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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9048060" data-attributes="member: 6779196">The “I try to __ by __” template isn’t necessary, it’s just an easy format to use if you’re unsure whether an action declaration would include both goal and approach or not. You could phrase the message declaration that way if you wanted to - e.g. “I try to send him the message [whatever] by casting the message spell.” It’d be a stilted way to express that, but it would convey the same information, which as I’ve said repeatedly in these discussions is the only thing I care about, not the specific verbiage. That’s why I phrased the recommendation the way I did: If you can phrase your action in the form “I try to __ by __,” it’s almost certainly a complete action declaration. You don’t have to actually phrase it that way if you don’t want to, but if you could do so, it probably contains all the information I need to adjudicate the action.I suspect you’re right that it’s not vastly different from the way you run your games. Probably the most obvious difference is that I love dungeons, which I know are not your cup of tea. I strongly favor what I call location-based adventures, where the focus is mainly on exploring a dangerous location like a dungeon and the storytelling,  such as it is, is largely environmental. This as opposed to what I call event-based games, where the focus is on an unfolding sequence of events, more akin to an ongoing narrative featuring the PCs.In terms of differences in technique though, there’s a thing I’ve seen a lot of DMs do, not sure if you do this: a player will declare an action in pretty vague terms (sometimes even just saying “I make a __ check), the DM will call for a roll, and then the DM will narrate the action in more detail based on the results of the roll. That’s something that I specifically avoid; I prefer for the details to be established by the player before I call for a roll, and in any post-roll narration I do describes the effects of the declared action on the environment, avoiding adding or altering details to the character’s action as the player described it. That’s something that’s very important to me, I want the characters’ actions to be under the sole purview of the player, and do everything I can to limit my narration strictly to the environment and non-player characters and monsters within it.</blockquote>

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