And 112% will just invent percentages out of thin air to try and prove a point that isn't correct.
I was simply giving a hypothetical example.
If you wanted the numbers I actually
believed, you'd better as hell expect that the proportion of GMs who treat Intimidate like a personal excuse to screw over their players
as hard as humanly possible would be in excess of 50%.
I am completely convinced that the
culture of play with Intimidate completely, thoroughly ruins it as a skill. It is not merely risky, it is
completely detrimental in the long term, an active trap that lures you in with the promise of utility and then produces nothing but harm beyond the five seconds after you rolled it.
There's no consistency in a TON of 5e rules and rulings.
Yes. And isn't it interesting that WotC's survey feedback indicates that that was a problem they needed to address?
Isn't it
funny how the very things I kept talking about a decade ago are finally coming home to roost?
It's almost like the "white room" isn't as useless as people thought.
What you guys are asking for is a return of 3e and codified rules for everything under the sun, and a lot that isn't under the sun.
Absolutely the hell not. You, as much as anyone else here, should know that I have
negative interest in going back to that. I think the designers of 5e WANTED to go to that, but they couldn't because they didn't have the manpower. So they just didn't write anything at all, which is totally the best choice ever right? Just don't tell people ANYTHING and you can't be wrong!!!
Instead, what we need are rules that recognize that they are abstractions, and
exploit that fact. Because an abstraction necessarily captures multiple things at once, that's....kind of the whole point of abstraction in the first place.
Concrete, comprehensive, simple: Pick two. If you want rules that are concrete and comprehensive, you get 3e, and all the ills that follow. If you want concrete and simple, and actually design it well, you get Dungeon World--but D&D as a community would never accept DW because its idea of "concrete" doesn't comport with D&D's idea. Which leaves comprehensive and simple,
but not concrete--meaning, abstractions leveraged to capture nigh-infinite spaces with straightforward rules structures, ones that can be easily understood and easily extended to cover the overwhelming majority of cases GMs and players might encounter.
Then--only then--you can address the
rare and unusual corner cases with rulings, because no rules will ever be perfect and corner cases will always exist forever. The existence of corner cases does not justify neglecting to design actually good rules, for the same reason that rounding errors do not justify skipping your algebra classes. Mathematical rigor has value even in a world where perfect rigor is impossible.
We already have that in intimidation.
No. We don't. That's the problem.
But you won't actually listen to anything I have to say about it, so there's no point discussing it further.
And this is the big one. Lots of time it doesn't cause you harm. Someone not liking you and/or what you just did =/= harm.
For example, this.
It is NEVER, EVER just someone disliking you. Because someone disliking you isn't """consequence""" enough for most GMs. That dislike must actually motivate the target to DO something against you. Something that will--ALWAYS--hurt you.
I have personally had several GMs who do this. That's why I never touch Intimidate. It's not worth the cost. Even if you get a GM who is copacetic and doesn't treat Intimidate as the Evil Skill For Evil Evildoers Who Evil Evilly,
there's no way you can know that at chargen, so it's just never worth it. A box that might contain one billion dollars, OR might contain the equivalent of one ton of T&T that will blow up in your face the moment you open it,
is not a box worth opening. Doesn't matter if the chance is 50% or 10% or 1%. Nobody is going to open that box, because a 1% chance of horrific death is not worth a 99% chance of a billion dollars.
