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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lalato" data-source="post: 5478947" data-attributes="member: 9171">Playing in a new game, with a new group and a situation came up that I thought might be an interesting jumping off point for discussion.The group walks into a room with a huge statue in the center.  There are a few other statues on one end of the room.  Blood splatters are on the floor near the huge statue.  A passage leads out of the other side of the room which also has a few more statues.  I smell a trap so I look at the room layout and figure out the best way to get through the room.  Obviously, I'm using player knowledge of the exact layout of the room from the map.  As I suspected, nothing happens taking the "safe" path I plotted.  A detect magic revealed that all of the statues had some kind of Enchantment magic going on.  Despite telling the rest of the party to stay back and not do anything stupid, two people decide to move into the corridor lined with statues.At this point, we've avoided the main room trap (using metagame knowledge as noted above).  This corridor trap is a different story.  We try to figure out a way to turn it off in order to save our allies, but the DM does not give us any skillcheck rolls because we apparently didn't say the right trigger words to allow for those skillchecks.We eventually figure out a way to destroy the trap, but only after one of the PCs died... and after several rounds of player inaction.  Apparently an arcane knowledge check would have been useful here to learn more about how to disable the trap.  As I noted above, the DM wouldn't allow the skillcheck because we didn't say, in character, something that triggered the skillcheck.I'll add that everyone said they were studying the trap to find out what they could learn... so it's not like the PCs shouldn't  have triggered a check.  However, the DM is somewhat of a stickler on some things... and since this is a new group with a bunch of new players we're still not used to his style of DMing.This whole episode touched off an interesting discussion after the session ended.  But it wasn't until this morning that I realized what I found odd about player in-character description triggering skillchecks thing.  The character knows more than the player does about certain topics.  Beyond that, the character is the one that is actually experiencing the game world.  At what point are skillchecks just automatic?  I'm not sure if they should always be automatic, but should some checks just always happen?  For example, if you're a Wizard, wouldn't you automatically think through the prism of your arcane knowledge and therefore get an automatic check against related skills in a lot of situations?  If not, why not?Anyway, this whole episode got me thinking about knowledge that I have as a player vs knowledge my character has that I don't personally know anything about.</blockquote>

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