D&D 5E Players: Why Do You Want to Roll a d20?

[FrogReaver]

Yeah, so say that. It's your character and character's life experiences. Help contribute to the exciting, memorable story we're creating together. Increase the fun by entertaining everyone else at the table with an interesting detail from your character's past in a reasonably succinct way.

Obviously I can't, at least not and enjoy the benefits of the auto success paradigm you've advocated for.

If the detail I think will be most interesting isn't the detail that's most likely to give me an auto success that's an issue. Then there's also the issue of just going through interesting details again and again looking for the same piece of info.

ME: I try to recall troll info from the library
DM: You don't
ME: I try to recall troll info from the bar
DM: You don't
ME: I try to recall troll info from church sermons
DM: You don't
ME: I try to recall troll info from theatre
DM: You don't
...

I just wanna roll each of those approaches into a single approach. Why would you force me to go through each one?

 

[FrogReaver]

Vagueness can be with anything. You left off a key detail from the orc example, which again reinforces why I'm hesitant to use examples in enworld discussions - bad actors in the exchange will change or ignore parts of it to try to "win" the argument, even though that's expressly against community standards.

In my example, there were 8 orcs and it wasn't clear to which orc the player was referring, therefore failing to be specific enough to adjudicate. Do you honestly think that if there was just ONE orc that I'd be pedantic enough to require more than the approach to the goal you gave above? That is highly uncharitable.

I'm going to have to block you now. Not because you partly disagree with me, but because I perceive you've demonstrated bad faith in the discussion and that's my standard for doing blocking. I think that's a shame as I thought we might have been getting somewhere. Good luck, I wish you all the best.

I wasn't using your orc example, I was using my own orc example. A single orc vs a single pc. Nothing disingenuous about that.

 

[FrogReaver]

How do you know in advance which things the DM will determine will have a consequence and require a roll, versus which ones he/she will grant auto-success/failure on?

Given the choice between these two approaches:
"Player always states goal and approach; DM resolves"
and
"Player states goal and approach when he/she believes that doing so may have an impact on resolution, and otherwise uses a shorthand when he/she doesn't think it will matter....etc."

I'll choose the former.

The former leaves off all the other life experiences wherein you may have heard about or came into contact with magical locks. That's the issue.

 

[FrogReaver]

Related to what @FrogReaver is trying to get at, something I hadn't noticed about the response @Elfcrusher gave to my question about a history check about trolls.

Because I specifically asked about ranged attacks, would I know about their regen? Assume I'm a newbie for a moment. The most I know about trolls is from Billy Goat's Gruff and what I can remember from Norse mythology. I might expect them to live under bridges and have multiple heads but I'd never suspect regen. Assuming, again, trolls aren't all that common in the region. As a newbie I'd have no reason to even think of asking about weaknesses.

I'm going with he thought you were posting in bad faith. I think he wouldn't know what bad faith was if it slapped him up beside the head.

 

[Maxperson]

So, the most obvious con at this point is that despite me listing a goal and approach, your style would have you come back to me and state that my approach was too vague (which brings back up my previous criticism that I can be super specific, pedantically so, but that doing so will take a long long time out of playing the game).

That seems like a False Dichotomy to me. There are more choices than "uselessly vague" and "pedantically specific." A simple, "I grapple the 5th orc" or "I grapple the orc with one eye" is sufficient to let us know which orc you are trying to grapple.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I wasn't using your orc example, I was using my own orc example. A single orc vs a single pc. Nothing disingenuous about that.

In which it's pretty ungenerous to think that "I grapple the orc" would be insufficient at his table.

 

[FrogReaver]

That seems like a False Dichotomy to me. There are more choices than "uselessly vague" and "pedantically specific." A simple, "I grapple the 5th orc" or "I grapple the orc with one eye" is sufficient to let us know which orc you are trying to grapple.

I've never once spoken about a scenario where there's more than 1 orc beside my PC

 

[FrogReaver]

In which it's pretty ungenerous to think that "I grapple the orc" would be insufficient at his table.

I don't think so. He's specified that he needs an approach and a goal. Grappling the orc is only the goal. Where's the approach?

 

[Maxperson]

Related to what @FrogReaver is trying to get at, something I hadn't noticed about the response @Elfcrusher gave to my question about a history check about trolls.

Because I specifically asked about ranged attacks, would I know about their regen? Assume I'm a newbie for a moment. The most I know about trolls is from Billy Goat's Gruff and what I can remember from Norse mythology. I might expect them to live under bridges and have multiple heads but I'd never suspect regen. Assuming, again, trolls aren't all that common in the region. As a newbie I'd have no reason to even think of asking about weaknesses.

There's nothing wrong with learning by doing.

 

[FrogReaver]

There's nothing wrong with learning by doing.

How exactly is the newbie supposed to know what weakness to ask about? Should he just cover all million possible weaknesses, specifically, so as he is not being to vague?