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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kae'Yoss" data-source="post: 1584430" data-attributes="member: 4134">Let's follow Johnny Adventurer into peril and see how he thinks about all this.Here, we see Johnny on the road, and the gentleman with the wardrobe-like build next to him is a professional highwayman, as are the guys who stand around them both with smiles on their faces that suggest that they don't think the words that come out your mouth are funny, but the entrails that will soon come out of the huge, gaping hole in your stomage will be.Now, the gentleman tells Johnny to hand over his valuables or he'll go hard on him. Johnny thinks: "S***, they got me. This guy is huge, and he has friends with him, some with bows and crossbows, and I'm all alone. I might beat him with room to maneuver, but those guys don't look like think much of fair play. I think I'll hand over my stuff, cause I have no friends here.Now, was Johny frightened? Hell yes! But why was that? Because the highwayman had a nice high value noted beside Str? Sure. Was it because he has made a really good Intimidate check? Sure not. He may have been intimidated, but he wasn't Intimidated (with the capital I, meaning it has something to do with the D&D Skill and Idea about intimidation). He saw no other way out than to do so. If we wait to see what's happened, we'll see that a dozen armed men on horseback - guards from the nearby city - will join the conversation, and as soon as the highwaymen look at their direction, Johnny will grab his valuables, shove one of the highwaymen aside and run for safety - he'll know the criminals will have better things to do than to deal with a single, harmless man. Not when they have a dozen far from harmless men, on horseback, with swords and lances, to deal with.Now let us leave Johnny for a while, for he'll do some dungeoneering, and monsters don't intimidate, but try to bite your head of first chance they get. After a week of wating through the blood of aberrations, magical beats, and the occasional outsider (and other fluids of vermin and oozes), Johnny is back in the big city, where he sits in a bar (with a name like "the Rusty Anchor" or something with "Wench" in it) and quaffs his ale. After overhearing and unnecessarily loud (and unnecessarily stupid) remark by a half-ogre one table down the row, he makes a snide remark, not counting on the half-ogre's levels as ranger and ranks in Listen. And of course the bigjob takes offense.He storms over to Johnny's table and shouts at him. They engage in some verbal sparring, and the half-ogre takes a sword and bends it in half and tells Johnny that he'll be next if he won't shut up this minuteThis is what Johnny's thinking:"Damn, that bastard is strong. If he gets me, I'm done for, I have my doubts he'll bend me in half - he'll probably break me - but he has to get me for that. He doesn't look fast, I'm sure I'm faster, and I only have to get out of the tavern - and the exit is right behind me - and run past that guard post. They'll see me followed by a big bloke screaming death threats at me, think he's an invader, and shoot so many arrow into him that he looks like a big, ugly hedgehog. Let's see if his muscles will avail him of anything then!"Threatening with strength might people make frightened, but frightened people don't behave the way you want them to. Actually, in D&D terms they'll drop what they hold and run away. Intimidate with charisma, on the other hand, won't only make people frightened, but also make them sure that they can't run away from that. They won't get away as soon as some armed guards appear, they won't bolt and run past the guardpost. Because they *know* that such behavior won't save them.</blockquote>

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