Undrave
Legend
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.
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!
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!