Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bawylie" data-source="post: 7810953" data-attributes="member: 6776133">You’re mostly ON POINT here. I believe that there are corner cases wherein invoking mechanics to declare activity in the narrative is appropriate and welcome. “I use my bonus action to dodge,” “I’ll dash to the orc,” are examples. Those are actions but they don’t require any adjudication - their outcomes are already set. Insight, you have presented, is a non-action. And I disagree. At my table, I have asked my players to make declarative, action-oriented statements whenever they would ask a question. So whenever I get someone ask me “Is this guy lying?” I respond with “what do you do to find out?” “Is there anything hidden under the floor?” “What do you DO to find out?” I try to avoid as many non-actions as I reasonably can. So in my game, the players tend not to ask but to act. I now get “I think he’s lying. I study his manner for signs of deception.” And “I’m comparing what he’s saying to what we already know. The story doesn’t match. I look for signs of deception or if he’s honestly ignorant about the info we know.” In the same sense that you’re always hearing things, you’re also always observing someone else’s behavior. But when you have an objective, and you take an action to complete that objective, you may need an ability (skill) check. If there’s no action at all, there’s usually no check. And as discussed above, some actions don’t require checks to resolve (and some may not have any reasonable chance of failing). To your point about DMs foreclosing on some approaches that “aren’t good enough” I can say I’m not out to do that. Most commonly, when someone declares something I consider an automatic failure, I’ll let the player know - their character would know that too - and see if we can renegotiate the action. I assume good faith on all parties, and blame myself for asymmetric (or insufficient) info. (This is a statement about my own games at my own table and not a criticism of other peoples’ Games which I am sure are delightful).</blockquote>

Verification