t call for rolls when failure doesn’t have direct consequences, if that’s what you mean.
Except in the example you gave... you just did. You callled for a roll where the only consequence of failure was that they did not hear anything. That is not a direct consequence in the way they were being discussed earlier. That is simply not knowing, and defaulting to the state you were in before the check was wrong, according to the arguments I've been responding to.
If it is information that I would be comfortable giving the players with a successful check, what harm is done by giving it to them without a check? If it is information that I would not be comfortable giving them with a successful check, then why would a check to gain that information be an option?
Why would players not be allowed to know something if they have the background to know of it?
Why would players know something that is obscure and took your BBEG 30 years of searching to uncover?
I was responding to the idea that simply "have them give a reasonable answer to why they know it" is fundamentally flawed. Reasonable answers are easy to come up with. Which means a clever player could position their character to "reasonably" know everything.
But you see what you’ve done here? By deciding that a check is needed to open the locked door, you’ve decided that any attempt to open it has an uncertain outcome. And that’s just not always the case. Some ways of trying to open a locked door are certain to fail (shouting at it). Some are certain to succeed (casting knock). Some are certain to succeed eventually if nothing stops you before you finish (smashing it down). But since checks are meant to resolve actions with uncertain outcomes and you’ve decided this door requires a check to open, you are forcing uncertainty into approaches that may not be uncertain.
Why do you assume that I am adding uncertainty?
Why is my thinking that a locked door might require a lockpicking check mean that I am going to allow shouting to work or knock to not work?
If an approach is certain to work, then it is certain to work. Whether I imagined lockpicking as their answer or not.
Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. So you do agree that there are some ways to go about accomplishing a goal that do not involve any uncertainty.
Yes, clearly.
Did I ever say that I didn't? But most skill checks would require rolling at some point. If they don't, why are we talking about skill rolls?
Right, but you said when the handle is poisoned and I describe using a cloth to wipe it off, but you called for a check and narrate me just glancing at the handle and not noticing anything when I didn’t roll high enough, despite the fact that I explicitly said I was wiping it with a cloth. That would be like if I said I had my pet giant knock down the door, you asked me to make a check, and since I rolled a 1 you said the giant missed the door and hit the wall instead.
Because I wasn't responding to the wiping of the handle. I was specifically, in my original post, responding to the poor handling of "You fail" given by the GM.
I was offering an alternative to the GM's narration of failure.
It’s very simple. What’s needed is a goal (i.e. “find out if the door is trapped”) and an approach (i.e. by wiping the handle with a cloth). That is all the information needed to be able to assess whether or not the approach could reasonably accomplish the goal, and if there is a cost or consequence for using the approach and failing to achieve the goal. If it has all of those things, ask for a check. Otherwise, a check is not needed, because the result is either obvious or doesn’t matter.
But, wiping the handle does not reveal the blade trap.
See, you are limiting the players to only using one method. They have to individually ask each different approach, and then you may or may not call for a check on any one of them.
Because the outcome of the action wasn’t uncertain (the handle was poisoned, so wiping it with a cloth would certainly result in finding residue), but you called for a check anyway. And when the result of the check was incongruous with the fiction (the die said the character failed even though their approach didn’t have a reason chance at failing to achieve the goal), you narrated the character doing something other than what the player said they wanted to do, in order to justify what the dice said happened.
Okay, so I'm only going to respond to this once.
It wasn't my example. It was Elfcrusher's I believe and fully called out to be overly sarcastic.
I never called for any check, I even said that wiping the handle would have auto-succeeded, which is why I was ignoring the wiping the handle because it made it an unassailable event.
The only thing I did to get this pile on was that I thought the way the DM narrated the failure was poor (You failed, take poison damage) and that I would have approached that narration differently,
if we had agreed a roll was needed.
So, I have nothing to defend here, since you are making false accusations of me.
