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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 3174220" data-attributes="member: 29398">Hmmm...let's see if I understand this.  You say:But then you say:When taken together, these contradict as to the relevance of DM input.  What's wrong with just rolling the dice and letting the chips (and the character) fall where they may?  A good DM will (usually) let you succeed when you should, fail when you should, and cling to the edge on a borderline roll...and will have a good reason when "usually" isn't the case.  And the DM is perfectly within her rights to not tell you what the "good reason" is unless it's obvious to you and-or the other characters.Take, for example, jumping across a narrow chasm...say, 8' wide...a jump you should be able to easily make most of the time; a roll of 1 or 2 might be trouble, but that's it.  You're the first to jump, and roll a 14; with your bonuses this beats the DC by a ton, but the DM says you fail (giving no reason why), and the last your party hears of you is a fading scream as you plummet into darkness to your doom.If the DM does this on a whim without reason that's just bad DMing; nothing can save you from that except find another game.  But assuming a competent DM running a dangerous adventure, do you have a valid argument?  No.The far side could be an illusion.  The chasm could be distorted to appear much narrower than it is.  There could be a huge-ass magnet or gravity well down the chasm that pulled you in.  An invisible creature could have got lucky and grabbed you from below as you jumped over it.  Whatever.  The only important thing is that you as a player don't know and can't know what went wrong...and that rules aren't everything.  All you're *ever* doing is rolling the d20 and hoping for the best, and if you can't trust your DM to have reasons for why things work the way they do there's bigger problems afoot than just the skills rules. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />As for said skills rules, put me on the side of leaving things in a gray area rather than having it all so black and white.Lanefan</blockquote>

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