Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9054111" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Not unlikely at all in my experience. I mean, I guess it might be unusual for PCs to go around smashing random vases for no reason. But, if there’s a vase in a dungeon or other adventuring location, there are many reasons PCs might want to smash it. And chances are, if there’s a vase the PCs have good reason to want to smash, it probably matters how they go about doing it.Obviously your games may be different, but this is not at all an unusual scenario to me.The question may cause the player to second-guess their originally intended action. But more importantly to me, I find:Player: “I smash the vase with my bare hand”DM: “It shatters into a thousand tiny pieces, and the stone pedestal beneath it sinks down; a  faint rumbling sound can be heard, and quickly begins to grow louder. What do you do?”To be far more immersive than:Player: “I smash the vase.”DM: “How?”Player: “What do you mean?”DM: “Like, do you use your bare hand? or do you use a weapon or other tool? Do you throw it on the ground?”Player: “Oh, I guess I just bring my bare hand straight down on it.”DM: “It shatters into a thousand tiny pieces, and the stone pedestal beneath it sinks down; a  faint rumbling sound can be heard, and quickly begins to grow louder. What do you do?”That break from the narrative may be brief, but if they happen frequently (which in my experience, they always do at first with players who aren’t used to this style), it gets tiring quickly. I prefer to keep in the fiction as much as possible and minimize meta-game discussion.That’s nice that it hasn’t been an issue for you, but your experience is not universal. It was often an issue for me before I started asking players to specify goal and approach when they declare their actions. Now it isn’t any more.Obviously I must necessarily make some assumptions, but if I you state both what you want to happen and how you try to make that happen, the remaining assumptions are just minutiae. If you only state what you want to happen, I have to assume the whole action you take to make it happen, which I don’t want to do (and certainly wouldn’t want a DM to do for my own character’s action!)Of course.</blockquote>

Verification