Recent content by Thomas Shey

That gets back to the "you can only get on the ride if you're this tall" approach, which is, if you can't properly do intimidating yourself, you don't get to play characters--or NPCs--that can. I think by now I've made it pretty clear where I stand on that. To a point? Yes. I don't insist...

On the other hand the GM is expected to do a lot of firewalling of NPC intentions and his awareness anyway, and if he can't do that this isn't going to be the only place there are problems.

Are you under the impression I care about what D&D 5e does here (or really anywhere)? In regard to what I'm talking about (note my "thumb on the scale" note upthread) only if your defintion of "controlling" is very broad. I'm talking about things like "They made a successful Intimidate roll...

Well, there are simply game systems and GMs that don't use social rolls at all. Not what I want, but they do have the virtue of relative consistency.

Well, that's all I'm recommending for. That seems to be a critique directed at Intimidate as a skill in general, which I'll flat out say I don't buy into; there's a difference between "This situation/individual is intrinsically intimidating" and "This individual knows how to present...

The problem is, you appear to be good with mental and social actions to be all about the player's play, and not about the character's capabilities, and apparently that the inverse is true where NPC abilities in these areas are irrelevant to what the character percieves or decides. I don't think...

Well, that's partly assuming some kind of metacurrency is present too, though. By itself they don't let you do that.

"Wrong" is doing heavy lifting there. I wouldn't say its so much "wrong" is its difficult to see any benefit it provides to make up for the extra overhead on it.

I always say the only real difference is you can more easily bake in special/critical results in the D100.

Depends what you mean by "interrogate". Do I evaluate them in context of other mechanics and what benefit they seem to supply? Yes, yes I do. I've been a mechanic hack for 40+ years now and sometimes pretty picky, so looking at mechanics in detail is something I do. As to you second...

My view is just that PCs shouldn't be a privledged set in regard to how social skills interact with them; but that doesn't mean it needs to be all or nothing in that direction either. I don't have much patience for people who think its okay for Persuade to be, effectively mind control when...

You're apparently under the impression I think completely disconnecting them from character abilities is okay either. I don't. (And if you're going to go to the all-or-nothing "I guess we don't need to even play then", save it. Character abilities matter in combat in most games, but I don't...

And I don't think its okay that its completely disconnected by the abilities of the characters and instead based entirely around the abilities of the player and GM. So here we are.

Doesn't make me accept it just because the GM liked it. If they can't explain what purpose doing these things serve being different in a way that I think is credible, its just a bad design as far as I'm concerned (as contrasted with a choice that's serving purposes I don't share, which is not...

How about "both"? (I should note I got a lot of early experience with BRP based games)>