D&D 5E Using social skills on other PCs

[HammerMan]

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.

hey I meet both
) neither player of DM knows if the orc can succsefully intimadate
2) there is a meaningful consequence to failing... the orc looks foolish

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.

okay, so if the player (say me) doesn't know if the orc is intimidating or not?

There's no actual rule, rule interpretation, or rule intent that allows ability checks just to see how intimidating an orc is.

Intimidation​

When you attempt to influence someone through overt threats, hostile actions, and physical violence, the DM might ask you to make a Charisma (Intimidation) check. Examples include trying to pry information out of a prisoner, convincing street thugs to back down from a confrontation, or using the edge of a broken bottle to convince a sneering vizier to reconsider a decision.

 

[Charlaquin]

okay, are you saying you want me to stop talking to you?

I’m saying I don’t think there’s any point in you and me discussing this topic with each other. We have ways of forming meaning that are incompatible.

 

[HammerMan]

What @Maxperson said.

I read it diffrently

There are atleast a few people that read it my way and at least a few that read it yours...

when talking here on line we should probably respect even if we disagree becuse someone asked and getting both views may help them.

 

[Maxperson]

hey I meet both
) neither player of DM knows if the orc can succsefully intimadate

Success is determined by the outcome, not the attempt. The orc can roll a 1 or a 30 and the player still determines the outcome, not the roll. If the player determines that his PC is not intimidated, then the roll of 30 fails. Since there was never at any point any doubt as to that outcome(1-30 all fail), then requirements for the outcome being in doubt are not fulfilled.

2) there is a meaningful consequence to failing... the orc looks foolish

That's debatable as to it being a meaningful consequence, but since "meaningful" is so subjective, I'll accept it. The attempt still fails with the first criterion, though.

okay, so if the player (say me) doesn't know if the orc is intimidating or not?

Intimidation​

When you attempt to influence someone through overt threats, hostile actions, and physical violence, the DM might ask you to make a Charisma (Intimidation) check. Examples include trying to pry information out of a prisoner, convincing street thugs to back down from a confrontation, or using the edge of a broken bottle to convince a sneering vizier to reconsider a decision.

It doesn't matter whether the orc is or is not intimidating. It matters if the outcome is in doubt. If the PC isn't going to actually be intimidated by the orc no matter what it rolls, there is no roll by RAW.

 

[iserith]

I read it diffrently

There are atleast a few people that read it my way and at least a few that read it yours...

when talking here on line we should probably respect even if we disagree becuse someone asked and getting both views may help them.

People are free to be incorrect about their reading of the rules. This has nothing to do with respect. I don't lose respect for someone who is not correct. I respect you're a person trying to do your best to make a fun game for your group. You can do that and still be incorrect as to what the rules say on this matter.

Here are two short-form scenarios I wrote, by the way, which can involve ability checks by NPCs to influence social interactions. In How to Defeat the Forum Troll, both Semanticus and Adhomina try to sway the crowd to their position on an important question. In The Laboratory-Tomb of Dr. Viktor Vampenstein, the ghost Igor Renfield may try to control a berserk Vampenstein's monster. These actions may call for an ability check.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

I actually don’t think the rules of 5e are hard and fast at all. They straight-up tell you you don’t have to follow them if you don’t want to. I’m arguing about what the rules support, not what they allow. They allow anything and everything you feel like, so that would be a pretty pointless thing to argue about. But they do support certain things. If you want to run fireball as a spell that does 8d6 fire damage to each creature in a 20-foot-radius sphere of a point within 120 feet of the caster that fails a Dexterity saving throw, and half that much fire damage to each creature in that area that passes, the rules support you in that. If you want to run fireball as a spell that does something else, the rules allow that (because they allow anything and everything), but they don’t support it (because they don’t provide any guidelines around running the spell that way).

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

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

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.

I believe you when you say you haven't seen a convincing argument. You assert that there can never be uncertainty in specific cases and then anything that contradicts that is easily shunting into configurations where they don't matter. It doesn't matter that monsters have CHA proficiencies because they'll never deploy them outside of GM solo play (itself not well supported in the rules). It doesn't matter that monster explicitly use ability checks like players to accomplish tasks because you've neatly excised the task of influencing PCs from consideration. It doesn't matter that the rules explicitly call out a use of a CHA skill to influence what a PC thinks because we've got a neat trick that obfuscates this so we can pretend it doesn't actually tell players what PCs think. We also have another neat trick that separates out what a PC knows from what a PC thinks -- a rather strange and arbitrary distinction only useful to support the initial assertion.

In fact, the point being missed by all of this is that if you don't adopt the initial assertion you have -- one, if I could remind, that is based on assumption and not direct reference in the rules -- all of these other things immediately add weight to the argument that PCs can be influenced by social proficiencies. This is the logical failure point for me -- your argument is circular. The initial assumption is really assuming the conclusion, so every step along the way is easily dealt with because it's always been right from the initial assumption (that the initial assumption causes other problems in other areas is not considered in this case). The can be shown by this pointing out that all of the evidence against you've discounted entirely because of the initial assumption and not any other reason. If you remove that assumption, that evidence is hard to discount otherwise. Your entire argument is assuming the conclusion in the premise.

 

[Ovinomancer]

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.

They would have to recognize that advice on how to roleplay is actually a critical rule that governs large sections of play. I find this assertion to be particularly bald.

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.

Really?! You've adjusted so many of them. You have a special way of dealing with insight vs deception that involves convoluted descriptions while still passing on the information for what the PC is supposed to think about it. You have an artificial distinction between knowing a thing and thinking a thing. You have parts of monster stat blocks being there only to support GM solo play. You have to modify how the basic loop of play functions for particular things. I don't see how you can actually say you haven't adjusted things, even if you believe all of these to be proper and correct! The case for not having to adjust these things would be if each of them was clearly presented in the rules so as to not need the additional thought and alignment to your premise! I mean, we can argue about if these things are persuasive or not, but I can't, for the life of me, see any valid argument for no adjustment needed!

 

[Bill Zebub]

Okay so if the DM doesn't know how intimidating/Persasive this creature is, that is uncertain right...

This is where the thing about celebrities/clowns/dogs that you mocked is relevant. Intimidation and persuasiveness (among other things) aren’t objective truths. They are highly dependent upon the observer.

“The orc was highly intimidating” really means that it exhibited behaviors that some people, but not all, would find intimidating.

For example, your little anecdote upthread about your sister and her boyfriend…my reaction to that was probably a lot different than you may have imagined. But other people might have had totally different reactions.

So the important question is: since people react to the same stimuli in different ways, how do we determine how a D&D character reacts? And in the absence of more specific rules (such as would be the case with charm spells, or a berserker barbarian’s intimidating presence, or an aboleth’s mind control) the only text we have that is universally applicable is that the player decides.

So, no. Although lots in the books is open to interpretation, in this case your interpretation is incorrect.

 

[iserith]

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.

Not necessarily. The rule is not "if climb, then roll Athletics" or "if search for clue, then roll Investigation." If it was, then yeah, you're going to have to break that out into distinct ability checks to resolve the action declaration.

The DM can instead say that climbing the tree is trivially easy, thus making the outcome certain and thus there is no ability check to resolve climbing the tree. The DM may then say the clue is hidden, making finding it uncertain, and call for an ability check. One action declaration, one roll resolves.

Alternatively, the DM can say that climbing the tree is hard, perhaps because it is slippery, but that once up in the tree's canopy, the clue is easy to see. So here the DM just calls for the Strength (Athletics) check to climb and, if successful, the PC gets to the canopy safely and the clue is there to be found. In this case, the clue is just part of describing the environment after narrating the successful climb.