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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6626193" data-attributes="member: 42582">iserith, an interesting thread.I hope some questions are OK. And a comment at the end.A common GMing pitfall can be setting stakes which make sense and create drama in the fiction, but are hard to follow through on if the player fails the roll. In this case, what happens if the shark drags Rosemary under? Presumably not the PC's death by drowning. Does she just lose her backpack?What is the basis here for the GM determination that Chuck didn't tidy up after himself? It does not seem to have been part of the adjudication of the check to disarm the trap.These sorts of cases, where taking a fairly simple step gives advantage to the check, can give rise to all the PCs doing it. Especially because, in the fiction, we can easily imagine it becoming clear to the others that Cow's walking stick or Rosemary's wet handkerchief are providing a benefit.How do you impose some sort of cost or other rationing constraint on these sorts of actions, and their imitation by other PCs, within the D&D framework?The insight check raises the possibility of the other PCs trying too. How do you handle that? Presumably as some sort of group check, but how do you adjudicate the outcome? And handling it as a group check does seem to presuppose that, in the fiction, the PCs are debating among themselves whether or not the salamander is being truthful, which goes somewhat against your "player autonomy with respect to PC belief" directive.I'm not sure about the "too many ability checks" dimension to this, but I completely agree about the "failure to engage the other players (via their PCs)". If you put the pressure on the other players to have their PCs say something (eg an NPC asks them a direct question, or the social situation is heading in a direction that they don't want it to) then in my experience they will declare actions for their PCs even if CHA is not the PC's best stat, just as the player of a wizard will declare actions for his/her PC if you tell him/her that an Indiana Jones-style boulder has just started rolling down the corridor, even though STR and DEX probably aren't that PC's best stats.</blockquote>

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