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="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8723652" data-attributes="member: 4937">So there is so many assumptions I don't even know where to start.  The first is you are stuck in this paradigm of fear where the problem is the characters are really good, or really smart, or really charismatic or something, but the players aren't and the if the players have to role play their characters they will mess up and fail.   Let's just let go of that insecurity as having no place at a table of friends who are all rooting for you to succeed.  And the second problem is that I don't know what they say will not be as good as what the character would do.  The character might have a 6 Charisma, and the player might be somewhat charismatic.  So equally you have to worry that someone will dump stat Charisma and then pretend to be super-charismatic.  But the most important assumption here that is just wrong is that it doesn't matter if you don't know how to describe it well.  It doesn't matter if you stutter and stammer.  It doesn't matter whether what you say is awkward and hesitant when you are trying to give a stirring speech along the lines of Henry V.  That's not important about what you say because your character's skill matters the most.  What's important about what you say in as much as is going to inform play is that your statements give me intent, and that it characterizes your character as something other than numbers on paper, and it tells me how to respond.  It creates a concrete transcript of play so that when the warden asks the guard, "Why did you let the Scarlett Pimpernell pass?" he doesn't respond, "Because he fast talked me."How you say it or whether you say it well has very little impact on the difficulty of what you say.  The content of what you say can radically alter the difficulty depending on whether you have figured out clues elsewhere that might unlock secrets of the NPCs heart.  But I assure you, if you play a high charisma character you won't get outshown in tests of charisma by a low charisma character very often because ultimately what we are going to test when we test fortune is going to be that character's charisma and not the players.  But let's just stop with the whole "The GM's out to get me", or bad experiences from GM's who learned how to play in skill-less systems who then adopted skilled systems but refused to engage with them and kept playing as if the skills didn't inform play.  Because while those things can happen, they aren't the sole alternative to how you play.Dude, in my game stealthy players can hide in the shadows of the corner of the room, and the NPC isn't going to see them unless they shine a bright light into the corner and stare there.  In my game you can treat the difference between being stealthy and not being stealthy as there is no dumb place a stealthy player can hide because he can hide almost anywhere.  Heck, by high level it's possible literally can hide anywhere, including in the open in the middle of the room.   Anyone can hide in box, even a kindergartener.   If a stealthy character hides in a box, there is a good chance the guard won't see him even if he looks in the box.   You have got to get over this idea that I'm just trying to play "gotcha" and make you lose.(When I was 5 I slept over at a cousin's house and as a prank I hid in the bed that I was sleeping in so that when my aunt came in to wake me she couldn't find me and freaked out.  Half of stealth is misdirection.)All the horror stories you've been through only prove that some GMs are bad, and every GM makes mistakes.  That's all they prove.  In our real world.  Let me repeat that.  In our real world.  The character sheet is an abstraction of the character in the imagined universe.  It's a very limited tool for interacting with that imagined character and some of the character's interactions with the imagined universe.  But the character in the imagined universe is presumably real, and the character sheet only abstracts out some useful bits of him (or her).  I keep trying to tell you this.  Player narration skill has very little impact on resolution.  Player wisdom to choose a good move, like deciding to flatter a character known for vanity, and deciding to be up front and honest with a character known to hate toadies and yes men, might help a little bit but things like that can be discovered through play using character resources as well (like Investigation).  And note, the most important aspect of this is not that it takes away from "the face man".  The most important aspect of this is it allows social problems to be overcome if you don't have a face man in the party or allows "rerolls" or "do overs" if the dice cause you to flub a scene the first time.  (Come back later with more ammunition and a better plan.)   It's a primarily way to prevent social encounters from being a locked door you can't open and to add richness and team play to social challenges in the same way say combat has.Only if talking your way into the palace is so trivial for you that you can't fail, or the consequences of failure so low that they don't matter.  But even then, I'd still like some idea how the player did it in case it comes up in the fiction.  Beyond that, the player himself doesn't necessarily know how easy it is to talk his way into the palace, so he still needs some sort of plan.   But even beyond that, "I talk my way into the palace" does nothing to characterize a scene (and make everyone laugh) quite like, "I pretend to be a fruit seller and in disguise get into the kitchens" or "I pretend to be an officious and important noble and intimidate my way through the guards."  That's entertainment.</blockquote>

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