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="iserith" data-source="post: 7797064" data-attributes="member: 97077">One issue is that "goal and approach" is conflated with needing a "meaningful consequence for failure." It does, of course, but not because I or others say so."Goal and approach" just means that the player is explicit with what he or she wants to achieve (goal) and how the character goes about that (approach) with reasonable specificity. This is as opposed to, say, the player asking to make an ability check and leaving us to guess or infer what the character is doing or forcing the DM to establish that in the narration phase of the play loop, effectively playing the character for the player.The player saying what the character is doing and hoping to achieve makes it easier for the DM to determine whether there's an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure, the two rules-mandated criteria for whether there is an ability check. It also makes it easy to set a DC and choose which ability score applies to the ability check, plus which skill proficiency, if those criteria are met.That's it. That's all it is. If people want to argue against players being more explicit about what their characters are doing and thereby making a larger contribution to the play experience, uhh, okay I guess? If they want to argue against meaningful consequence for failure being one of the prerequisites for ability checks, then they can just scream impotently at the rules books for a while. I didn't write the things. And of course they don't have to use those rules if they don't want to.</blockquote>

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