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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunshadow21" data-source="post: 6742124" data-attributes="member: 6667193">That sums up the biggest difficulty in this thread quite well. No one thinks the dice can force the PC to act a certain way; the differences lie in what constitutes appropriate influence. Your position, and the position of several others, seems to be that the dice cannot have any direct influence whatsoever without crossing the line of player agency, and therefore, it is not worth the effort of rolling them to attempt to gain any kind of influence, which must come only from roleplaying. It's fair, but can come across as odd and arbitrary if the person making the argument agrees to letting class abilities and magic that have the same effect work while disallowing the skills simply becuase the source is different. To me, if you're going to draw that line, you need to draw that line with everything that could potentially limit player agency in that manner. Highlighting only magic or only interaction skills or only class abilities simply because of the source seems like cherry picking to me, and a cause of more trouble than resolution. The idea that the interaction skills are less well defined as some merit, but that also means that DMs are free to choose a definition that is in line with other skills, and there is no particular reason to assume that undefined must mean overly powerful. Choosing to default to overly powerful is entirely on the DM, and I have no sympathy for a DM that defaults to overly powerful and than can't reacts to that decision by deciding it's too powerful, and therefore, cannot be used; all that is needed to make it work is a change in a definition that the DM has full and complete control over.The counter position is that dice can have some kind of influence without being particularly restrictive. Using intimidate to make a PC somewhat afraid and wary of an NPC guard is a good example; the PC can still act however they wish, even if it is clearly against what the guard is suggesting, but a successful intimidate roll means that the PC does so knowing full well there will be consequences. This is where the intimidiate roll ends; the PC, and any other PCs present, can, and often do shape just how much that really matters. If the PC was rash, went off on their own, and gave the guard good reason to be extremely intimidating, it's going to matter a lot more than if the full party is there, and the worst that happens is that another PC ends up dragging the intimidated PC away before they can get in further trouble while the face of the party calms the guard down and gets what the party needs from him. A single dice roll has just as much, or as little impact, as the PCs let it. If they setup a scene that relies on a single dice roll, it's on them, but they will almost always have enough control over their own actions to prevent that if they want to.In the end, I find that the power of these skills is precisely what the DM decides it should be, so a DM complaining about these skills being too powerful to use on PCs seems really odd to me, as it is entirely within their power to adjust the power of the skills to something more appropriate. I'm not going to say a DM that makes that complaint is wrong, but I am scratching my head why so many DMs seem to spend so much energy trying to fight these skills when it's so much easier to simply drop them entirely or reshape them once to something more usable and moving on.</blockquote>

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