You were the one who brought up the goal of play, in post 240, when you said, “There is a lot to unpack in those decisions though, including the idea that guessing correctly with limited information should be the goal of play.” I was merely informing you that this is not, in fact, the goal of play in my preferred style. Anyway, different methods having the same goals does not mean those methods are equivalent. You are going about trying to achieve the goal in different ways, which will have different consequences.
I mean, that’s nice for you, but I do need it from them.
That would be why I said that reason goes away…
You don’t need to do anything you don’t want to do. I would as them what they are trying to learn with the check they’re asking to make and how.
Again, that’s all very nice for you but those aren’t assumptions I am comfortable making.
Right, which is why I said I prefer, but do not require, that more active phrasing…
Then what they want to know is just more information about the subject, broadly. That’s a perfectly valid thing to ask for, but I do need the player to tell me so, explicitly.
If they don’t even know to ask about something, it’s probably not relevant to the challenge at hand. Remember, this is in the context of an adventuring scenario, where there are specific goals and challenges at play.
Their motivations. Ok, see that’s a goal, that’s something you want to know about, which I could not ascertain from “insight him” alone.
Looking at him. See, that’s an approach. So, your action declaration here is that you are watching him for signs of his motivations. The rest is unnecessary details - not unwelcome, but not necessary for my process.
You do though - you just said it, you’re doing it by looking at him. That’s all I need. You’re getting too bogged down by assuming I’m asking for a whole lot of highly specific detail, but that is an inaccurate assumption.
Right, which is why that degree of detail is unnecessary.
Perhaps you are comfortable making assumptions like that based on the context alone. I am not.
I don’t agree that it’s always so obvious. Sometimes it can be, but oftentimes what may seem obvious to one person is not obvious to another. Better, in my view, that we just be explicit about our intentions from the beginning and avoid that confusion. Explicit communication is basically always preferable to relying on inference.
Then we’ve just added an unnecessary exchange, potentially hurting the flow and pacing of the game, which could have been avoided by simply being more explicit to begin with.
Yeah, so this is where the sentiment you initially objected to about “asking for a roll is asking for a chance of failure” comes in. By introducing a die roll, you’ve introduced a 5% possibility of not getting this information the DM would have considered “free” had you asked for the information directly, instead of asking to roll a check to try to get the information on a success.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of that. That gets into what I mentioned earlier about hiding the information players need to make good decisions. If there’s extra information to be had, in my view it shouldn’t be gated behind a high roll on a check you had to ask to make. It should either be given freely if it’s necessary information, or revealed as a result of active engagement with the fictional world if it isn’t. Such engagement might or might not have a chance to fail to reveal that information, but that chance of failure shouldn’t be assumed before knowing what said engagement even is.
Sure, but then the request for the roll and the response that the roll was unnecessary is superfluous. Either say the character recognizes it as an arcane gate in the first place, or if you forget to do so, let the player ask “do I know what that is?” instead of “can I make an Arcana check?”
“I just want to know more about [whatever]” is a perfectly valid goal.
No, I said it doesn’t work for me.0
Right, because I don’t particularly like your laxer and more fluid style. For the reasons we’ce been discussing here. If it works for you, fantastic, but I don’t see why I should need to sing the praises of your style when what I’m trying to do is defend my style against people who are calling it childish or mischaracterizing it as being contingent on “describing things well enough.”
I think you’ve been having a completely different conversation than I have. Where did I make an unfounded assumption about your style and where did you point that out? What am I ignoring and where have you previously talked about that at all?
I do not think it’s necessarily self-explanatory. Maybe in some cases it is, but in others it will seem to be, but only due to a miscommunication. I do not like to make such assumptions, and do not think it’s too much to ask that the player just say they want to get the door open so we’re all sure we’re on the same page.
Athletics is not what I need to know for the method, Athletics is the name of a skill that might potentially allow them to add their proficiency bonus to an ability check, if one is necessary, and the method involves that skill. Based on your example descriptions, it sounds like the method you had in mind was breaking the door. Another relevant point would be if the character is trying to break it with their own body, or using some sort of tool.
And here we bring the post full-circle. Because, yeah, different “types of persuasion” as you put it might all be capable of achieving the same goal, but that doesn’t mean they’re all equivalent. They go about trying to achieve the same goal in different ways, some of which might be more or less effective than others in different contexts. The NPC in question might be particularly receptive to politeness, or particularly unreceptive to it. They might be very gullible, or they might be very shrewd. They might be a pushover when threatened, or they may respond negatively to verbal threats but cave quickly to demonstrations of violence. Any of these factors might affect my decision-making about if the action can succeed or fail, how difficult it might be to succeed, and what the consequences for failure might be. They will certainly inform how I would describe the NPC’s response in any case. So despite all having the same goal, the way I resolve such an action can vary significantly depending on the approach.
