NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8720437" data-attributes="member: 6801228">And that all sounds perfectly fine. But the moment you ask "do you walk across the rug" I'm stopping what I was doing and trying to figure out what is up with the rug, because you have now indicated that there is something there that I missed, and needs to be figured out before I can get to the desk. Likewise, if you ask "Do you search from in front of or behind the desk?" I now have a problem. To me, this question indicates there is a trap, I'm going to set it off, and I'm trying to guess which side is the safe side to stand on. Which is frustrating, because I would have imagined my searching the desk to give me a chance to notice any trap. Most likely though, considering I have no idea of knowing which side is safe and accepting I'm about to lose hit points, my answer would be "both, starting with the front" because my OTHER concern is, much like I have experienced in real play, searching one and not the other means I'm going to miss an important clue that could harm the party if missed. And I know "why don't you trust the DM?" Because I've been burned in the past, and the way you phrase those questions, the way those factors didn't come up until after I made my declaration, locking me into my actions, signals to me "You messed up, you are going to get hurt". And you can state that you wouldn't do that til I'm blue in the face, but it doesn't change the fact that that is immediately where my mind goes, because that is exactly like the scenarios I faced that were done by the DMs who relished in that. And the fact is, you recognize that, and that almost seems like your intent. Because you want the player to declare their actions so they DON'T "come back after something bad happens and say “But I didn’t mean I looked under the rug.“. or “I didn’t mean I opened the Armoire.”  If you mean something, say it." So my instinct that something bad might happen if I say or do the "wrong thing" is 100% accurate, because the reason you want me to be specific is so that when something bad happens I can't blame you. Again, most of your example sounds perfectly fine. But then I see these hidden shards of glass in the muffin and my only response is "this is why some players want to roll, instead of declaring an action" because the dice roll can give them more information so that they can make informed actions, instead of going in blind and trusting that they didn't make a mistake. Which, quite often, they did make a mistake.</blockquote>

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