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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5585441" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I think it is possible to deal with any situation using 'roll first' (suggest a better name if you want, lol). There can potentially be some situations where it kind of degenerates to the same thing as describing first perhaps, I'm not sure.I'd envisage a 'detailed' situation like KS is describing something like the player knows certain things about, for example, the Duke. He knows the guy has a problem with revenue and needs more cash to provide his daughter with all the goodies she likes to have. The player thus knows that a viable approach is to Bluff and claim that he's SURE the goblin's have lots of loot, so sending along some guards to help defeat them will surely result in some cash (the player suspects there must be SOME treasure, but doesn't actually know factually how much there is, so this is a Bluff). Now, we know that the Duke COULD respond well to this, but the results are still not guaranteed. This can be explained as a more or less convincing lie by the PC. So we have the ingredients to describe any result that could happen. Maybe the player rolls well and describes a believable story about how he heard from a miner that lost a bunch of gold to the goblins. Maybe the player rolls badly and he could describe it as the PC overselling the tale or just bad luck ("I know that miner, you're full of it, he's been striking out for the last 3 years" says the advisor). Overall though this strategy is straightforward and plays to a strong advantage, so the DC is medium or even easy. If the player instead tried to appeal to the Duke's sense of duty (and he knows the guy is pretty self-centered, so this is not a strong trait for the Duke) then he can give Diplomacy a try, but it will be a hard roll. If he's elegant enough or maybe catches the Duke in the right moment he might succeed, but it is a tough sell (hard DC). Again, you could do roll first here. Notice that I am rewarding PC cleverness by the difficulty of the check, you could use bonuses as well if you want, it mostly amounts to the same thing. I'd also allow players to make some checks that give some initial feedback in some cases, like using Insight to read the Duke's mood would probably mean I'd explain these choices and the relative DCs. That would give the player a chance to pick the better strategy. If less details are present then that action could give a bonus to a check or just reduce a DC, letting the player describe how he has an optimum strategy AFTER the check (So he could use Bluff on a random guard, preceeded by Insight, which makes the Bluff check easy, the player then describes how he sussed out the guard and told the most effective lie, the DM could also provide input on this if he wants, or just let the player effectively map out the guard's personality, as a minor NPC it won't matter).</blockquote>

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