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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5322932" data-attributes="member: 82106">My take on this is that a player saying "I make a Perception check" is USUALLY shorthand. The situation is explained, a problem exists which the player wishes to resolve. It is usually pretty clear what the player intends the character to do. It might be considered 'sloppy' at some tables and if the players get too much into the habit of it they do risk falling into bad habits, but generally speaking there's not a lot of difference between "I make a Perception check" and "I look for the hidden creature" in practice. I think from a theoretical perspective you are correct. There are a few edge cases like knowledge checks where the character isn't really taking an action at all though. Still I agree, character actions can only interact with the fictional world. The rules IMHO are just guidelines for how to do that in a nice systematic way.I would say that last example is actually a DIE ROLL. This is exactly the sort of thing the dice are there for. They allow you to play out complex situations without knowing every single detail of the world. Remember, the world works in a deterministic fashion. In reality when a person decides to climb a wall they succeed or fail for entirely deterministic reasons. The factors involved are however immensely complex. Dice just give you a way of 'fudging'. In the above example the to-hit roll determines whether or not the wizard was effective in using his tactics or not. The player may choose to describe how some of those factors play out as part of a description. "I see that the wizard is putting his weight on his back foot, so I press forward hard and slam him back against the next step, causing him to fall." Maybe that works and maybe it doesn't.Careful, you're coming close to advocating "you can't grab that swarm" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I would say that your PC is assumed to skilled enough at what he does to use the best possible tactics at all times. Given that I'm no martial arts/fighting expert I wouldn't even dream of knowing what those tactics would be, but presumably my character does. Now, I might describe the tactics I imagine he's going to use, but I doubt that most DMs are any more qualified to judge their theoretical effectiveness than I am. I wouldn't even dream of giving players die roll modifiers on that basis. I can understand your point about wanting your narrative to have an impact on the game. The problem I have with that is it is at least as much a slippery slope as ruling you can't grab a swarm. It isn't especially fair to the players either since it gives a mechanical advantage to the player based on something that isn't part of the game (the player's skill at describing combat). For the same reason I don't hold much with giving 'role playing bonuses' to the people that are more skilled at describing their social interactions, etc. I know this position can be criticized by arguments such as "well, players with greater tactical skill do better in combat" and that is true. All it illustrates to me is that there IS a game element involved in the game. In some perfect world we'd be able to assume the role of the characters completely, but since that isn't in the offing this decade (this century, certainly not in my lifetime) then we'll just have to do the best we can. People with a good understanding of social situations are STILL more likely to do better in those cases even without bonuses too, so it isn't like that kind of thing is only happening in one aspect of the game.</blockquote>

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