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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9457902" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Shrug cribbing language from how it has been expressed in the past. I figured the sentiment would be well-expressed without needing a thesis level review of my phrasing.Your last sentence implies that the opposite technique either doesn't allow the DM to present obstacles (which is rather silly since the entire discussion is hinged around a response to obstacles) or that the player asking to roll instead of describing an action does not allow for emergent generation of story via attempting to achieve a character's goals. I'll review the next paragraph before offering a rebuttal to the second idea.Right, this has absolutely nothing at all to do with the specific method of resolution. On a meta-level, the story is equally likely to be twists, conflicts and setbacks if you roll for results. I know this intimately, as my major writing projects over the last few years have been explicitly that exact sort of story telling. In fact, the issue with the rolling method is often a LACK of such things, as the dice decree a success where a challenge was meant. I also find your implications to again be rather harsh. The player asking to roll is not giving the DM permission to shape the path of the story in general, nor does it prevent them from taking actions that align with their character's goals. You seem to have the complete wrong conception with which to tackle this, because you are looking at this in terms of the agency of the character. But that is not what is going on here. To fully explain, I need to lay some ground work. Firstly, remember again that the opposing style is a lack of requirement. No one has ever stated in any of these discussions that they would require their players to never state an action and only ask for a roll. Every refutation of your preference I have ever seen across these boards is consistently that they would simply not force the player to rephrase their attempt and force them to come up with an action. This is a key point that leads into the second, which is that the opposing style is one of inconsistency. Sometimes the player will describe their actions as you would, sometimes they ask to simply roll. And that is the key that I think trips you up, because it leads to a question. What is the difference between those times? We often phrase this as being something that "new players" do. But I've seen experienced players do it as well, and there is a pattern. So, when do we simply hold up the die and ask to roll? There are three major categories in my experience: Lack of Knowledge, Lack of Care, Lack of Confidence. I'm going to tackle the last one first, because it is the most simple and the only one where I tend to agree with the idea of getting the player to add more specificity to the request. You see this almost exclusively with the persuasion skill. The player knows that they should be able to persuade the NPC to their side, but they lack the confidence to even come up with reasons. There could be many reasons for this, or this could instead be one of the other two categories, but this is the player attempting to reach out. They believe themselves to be a poor speaker or someone with bad ideas, but they KNOW their character is better than them. So, instead of ruining it by saying something stupid, they just lean on the dice. I agree this is a bad reason to do this, but it is one that exists.The other two are more complicated, and intertwined. On one hand, you have the "lack of knowledge" situation. This is really common with the knowledge skills or the information gathering skills. A player who holds up the die and asks "Can I roll Arcana" after you described a magical ritual isn't asking because they want you to take over their actions, they are asking because they have no idea what to do... but since it is a magical ritual Arcana should tell them something they need to know to do something. You might consider this a failing on the part of the DM, and you might be right, but at the same time... DMs are human. We make mistakes. I might have described the ritual and made it sound really cool and ominious... and left my player sitting there thinking "what the heck do I do with this information? I've got nothing." So they turn to the dice to give them clues. They aren't asking you to let them use Arcana to dismantle the ritual with you describing their actions, but instead are asking for information to guide them in taking the action. Same with to a degree with Insight. They are fishing for information, because they are not sure what to do. But that particular skill also ties into the last category. Lack of Care. I do not care how you want to describe me insighting someone. I can purple prose it, I'm capable of that, and if I feel like looking for a particular tell, I'll mention it as part of the die roll. But ultimately... it doesn't matter. The same thing happens with lockpicking. I want to use thieves tools to unlock the door. I don't actually care HOW I unlock the door, that isn't the detail that has meaning to me. My action which goes up to Mulligan's point is unlocking the door so that we can reach our goal. During the Star Wars Trash Compactor scene, we are never told anything about HOW R2D2 hacks the mainframe and turns of the Trash Compactor. Did he find a weakness in the firewall and overload the pistons? Did he readjust the clock of the computers and set them for a time of day when those machines don't run? Did he send a maintenaince request? It actually does not matter. What matters is that he hacked it and turned it off, the HOW does not actually matter for that moment. What matters is that he did it, he took the action and saved the team. And so, this is why I think you've missed the point by referring to Brenden Mulligan's discussion on railroading. Because the only time the player actually gives up control... is when they don't actually care about the details. I want to pick the lock on the door, I don't particularly care if it requires a three-pin wrench, a flex-pin twisted left, or anything else. Because in a move it would just show the character fiddling with the lock and unlocking it, and in a book, they would just say "and he unlocked the door" 95% of the time. Because the detail of how doesn't matter. And the other two times this tends to come up isn't about giving up control, but asking for help. What do I want to do when I roll Arcana on the world-ending ritual? I want to figure out what actions I can take to stop that ritual. How do I do that? By being a character who has specialized knowledge of magic and knows what to do when seeing a world-ending ritual. How do I do that? I have no idea, but my character certainly does if you'd just let me roll the dice. Now, in that instance I may not have them roll the dice. I might just tell them the information. But both players and DMs are very reluctant to skip the dice rolling when it comes to learning secrets or hidden information. I think we are in agreement, reading this, on the category of Lack of Knowledge being a source of this occurring sometimes. And you may then disagree with me about the Lack of Care because you may see "Slieght of Hand the door" when finding a locked door plenty for a stated goal. Where I feel like you may slightly be going too far is that you consider this a result of lax DMing. That if the information had been properly conveyed then this wouldn't happen... And I'm reminded of the idea that, "Well, if I give my presentation correctly, no one will have any questions." We can't communicate ideas clearly between people, not to that level. Again, the "other side" here simply acknowledges that it is fine that players occassionally just hold up a die and ask a skill name. That is, to an extent, just an acknowledgement that sometimes... we didn't give them what they needed to make a more coherent plan. And that can happen, even with the best of intentions and the most well-written and edited DM notes ever, you can still miscommunicate. And that... is fine. It happens.</blockquote>

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