D&D 5E Players: Why Do You Want to Roll a d20?

[Charlaquin]

But, for the umpteenth time you STILL HAVEN'T GIVEN ME AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT THAT NARRATION COULD BE. It's easy enough to say, "I don't know what your character is doing" but, since I'm asking you REPEATEDLY for an example of WHAT CAN I DO? and you STILL refuse to answer, it become extremely frustrating.

So one more time, what narration can I do to determine if my paladin knows if a specific spell would affect a specific monster.

Everyone has avoided actually answering that question. Not one of you has managed in several posts now to actually answer a simple question.

Actually, several people have given examples of action declarations that would be perfectly valid in their games. Maybe if you spent more time reading the things we actually write instead of trying to win the argument, you’d have noticed them. I can dig up some quotes if you like.

No, I have not determined that. That's what happened in MY GAME. But, I'm asking you, if I'm playing in YOUR GAME, when YOU ARE DMing, and I want to know if my paladin knows a piece of information, what can I do at the table to determine that?

Well, casting Protection from Evil and Good on the hobgoblins would certainly allow you to determine that casting Protection from Evil and Good will rout out the Intellect Devourers. Another one might be “I go to the arcane university and research Intellect Devourers to see if I can find out any techniques for routing them out,” though that’s not particularly helpful if you’re currently in combat with Intellect-Devoured hobgoblins. In Iserith’s game, you could probably do it with “I think back to my experiences when my village was attacked by Aberrants to try to remember how we dealt with the Intellect Devourers.” If you have other ideas, I am open to them.

See, I think this is largely the heart of the problem here. @iserith has molded the conversation around this idea that checks can only be made when there is significant risk of failure. But, that's not all checks can be used for. Checks, particularly things that aren't really actions like knowledge checks and Insight checks, are made when no one at the table can really answer a question. They are a neutral arbiter. I don't want to simply declare that I know this. I don't want the DM to tell me what I do or do not know. I want to use the mechanics of the game to determine that. I want that as a DM and as a player because the dice are entirely neutral.

Does your character know this information? Roll the dice and let's see shall we? And then we play from there. It's no different than "Can I hit the monster with my sword?" Well, roll the dice and let's see shall we? Or, "Can I parkour up this wall?" Again, let's roll the dice and see. The DM doesn't know the answer. The player doesn't know the answer. So, let's leave it up to the dice. The dice will tell us one way or the other.

That is certainly a way that you, as a DM can choose to use checks. At my table, and at many of our tables, checks are only used to resolve actions with uncertain outcomes. You don’t have to run it that way at your table. You don’t have to like that we run it that way at ours. But it’s pretty asinine to try to tell us that checks can be used that way when we’re telling you that, in our games, they can’t.

This interpretation that ability checks can only be used for one thing, and one thing only - to determine the outcome of actions with significant risks in failure - is a very limited and limiting interpretation of how dice are used in the game.

You’re welcome to hold that opinion. Personally, I find it an extremely useful interpretation. Different strokes.

 

[Charlaquin]

It's the fact that you are looking, and expecting, the player to come up with that narration that gives me pause. Since the DM is always on the look for the players to "describe their actions" but, when actually questioned about it in a real circumstance, I get nothing but the run around and no one can seem to actually give me an example of what would constitute a "narration".

Again, you have been given examples. But the reason you’re having such a hard time getting examples is that those of us who handle action resolution this way don’t generally have specific actions in mind that are or aren’t going to work. We prefer to judge each action in context. If you describe an action, I can tell you how I would resolve it at my table, but if you give me a scenario and ask “what could I say to make you allow me to do X?” I’m not going to have one clear answer. I’ve done my best to give you examples of actions that could result in succeeding at the goal you described, but that’s not really the way it works at my table. To do something, you have to do something.

Fair enough. For me, I see it as simply driving the players away from the skill system entirely and into the hands of the casters since the players don't need to satisfy any requirements from the DM in order to use their spells.

And that’s a valid outlook. I haven’t seen my DMing style lead to that in my games, but I can certainly see why some players might respond that way. I don’t really see it as a problem if they do. That’s their choice to make, and if they’re completely ignoring skills, they are going to be more likely to fail when the outcomes of their actions are uncertain than the players who do pay attention to their skills and take actions that align with those skills, as insurance against failure.

Yes, you are ignoring a direct quote from the PHB. The PHB SPECIFICALLY CALLS OUT using Insight to determine if someone is lying. It's RIGHT THERE in the book. So,, yes, you are ignoring the direct quote from the PHB and YES @iserith is still ignoring that.

No, I am not ignoring that quote. If your action involves observing a creature’s body language, speech, etc. to try to determine if it is being deceitful, and if that action has an uncertain outcome, then you can apply your Proficiency Bonus for Insight to it. I have never made the claim that the Insight skill is not useful for the purpose of identifying deceit. What I did claim, and I stand by, is that a successful roll on a d20, adding your Wisdom modifier and your Insight Proficiency Bonus, doesn’t do anything on its own, except telling you whether or not your action succeeded. It is your action that allows you to determine if a creature is being deceitful, the ability check merely determines whether or not it worked.

Yeah, see the problem is, every time this subject comes up, you folks sound EXACTLY like those DM's. The DM's who feign obtuseness in order to "engage with the fiction", who insist that the game should be run THIS way because THAT'S WHAT THE RULES SAY. The DM's who, when actually questioned, cannot actually answer anything specific, but, instead throw up walls of bafflegab and misinterpretations in order to avoid ever actually coming out and saying anything.

If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck...

And you sound exactly like the awful DMs I’ve played with who never narrated things in terms of the fiction, who refused to allow any action that wasn’t phrased in the form “I make an X check” to succeed, who made it impossible to play a social character because no matter what you said it was always going to come down to a single Charisma (+ whatever skill) check, without so much as a bonus for playing to the NPC’s personality traits, which meant even with maxed out Diplomacy you were bound to fail fairly often. I’m willing to extend you the benefit of the doubt that, although you use the same action resolution style as those awful DMs, you are not an awful DM yourself. This conversation would be a lot more fruitful if you would extend the same benefit of the doubt to us.

 

[billd91]

Well, casting Protection from Evil and Good on the hobgoblins would certainly allow you to determine that casting Protection from Evil and Good will rout out the Intellect Devourers. Another one might be “I go to the arcane university and research Intellect Devourers to see if I can find out any techniques for routing them out,” though that’s not particularly helpful if you’re currently in combat with Intellect-Devoured hobgoblins. In Iserith’s game, you could probably do it with “I think back to my experiences when my village was attacked by Aberrants to try to remember how we dealt with the Intellect Devourers.” If you have other ideas, I am open to them.

For some people, the way they play, casting a Protection from Evil and Good would be more or less begging the question. The player already knows it'll work and "experimenting" with casting that spell is something they already know the likely outcome to - and they reject that as metagaming. That's part of the point of Hussar going to his DM with a sidebar. He wants to avoid doing that kind of metagaming. Plus, it's not so much playing the PC as it is playing yourself and your previous experiences with the game rules. When you're at that point, there's little point to having knowledge skills as a savvy player can always come up with a justification for the PC knowing what the player knows.

I think Hussar's objections are a bit overblown, but there have been other people on these boards over the years who have similar issues of "playing the DM" rather than playing their characters. Given previous posts, I think it's clear it comes, at least in Hussar's case, from a long history of dysfunctional games due to DM issues. That said, iserith's responses are about as unyielding in really engaging in Hussar's points as Hussar is in giving way. It's probably better to just leave it all be.

 

[Charlaquin]

Because the PC is not the player and vice versa. If the PC exists on a world with no dragons and in the middle of the campaign once somehow makes it in from elsewhere, do you really expect that the PC will know all about dragons just because you do?

So they can act all surprised and confused when they see it, they can make up a silly name that their characters decided to give to this creature they’ve never seen before, all that jazz. Or maybe someone could chime in that they’ve heard legends of creatures like this before from long ago, but thought they were only stories to frighten children. Or both, why not both? both is good. Either way, if the wizard chooses not to cast his go-to fireball because his player knows it’s a red dragon and red dragons are immune to fire, I’m not going to question it. I’m not going to protest that “you always start off a big fight with fireball, and your character has no way of knowing this creature is immune to fire, so if you don’t start off this fight with fireball you’re metagaming, and that’s bad!” It’s not my job to police what actions the PCs would or would not take. Besides, we’re clearly playing in a homebrew setting in this hypothetical scenario. For all the wizard’s player knows, this dragon might be vulnerable to fire, and acting on that player knowledge could actually be a poor decision.

 

[Charlaquin]

For some people, the way they play, casting a Protection from Evil and Good would be more or less begging the question. The player already knows it'll work and "experimenting" with casting that spell is something they already know the likely outcome to - and they reject that as metagaming.

Right, but I’m not those people, and I think the metagaming concern is silly. If a player wants to do that, that’s their decision and it’s not my place to question their motives. If they feel like that’s not something their character would do, they’re free to do something else. I’m not interested in playing the “what do I have to do before I’m allowed to act on this knowledge I have as a player?” game. The answer, in my game, is nothing, act however you see fit.

That's part of the point of Hussar going to his DM with a sidebar. He wants to avoid doing that kind of metagaming. Plus, it's not so much playing the PC as it is playing yourself and your previous experiences with the game rules. When you're at that point, there's little point to having knowledge skills as a savvy player can always come up with a justification for the PC knowing what the player knows.

There are plenty of things knowledge skills are useful for besides allowing you to act on player knowledge if you succeed at a check. And if a player in my game isn’t interested in taking knowledge skills because they don’t need them to do that, that’s their decision.

 

[iserith]

But, for the umpteenth time you STILL HAVEN'T GIVEN ME AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT THAT NARRATION COULD BE. It's easy enough to say, "I don't know what your character is doing" but, since I'm asking you REPEATEDLY for an example of WHAT CAN I DO? and you STILL refuse to answer, it become extremely frustrating.

So one more time, what narration can I do to determine if my paladin knows if a specific spell would affect a specific monster.

Everyone has avoided actually answering that question. Not one of you has managed in several posts now to actually answer a simple question.

No, I have not determined that. That's what happened in MY GAME. But, I'm asking you, if I'm playing in YOUR GAME, when YOU ARE DMing, and I want to know if my paladin knows a piece of information, what can I do at the table to determine that?

What can I roll to see if you've read any of @Charlaquin, @Maxperson, or my posts in this thread about this very thing.

 

[iserith]

So they can act all surprised and confused when they see it, they can make up a silly name that their characters decided to give to this creature they’ve never seen before, all that jazz. Or maybe someone could chime in that they’ve heard legends of creatures like this before from long ago, but thought they were only stories to frighten children. Or both, why not both? both is good. Either way, if the wizard chooses not to cast his go-to fireball because his player knows it’s a red dragon and red dragons are immune to fire, I’m not going to question it. I’m not going to protest that “you always start off a big fight with fireball, and your character has no way of knowing this creature is immune to fire, so if you don’t start off this fight with fireball you’re metagaming, and that’s bad!” It’s not my job to police what actions the PCs would or would not take. Besides, we’re clearly playing in a homebrew setting in this hypothetical scenario. For all the wizard’s player knows, this dragon might be vulnerable to fire, and acting on that player knowledge could actually be a poor decision.

Right. In Hussar's example, he decided for some reason he didn't know if his character did or did not know a thing that he as a player knows. Cool. Not my role as DM to help him out of a problem he created for himself. That's on him as a player to do stuff to get the information in a way that satisfies whatever he's got going on in his head. I'll narrate the results of him doing that stuff.

 

[robus]

Right, but I’m not those people, and I think the metagaming concern is silly. If a player wants to do that, that’s their decision and it’s not my place to question their motives. If they feel like that’s not something their character would do, they’re free to do something else. I’m not interested in playing the “what do I have to do before I’m allowed to act on this knowledge I have as a player?” game. The answer, in my game, is nothing, act however you see fit.

The problem I see with questioning player actions as “metagaming” is that the line between non-metagame action and metagame action is never clear. Any action however large or small can be called out as metagaming. And if a DM wants players to “perform” their non-meta game ritual before finally attempting the action everyone knows is the right one, how does one determine how many good-faith “non-metagame” actions are required before a “metagame” action is allowed? 1, 3, 10?

Better, as you say, to not even play the “metagame game” with your players and allow them to declare whatever action they wish. Much better, IMHO, to give experienced players a fresh setting to play in where little of their monster knowledge will aid them.

 

[Maxperson]

What can I roll to see if you've read any of @Charlaquin, @Maxperson, or my posts in this thread about this very thing.

A joint?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Right. In Hussar's example, he decided for some reason he didn't know if his character did or did not know a thing that he as a player knows. Cool. Not my role as DM to help him out of a problem he created for himself. That's on him as a player to do stuff to get the information in a way that satisfies whatever he's got going on in his head. I'll narrate the results of him doing that stuff.

Well, this is the bigger reason why some of us play one way and other plays another. I for one would not like to play in what sounds like your style of game... because if you genuinely believe that Hussar as a player can play with whatever knowledge he already has, then metagaming should be completely acceptable. Is that correct?

In Hussar's example... if you as the DM will not police his character and stop him from getting himself out of a hole "he himself has put himself in"... it seems to me that you shouldn't have a problem with whatever solutions Hussar comes up with to solve his PC's issue. That would include things like looking up spells in the Player's Handbook. That would include things like looking up monsters in the Monster Manual. That would include doing google searches for relevant historical info. Are all of these solutions okay with you? If Hussar has a question of whether his PC knows a bit of esoterica and you aren't going to give him a method for just determining it (like a check) and instead are going to let him decide for himself whether his PC knows it... then there shouldn't be any problems with him the player just looking up the information and then declaring his PC knows the answer. That was he can avoid the dreaded check altogether.