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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stormonu" data-source="post: 9747256" data-attributes="member: 52734">I skipped ahead a few pages, so forgive me if this has already been covered.One of the big things that used to come up in the old games I ran was "your character knows what you know."  If someone could, for example, describe how they open a stuck door by hammering out the hinge pins and taking a crowbar to the door, it'd work and wasn't a Carpentry skill check to do so or figure it out.  On the other hand, the reason there were dice rolls for combat was because you and the DM weren't expected to stand up and actually cross blades.Since those days of 1E & 2E, there has been an increasing separation of player and character.  What the in-game character knows and can do is a lot more siloed than those days, and that siloing highly encouraged to avoid metagaming.  That's led to a lot of cutting out the description and just reaching for the dice to resolve it.I think there's a middle ground that can be reached; if the player can describe their actual action and it makes sense it would be in the character's ability to replicate, forgo the dice roll.   If the player doesn't have a clue about what to do, but the character likely would, then roll the dice - or if it sounds within the bounds something the character would see, understand or could perform just tell the player.  Save the dice rolls for real times of drama where just saying you're going to do something doesn't mean it's going to work, and something interesting happens should you fail.  I think this is how 5E intends for things to play out, but I suspect a lot of folks don't actually do this as they want the drama of the dice, all the time - even when there isn't any stakes or failure results in an impasse and brings the session to a screeching halt.Over the years, I've had a lot of problems in giving incomplete (or erroneous at the worst of times) information as a DM, or the players just not catching on something that would be flat obvious if they were standing where their character was.  There's not a bulletproof solution for these moments, you just sometimes have to be understanding and roll with it when it comes to light, then try to do better next time.</blockquote>

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