D&D General "I make a perception check."

[GMforPowergamers]

I don't think you are quite grasping what @Charlaquin is doing as GM. They are assessing the need for a skill check based ona description of action in the world. They aren't measuring the DC based on how good you are at playing word games. i don't think they particularly care how clever you are, just that you say what your character is doing in enough detail to adjudicate the action.

yes I get that... but the detail, the knowing what to say. that is a skill in and of itself. And 2 different DMs may have different things they like to hear or not hear, bias both active and passive... so knowing your DM is in and of itself an advantage.

the problem I want to avoid is once you figure out what skills rolls and checks you can talk your way into auto pass you just don't take those skills and stats and use them to pump things you can not talk around... leaveing a trap for the new player that did the reverse and has spent resources on things that don't need to be rolled if you know the right way to say it

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I think there should be room for "I take a second look around, just in case." (There may be mechanical/probability reasons that's problematic, but its not conceptually unreasonable).

If "I take a second look around, just in case" produces something new to consider, I see that as a failure of the DM to fully describe the environment as laid out in the How to Play game cycle.

The PC has really already looked around as evidenced by the DM's description of the environment. What else does the PC specifically want to do now?

 

[Reynard]

Are you literally trying to tell me that a character that hides in a chest or armoire ought to be visible to a guard that enters the room because they don't have a lot of hide skill? Are you literally telling me that a GM ought to say "No" to that proposition because in his opinion the character didn't have enough hide skill to think to do that. At my table, one of the meta-rules is called the Kindergartener rule. Anything that you can propose that a Kindergartner might be able to succeed at shouldn't be something locked behind a CharGen asset hurdle. It might be something you need CharGen assets to be good at, like grappling, but if a Kindergartner can do it then everyone can do it.

On this thing in particular, what I think @GMforPowergamers is suggesting is that the poor skill roll represents the clumsy, heavily armored paladin not fully closing the lid or something similar. If so, i don't really have a problem with that, assuming this was a hurried "oh crap!" moment where everyone scrambled for hiding places with seconds to spare.

 

[Celebrim]

no... just every declaration of intent would be measured by the character ability...

Sure, but every declaration of intent is also inherent a measure of player ability. Knowing what you should intend to do is a measure of player intelligence, experience, and judgment.

Every action can be phrased in a manner than has a reasonable chance of success and every action can be phrased in a manner that doesn't have a reasonable chance of success. I can't ignore that as a GM without insulting the player by deciding for him what I think his character does. I can't play the character for the player by deciding that isn't what a character with his abilities would do.

If I set a scene like, "The Queen is weaping bitter tears", and the player says, "I use Persuasion on her." and I say, "Role play that out." If then the player player decides that because the Queen is bawling he should go up and slap her like this is some 1920's movie where if a woman is hysterical she needs a good slap, I'm not going to roll that as having the same chance of successfully socially interacting with the Queen as a more reasonable proposition regardless of how high the Charisma and social skills of the player are.

At some point, "Your character is too Wise and too Charismatic to act that way" becomes railroading and becomes taking the character from the player.

You have said what you won't tolerate. Fine. I won't tolerate a game that the player isn't contributing to the transcript of play. I won't tolerate a game where the player goes "I use Persuasion on the Queen to calm her down" and then expects me to tell them how they did it as if I was the only one making up this story. You tell me what you do, and then your characters skill comes into play.

Or to put it another way, high Charisma will not make insulting the King or Queen a good idea. It just makes it more likely he won't behead you for it.

1 no you can't no bot can handle the number of variables... that is why you can't have a D&D video game that acts like a DM.
2 that isn't even close to what I asked for and is DANGERUSLY close to insulting when we just said how civil this has been... please don't ruin it

I'm not being insulting. I'm in this field. Yes, a modern RPG simulation would require behind the scenes all choices be predefined in terms that the characters could understand so it would work a bit more like a complicated Choose Your Own adventure book, but we could in fact make it so that the character turned it's own pages (as it were). And the more we learn about creating AI the closer we'll get to having a video game that acts like a GM, even though we aren't quite there yet.

And what I am saying is that in the more extreme versions of what you claim your position are, you are literally asking for your ability to choose things as a player to be removed because that's the only way we can take player skill out of the equation for mental and social skills.

 

[Thomas Shey]

so I added "I want to use what my character is good at (perception) but I the player don't know how to do (perception) but I have a declaired intent (find out if there is danger)"


you can insert any action in the game "I attack" "how" "Idon;t know but my fighter should"

I think there's some room for a hybrid situation where a bit more than "I attack" or "I look around" is beneficial or even necessary, but where the biggest part still comes from the character capability. What I don't buy is there's any intrinsic difference here between narrating parts of what you're doing in physical actions or mental ones; I think the people that do are taking it as a given that privileging some parts of the experience is okay, and that's their choice but I'm not required to agree with them.

 

[Reynard]

If "I take a second look around, just in case" produces something new to consider, I see that as a failure of the DM to fully describe the environment as laid out in the How to Play game cycle.

The PC has really already looked around as evidenced by the DM's description of the environment. What else does the PC specifically want to do now?

No one is perfect and the game is a conversation. A player asking for clarity should absolutely not be considered a failure of GMing. A player asking for clarification and the GM not providing it is a failure. That doesn't mean, though, that that clarification needs to come in the form a retrying an already failed check without a change in the characters actions or otherwise a change in circumstances.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I feel like you taken some bad experiences with certain styles of play, gotten bitter about those experiences and then come up with a completely nonsensical position.

at first... these ways of doing things were reactions to bad actors (both DM and Players) none of those are with us anymore and have not been in editions and over a decade BUT what we found was doing it this way opened up new doors and ways to play and in general made the game more fun for us all.
So even when teaching new players 5e I default to 'your character knows better'

...is utter nonsense. You don't actually mean that.

I do though. As much as I can't imagine what a 100%/0% version of the game would be, I say the closer to it the more fun I have experienced.

I get what you do mean, but the statement "I NEVER want to play a test of me..." is literally equivalent to "I never want to play a game."

wrong
the point of the game is not to test me...

lets say I know that (out of game me the player) there is poison on the door knob... but my character doesn't. I would fall for the trap than use my out of game knowledge.
this is also why i don't like the adventures that act this way... if My PC dies and I bring in a new one the new one doesn't know anything about the trap that killed the last one.

The fact that the game is a test of you is what makes it a game and not a simulation.

no what makes it a role playing game is trying my best to play the role of someone that could be very alien to me.

What you actually mean is that there are specific aspects of the game that you don't want to be a test of you, which is fine, albeit maybe much harder to implement than you think.

what part do YOU think i want to test me?

 

[Thomas Shey]

If "I take a second look around, just in case" produces something new to consider, I see that as a failure of the DM to fully describe the environment as laid out in the How to Play game cycle.

The PC has really already looked around as evidenced by the DM's description of the environment. What else does the PC specifically want to do now?

Take more time? That's not considered an out-of-bounds action in most RPGs I'm familiar with.

 

[Thomas Shey]

On this thing in particular, what I think @GMforPowergamers is suggesting is that the poor skill roll represents the clumsy, heavily armored paladin not fully closing the lid or something similar. If so, i don't really have a problem with that, assuming this was a hurried "oh crap!" moment where everyone scrambled for hiding places with seconds to spare.

Yeah. "Fully hiding in the closet" doesn't actually tell the whole story. Did they get their cloak all inside? Leave marks in the dust where they moved? Do they bump against the side while they're waiting? Is all that independent of character types and skill, and if so, why?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I do t need you to describe it in detail, I just need to know what you want to accomplish and how you imagine your character trying to do that.

my character is trying to use there perception to actively look for dangers that may be hidden at first glance..

Really though? I bet if you tried you could come up with something. Like, you’ve played Hide and Seek at some point, right? I’ve described the environment, now you describe how you want to interact with it to try and find out if there’s hidden danger with it.

except this is just the example... every skill in the game, sooner or later you will run into one that "I have no idea how to do that?"