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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunshadow21" data-source="post: 6736166" data-attributes="member: 6667193">How is this any different from the player using the exact same skill to make the DM run an NPC a certain way? In neither case is the person using the skill able to fully dictate precisely how the character affected will react. The DM can no more force the player to respond a specific way to the skill being used on their character than a player can force a DM to respond a specific way when a NPC gets intimidated or fails to detect a lie or otherwise be effected by any of the social skills.  If either side is expecting complete domination using these skills, disappointment will follow regardless of who is initiating it and who is having to respond. However, players who think that they are always going to have 100% complete control over every single action or reaction of their character when magic and/or combat is not involved is going to be as disappointed as the DM who believes the same about his NPCs and then finds himself dealing with a PC or two that have massive ranks in social skills. I as a DM will only very rarely completely remove options, and don't usually place the entire outcome of such an encounter on a single dice roll alone, reducing the sting of getting intimidated to a fair degree, but I have no problem making it clear that certain actions will be easier than others given any set of circumstances and dice rolls. There is a definite difference between "trying to intimidate" and "being intimidating" and the responses should be different in both cases; in that particular case, having a rule that imposes a minor, but very real, effect can go a long way towards getting the players to accept the rp challenge as legitimate. I also play Pendragon, where such reactions are not only far more hard coded, but usually have far more drastic results than what most skill checks in D&D will yield, and the role playing in that game is far better than anything I've ever seen in D&D, even with so much of it seemingly created by the external force of the rules and not by the personal desires of the players. This doesn't mean that a DM should automatically expect a PC that was successfully intimidated to automatically respond in one given manner, any more than a player should expect an NPC to react exactly how they wish on a successful roll, but the player of that PC has to understand that rolling dice has consequences, they can be triggered by either side of the DM screen, and bad rolls at the wrong time will certainly make certain options notably harder. If a player is unwilling to accept this, they don't have to use those skills on NPCs, which will reduce the chances of them coming up at all; but if they wish to use them on NPCs regularly, those skills become fair tactics for me to use against them.</blockquote>

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