D&D 5E Out of Combat Woes

[Hand of Evil]

Non combative challenges are more depended on the players not the DM but the more prep the DM can provide for the players the better the challenge becomes. These are things the DM can setup to get the characters invested in the challenge, things like skills, knowledge and background information.

Like in a chase scene with a rival group for informant, there are a number of outcomes; the players get the guy, the rivals get the guy, the guy gets away, the players and rivals work together. But what can invest the players in the chase, knowledge of the informant, the area the case takes place, the rival guys. Why are they rivals, sound like there is a story there, let the players tell that story not you as the DM!

Get the players invested.

See link in my sig for DM ADVICE

 

[KarinsDad]

Agreed. But I take it further. You are required to narrate specifically what you do. So a player who said, "I try to convince the King that sending troops would increase his popularity with the people.", would be told, "Ok, so do that. What exactly do you say?" The player is then expected to at least say something like, "Your majesty, sending the troops would increase your popularity with the people."

At that point now, a diplomacy check is called for, and is modified by the following:

a) How valued is the PC to the king, so that the king would desire to please the PC?
b) How much risk is the PC asking the king to perform?
c) How much authority does the PC have relative to the king, so that the king would be inclined to listen to this opinion?
d) How well aimed is the appeal? That is, is this the sort of king who would care what the people think of him? Or does this king only care about his purse?

Those factors together taken together will produce a DC.

I've found that the game runs smoother if I don't bother with the quick Diplomacy check.

I just let the roleplaying organically flow. I know which PCs have Diplomacy trained, so I might ask for a check mid-conversation as an aid to some minor point so that they can use their trained skills, but not necessarily to the overall discussion of the important concepts unless the players asks for a check (which I may or may not allow depending on circumstances).

I've also found that if a DM wants his player to speak "in character", then have the NPCs speak "in character". Take the role of the king and converse with the PCs and the players will usually respond in kind.


I find the entire concept of skill challenges to be a bit artificial because I tend to just have the players tell me what their PCs are doing and for the most part unless it is a moderately difficult task, it just happens. Telling me how they are jumping from rooftop to rooftop to chase the assassin is a no brainer if they have the strength to make the distances between buildings and I do not normally ask for Athletics checks (if the jumps are too far, then they roll). Checks occur only if needed, not as part of a x successes wins the challenge and y failures loses the challenge. There will be some rolls eventually that might determine if the PCs are successful or not, but the entire round robin skill challenge system is way too formal and artificial for my tastes.

The problem that I see with rolling a lot of dice for roleplaying and skill challenge resolution is that some player is always bound to roll a 1 or 2 on the die which means that something bad always happens (minimally, a failure in a skill challenge, but maybe more). I'm not a big fan of "something bad happens" every single time we roleplay something important or the PCs do something unusual (like chasing the assassin across a rooftop). So, a few rolls total (and if necessary) suffice to settle the issue as long as there are portions of the encounter that I as DM deem to be on the fence about (i.e. it could go either way) instead of a few rolls per player. Just my preference to speed up play and make it more about player/DM descriptions than player/DM rolls.

 

[Pvt. Winslow]

There's been some good suggestions. I might need to sit down with my players and ask them how they feel non-combat should run. Whether they're fans of skill challenges for important scenes, or if they'd rather stick to freeform roleplay. I find though, that the less you make skill checks important out of combat, the less point they have. Spells already obsolete a lot of skills in certain situations, and some skills, like say Animal Handling or Insight, might not come up naturally very often unless you encourage PC's to use skills. My players will pick up on me setting arbitrary DC's to skill checks, and while a few won't care, others might wonder why DC's sometimes fluctuate wildly.

I tend to speak as my NPC's in 3rd person, as I'm horrible with accents and forms of speech, and I find using 3rd person allows me to emote their actions better anyway. "The baker stares at you for a long moment, confused on why you want a triple layer pie, but nevertheless shrugs and tells you it will take 3 days to make". Occasionally I'll still mix in dialogue, usually for important NPC's such as companions or foes, but not generally.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm not sure what you mean by plot hook here.

By a plot hook, I mean the DM introducing something to the setting which is meant to inform the player of some potential larger challenge or conflict or point of interest that they can investigate. A scene which is self-contained and offers up a challenge or conflict that can be resolved within that scene is not a plot hook.

For example, in the last game I played, one PC wanted to get a shield made. She didn't have the cash to buy it, so she tried to awe the shield maker with her frost giant's daughter's daughter physique. I interpreted the Reaction Roll as having the shield maker's wife see that action as a challenge. Eventually the PC was able to convince the shield maker to craft her a shield that fit her large size; it was an entertaining bit of social conflict, but there wasn't what I'd call a plot hook.

Agreed; not a plot hook. I don't want to get distracted critiquing styles of DMs that are happy with their campaign, so I'm going to try to avoid responding to your examples in detail. Instead, I'll just talk about why you'd use the technique of writing plot hooks in the first place.

The purpose of plot hooks is to avoid the problem of the PC's being lost in the sandbox and unable to figure out what will be interesting an engaging.

One potential problem that a DM can have in his style is being overly linear, so that player's have no real choice of what to do. In such a campaign, you can think of this as "Every scene is a plot hook, and in the DM's mind each scene has one and only one plot hook." Players are expected to bite every plot hook that is offered, and players that grab onto the "wrong" hook must be forcefully put back on the "right" path regardless of how engaged they are. This is bad railroading and much is written about it.

But the opposite tendency of never offering plot hooks while less common is at least as bad. This is bad sandboxing. The DM is convinced that his main job is to offer up a high verisimilitude high fidelity world. In such a world, the only things that happen to players are the sort of things that are uncoincidental and normal. Nothing unusual happens to the PC's beyond what would be expected to happen to any ordinary person living in the setting doing the things they are doing. If adventure is to be had, the players must seek it out themselves, and adventures may in fact be out there, but naturally what they'll realistically most often encounter is more mundane and ordinary affairs. Almost invariably, this is coupled with a DM that strongly believes in their own powers of improvisation and whose "high fidelity" world is actually always made up on the spot and so rarely has real high fidelity because the things that haven't been made up in those vague and empty spaces never have artifacts that spill out of those spaces. It's the equivalent of procedurally generating a dungeon one room at a time, so that never can you hear or smell what's going on in a room two rooms over, nor does the inhabitant of the room two rooms over ever come to investigate the noise the PC's are making, nor does any room ever have the artifacts of prior visits by that as yet unconcieved inhabitant. Each room may be as detailed as you like, but this isn't a high fidelity world.

The actual result of this bad sandboxing is what I call a "rowboat world", in that the typical state of the players is that they are put down in the middle of an empty ocean in a rowboat without a map and told to make their own fun. It's the opposite problem of a railroad. Instead of having too few choices to make, the players are given too many potential choices to make and no information that let's them properly select between them. In the DM's mind there may be all sorts of adventures to be had "out there" in specific places if the players do the right things, and they might even make a few notes ("the is a civil war being fought by supporters of two princely heirs in Overhilldale") and some sketch of a map (if your lucky), but alas they made their bearing 302.7 degrees and so missed the Isle of Loot and Adventure by 15 miles. Games like this can eventually develop into interesting high fidelity settings, but only after the players engage in a lot of exploration and the act of creation in detail is actually carried out. So the game is actually waiting on the DM to do the detailing and setting creation that create the plot hooks the PC's will eventually bite, and the game actually gets started - if ever - in relative earnest only after some period of world building as play passes.

Detailing out a setting and brain storming ahead of time and crafting plot hooks to offer to the players will avoid this problem.

 

[Celebrim]

Here are two extremes.

False choice. Offering up, "Do you want to eat a manure filled straw man, or this nice yummy pie?" is hardly a fair description of the options, even if we assume the two things you describe are actually extremes on a single continuum - which they most certainly are not.

 

[iserith]

Really, any suggestions will help.

I'm going to put some advice here that I gave to some posters on WotC about this same issue:

As much as I love skill challenges in D&D 4e, they aren't a great fit in D&D 5e mechanically. The same basic interaction holds though: DM presents a challenge, players try to overcome it, and dice come into play to resolve uncertainty. It's just not as structured in 5e.

If you wanted to present a number of situations in a longer challenge or a series of complications in a shorter one, just write those down and assign a DC for task resolution if the players' solution is uncertain to work. If it is certain to work, they just succeed - no roll. if it's certain to fail, they just fail - no roll. If they get through your list of complications without failing thrice, then they achieve the win conditions for the stakes you set. If not, then (interesting) failure comes into effect. You can probably leave off on worrying about stuff like Primary Skills, Secondary Skills, and Advantages (not to be confused with advantage or disadvantage in 5e). DCs will likely be in the 10-20 range, tops, and Help action and group checks may apply if the players establish the fiction necessary to have that make sense.

At this point I'm asked to workshop one with the poster:

If you wouldn't mind. A town (15 or so buildings) was attacked before the players arrived. Most of the attackers have left but some are still around looting. One scene (skill challenge) I thought that the players would come upon was a burning building (most are burning or burnt out) with a family (maybe the freshly killed father clutching his pitchfork by the door and a mother and children) trapped inside.

Complications I was thinking of smoke and fire causing injury or death to the family, crumpled burning timber blocking entry to the building that they have to remove to get to the trapped family, scared children, looting bandits that might spot them.

Thoughts?

Here was my response:

Okay, so this seems to me to be a fairly easy challenge. Let's make it Complexity 1, or 4 successes before 3 failures. Our stakes appear to be: Victory - Save the family and gain some kind of benefit; Defeat - Save the family but it costs (e.g. level of exhaustion, lost hit dice, damage, etc.) or introduces a new complication (e.g. draws unwanted attention).

Complications could be Asphyxiating Smoke, Searing Flames, Choking Debris, and Frightened Folks. If you want a Complexity 2 skill challenge, add two more complications like Wandering Bandits and Collapsing Ceiling (or whatever).

Now just present each complication in whatever order makes sense based on how the scene is unfolding. They are just "tags" that will help you improvise in the moment to fulfill step 1 of the basic conversation of the game: DM describes the environment. Then ask, "What do you do?" Judge their goal and approach to determine if it's a success, a failure, or uncertain and deserving of a roll. If there is a roll, assign a fair DC. If they want to ask for help, give advantage if the person helping actually puts forth ideas that would help. If three or four PCs want to take on a complication, that can be a group check.

Wherever possible, make sure nobody's hogging the spotlight. I like to give one complication to each person in the group by presenting it to them specifically based on what they're doing at the time, then asking "What do you do?"

Here's what I suggest that will look like in actual play:
[sblock]
DM: The bandits are sacking this town. A building burns nearby - a two-story building with a shop at the bottom and a residence at the top by the looks of it. From within, you can hear the anguished cry of a child and the desperate pleas for help of a woman. Crying out for the gods' help as she is, she must have given up hope that anyone else is coming to rescue her. What do you do?
Players: We go in there to save them!
Fighter: I'll lead the way in.
DM: What's the marching order for the rest of you?
[Players sort it out with Cleric behind Fighter, then Wizard followed by Rogue in the rear who is on the lookout for additional trouble.]
DM: Within the structure, you can now hear the cries of the woman and child are coming from upstairs. The smoke is thick and black, obscuring your vision and making breathing difficult. There is a risk of choking on ash and becoming a victim of this fire. How do you deal with that?
Wizard: I do my endless handkerchief trick and give everyone a cloth to put over their mouths.
Cleric: I yell for everyone to crawl.
Rogue/Fighter: We cover our mouths and crawl.
DM: Okay, that's sufficient to protect yourself from the smoke for now [marks an automatic success] but the tradeoff is that you're slower and less maneuverable. Somewhere behind you, the fire reaches something combustible which explodes, scattering the flames around you. They block your path to the stairs now, their searing heat threatens to burn and blister your flesh. What do you do about that?
Cleric: I look around for something like a barrel of sand or water or the like - anything that could be quickly thrown on the fire.
DM: You find a barrel of water - it's big and heavy. What do you do?
Fighter: I'm going to give that thing the old heave-ho and smash it on the floor, spilling the water in all directions.
DM: Okay, it sounds like you're making a Strength check. Because you're going to have to stand up into that smoke again, it'll be at disadvantage. If you succeed, you'll clear the area of the stairs and then some with the water. If you fail, you put the water out, but will become exhausted from smoke inhalation as you exert yourself.
Fighter: Would my Athletics skill apply here?
DM: Sure.
Fighter: Okay, heave! *rolls twice*

And so on. If Fighter fails his check here, that accrues a failure for the challenge in addition to his level of exhaustion, bringing them closer to the Defeat conditions (whatever they are). After they get past the stairs, the rogue catches sight of some bandits that enter having heard the disturbance the fighter made. So I'd spotlight him to deal with it. Then upstairs, the others can deal with flaming debris between them and the woman and child.
[/sblock]

And this is what the poster reported after running it the way I suggested:

I just wanted to report in. I ran my first Skill Challenge as a GM, as I posted earlier I had never played with a GM that did skill challenges the "right" way before. It was awesome, the players where really engaged and two of them after the session said that was their favorite part of the game.

Hope that helps!

 

[Celebrim]

I've found that the game runs smoother if I don't bother with the quick Diplomacy check.

I just let the roleplaying organically flow.

Organic flow is the ideal situation, but rolling a dice need not interfere with that organic flow. What I think you need to do is let the role-play flow until its reaches some sort of climax, then as you reach that climax use the dice to resolve (or heighten) the tension of the scene. At some point in a scene, you're going to reach the point where the outcome is doubtful - the NPC may or may not be offended, may or may not be emotionally moved, may or may not be intimidated, or may or may not be persuaded.

The adjudicated fortune rolls are as preferable to the DM entirely relying on his own judgment here, as there are to the DM relying entirely on coin flips. The specific features that are desirable are:

a) The players get a sense that the world is fair and reasonable, and that it's not actually just wholly governed by the DM's whim. This is particularly true if the DM can show the players that things aren't actually wholly arbitrary. Without a fortune roll, the players will get the sense that the outcome of social situations is basically preordained, and the DM is likely to overrule their specific plans because he doesn't like them.
b) The players get a sense that the NPCs are not merely avatars of the DM's will and preferences, but independent subcreation with their own feeling and opinions. This is particularly true if the DM can show that the mechanics of the fortune correspond to features of the imagined world. Without a fortune roll, player's are likely to get the sense that they aren't actually negotiating with the NPC's, but negotiating with the DM. And in many cases they'll right.
c) The players get a sense that investment in social skills will be rewarded in play. Without a fortune roll that demonstrably has meaningful results, charisma and everything related to it is a dump stat. In 1e, I use to DM much as you describe with only rare reliance on fortune rolls and only for really what you admit is "some minor point" and not for the "important concepts". The result was predictably that charisma was the least valued stat, and that players tended to rely on their own charisma (and were being unwittingly judged by me on the basis of their charisma) and the outcomes of such play were almost always my own unreflected upon preferences. It was often fun, particularly because I've always been pretty good at making interesting NPCs (or at least, my players have long so complemented me), but looking back it wasn't as great as it could have been.
d) By avoiding the fortune roll, what you are essentially telling players with poor social skills - shyness, poor self-esteem, speech impediments, autism spectrum problems, etc. - is that they aren't supposed and aren't going to be allowed to influence the game, at least in social situations. You might coax these persons out of their shell in other ways and by skilled DMing, but social situations in game are as likely to be as stressful and frustrating as they find them in the real world if what you are judging (consciously or unconsciously) is their skills rather than the character's skills. That's the reason that I most like to judge content, and leave the dice to judge style and sophistication of the delivery.
e) The dice, especially when thrown in the open for dramatic effect, represents a point of natural drama in the play. In a book dramatic tension occurs in those points where its clear fate is hanging in the balance and the reader eagerly devours the page to find out what happens. The throw of the dice in a game is an equivalent moment, the better because it can be shared. Everyone hold's their breath; the dice clatters. The players are briefly suspended in an emotional moment, and the dice when it comes to a stop is going to release a torrent of some sort of emotion - tragedy or victory is at stake.

I've also found that if a DM wants his player to speak "in character", then have the NPCs speak "in character". Take the role of the king and converse with the PCs and the players will usually respond in kind.

I pretty much always speak with NPC's "in character" unashamedly relying on my terrible accents and lame acting skills to at least mark that I'm "in character" even if they aren't as entertaining as I'd wish them to be. But I still find that I regularly have to prompt players to engage IC, because they have a tendency to switch to OOC when speaking to each other (until they are highly skilled indeed) and then continue in that mind frame when turning to address the NPC. Also many players with some prior experience have poor habits that I need to help train them out of and which they'll fall back into from time to time. The goal here is to eventually get into a 'flow' state where IC interaction can be begun in a completely natural manner and becomes its own special additional joy of play.

I find the entire concept of skill challenges to be a bit artificial because I tend to just have the players tell me what their PCs are doing and for the most part unless it is a moderately difficult task, it just happens. Telling me how they are jumping from rooftop to rooftop to chase the assassin is a no brainer if they have the strength to make the distances between buildings and I do not normally ask for Athletics checks (if the jumps are too far, then they roll). Checks occur only if needed, not as part of a x successes wins the challenge and y failures loses the challenge. There will be some rolls eventually that might determine if the PCs are successful or not, but the entire round robin skill challenge system is way too formal and artificial for my tastes.

Agreed. Not having to roll for automatic tasks is a function of a skill system that lacks a fumble mechanic. Once the players have enough ranks, they really can perform increasingly heroic tasks without need to rely on a fortune mechanic because they've achieved a 100% chance of success and as a general rule you don't roll for tasks with 100% chances of failure or success. I loath round robin skill challenges and other artificialities, particularly when they have no real drama. I could imagine situations where you would have organic skill challenges that would look superficially a lot like 4e's skill challenges, but they are situations where it just so happens that there is a fair correspondence between that structure and the structure of the challenge. An example might be, "Row a boat down the rapids.", where you treated the rapids as being a series of collective tests where each player described one thing they were doing to help the boat, and in each test if they group on the whole failed, the boat lost a hull point and was smashed after X number of failures. But in this case, clearly the structure of the imagined space is determining the mechanics, and not the other way around.

The problem that I see with rolling a lot of dice for roleplaying and skill challenge resolution is that some player is always bound to roll a 1 or 2 on the die which means that something bad always happens (minimally, a failure in a skill challenge, but maybe more).

Wait??? What? No, that doesn't follow at all. The skill monkey in my party has enough ranks at least a half dozen skills, that he never fails at all any task with DC 15 or less (which is most ordinary tasks). The 'face' in the party has like a +16 in diplomacy. Even if the player rolls a 1 or 2, usually nothing bad happens as the character on her worst day is still extraordinarily likeable and persuasive and achieves an above average result. Your conclusion follows only if the difficulty of a situation automatically scales to match the PC's skills. But that is wholly artificial. The way I look at the world is almost entirely the reverse of that. As the PC's increase in skill they begin to automatically succeed in tasks that are truly challenging, while at the same time heroic and seemingly impossible tasks they now have small chances of succeeding in. Rather than discouraging players from attempting things, this encourages them to attempt things since they rarely are worse off for the attempt than they would have been doing nothing.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I tend to speak as my NPC's in 3rd person, as I'm horrible with accents and forms of speech, and I find using 3rd person allows me to emote their actions better anyway. "The baker stares at you for a long moment, confused on why you want a triple layer pie, but nevertheless shrugs and tells you it will take 3 days to make". Occasionally I'll still mix in dialogue, usually for important NPC's such as companions or foes, but not generally.

I suspected this would be the case from your description of the problem. In my experience, dialog I critical to role playing. It's important that you be able to become your NPCs, so that your players can become their characters.

I know there are other styles, but have personally never seen them work.

 

[Celebrim]

I find though, that the less you make skill checks important out of combat, the less point they have.

In one of my typical sessions, I there are more skill checks than attack rolls. How important skills are to play is mostly up to you.

Spells already obsolete a lot of skills in certain situations, and some skills, like say Animal Handling or Insight, might not come up naturally very often unless you encourage PC's to use skills.

This is a topic unto itself we'd need to fork from, but in general I think it's going to be less of a problem in 5e than it was in 3e - which was plagued by a combination of the designers being too conservative about skills and too faithfully translating 1e spells into the new mechanics. It's correctable in most cases with a little thought.

My players will pick up on me setting arbitrary DC's to skill checks, and while a few won't care, others might wonder why DC's sometimes fluctuate wildly.

Avoid arbitrary DC's as much as possible. All DC's have a certain level of arbitrariness - even AC is in a certain sense arbitrarily picked by a DM. But if the DC relates back to the situation in a understandable way, and is documented (my diplomacy house rules describe the process I outlined above in much greater detail), the fact that a given DC could be +/- 2 or 6 from a declared difficulty depending on the DM's interpretation ("does your PC count as an acquaintance or valued companion?"), isn't really going to be a problem. If the PC's question you regarding the fluctuating DC, "Why is the DC 35 in this case, but just an 8 in the other?", simply be prepared to justify your choices. In some cases that's obvious: "Well, in one case you are trying to climb a smooth worked stone wall coated with ice, and the other you are trying to climb a broken cliff face that leans slightly back from vertical and is hardly more difficult to climb than a ladder." In some cases, it might require more explanation, "Well, you are asking the guard to almost certainly risk his life if he's found to have helped a prisoner, so that increased the base DC by 9, but on the other hand, the guard is a casual acquaintance so I lowed the DC by 1 and the guard knows you are a sworn Templar of Aravar and respects your rank so I lowed the DC by 1 on account of that. The guards current attitude to you is dislike, and you are asking for a favor, so the base DC here is a 20. However, your appeal is spot on. The guard also dislikes his boss and believes he's unnecessarily cruel and unjust (to both him and the prisoners), and the thought that the boss will be the one blamed and removed from authority appeals to him so I'm ad hoc lowering the DC by 3. Putting that all together, we get a DC of 24." In practice, once the player's get a sense that you are being fair and giving proper consideration to their plans, you'll generally not have a lot of questions of this sort.

I tend to speak as my NPC's in 3rd person, as I'm horrible with accents and forms of speech, and I find using 3rd person allows me to emote their actions better anyway. "The baker stares at you for a long moment, confused on why you want a triple layer pie, but nevertheless shrugs and tells you it will take 3 days to make". Occasionally I'll still mix in dialogue, usually for important NPC's such as companions or foes, but not generally.

I'd encourage you to work on those skills. The proffered narration, "The baker stares at you for a long moment, confused on why you want a triple layer pie, but nevertheless shrugs and tells you it will take 3 days to make", isn't bad but you could improve it quite easily. I'd suggest that "The baker stares at you for a long moment, seemingly confused, but then he shrugs and says, "Oh god's bells, what do I care why you want a three layer black bird pie, so long as you pay for it in advance. But, I need to acquire and prepare the ingredients. Is Thorsday morning soon enough?"

You want your NPC's to be memorable and have traits and mannerisms, and you won't get that out of third person narration quite as easily. Narrating in first person will make NPCs much more likable (or hate worthy). Secondly, you want to as much as possible show and not tell. The PC's probably don't know what the Baker is thinking (unless they have detect thoughts) so don't tell them what the baker's motivations are for behaving in a certain way. Indeed, it would be better if you can to express "confusion and surprise" through a facial expression if you can, though this will take practice. The only reason to skip dialogue is when it isn't meaningful or entertaining.

 

[iserith]

There's been some good suggestions. I might need to sit down with my players and ask them how they feel non-combat should run. Whether they're fans of skill challenges for important scenes, or if they'd rather stick to freeform roleplay.

This is always the best place to start when you feel there's an issue.

I find though, that the less you make skill checks important out of combat, the less point they have. Spells already obsolete a lot of skills in certain situations, and some skills, like say Animal Handling or Insight, might not come up naturally very often unless you encourage PC's to use skills. My players will pick up on me setting arbitrary DC's to skill checks, and while a few won't care, others might wonder why DC's sometimes fluctuate wildly.

It could be said that smart play (as a player) is to avoid making ability checks. Think about it: Would you rather just succeed or would you rather roll and have a chance of failure? So a spell is clutch for just that reason - you remove the risk by expending a resource. Consider the same formula when adjudicating success, failure, and uncertainty when a player is trying to overcome a challenge. If they spend a resource and state a reasonable approach to their goal, grant success. A resource can be just about anything in context, including time (e.g. DMG, page 237, "Multiple Ability Checks"). It's only when they can't or don't spend a resource or their approach is on shaky grounds that they should have to roll. Of course, some of this depends on your view of the role of the dice in the game (DMG, page 236-237). I advocate the "middle path."

You can also run this game without ever using a DC other than 10, 15, or 20 and it works fine. I find what players really care about is knowing the stakes before the roll and that failure should be fun and interesting for the players, even if it totally sucks for the characters.

I tend to speak as my NPC's in 3rd person, as I'm horrible with accents and forms of speech, and I find using 3rd person allows me to emote their actions better anyway. "The baker stares at you for a long moment, confused on why you want a triple layer pie, but nevertheless shrugs and tells you it will take 3 days to make". Occasionally I'll still mix in dialogue, usually for important NPC's such as companions or foes, but not generally.

The "third person" approach is called the "descriptive" approach to roleplaying. Speaking in the first person is the "active" approach to roleplaying. Both are perfectly valid ways of doing it. (See Basic Rules, pages 66-67.)