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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 5083374" data-attributes="member: 710">When it comes to social skills, one thing that is often brought that if physical skills the player has have no relevance for the character, than so shouldn't his social skills.But I am afraid that misses the reality of the game. The players very clearly have always advantages based on their mental abilities - including social skills. Intelligence helps when you play RPGs. Tactics matter. Character Building matters. Connecting the dots in the plot matters. All this requires the player's abilities, not the character's abilities.The players skill intelligence can "manipulate" the difficulty of other checks just fine. "Hey, we could each try to climb this wall individually. Or the guy with the highest modifier goes first, and then drops a knotted rope! Changing the DC from 20 to 5 for the rest." The character with this idea could be the guy with INT 6 and no training in Climb.At some point, we cannot simply ignore our own abilities. It would make the game pretty pointless. There could be some "work-around". Maybe the INT 6 player makes the brilliant suggestion out-of-game, and then the party Wizard with INT 22 makes it in-game. It is part of the fun of the game that the player's choices matter and have an impact on the story. If players have to "dumb down" their choices because the character they play isn't particularly smart or eloquent, that seems a bad choice.The trick for the DM is to figure out how to still make these skills count. In my Climb example, the plan still required at least one guy with a good skill. (But if they just had to climb down, that wouldn't have been the case).An alternative approach - especially for social skills - is to use the skill check result as a measure not of success, but the degree or nature of the success. Maybe the guards are convinced that the PC did just catch a murderer and took him down in self-defense. But a failed check might indicate they felt their action was rash or uncalled for, or that it was none of the players business to deal with the problem. Maybe they still take the players for questioning. On a succesful check, they might remind the PCs that there is a reward for apprehending the murderer, or they keep them in mind for later "jobs".</blockquote>

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