D&D 5E Are there actions not covered under a skill?

[Charlaquin]

See, that's the disconnect, I think. I don't want to play a game whre the storytelling is primarily environmental, at least not in a paradigm like DnD where combat becomes a whole thing, and I definitely wouldn't want to use 5e where threat in a dungeon delve is based primarily on resource attrition.

I don’t understand how you think “storytelling is primarily environmental” leads to “combat becom(ing) a whole thing.” You can have a combat-light game with environmental storytelling. Quite easily, in fact. Look at puzzle games like Myst and The Witness.

I can enjoy a delve in a game where combat is more like many pbta games, where you just make a roll to find out the cost of a fight. But...DnD? Nah. To me, DnD is primarily good at save-the-world stories and other plot and character focused stories.

Depends on the edition. I certainly think 4e did such event-based adventures better than it did site-based. I find the opposite to be the case in 5e.

 

[Reynard]

I’m not a fan of this, as I find “20 questions” play very boring, and it slows the game down.

That's totally valid. I find it exhausting as DM to have to pain a picture for every little element when the players are going to see it in their heads they way they will anyway. Some specificity is required, of course, and you want to give players a decent sense of space and mood and location, but when using archetypal locations you can make less do more pretty easily.

One consequence of too much description is accidental importance. With some players, say too much about the picture on the wall or the door knob and you are in for a half hour of poking, prodding and -- yup -- unnecessary pixelbitching. I think it works better to have players tell you what they want to know by not only their questions but their actions. I much prefer to read and respond to the table than to lecture to it. After all, the game is about them and their characters, not me or my novel-like story I am trying to put them into.

 

[Fenris-77]

The principle of closure really applies to DMing. Humans are masters of filling in details based on a shallow information pool. Sometimes its more efficient to describe one item in a room in more detail, and just list the other contents, because the description gets carried over to the whole room by the listener. Or at least that's what happens when it works well. Generally the one thing is the biggest or most iconic thing in the room. What that description method doesn't do is index which thing to search. It might, but it doesn't necessarily.

 

[iserith]

That's totally valid. I find it exhausting as DM to have to pain a picture for every little element when the players are going to see it in their heads they way they will anyway. Some specificity is required, of course, and you want to give players a decent sense of space and mood and location, but when using archetypal locations you can make less do more pretty easily.

One consequence of too much description is accidental importance. With some players, say too much about the picture on the wall or the door knob and you are in for a half hour of poking, prodding and -- yup -- unnecessary pixelbitching. I think it works better to have players tell you what they want to know by not only their questions but their actions. I much prefer to read and respond to the table than to lecture to it. After all, the game is about them and their characters, not me or my novel-like story I am trying to put them into.

Luckily the PHB tells us what to do here (p. 6) which allows us to avoid these outcomes. The play loop outlined there says the DM need only describe where they are, what's around them, and the basic scope of options that present themselves. Then the next step begins: the players describe what they want to do. (Notably, a question isn't actually describing what they want to do unless it's something like dialogue with an NPC.) Once they do that, the DM can narrate the results of the adventurers' actions.

Now here's the part I think a lot of DMs totally miss: The play loop goes back to step 1 right after the DM narrates the results. Now the DM gets to refine the basic scope of options in the environment based on what the characters have discovered by way of their actions. Some options are closed now and others are open. This play loop continues throughout the entire game, regardless of the pillar (except that combat's a bit more structured).

So as you can see, front-loading a bunch of description that the players are going to forget most of isn't really suggested by the game. That's a DM doing something that is potentially problematic and was particularly prevalent in a lot of old modules. (I recall boxed texts that were full pages in Dungeon Magazine.) But with the play loop, it's smaller chunks of information spread out through the scene.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think that’s kind of a different topic.

I disagree.

I think @doctorbadwolf is proposing a scenario where the choices are mutually exclusive, so choosing one eliminates the possibility of the other. In that case, they lose whatever was down the path they didn't take (and that makes all the difference).

They don’t lose it though, because they never had it in the first place to lose. They just never gain it.

This feels like semantics pretending to be a meaningful distinction, but I may just misunderstand you. If one path is easier than the other, or faster, or literally in any way more beneficial, it's a stake. You lose something by picking the other path. Semantic arguments about the wording, where we go back and forth about "lose" vs "miss out on" or whatever are the least useful or interesting kind of discussion we could possibly have. Arguing about which star wars movie is the best is a better use of our time than that.

This is what I refer to when I say pixelbitching. It isn't fun and doesn't have a positive effect on the game.

Yeah it's a style of play that is...very much antithetical to how I play dnd. "I search each piece of furniture thoroughly and carefully." may be less fun, but it is sufficient for any reasonable DM, IMO.

It definitely sounds like a communication issue. Each person in that scenario was making assumptions about the other person's play style. That was the source of the problem, not that either of them preferred the style they did.

I disagree. The DM was being a doof. Even if they are a DM that requires a roll regardless of how specifically you describe the action (and tbh I don't want my players spending ten minutes describing how the inspect something unless it's a back and forth where we walk through the process of solving the puzzle*), that should have been a "Okay go ahead and roll an investigate check." A good DM will either give advantage or lower the DC due to the detailed approach, but, yeah, I don't beleive in player skill so I'm also fine with not making players feel like they have to go into that kind of detail so they can get bonuses and easier rolls.

It's the whole "telegraphing" thing that I just don't get.

But let's say I'm describing someone's living quarters/small apartment. What we would consider a studio apartment would be pretty typical living arrangement for many people in my campaign world.

So if I'm describing it, it's going to have what I would consider standard set dressing. Bed, maybe a dresser, wardrobe along with a small desk and chair. Maybe another couple of pieces of furniture and a small stove. Couple of pictures on the wall, probably a cupboard. Likely even a little storage cubby up high. I probably forget to mention the chamber pot but it's probably in there too.

Why all that? Because it's what I would think would be reasonable for the person living there. I'm describing someone with a fair number of possessions but not fabulously wealthy. It's set dressing that sets the mood.

It's never just going to be a bureau with a single drawer (which, yes, is an exaggeration).

I can't think of any logical reason for any particular piece of furniture or location to stand out short of just putting a big neon sign saying "search here" pointed at the futon.

This.

It also, for me, helps me form a clearer mental picture of the game world and what’s happening in it that I struggle to form when the DM’s description of the environment is largely set dressing and the actions the characters take are vague and undefined.

It's not binary, to be fair. Every DM I know who just describes the scene without regard to what items are secretly important does so with a decent level of specificity in order to paint the scene. We just don't describe the some things in more detail than others unless it feels right to do so in terms of something in the scene naturally being an attention grabber.

it absolutely adds something to the game, by rewarding players for paying attention to the DM’s description of the environment and picking up on the signals that are seeded into it.

That only adds something to the game if one agrees that forcing players to either remember a bunch of details over the course of months of real time, or take detailed notes while remaining engaged with the game, both of which are very, very, difficult, for a lot of people, in order to be good at dnd. The only requirement to be good at dnd should be coming to the game and being engaged with the game and actively working toward everyone having a good experience.
If you want to play dnd as a Dark Souls style game, that's fine, but those of us who don't want any part of that are never going to respond happily when people like the poster I put on ignore act like this style is somehow "the right way" to play.

I did find my keys in that example, though. I spent sufficient time searching for them, and succeeded in finding them.

This is why I get so frustrated discussing things on the internet. The point of the example is clearly that sometimes time simply will not cause you to find the thing. You have to come back later, or someone else has to look, or in some cases, it just doesn't happen.

I think...maybe you just have a good memory and perhaps don't have a great understanding of what not having a reliable memory is like? I hate to draw these kinds of conclusions about someone I don't know, but that is what comes across in a lot of this thread as I read your replies to myself and others.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's totally valid. I find it exhausting as DM to have to pain a picture for every little element when the players are going to see it in their heads they way they will anyway. Some specificity is required, of course, and you want to give players a decent sense of space and mood and location, but when using archetypal locations you can make less do more pretty easily.

Agreed. The razor I use to cut through this thicket is to focus my description on things that are most relevant to the players. What can they interact with or otherwise affect? What can potentially harm or otherwise affect them? What they need to be made aware of to navigate this scenario effectively? Those are the things to focus the description on.

One consequence of too much description is accidental importance. With some players, say too much about the picture on the wall or the door knob and you are in for a half hour of poking, prodding and -- yup -- unnecessary pixelbitching.

My approach avoids this issue in two ways: the first is the use of telegraphing. If I’m doing my job right and the players are paying attention, they should be able to recognize what’s important not through quantity of description, but by the details of the description. The second is the action adjudication process. Since I don’t call for rolls to resolve things that have no chance of success, players who latch onto some unimportant detail of the environment should quickly realize they’re barking up the wrong tree when they fail to accomplish their goal without being asked to make a roll. That only happens if their approach didn’t have a chance of accomplishing their goal. Sure, there’s a small risk of the players thinking the approach rather than the goal was the problem, but it shouldn’t take long before it becomes clear that the goal is indeed the issue.

I think it works better to have players tell you what they want to know by not only their questions but their actions.

Me too. I also prefer actions over questions.

I much prefer to read and respond to the table than to lecture to it. After all, the game is about them and their characters, not me or my novel-like story I am trying to put them into.

I agree.

 

[iserith]

but, yeah, I don't beleive in player skill

I mean, that basically sums up the disconnect here.

That was a very common thing to say in the D&D 4e days. I used to make that argument myself - "character skill, not player skill." I've since realized that was wrong though. Player skill is very much a thing in any game where the outcome is not totally random.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But that doesn't make it not an essential game design tool, nor not especially important to environmental storytelling. It's fine you don't like those games of course, but that doesn't mean they aren't any good or that they don't require a different set of tools.

I also think it's maybe a little unfair to call resource attrition the primary threat. Even in OSR games where resource attrition is a core feature, with its own mechanics and whatever, it's not the primary threat. It's an additional source of planning and stress that highlight and amplify the actual threats. It's still zombies waiting to eat your face, but you also have to worry about having that happen in the dark. Used right it's a fantastic storytelling tool. It's not for everyone though.

I don’t understand how you think “storytelling is primarily environmental” leads to “combat becom(ing) a whole thing.” You can have a combat-light game with environmental storytelling. Quite easily, in fact. Look at puzzle games like Myst and The Witness.

That is absolutely not what I said. I said that I don't think environmental storytelling and a game where combat becomes a whole thing are a good mix.
I literally said that I prefer a combat-light game for environmental storytelling.

Depends on the edition. I certainly think 4e did such event-based adventures better than it did site-based. I find the opposite to be the case in 5e.

And I think 5e also does event based adventures at least as well as it does site-based adventures. It just provides the resource attritiion framework to make site-based adventures work better than they did in 4e, but because classes are asymetrical in resources and recharge timers, 5e has more of a reliance on a specific number of encounters per day to be balanced. It improves (but does not fix) 4e's problem of too-involved combat making site-based play tedious unless all fights are avoided, however.

But the game runs very very well when resources aren't a significant part of adventure design. I know from several years of running the game that way. It doesn't actually matter that the wizard and monk and rogue are on totally different resource models when the danger pretty much never comes from running out of resources. What matters is how hard it is to kill each character, and how much they can contribute to a scene, and the biggest balance issue in 5e becomes the fact that fighters have fewer non-combat resources to allow them to be good at doing a wide range of things. I give my players a bonus feat at level 1, and Skilled and Prodigy are two of the most common feats taken, for this reason. I also offer a bonus skill when needed if someone makes a real meathead characters like a champion fighter. It helps.

But the long rest wizard, short rest monk, and at-will all day rogue have no discernible balance issues in my games, whereas the issues are plain as day when I join a game that uses dungeon style design but doesn't hit close enough to the 6 encounters a day guideline or find some other way to drain party resources.

 

[Oofta]

When it comes to player skill vs character skill I'll take character skill every time.

Player skill is inherently biased to the benefit of the players who know the DM well. My wife has had me as a DM for a couple of decades now, she knows my "tells" whether she's consciously aware of it or not.

That, and it's a role playing game. If the guy who struggled to graduate from high school wants to play an Int 20 wizard that's what he gets to play. His character will be far more capable than the player.

 

[Charlaquin]

This feels like semantics pretending to be a meaningful distinction, but I may just misunderstand you. If one path is easier than the other, or faster, or literally in any way more beneficial, it's a stake. You lose something by picking the other path. Semantic arguments about the wording, where we go back and forth about "lose" vs "miss out on" or whatever are the least useful or interesting kind of discussion we could possibly have. Arguing about which star wars movie is the best is a better use of our time than that.

Except this difference of interpretation of what constitutes stakes seems to be at the core of our disagreement about challenge. So evidently there is some material difference in our understandings of the scenario that goes beyond just what words we use to describe it. Much like (to bring this full circle) there is a material difference from a game in which a check modified by both an ability and skill is the default and a check modified only by an ability is a backup, versus a game in which a check modified by an ability is the default and a skill modifier is a bonus that can be applied on top of it.

Yeah it's a style of play that is...very much antithetical to how I play dnd. "I search each piece of furniture thoroughly and carefully." may be less fun, but it is sufficient for any reasonable DM, IMO.

Yeah, that clears the bar of reasonable specificity in my opinion.

I disagree. The DM was being a doof. Even if they are a DM that requires a roll regardless of how specifically you describe the action (and tbh I don't want my players spending ten minutes describing how the inspect something unless it's a back and forth where we walk through the process of solving the puzzle*), that should have been a "Okay go ahead and roll an investigate check." A good DM will either give advantage or lower the DC due to the detailed approach, but, yeah, I don't beleive in player skill so I'm also fine with not making players feel like they have to go into that kind of detail so they can get bonuses and easier rolls.

For the record, I didn’t spend 10 minutes monologuing about what my character was doing. It was a 10-minute back-and-forth between me and the DM (and another player, though I left that detail out cause it wasn’t particularly relevant) where I (or the other player) described an action, and the DM gave some kind of response like “you can’t tell” or something similarly unhelpful, then I (or the other player) described something else and the DM gave another unhelpful response, until everyone involved was so frustrated he finally said “why don’t you try investigating it?” If he had wanted me to make an Investigation check to determine what I learned, that’s fine, but he should have asked for it as part of the resolution of my first action. And that was normally how things would go in this game, I would describe an action, he’d call for a check, I’d make it, and everyone was happy. I don’t know what the deal was in this specific instance, whether he was having an off day, or he had a really specific idea in mind about how this puzzle should be solved and I wasn’t doing what he wanted, or what. But that was one link in a chain of events that lead me to quit that game.

That only adds something to the game if one agrees that forcing players to either remember a bunch of details over the course of months of real time, or take detailed notes while remaining engaged with the game, both of which are very, very, difficult, for a lot of people, in order to be good at dnd.

I do not agree that forcing players to remember a bunch of details to be successful is a good thing, and I do not make remembering a bunch of details necessary to be successful in my games.

The only requirement to be good at dnd should be coming to the game and being engaged with the game and actively working toward everyone having a good experience.

Agreed.

If you want to play dnd as a Dark Souls style game, that's fine, but those of us who don't want any part of that are never going to respond happily when people like the poster I put on ignore act like this style is somehow "the right way" to play.

Nobody here is saying the way they play the game is “the right way” to play.

This is why I get so frustrated discussing things on the internet. The point of the example is clearly that sometimes time simply will not cause you to find the thing. You have to come back later, or someone else has to look, or in some cases, it just doesn't happen.

Coming back later... Is spending time...

I think...maybe you just have a good memory and perhaps don't have a great understanding of what not having a reliable memory is like? I hate to draw these kinds of conclusions about someone I don't know, but that is what comes across in a lot of this thread as I read your replies to myself and others.

Haha no. My memory is terrible (for most things. Stuff like song lyrics stick in there like glue for some reason, but I also have ADD and my memory is generally crap). Memory is not a skill I require of my players - I’ll encourage players to take notes if it helps them, but I never require such things and I’m always happy to remind players of details they may have forgotten if they ask.