D&D 5E How to force emotions down your players' throats?

[Bawylie]

Doctorbadwolf's point that
"How tall is the tree?" and
"I size up the tree" are functionally equivalent is correct.

Same as "can I get up there with a move?"

At heart, it's just a player trying to gauge what's evidently possible.

No problem there.

What the "No Questions" thing really does well is to create a social construct that reinforces thinking about your character Doing something.

This is important. Maybe not important in any single given circumstance, but overall has a big impact on pace and involvement. I mean, it doesn't necessarily pay out on "I size up a tree," but it sure does pay out over 2 hours of play. You get more Things Done. More Actions.

That's generally worth it.

Of course, there are other techniques that are more or less direct and maximizing actions (I've seen DMs time limit turns, I've seen DMs employ queuing). No Questions (or better "Tell Me What You're Doing") does that AND reinforces the idea that stuff is really happening.


-Brad

 

[Tony Vargas]

I guess I just don't see how the two are meaningfully different.

It keeps it from /feeling/ like 20 questions or DM-may-I. It doesn't make it not both of those things, but it could quite effectively mask it. It also keeps the players in the mode of declaring actions for their characters, rather than jumping to mechanics, maintaining the DM's vital role of making rulings.

Often, it's being asked because it's something that the character can just see, but the player can't, and thus the player has to find out, one way or another, what their character can see.

I don't think it need be pushed as far as obfuscating a simple thing the PC should be aware of that the DM simply omitted from an initial description. Like color, for instance.

This gets back to some old-school (at least as I remember it) DM/player give/take D&Disms. DMs would carefully describe not quite everything about an area, and players would ask more specific questions. With no Perception or Investigation or Search skills, player skill in spotting subtleties and omissions in the DMs descriptions and declaring specific actions to search for things, substituted for PC alertness and observations.