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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7807989" data-attributes="member: 97077">What do you think "declaring an action" means? The DM says what the monster tries to do just like a player says what a character tries to do. If a check is called for, the DM makes one as per the standard adjudication process.See the section on "How to Play," which is fundamental to understanding the game in my view: "This pattern holds whether the adventurers are cautiously exploring a ruin, talking to a devious prince, or locked in mortal combat against a mighty dragon." Combat is more structured, sure, and you do take turns, but the rules even explicitly say the target of the grapple decides how to resist the grapple. Further, reactions permit players to declare actions when it is not their turn. Action declarations are clearly not limited to turns.Check those rules: "However, a character not watching for danger can do one of the following activities instead, or some other activity with the DM's permission." That is a trade off against watching for danger. If said activity is at least as distracting as navigating, drawing a map, tracking, or foraging, the DM can say you can't also watch for danger. The exception carved out for this is the ranger in favored terrain.I think you may be narrowly defining "action declaration" in way that the rules do not support.I quoted these rules earlier:This is in the DMG, pages 237-238.The D&D 5e rules don't require anything of DMs. The rules serve the DM, not the other way around. I say how I play and I show how the rules support the way I play because I base the way I play on the rules. Many DMs in my experience run most games and certainly different editions of the same game largely the same way. I do not. I stopped doing that when I realized that my D&D 4e game wasn't going as well as it could be going because I was still treating it like it was D&D 3.Xe. This was further reinforced when I tried to learn Dungeon World and later Apocalypse World while I was running D&D 4e. Different games demand different approaches and those approaches are informed by the rules of the game. So I learned from that point forward to work hard at dropping my assumptions and trying to let the rules of the game inform my approach and to sharply examine my habits to make sure they were informed by the rules, if they were not, to get rid of them if they were troublesome.So this isn't me coming at the game going "I want to run it this way and I'm going to find the rules that support it." Instead it is "I don't have any particular way I want to run this game, so I'm going to let the rules tell me and, if that turns out to be fun, I'll keep playing it." What you see me advocating for is the tried and tested result of that philosophy. Those who have adopted some of the things I've mentioned have reported that their games run smoother as a result. And I think that's great. But it doesn't mean that anyone else is running the game wrong, even if I choose to question the reason why people do the things they do in order to get them to critically examine their approaches - or more likely - to get lurkers who are reading the exchange to do the same.Edit: A couple of egregious typos</blockquote>

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