How does a GM possibly narrate the results of insight checks without explicitly saying what a PC is thinking? How does a GM narrate passive perception checks without explicitly saying that a character heard/smelled/touched/felt something?
Better for the DM to say instead "Tell me what you do to figure out if they are being truthful or not."
I also mentioned quoting the relevant material, and not just source titles and page numbers. Telling someone else to go read something that you're citing as a supporting point doesn't shift the burden of the citation from you to them.
No, there are Intimidation checks for Charisma, and nothing in that section or the general section on ability checks says NPCs can't make them against PCs. So there can be Intimidate checks against PCs, successful and not.
Having looked those sections over, despite your not quoting exactly what you think they're saying that supports your point, I don't think that they're saying what you think they're saying. There's no blanket rule that the DM doesn't adjudicate how a failed roll results in a PC reacting, or any blanket prohibition on saying what a PC does when some aspect of the game world acts on them. Saying otherwise is injecting a point of view that the books don't intrinsically support.
Me telling a player "they are showing signs they aren't being truthful" is the exact same thing as me telling a player "Grogdor doesn't think they are being truthful".
If you want to inform yourself on this matter, you're welcome to just open the books. It's not even much reading to be done at all. Based on some of the things you are saying, I highly recommend it. There's some good stuff in these sections that are often overlooked.
The rules on ability checks requires there to be an uncertain outcome or else there is no check. The rules also state that the player determines how their characters think, act, and talk (the definition of roleplaying). Since the player is the one who determines this, whatever they determine as their response to the attempt at Intimidation is the outcome, thus it is not uncertain. No uncertainty, no roll. DM describes the attempt, the player describes the response, if any.
Oh, so you did read it? Great. Perhaps you can understand that listing every single thing a DM or player can't do isn't very practical. But the rules can and do describe what each role is and it very clearly defines that the player is the one who describe what the character does, determining what the character thinks, says, and how they act.
In the former, the player has stated what they are actually doing - attempting to notice specific patterns of behavior that indicate a lack of truthfulness - and you are saying, "Yes, you notice this." (Same as you notice the trap or the like.) In the latter, you're telling them what their character thinks, which is not the DM's role. Whether you or your players care about that I leave to you and your players.
Shouldn't the player be saying that stuff before the check instead of "is he lying /truthful?" or "I roll insight" then getting salty when the gm feels the need to fill in something descriptive that refuses to let a pc act while existing as a disembodied quantum entity observing from within hammer space?
I'm not really sure what you're saying here, but I'll take a crack at answering. Yes, the player should be the one describing what they are doing, and I'm saying the DM should be asking for what the character is doing because "Is he lying?" is a question, not a description, nor is a request or demand to roll an ability check (which is not the player's role anyway). Once an appropriate action is stated, the DM can adjudicate it and narrate the results.
This is it really. the real question is "are you an adversarial DM?"
So Russian roulette with three bullets in the cylinder, then? I feel like you claiming this is a totally different situation maybe rather supports my notion you're not really thinking this through, player-side lol.
