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Message: <blockquote data-quote="redrick" data-source="post: 7299362" data-attributes="member: 6777696">I agree with this. My goal is not to be in a situation where the checks being used are surprising and counterintuitive to the players. I think that's part of letting the rules fade into the background.It also sounds like you and your group have been playing together long enough to have a pretty good sense of how skills are applied and when they are applied, at least in the context of your own group. So, if you are describing your action and rolling the die that you know the DM was going to call for anyway, and the DM is cool with that, I'd say that's all up to the etiquette of your group. No foul.For myself, and thinking about what I want at my table, I think of a few things.1. I often play with people who are new to RPGs, or new to D&D, or at least new to playing with me. The longest consistent gaming relationship I have now is about two years, but most of the people I game with I have known less than a year.2. When a player rolls a die, that has an implicit meaning that is understood around the table, especially if it is a significantly high or low roll. That number is something that has happened. Taking that die roll back feels like a bit of a retcon.So, even assuming that the players are, in good faith, describing their actions in a way that I can understand, sometimes they might call a check on themselves that would not match what I would call. This might happen because:* There is a miscommunication about the environment that makes the described action by the player impossible or different than understood. What if, after clarifying, we establish that, to pick the lock, the player has to stand directly under the giant guillotine blade. When the player decides to go ahead with that action, will we use the existing roll? Or will we use a new one? What if the player rolled low? Will they choose to behave differently under clarification?* The player misunderstands the skill applied and describes an inappropriate check. (I once had a player announce that he was going to acrobatics over the pit.)* The task might not have required a check, but now a particularly low roll or a particularly high roll needs to be factored into the fiction.* Just because one player always nails which actions will require a check and which skill is required, another player might not. It kind of sucks to say, "Bob, you can go ahead and roll your dice with your actions, but Jim, you can't, because you're not good enough at D&D, yet, so all of your checks have to be approved my me." By just putting the calling of the check on the DM, we can avoid that. It's not about asking for permission. It's just a division of labor thing.So I would get annoyed with a player at a table where I was the DM who insisted on always calling and rolling their own checks, even if I asked them to wait, because it would feel rude and disrespectful to the table as a whole.</blockquote>

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