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Message: <blockquote data-quote="UngainlyTitan" data-source="post: 9809807" data-attributes="member: 28487">I have a lot of thought on this. In general, I am very much of the opinion that the character should carry much of the weight over the player. Unless the players and the DM want to play the other game. That game is not illegitimate, but I have seen, charismatic players pull off shenanigans that their less charismatic player fail on despite having the more charismatic character.The player should be able to play a character that they cannot actually pull off, and the DM and the system should help them achieve their fantasy.There is a fundamental tension between what a referee can communicate and what the players can pick up. The players can only experience the world as described them and the DM can never really convey all that a person in the player characters situation would actually know. This is not a problem in a novel or other media since author only need to communicate to their audience. They do not have to worry overmuch about the audience missing a piece of the narrative it is not going to change the arc of the story.On the other hand, if the players misses something essential, that can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt.Traps, can be really tricky and emblematic of the issues. Are they there as gotcha?, to attrit resources, as puzzles for the players, to allow the rogue show off their cool stuff, to split the party or something to indicate the alien and dangerous nature of the environment? Some or all of the list.Personally, I do not want my player probing every step with a 10 foot pole, dusting rooms with flour to reveal tripwires and poking at every loose brick and statue. I prefer to believe that the player characters are competent at this dungeon delving stuff and thus have a keen sense of where traps are likely to occur and some innate mechanic to spot and or disable them as needed. The social situation is similar, if people want to act out in character that is lovely but if some stammers out that they want to say something cool and swive their potential paramour with a charisma check, I am also cool with that. I am pretty poor at the acting thing myself despite being at this for years.The players are not tactical geniuses, which is why the characters have all those cool combat powers. There is no real singular answer to this, but I think, leverage as much of the character as we can and let the players direct as much as they can and are comfortable with. Rolling dice on its own is not at that interesting, if it is not interesting people will not play it. The players need to exert some level of direction and creativity, or they may as well be playing a boardgame. Not sure, there is a single place to draw this line or even that the same people will draw this line in the same place in different contexts.</blockquote>

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