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Message: <blockquote data-quote="redrick" data-source="post: 7311017" data-attributes="member: 6777696">I'm editing out the rhetorical questions, and I'll try to break this up into chunks that I can respond to.I didn't say that you roll a check for everything at your table. I assume that you do not roll checks to pick up weapons at your table, unless they are embedded in stone. However, when I, and others, have said that we do not roll checks for tasks that we view to be trivially successful (or boring to fail), you have accused us of "magic word" DM'ing.Setting aside the fact that "auto-success" and "auto-fail" does not combine well to "auto-play" (autoplay sounds like autopilot).The process that you describe as "determination of auto-fail or auto-success" would not, for me, be a process of failure and success. It is a process of determining what is impossible and what is trivially possible. No check has been auto-failed or auto-succeeded, because no check has occurred. When I ask the dude at the counter at a deli to give me a bottle of advil, I'm not "auto-succeeding a persuasion check," because, there is no doubt in my mind that, if I ask the person working at the deli to give me something behind the counter, he will give it to me.I think you are blowing this "good strategy" thing a bit out of proportion. It is good strategy to break tasks down into achievable steps when possible, instead of just walking into a situation, throwing a d20 on the table and announcing a skill check. Personally, I would rather tell a player that announcing a vague skill check just won't cut it, tell me what you are actually doing, but going head to head with players sucks, so we often allow the check when some basic investigation of the situation would have bypassed the initial check (to accomplish something for which no check would have been needed), so we let the player have their skill check and, oh, wow, you rolled a 2+5 on your investigation check? Yeah, wow, I guess it never occurred to you to look under the bed.Also, I should add, "search the room" scenarios are just a small subset of most games. I don't do that many of them these days.You keep coming back to this "on" or "in" scenario. I don't know what post or poster you are referring to and I don't know what situation you described. Maybe this makes sense, maybe this is pixel bitching. If we are saying, "I look on the bed" vs "I look in the bed", that's a little silly, unless the object is hidden under the mattress. On the other hand, something being "on the dresser" is very different than "in the dresser." I don't think I could mean "I go through the dresser" and accidentally say "I look on top of the dresser."Never, in a game that I DM'ed, has a situation come down to confusion over the preposition used by the player.Sort of. In the way I run this, the character is always in mind, just maybe not the attributes written on the character sheet. Where is the character in the space? What is the character doing?I don't think a situation is ever going to come down to "a single word said or unsaid." Again, this is not a text adventure game. I have a normal vocabulary, and I can clarify with the player if I really don't understand what they are saying. If the situation doesn't make sense, I can try another approach to explain it, instead of just restating the same boxed text over and over again.Personally, I don't see actions that could be resolved in the "goal and approach" section instead of the "call for a skill check" section. Actions don't require a check when their outcome is obvious. Usually, the difference between needing a check and not needing a check is different actions. (Do I try to climb the wall? Or do I move the boxes over and climb up on top of the boxes?) It's not about clever monologues or slipping in the right adverb.I think auto-play mischaracterizes and it sounds like autopilot, but what I took offense at was "auto-play checklist," which is the assertion that playing in a game that makes fewer skill checks is simply going through a procedural checklist in order to do everything. I'm sure there are tables like that, but it's not representative of asking players to state their goal and approach before determining the need for a check, as a whole. And it's part of a whole package of terms, the other of which I remember is "magic words."I said "roll FOR EVERYTHING", I was not criticizing your game, or anybody else's game, but simply saying, every time I see a scenario described where the DM felt no skill check or character sheet referencing was required, you described "the magic words coming in." I don't have any problem with what your table sounds like.</blockquote>

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