Hiya!
Thread title. All this talk about alternate ability use on skills brought up the old 'use STR for Intimidate' and it got me thinking about Intimidate and how is SUCKS.
"There are no sucky skills.... only sucky Players and DM's"
Now for the details...
Undrave said:
Animal Handling is a pretty close second because more DM and players forget how important it would actually be in a pre-steam society and make it far too situational... but I still think Intimidate is worse.
The reason is that Intimidate will usually make things worse in 75% of the time you try to use it to force someone to do something. If you fail you usually shut down the entire social encounter right then and there, and even if you do succeed, that NPC is probably gonna hate you for quite a while. It's almost always a bad idea unless you're dealing with someone you're ready to fight.
At best it can be used to make enemies surrender and cut down the 'mopping up' phase of combat? But usually the DC isn't gonna be easy, and how can you trust someone who would do or say anything so you don't kill them?
Maybe Intimidate should have been rolled into Persuasion and just be a way to go about it and be left to the DM, like a lot of thing in 5e...
Anyway, discuss!
Too many Players/DM's ignore the "reality" of the campaign world. They reduce virtually everything to "how does this dice roll affect the mechanics of the game at hand?", and completely ignore just WHAT those dice rolls are attempting to do; model the 'reality and randomness' of the fantasy milieu.
Intimidating an Innkeeper in the towns only Inn...yeah, probably a bad idea no matter what, for the reasons you stated.
Intimidating an Orc war-band leader into allowing you and your group to leave unmolested? Probably good if you succeed, and bad if you fail.
Intimidating a Dwarven military leader into going with your plan...maybe good no matter what. Sure, he may be annoyed that he got intimidated by a soft human...but he might see that as a sign of strength of character and force of will. Something dwarves tend to look up to. (re: "Yeah, I went with his plan...but dang it all if'n that boy stuck to his guts and showed some real stones! He tries it again, well, that's gonna end differently. But this one time? Gotta respect a man for standing up for what he believes. He got through my pigheadedness...THAT time....").
So, bottom line, not everyone reacts to being Intimidated the same. Just like not everyone reacts to being "conned" (re: Persuaded) the same. People, and races, professions, etc, have different personalities. When the Player/DM treats everyone as if they were "just like themselves", that's when perceived problems arrise...and what can totally kill the suspension of disbelief.
^_^
Paul L. Ming