NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6426851" data-attributes="member: 5143">I suppose.  But the level of detail can stay about this same during the entire game.  I tend to use combat in a game as the baseline of the "amount of detail" needed.  In the case of D&D, you need to declare where/if you are moving, which abilities you are activating, which weapon you are attacking with, and which target(s) you are attacking.  Often, we use the shorthand "I attack" to default to "I attack with my weapon using my 'standard' attack routine on the same enemy I hit last round."  But all of that technically needs to be specified.In the adventure I was talking about in the OP, we actually rolled for initiative and I was asking for actions in turn order with action economy intact since we were trying to see whether the PCs could stop the jumping lightning before it zapped anyone else.I think this is one of the reasons skill challenges always rubbed me the wrong way.  It is also, I think, one of the ways the player in question was trained to believe he didn't need to do any thinking on his own.  He really started playing in 4e and was used to playing skill challenges where he had to declare absolutely nothing.  Most of our skill challenges went:"You need to disarm a complex magic trap.  What do you do?""I use Arcana!""Alright, you do whatever Arcana does and you partially disable the trap.  One success."I allowed this because it's what the rules suggested you should do, but it always rubbed me the wrong way.  I wanted people to describe WHAT they were doing and then let me suggest which skill they'd use to do that.  But whenever I'd ask people to describe what they were doing, my players would get mad at me because that wasn't a requirement of the rules.  They just wanted their character to figure it out for them.This kind of game is simply no fun for me.  It's just an exercise in looking at your best skill and rolling a die.Yeah, to me, action declarations are saying what your character DOES, not what he/she thinks about.  You get to think FOR your character.If someone said to me "my character thinks about this problem and the best way to solve it" my response is "great...then what do you actually DO?"To me:Int=Ability to remember and have the DM give you free information to help you make your decisionsWis=Ability to perceive better and therefore see things that will give you more information to help you make your decisionsCha=How well the people around you will react to the things you sayNone of these things allows you to actually MAKE better decisions.  That's left up to the players.</blockquote>

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