D&D 5E Using social skills on other PCs

[Lanefan]

Part of the basic game loop is for the player to tell the DM what the PC wants to accomplish and how they are going about doing it. How is that a problem? How can a DM adjudicate an action if the player doesn't indicate what the goal of the PC is?

To me the issues arise when a player tries to tie more than one goal into one action.

Example: I climb the tree to look for a clue.

That's two goals in one. Goal one: to get up the tree. Goal two: to find a clue there. The player has indicated a goal, sure, but it doesn't map directly to the declared action, meaning these need to be broken out into two different actions/resolutions and dealt with sequentially.

 

[Charlaquin]

This is the strongest version of the argument I can think of as well, but it immediately gets eroded by numerous lines of evidence that require outright dismissal or further unsupported argument to sidestep. The existence of monsters having proficiency in social skills, for instance, now has to have the completely unsupported statement that they're only to be used on other monsters. The same applies to the clear text of the ability score section that says that monsters use ability scores to complete tasks just like PCs -- this has to have an unsupported carve out for CHA tasking. Now we have this single sentence rule causing significant and otherwise unsupported alterations to other provided rules.

I don’t agree that this requires dismissal. Social skills in a monster’s stat block serve exactly the same function as social skills in a PC’s character sheet, and as non-social skills in either place: to inform the person who controls the character (the DM in the case of monsters and the player in the case of a PC) what subset of ability checks they can apply their proficiency bonus to. In the case of social skills, it’s ability checks made to resolve uncertainty in the outcome of an action made to socially influence another creature. There is no “using social skills on” PCs or monsters. There are only ability checks made to resolve uncertainty, which exists in the case of attempts to socially influence monsters/NPCs, and does not exist in the case of attempts to socially influence PCs.

That's before we even get to the canonical insight vs deception discussion! That requires an entirely special handling of resolution phrasing to avoid the single sentence. Then, lurking in the background like hungry grues, are any of the knowledge checks. How do we ever deal with a knowledge check -- literally a check to see what a PC thinks about a topic -- against this proscription? Even if we take any talk of metagaming offline and let player declare whatever they feel like for knowledge of something, a check to confirm cannot escape telling the player what the PC thinks.

Again, I don’t agree with you that determining what a character knows or observes is the same thing as determining what a character thinks. A knowledge check will tell you whether or not your character knows a certain piece of information. What your character does with that information - how they think and act - is up to you as a player. Likewise, a Wisdom (Insight) check will tell you whether or not your character successfully identifies another creature’s emotional state based on nonverbal cues. What your character thinks about that is up to you.

So, if we're to go with the strongest argument, we have to acknowledge all of the ways that the rest of the rules erode it with vigor and require further patching or outright ignoring other parts of the rules when inconvenient.

So far, I have not seen a convincing example of a place where the rest of the rules erode this argument.

A further point, that just occurred to me, is that the player may be uncertain about what their character thinks. We have no supported rules procedures for the player declaring uncertainty to the GM. We have to come up with that. I don't think it hard, but it's also not at all supported by the rules.

Indeed, I agree. We must go into unsupported territory if we wish to establish a mechanic for the player to use to resolve their own uncertainty about what their character thinks. For example, we might establish that the player can ask the DM to make an ability check for the monster or NPC against a DC determined by the player. I actually think that would be a pretty good ruling. It’s not supported by the rules as far as I can tell, but that doesn’t make it bad or wrong. It just means you’ve got to do the work yourself cause the rules themselves don’t help you there.

 

[Charlaquin]

Technically, the only RAI that matters is what the designers say since they are the ones that wrote the rules with intention. We can surmise RAI and we can point out RAW. As @Maxperson says, if you say RAW is something other than it is, you'll get pushback.

I suspect @HammerMan was using RAI to mean Rules As Interpreted, rather than the more common Rules As Intended.

 

[HammerMan]

No, not where ability checks are concerned.

yes.
I know this because when these discussions come up and we get all these different people it is NOT everyone on one side. So maybe one is in the majority and one is in the minority, but BOTH must be reasonable ways to read the rules...

 

[HammerMan]

RAI is Rules as Intended, not Rules as Interpreted. As in "what the designers intended."

Where did I say "RAW is ONLY skills by players?" Why would I say something I don't believe to be true?

so can my ORC use the intimidate skill on his stats when in an encounter with a PC?

 

[HammerMan]

deleted

 

[Maxperson]

so can my ORC use the intimidate skill on his stats when in an encounter with a PC?

Not by RAW, no. By the rules an ability check is only called for when 1) the outcome is uncertain, and 2) when there is a meaningful consequence for failure. Skills only come into play when ability checks happen.

Since you've acknowledged that the player decides the outcome for his PC, there is no time where number 1 happens. The outcome is never uncertain, so there is no roll by RAW.

What you can do is describe the orc's attempt to intimidate. Or you can do as you've said and roll the die to see how intimidating you feel the orc is being, but that's not an ability check under the rules. It's certainly a valid way to play, but it isn't RAW, RAI, or RAI. There's no actual rule, rule interpretation, or rule intent that allows ability checks just to see how intimidating an orc is.

 

[Lanefan]

You’re misrepresenting my argument here. My argument is:

Assumption: All text is rules unless specifically called out otherwise.

I think right here is where your foundation crumbles a bit, in that 5e has a overriding blanket statement* that suggests many (all?) of its "rules" as being guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules.

And this is why a lot of arguments here and elsewhere end up going round in circles: some take that blanket statement to heart and read the text as malleable guidelines while others ignore it and read the text as hard-and-fast rules.

* - I don't know where it is in the books but it's been quoted in this thread at least once.

 

[Charlaquin]

I cannot find anything in the text that provide the intent you are suggesting here. Someone fresh to the game with no prior experience would be highly unlikely to discover this intent. I feel that your certainty of intent comes more from smuggled assumptions from prior play and perhaps discussion here on the boards that helped forge and cast your current opinion.

That’s certainly possible. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ll cop to the fact that my interpretation is probably very colored by my experiences running the open D&D Next playtest (though it’s certainly not colored by my experiences playing or running D&D 4e or D&D 3.5). But I’m pretty confident that I have arrived at the intended interpretation regardless, and I think someone who reads the D&D 5e player’s handbook and dungeon master’s guide in their entirety and takes them on their own terms, thinking about it as it’s own game rather than thinking about it as the next iteration in the continuum of the singular game D&D, will likely arrive at that intended interpretation as well. The problem is, nobody reads RPGs that way, least of all D&D.

I will say that a few years ago I'd have probably agreed with you, but in the intervening time with my broadening of experience in different games, looking at what 5e actually says and does has made me much, much less confident in this argument. Your argument requires that you elevate a single sentence to a major rule of play, that you make an assumption about text being rules to make it so, and then requires quite a bit of downstream adjustment of other rules and outright ignoring some. That, to me, violently conflicts with the starting assumption and I cannot see a way to reconcile some of these issues and maintain the argument that it's clearly intended play or that the rules actually support whatever intent is assumed.

I have so far not been presented with rules that my interpretation requires adjusting or ignoring. There have been a few attempts at doing so, but so far they have not been compelling.

 

[iserith]

so can my ORC use the intimidate skill on his stats when in an encounter with a PC?

What @Maxperson said.