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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7798771" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Nice! Sounds like a fun scene. Unsurprisingly, I would have run it differently, but the most important thing is that you and your player had a good time and created a memorable story.Since you asked, if I had been the DM, I wouldn’t have asked for a Perception check when Rae said she wanted to smell the tea. From her comment “I want to smell the tea, can I tell if it’s ok?” I can easily surmise that her goal is to find out if there is anything wrong with the tea and her approach is to smell it. Since there is nothing wrong with the tea, there is no way this approach will achieve her goal, so I would simply skip the next two lines and go straight to “it smells like mint tea.”Now, Rae might take this to mean that, since there was no check called for, there is nothing wrong with the tea. However, that would be a dangerous assumption, since it is equally possible that there is something wrong with it, but that it can’t be detected by scent. Especially if Rae suspects poison, most (good) poisons are odorless in lethal doses. So it makes sense that she might want to follow this up, just like she did in your game.When Rae asks to make a Medicine check, I can guess that she probably still wants to know if the tea is poisoned or otherwise “off,” and that she thinks her Proficiency in Medicine would help her achieve that goal. But I can’t surmise what her character is doing to try to determine that, so I would ask her to clarify.At that point, she might suggest taking a small sip and spitting it out if it tastes “off,” or she might say that she’s trying to draw on her training in Medicine to try to recall any deadly poisons that are odorless, tasteless, and dissolve instantly in liquid (heh). Or she might suggest something else entirely. At this point it becomes very difficult to say what I would do without knowing what Rae would do.Another possibility is that Rae struggles to come up with an approach that might employ her training in Medicine and help her determine if the tea is poisoned. If I were getting the sense that this was the case, I might step in with that narration, “Granny looks at you, sipping her own tea and says 'Oh, deary it's just tea. If I wanted to kill you, you'd already be dead' with a wink,” to keep the flow of the game going and hopefully reassure Rae, rather than risk the pace breaking down as Rae tries to finagle an approach.</blockquote>

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