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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 2554689" data-attributes="member: 2268">If that's not a reason for the DM to rule out an action, I don't know what is? Of course, different DMs might have different POVs of what is stupid and what is not, and it's always a matter of DM and players being on roughly the same wavelength, but you need that for most games to turn out good anyway.In this example, a player wanted to try something because "the skill works that way, I have it, and it isn't specified if it works on dragons or not". It's about a "fierce" gnome barbarian trying to intimidate a dragon who is busy mopping the floor with him and his companions. You could of course handle it by allowing him that roll, adding a few penalties for simply not being a threat at all, and listen to the player argue that those penalties are unfair and not in the rules. Or you let him roll, don't really care about the result but simply announce it didn't work without giving a real DC, and listen to the player trying to back-calculate any modifiers and the dragon's HD based on that table in the PHB. Or you flat-out tell him no, give him a shorthand of your reasons for it, and leave it at that. It's always up to the group's individual make-up which way works better, of course.But that's one point for the original topic: with all them options being equally available to players and DMs alike, I've noticed an increase in players expecting, or even demanding to make this-and-that ability check, asked for or not, because it "says so in the rules that I can" and expect to get the results as written in the rules. The endless discussions from OD&D/2E IF some action is possible and how to handle it have been replaced by players trying to overrule the DM with the existing rules. One is as annoying as the other, but in the former case, the DM was still expected to have the last word in a rules decision.To be honest, if a bunch of roleplayers who have been playing for 15 years and up suddenly get in your face about a rule decision, arguing that it will "unbalance the whole game" and "that you're trying to get something out of it that's simply not built into it", you're close to throwing the whole thing overboard as a DM. I'm not saying it's the standard in D&D players, but I can confirm that too many options, and a ruleset that tries to codify every possible action, stifles creative thinking on both sides of the screen, and leads to a lot of frustrating, number-crunching discussions. :\</blockquote>

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