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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7583444" data-attributes="member: 6779196">That’s probably part of it, but I think the bigger issue is players not being able to accurately predict the results of their actions. A lot of players are used to a situation where their approach to achieving a goal has no visible impact on their chances of success. They might describe an approach they think is sure to achieve their desired goal, such as climbing a knitted rope to get to the top, only to be asked to make a check, not told the DC, get a lowish result, and get told something like “you don’t get very far on your first try.” They’re left scratching their heads because they’re not sure why they failed to climb the rope beyond the low number on the die, they don’t know if they would have had a better chance if they had done something differently, if they would have had a worse chance had the rope not been knotted, and nothing about their situation seems to have changed as a result of their roll.This undermines their confidence that the game world will behave in a logically consistent way. They get the impression that, at the end of the day, the d20 roll is all that really matters, and their approach just introduces the possibility that the DM might tell them to make a check with a skill they’re not as good with. They turn to their stats instead of their decisions as a more reliable way to influence their chance of success, and instead of thinking about “what can my character do to have the best chance of success?” they think about “what skills do I have the best chance of success with?” instead of describing an approach that they think will lead to achieving their goal, they state their goal and announce that they want to make a check using the skill they have the highest bonus with that seems reasonably applicable to the situation (note that my player who wasn’t comfortable describing an approach to searching for traps at first pointed to her proficiency with Thieves’ Tools, rather than Perception or Investigation.)Now, to be perfectly clear, I’m not saying that anyone here would necessarily handle the above rope climbing scenario the way I described above. It is not my goal to set up a straw man about anyone’s DMing style. It’s actually an example of the kinds of calls I often made as a new DM.</blockquote>

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