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How can you add more depth and complexity to skill checks?
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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8091905" data-attributes="member: 16814"><p>I think you might want to take a page from your own book and calm down. I've talked about issues that can arise from allowing players to ask for skill checks, and they most definitely can arise. You might avoid them, and kudos to you, but they exist. No approach is foolproof (my own has problems, just not the ones you imagine it does).</p><p></p><p>Asking for skill checks does the following:</p><p></p><p>1) It puts the GM into the position of having to guess what the PC is actually doing. </p><p></p><p>--The usual answer to this is that sometimes it's obvious. Granted, sometimes it is, but when you say this you're also saying that sometimes it's not obvious and the GM guesses. </p><p></p><p>--The answer to that is that the GM can always ask for clarification. This means that you're perfect and never are in a situation where you think it's obvious, but what you think isn't what the player thinks. I find that hard to track because RPGs have an inherent information asymmetry between the GM, who knows lots, and the player, who only knows what the GM tells them. This means, to avoid this, you're always aware of not just what you're thinking/know but what the player is thinking/knows. I know my players really well, and I'm good at reading rooms and people, and I can't do this. If you can, awesome, but that's you, not the playstyle. It also means that you end up where I start, so not seeing a lot of savings here, in this case. Even if you avoid the information asymmetry, you're still doing what I do when your first pass doesn't work, so this isn't a terribly great response.</p><p></p><p>2) It makes the game one where a lot of the time players are asking the GM questions rather than doing things.</p><p></p><p>-- this is a preference issue, but I can definitely say that the weird animal tangent from earlier posts exemplifies this. It's the kind of additional information asymmetry that's often paired with having players ask the GM if their character knows things. You stated above that the check was a tool to get your to create more lore for your games based on players asking, but, from other threads, this is kinda circular because you also are very much against "metagaming" or using player knowledge so players have to ask you for checks to see if their characters know something. Here the playstyle approaches reinforce, and show that if you're going to make players check with you on character knowledge anyway you're also probably going to be very strongly in favor of asking for checks because it streamlines this process. I don't do the former, so the latter streamlining is useless to me as a tool.</p><p></p><p>That's describing what asking for checks does.</p><p></p><p>Again, the pea being moved here is that "some situations" is trying to cover a lot of ground and it tacitly acknowledges that "some situations" means "other situations" exist. Skipping the step where the GM determines what "situation" this is, and possibly making a mistake of situation, by just having players say what their characters do (which is the fallback safety point of asking for checks in non-obvious situations) is, to me, not a problem. It's fast, it's easy, I don't lose time, there's not formula my player have to follow -- they just tell me what they want their characters to do. I mean, I'm very confused that asking players to engage the fiction by describing what their characters do, in an RPG no less, gets labeled as "dogmatic" by someone arguing that they should be able to just press buttons on their character sheets and let the GM fill in the blanks. Scratch that, not confused, flabbergasted. It's a very weird place to be, being told that expecting players to actually say what their characters do is dogmatic. Very weird.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 8091905, member: 16814"] I think you might want to take a page from your own book and calm down. I've talked about issues that can arise from allowing players to ask for skill checks, and they most definitely can arise. You might avoid them, and kudos to you, but they exist. No approach is foolproof (my own has problems, just not the ones you imagine it does). Asking for skill checks does the following: 1) It puts the GM into the position of having to guess what the PC is actually doing. --The usual answer to this is that sometimes it's obvious. Granted, sometimes it is, but when you say this you're also saying that sometimes it's not obvious and the GM guesses. --The answer to that is that the GM can always ask for clarification. This means that you're perfect and never are in a situation where you think it's obvious, but what you think isn't what the player thinks. I find that hard to track because RPGs have an inherent information asymmetry between the GM, who knows lots, and the player, who only knows what the GM tells them. This means, to avoid this, you're always aware of not just what you're thinking/know but what the player is thinking/knows. I know my players really well, and I'm good at reading rooms and people, and I can't do this. If you can, awesome, but that's you, not the playstyle. It also means that you end up where I start, so not seeing a lot of savings here, in this case. Even if you avoid the information asymmetry, you're still doing what I do when your first pass doesn't work, so this isn't a terribly great response. 2) It makes the game one where a lot of the time players are asking the GM questions rather than doing things. -- this is a preference issue, but I can definitely say that the weird animal tangent from earlier posts exemplifies this. It's the kind of additional information asymmetry that's often paired with having players ask the GM if their character knows things. You stated above that the check was a tool to get your to create more lore for your games based on players asking, but, from other threads, this is kinda circular because you also are very much against "metagaming" or using player knowledge so players have to ask you for checks to see if their characters know something. Here the playstyle approaches reinforce, and show that if you're going to make players check with you on character knowledge anyway you're also probably going to be very strongly in favor of asking for checks because it streamlines this process. I don't do the former, so the latter streamlining is useless to me as a tool. That's describing what asking for checks does. Again, the pea being moved here is that "some situations" is trying to cover a lot of ground and it tacitly acknowledges that "some situations" means "other situations" exist. Skipping the step where the GM determines what "situation" this is, and possibly making a mistake of situation, by just having players say what their characters do (which is the fallback safety point of asking for checks in non-obvious situations) is, to me, not a problem. It's fast, it's easy, I don't lose time, there's not formula my player have to follow -- they just tell me what they want their characters to do. I mean, I'm very confused that asking players to engage the fiction by describing what their characters do, in an RPG no less, gets labeled as "dogmatic" by someone arguing that they should be able to just press buttons on their character sheets and let the GM fill in the blanks. Scratch that, not confused, flabbergasted. It's a very weird place to be, being told that expecting players to actually say what their characters do is dogmatic. Very weird. [/QUOTE]
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