D&D 5E Persuade, Intimidate, and Deceive used vs. PCs

[MostlyDm]

Providing the same detail as "real senses" do isn't what we're tasked with doing when describing the environment. We only need to provide enough information to create the fictional context necessary for the players to start describing what they do.



It's not a word game. It's describing what you want your character to do, step 2 in the basic conversation of the game.

• "What do the other doors look like?" --> "I walk over to other doors and examine them closely."
• "Is there anything odd?" --> "I scrutinize the other doors for a few moments to see if there is anything odd about them."
• "Does the door smell like a Christmas tree?" --> "I take a big whiff of the door to see what it smells like."
• "Does my character know anything about this?" --> "I try to recall what I know about the historical significance of colorful doors that smell like Christmas trees."
• "Can I roll my arcana to know something about this?" --> "I try to recall what I know about magical doors that may resemble these doors before me."
• "Can I roll nature to know what type of wood it is?" --> "I examine the door and try to figure out what kind of wood comprises it."

"Is there something I missed?" is a strange one to me. It's like the player asking the DM to give him or her the answers.

"What color is the door?" must mean the DM sucks at describing the environment.



What would it look like to get something so simple wrong?

I'm calling shenanigans. Especially on the bold part. It's weird, after I left you seem to have doubled down on the "no questions" thing, whereas when we discussed it up thread you acknowledged that sometimes questions are okay.

Here's the thing. You have now indicated the following:

1) your room descriptions are brief, typically no more than 3-4 sentences
2) players must declare actions to gain more information
3) if a player is asking the color of an object in the room, the GM sucks at description.

Sorry, but no. You aren't giving the color of every object in a room in 3 sentences unless that room is Spartan as hell. Maybe you're telegraphing object importance and giving the colors that matter; I'd buy that. That has its own problems. Except in the transcript plenty of areas have very flat descriptions so far, but not too much telegraphing. So that's good.

But if for whatever reason the player is curious about another color...

He has to say he investigates or something, doesn't he?

This is the part where it really breaks down. Ovinomancer had a good point about penalizing observant characters. I don't need to especially focus on the room I'm in, and I can still pick up something like 8 colors in my periphery. And I'm lying down in bed in dim light (disadvantage to my perception checks!) with my eyes primarily focused on a phone. I'm not a hyper observant guy.

Do these colors matter? I dunno. But if a player wants that info to help them picture the scene, why make it awkward and implausible for them to get it?

You said before you don't refuse all questions. But you pushed back to other posters using this example. I don't see your case. Looks like a serious flaw in your style, if people have to spend time doing utterly implausible stuff like examining a room to get color descriptions, or any other ancillary details that are readily apparent but didn't make it into a 3 line description.

 

[Ristamar]

I'm calling shenanigans. Especially on the bold part. It's weird, after I left you seem to have doubled down on the "no questions" thing, whereas when we discussed it up thread you acknowledged that sometimes questions are okay.

Here's the thing. You have now indicated the following:

1) your room descriptions are brief, typically no more than 3-4 sentences
2) players must declare actions to gain more information
3) if a player is asking the color of an object in the room, the GM sucks at description.

Sorry, but no. You aren't giving the color of every object in a room in 3 sentences unless that room is Spartan as hell. Maybe you're telegraphing object importance and giving the colors that matter; I'd buy that. That has its own problems. Except in the transcript plenty of areas have very flat descriptions so far, but not too much telegraphing. So that's good.

But if for whatever reason the player is curious about another color...

He has to say he investigates or something, doesn't he?

Context is everything in this case. [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] mentioned that he'd note the color of the door in his initial description if the color of the door seemed odd or stood out in some fashion.

If the door looks like a basic wooden door, it's probably not going to get mentioned in a limited description highlighting areas of note. If the door is painted in hot pink (assuming that's not the current trend in that area of the campaign), it's going to to noticed, and thus described, immediately.

 

[MostlyDm]

This reminds me of something else:

I have a DM who wants our TotM combat in a savage worlds game to be intense and chaotic and not optimal. Among other things, declaring actions in melee requires we do some LARP-ish adjudicating using resin weapons to determine angles of attack, location, likelihood of parrying, etc. People reading this may think that sounds ridiculous, or maybe ridiculously fun. It's mostly the latter.

But in his haste to keep things tense and atmospheric and chaotic he sometimes leaves out what I consider important details that *should* be available. And he's like you, I know that if I ask "how far is X from me?" He will say something like "okay you spend a moment pondering that," which means I've forfeited any action. Sometimes that's fair, other times it turns out X was two arm lengths away.

It's gotten to the point where I preface such questions with something like "without thinking about it, just based on my peripheral vision, do I know where X is?"

I have a feeling you're going to chalk stuff like this up to bad description. But it's not. He gives good descriptions, he's just not psychic and can't always predict what I'm going to care about. That's inevitable, unless your scenes are so simple that there's only a couple of relevant data points to keep track of.

 

[MostlyDm]

Context is everything in this case. [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] mentioned that he'd note the color of the door in his initial description if the color of the door seemed odd or stood out in some fashion.

If the door looks like a basic wooden door, it's probably not going to get mentioned in a limited description highlighting areas of note. If the door is painted in hot pink (assuming that's not the current trend in that area of the campaign), it's going to to noticed, and thus described, immediately.

This gets back to what I said in post #545. You won't always know what details someone else will be curious about. And sometimes the detail they are curious about would be readily apparent if they were there. This is a limitation of the medium. Iserith's approach exaggerates the problem, distorts it, makes it *worse* than simply filling in such gaps if asked.

 

[Lanliss]

I apologize if I am misunderstanding, but is the current objection the fact that Iserith plays an "all roleplay" style?

 

[MostlyDm]

I apologize if I am misunderstanding, but is the current objection the fact that Iserith plays an "all roleplay" style?

No.

 

[Ristamar]

This gets back to what I said in post #545. You won't always know what details someone else will be curious about. And sometimes the detail they are curious about would be readily apparent if they were there. This is a limitation of the medium. Iserith's approach exaggerates the problem, distorts it, makes it *worse* than simply filling in such gaps if asked.

I'm not sure how it's worse. It's a functionally equivalent approach, but it sets a different tone (I thought that was established back in post #360). I don't recall him penalizing his players' action economy like your friend's Savage Worlds game. That definitely wouldn't play well at my table.

 

[Lanliss]

No.

Ok, thanks.

 

[MostlyDm]

I'm not sure how it's worse. It's a functionally equivalent approach, but it sets a different tone (I thought that was established back in post #360). I don't recall him penalizing his players' action economy like your friend's Savage Worlds game. That definitely wouldn't play well at my table.

Even without the penalizing, it's worse. If I have to say "I inspect the table to see what color it is" that's very different than just saying "what color is that table you mentioned?"

You don't need to inspect an object to glean basic observable details from it. So the first example isn't realistic and, to me, is far worse for immersion. It feels very fake.

 

[MostlyDm]

For what it's worth: I'm skeptical this is even an issue in Iserith's actual play. I haven't seen it much in the transcripts so far, because he tends to answer reasonable questions without issue so far.

But it seems like as this thread goes on he is digging in his heels on the "no questions" thing. Probably a result of aggressive antagonism towards his style. I dunno.