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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Necrofumbler" data-source="post: 9069974" data-attributes="member: 6923702">At my table, player describes action AND/OR intention, and for his entire round. Then DM decides if a (some) check(s) is (are) needed, and what kind of check(s) it is.- A minimum amount of the player actually needing to roleplay his action and/or intention is assumed to be needed at least most of the time.- "Pushing Buttons" is very strongly discouraged. Example : "I try to Intimidate the guard!". That is just reciting wored per word an ability/skill/power name right out from the player's character sheet, and I find this extremely flavorless and boring, as it leads to all a-bit-similar similar situations ending up feeling like one single exact same action.- We use "Angry GM's Murky Mirror": There is no real "In Character (IC) vs Out Of Character (OOC)" special wall artificial separation between a player and his character. The character is more like your Avatar in the game world. Thor might have super duper high level stats and abilities, but still makes dumb decisions all the time. In the same way the argument that "But my charac ytter is a pro, he ikno3ws exactly 3ehhat to do!" is no0o good. If you are panicking or not paying attention, or making dumb moves, then your character is just as frigging confused as you are. Your 20 INT stat for your wizard means something only mechyanically, he is a master to making his spells more precise or tougher to resist, and good at recallling obscure lore when it counts. But as for making "intelligent" decision, it's on the player. Same for the 20 CHA Bard: that affects only mechanical bonuses. But even a +120 on his Diplomacy roll won't save him from outright very badly insulting the well-known-to-be-all-serious-business-and-quite-high-up-on-his-own-ego king right in his face., in front of the entire court, because the player is a zero-social-skills person that can't learn t talk nciel;y even if his life depended on it. Because in that case, the DM doesn't even ask for a roll, he knows such an action is auto-failure. It's easy to "ropleplay" a strong or tough or dextrous character. But iyt's neraar imppossible to roleplay a character that is very intelligent, or vvery wise, or very charismatic. That is why those things afer ONLY the mechanical rolls, NOT the PC's personality. But the way you roleplay, and the consequences, those things are 100% on you the player.- Pupettering is somewhat discouraged. aka "controlling your PC as if it is a perfectly controlled 3rd person external entity". I reward roleplay, not min-maxing.- It's a cooperative and collaborative social team-based game. The agency of "players mostly in it for themselves" is always limited by "anybody in the group has veto power on other any players actions if that would ruin the overall fun at the game table". Excuses like "But that's what my PC would do! (about to do a sucky for game table ambiance fun-killing action), because <arbitrary PC background reason XYZ>!" becomes instead a "Nope, it is 100% YOUR own decision as a player to ty to MAKE your PC act like that. You're the one who's being a dick for deciding to ruin everybody else's fun. Instead, try to invent some story telling rationale why your PC, despite "thinking like that", would actually NOT end upp doing such an action. You don't play for your own fun, but for the fun of the entire game table." The "I don't really care if nobody else has fun, as long as me I have fun!" attitude, which I've actually really seen said verbatim a few times, leads to immediate "Please pick up your dice and leave". Any hostile "intra-party conflict" interaction can be interesting rolepaly opportunity, but only if the GROUP AGREES.- "Problem-Player" problem, are solved by adressing the problem player directly, not by "targeting" his PC with bad events.- Any player "deciding" what check is to be rolled, or rolling a d20 without even having been asked to roll something by the DM, leads to an automatic failure of the attempted action (or entire turn if no action/intention was stated), without being able to do something else. And out of combat, "player turns" last a lot more than 1 round. I've had my share of "D20 twigglers" that constantly roll their dice, be it from nervousness, or (much morre probabe) hoping to drown my vigilance until "just by pure random happenstance" the 20 they just rolled now coincides with finallly stating the REAL action they wanted to try. You roll. Once. After the DM asks you to. - Less "game vital" pretty easy actions "that could still miss on a small non-Nat-1 number", often lead to DM just saying "you succeed" anyway (i.e. not asking for a roll at al). Less "game vital" pretty hard actions "That could still succeed on a high non-Nat-20 number, often lead to DM just saying "you fail", no check asked. DM decides what is "vital" or not. Typically, if the situation is not really a stressfull one, then it "ain't vital". This cuts down on tons of needless secondary checks and speeds up the game quite noticeably. Players arguing "but I still should have a small chance to do it!" just means they are ARGUING WITH THE DM. See "problem players" above.- No "takebacks". A round is a frigging 6 seconds. Your PC is moving around a lot, seeing things from a 1st person perspective, maybe with sweat partially obscuring his vision, not at full breath, pain from lesser gashes, etc. Meanwhile player is very confortably sitting and gettting a bird's eye view of the enntire battlefield, nd before it's your turn you have had MINUTES to think. So, no, it ain't an optimized chess game, but the chaos of battle. When called out bby the DM, you do something NOW, or you end up losing your turn.- You precedeclare your entire round, THEN your round is resolved. You forgot to declare a part of your round's worth of actions? Too bad, you don't get to do it. This cut down a lot on "analysis paralysis".- You have no friggging idea what's going on? You don't get a replay recap of the round that just occurred. Follow the damned game! If it wasn't because you think that when it's not your turn you can ignore being interested in what the other players are doing and can just go surfing the web on your cell phone to pass the time because you have ADHD or something, you can ask 1, maybe 2, extremely dead simple quick questions. Anything REQUIRING a check, though, costs at least a Bonus Action to do (for DC 5 and DC 10 checks) or your enntiire Action (for DC 15 or more checks). And no, you can't say "Oh it's going to cost me my action? I try to do this instead them! No rewinds, no takenacks. Stop min-maxing, just roll with it.  I don't reward gamer table behaviors I find abhorrent especiallly those that show an utter lack of respect to the other players. Such as not being interested in what they do only in your own PC's actions. And iif you were a bit lost because you DID "mentally drop out of the game" because you went surgimg, too bad, you just lost your entire round. You edron't gget to "ask a question", DM gives you a very quick "general" recap of the current situation (not everything that led up to it), and you'd better start thinking about your NEXT round and learn to follow the game better. Basically, it's "Git Gud" or be ready to suck big time. Player's actual game table performance has a diirect impact on character's performance. It's not a chess or board game. Your PC represents YOU "if you really were that character thrown into that fantasy world".Those are more like guidelines, than hard and fast absolute rules. I give lots of leeway.Typically, a new player either gets on with the program really fast, or drops out all by himself, which is "good riddance!", not only according to me, but according to all my players too.In any encounter, especially social ones, if the encounter is "for fun and laughs", then I'm extremely forgiving about moost things. But in a "deadly serious life or death or social situation", yeah, what you say is what your character says. Or an "equivalent" in the game world. Deadly serious dramatic encoounter with the no-nonsense king with an inflated ego and a huge army? If Player A says to player B, loud enough for DM to hear, something like "That king is a real dick, should we just kill him?" you can bet there is going to be a big bad reaction from that king. Especially if the staatement comes from a non-new player that should really already know otherwise how we run things. Even if that screws up the entire adventure, too. I don't "railroad."Similarly if players try to Long Rest all the time after everyy couple fights, I don't "suddenly" use cheap "rest breaking" tricks that just magically happen to occur ONLY when they try to Rest "too often", but magically never happen wqhen they long rest is the exact samme spot "after doing a sufficient number of encounters". I at least roll with it until the adventure is over, then change the resting rules altogether. That'd be just dickhead DM railroading. Nah. Players will naturally try to do "what works best" and rewards thme the most foor the least amount of risks and effort. So if something seems "bad" like not enough encounters pper long rest (because thhat really wreaks huge havoc on casters vs martials relative power balance, as suddenly bthe casteres can jjust opt to go supernova in all fights, never lacking for powerful spells, while fighers get nerfed because they end up getting to use their short rest special powers only once per "effective" long rest, any "player exploit and abuse" is actually on me not fixing it in the first place (and on the core designers, too), and not on the players.</blockquote>

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