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Message: <blockquote data-quote="redrick" data-source="post: 6551486" data-attributes="member: 6777696">Fair. The combat scenario is contrived, and unsuccessfully at that. I was attempting to illustrate that the existence of a resolution mechanic doesn't have to encourage calling out random abilities without at least some attempt to determine if those abilities are applicable. And it doesn't have to be incredibly detailed or creative. A player doesn't have to describe a complex combat maneuver, just, "Can I reach the group of goblins with a burning hands spell? Ok, I cast burning hands on those goblins." That's more engagement with the game world than, "Religion. [roll]. Arcana? [roll] History? [roll]." And even the least role-play-y players at my table do that automatically in combat, which is the most crunchy part of the game we're playing. (D&D.)Yeah, again, bad example on my part. I would never actually punish a player for not being specific at the table. I would just ask a follow-up question to make sure the player knew what was going on.I will make players re-roll dice that they roll without a clear indication of intent, because I think that is an important sequence of events. Player states action and intent. GM responds, possibly with follow-up questions and caveats, calls for a roll. Player rolls. I guess that could be considered punishment if the player had made a really good roll, but it doesn't consume any in-game time.So, to bring it back to Mark CMG's original post, it's not clear to me, from that excerpt, that the player knew what she was trying to do when she made these ability checks. Or, if she did know what she was trying to do, she didn't bother to communicate that to the GM, which is a problem, since it's the GM's job to determine the outcome of the character's actions. I mean, clearly, her meta-intent is clear — she's performing an ability check so the GM will tell her what is going on. But that doesn't tell me anything about what the in-game challenge is for her character, or the amount of time taken. I mean, she performed 3 ability checks right up front. If her character wracks her brains at all like I do mine, that gelatinous cube would have been engulfing me half-way through my mental review of Griddlebock's Manual of Floating Aberrations. (Or is this a gelatinous cube laying in wait for adventurers to crowd around it?)Regardless, it's the job of the GM to elicit more information from the players about what they are doing. It's the GM's job to remind players of things that the players should see and know that would most likely be affecting their decisions. (Like, to counter my above example, it's the GM's job to say, "I guess I didn't make that clear, but the blood hawk is 20 feet in the sky and you can't reach it with your sword. Do you want to switch to a ranged weapon?")</blockquote>

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