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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9375524" data-attributes="member: 6779196">In theory, yeah, I agree. In practice, I just let the player make the call, trusting that they understand their own intent better than I do.In my view, if the player thinks Investigation would apply and I think it wouldn’t, there has probably been a miscommunication; they obviously intended to declare an action that benefited from their character’s ability to make decisions based on clues, and something about how they phrased it must not have expressed that intent to me adequately, or else I must have misinterpreted their action declaration. In either case, rather than get bogged down in trying to wordsmith a more appropriate action declaration, I prefer to trust that they knew their intent and let them use the skill they intended to. Unless it’s something really egregious like describing climbing an cliff and then trying to apply animal handling.This is why both goal and approach are important in my way of resolving actions. If your goal in snapping the staff is to get two smaller lengths of wood, then strength is the most relevant factor in whether or not that approach achieves that goal. On the other hand, if your goal is convincing the guard to let you off the hook for your crime, then the most relevant thing in determining if snapping a staff in half can achieve that goal is how effectively you can sell the implicit threat of “this is what might happen to you if you don’t let me go,” which in my view is more a matter of Charisma.Intelligence doesn’t measure ability to reason an argument, it measures information retention and recall. Familiarity with the relevant case details (History), and ability to make a convincing case based on those details (Charisma) are the most important factors in my view.</blockquote>

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