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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8718933" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure, but every declaration of intent is also inherent a measure of player ability.  Knowing what you should intend to do is a measure of player intelligence, experience, and judgment.  Every action can be phrased in a manner than has a reasonable chance of success and every action can be phrased in a manner that doesn't have a reasonable chance of success.  I can't ignore that as a GM without insulting the player by deciding for him what I think his character does.  I can't play the character for the player by deciding that isn't what a character with his abilities would do.If I set a scene like, "The Queen is weaping bitter tears", and the player says, "I use Persuasion on her." and I say, "Role play that out."  If then the player player decides that because the Queen is bawling he should go up and slap her like this is some 1920's movie where if a woman is hysterical she needs a good slap, I'm not going to roll that as having the same chance of successfully socially interacting with the Queen as a more reasonable proposition regardless of how high the Charisma and social skills of the player are.  At some point, "Your character is too Wise and too Charismatic to act that way" becomes railroading and becomes taking the character from the player.  You have said what you won't tolerate.  Fine.  I won't tolerate a game that the player isn't contributing to the transcript of play.  I won't tolerate a game where the player goes "I use Persuasion on the Queen to calm her down" and then expects me to tell them how they did it as if I was the only one making up this story.  You tell me what you do, and then your characters skill comes into play.Or to put it another way, high Charisma will not make insulting the King or Queen a good idea.  It just makes it more likely he won't behead you for it.I'm not being insulting.  I'm in this field.  Yes, a modern RPG simulation would require behind the scenes all choices be predefined in terms that the characters could understand so it would work a bit more like a complicated Choose Your Own adventure book, but we could in fact make it so that the character turned it's own pages (as it were).  And the more we learn about creating AI the closer we'll get to having a video game that acts like a GM, even though we aren't quite there yet.  And what I am saying is that in the more extreme versions of what you claim your position are, you are literally asking for your ability to choose things as a player to be removed because that's the only way we can take player skill out of the equation for mental and social skills.</blockquote>

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