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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 9068449" data-attributes="member: 6787503">Please don’t tell me what I’m likely to do. If you think I’ve been overly critical or misinterpreted (or misrepresented) something you said, feel free to point out the particular instance or instances.I could be wrong, but this seems to posit a set of games in which players are rewarded with success for describing things well: doing things like using precise language, correct grammar, and descriptive adjectives and adverbs, and including sensory information in their descriptions. Such games might exist, but I don’t believe I’ve ever played in one, and I think whether or not a game rewards a high level of descriptive language skill is mostly orthogonal to the topic of this thread and poll except insofar as players and DMs describing things allows them to utilize such skill. The poll doesn’t touch upon whether quality of description plays any part in the adjudication of what is described. The poll is only concerned with the actual matter being described, not how it’s described beyond what information about the character’s action the description contains. For a player with a low level of descriptive language skill, a clear expectation to describe both the character’s action and intention may in fact be helpful in providing a template of sorts which the player can use to ensure they are giving a complete description, focusing on the two important elements, without needing to add unnecessary details. I realize, given what you’ve written below, that what I’m calling “descriptive language skill” is probably not what you mean here, but I wanted to address this because I believe statements like this are one of the reasons discussions of this topic tend to go around in circles with people talking past each other. This, on the other hand, sounds like a preference about what is being described rather than how it’s described. If I understand, your preference is for players to describe only their character’s intentions (e.g. to find traps) and not what the character does to realize their desired outcome. This would be consistent with the fifth and sixth options on the poll. This has the effect of minimizing what’s commonly called “player skill” because it doesn’t allow the player to describe their character doing things that would affect whether or not they achieve their goal. Got it, and, for the record, I didn’t think you were making a statement about “one true way” to play the game. The issue I had with your statement was that it seemed to imply that other posters had an impaired ability to discern reality. I think if I’m understanding you correctly, there’s functionally no difference between a player making a “descriptive action declaration” and announcing an intention to roll an ability check at your table because of the way you choose to adjudicate outcomes.</blockquote>

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