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Players: Why Do You Want to Roll a d20?
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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7793159" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>I used to have a lot of anxiety about this too. Turned out, most DMs aren’t out to ruin your day, and in fact are doing their best to give you a challenging but fair and hopefully rewarding experience. I would much rather my success and failure be determined by that person’s best judgment of the actions I describe my character taking than at the mercy of a slightly weighted random number generator. And anecdotally, since deciding to embrace the DM’s Judgment rather than hide from it behind the impartial but fickle d20, I’ve found that my characters succeed much more reliably.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Some DMs are comfortable interpreting a motivation and method from just the name of a skill and the context leading up to it. Even with such DMs, I find that more specificity in action declaration tends to lead to a lesser number of checks called for, and therefore a greater rate of success. Personally, I don’t like to make any assumptions about what a player’s character does when I’m DMing. Even if it seems obvious to me what a player is hoping to accomplish and how, I would rather hear it from them than assume my intuition is correct and risk adjudicating an action that they didn’t want to take.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Personally, I don’t expect my players to narrate mental actions. I give them information that I think is pertinent if they have a relevant proficiency, and if they want to know something specific, they are free to ask (e.g. “do I know trolls are weak to fire?” “Sure.”) But generally if you want to learn something you don’t know, you’ll have to take action steps to uncover that information (e.g. “I wave my torch in the troll’s face to see if it reacts with fear!”) Different DMs handle these sorts of things differently. At Iserith’s table, for example, I expect you would be asked to rephrase “do I know if trolls are weak to fire” in the form of an active attempt to recall that information, (e.g. “I think back to my training as a soldier to try and remember any weaknesses they might have.”)</p><p></p><p></p><p>And if you left it at that, there would be no argument. But for some reason people who “understand but don’t want to do it that way” ask an awful lot of questions about the way we do it.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Not that it really matters, but my interpretation of the rules is very consistent with Iserith’s. He even agreed with me on the point that you took as a house rule. That’s another reason it seems like you don’t understand the way we do it as well as you claim to - when I said that a Wisdom (Insight) check won’t allow you to figure out if an NPC is being deceitful, I wasn’t saying that under my house rules the Insight skill can’t be utilized in attempts to uncover NPC deceit. I was saying that under my (and Iserith’s, for whatever that’s worth) interpretation of the rules as written, checks don’t do anything on their own. They are tools the DM uses to resolve actions that have a chance of failing and consequences for failing.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 7793159, member: 6779196"] I used to have a lot of anxiety about this too. Turned out, most DMs aren’t out to ruin your day, and in fact are doing their best to give you a challenging but fair and hopefully rewarding experience. I would much rather my success and failure be determined by that person’s best judgment of the actions I describe my character taking than at the mercy of a slightly weighted random number generator. And anecdotally, since deciding to embrace the DM’s Judgment rather than hide from it behind the impartial but fickle d20, I’ve found that my characters succeed much more reliably. Some DMs are comfortable interpreting a motivation and method from just the name of a skill and the context leading up to it. Even with such DMs, I find that more specificity in action declaration tends to lead to a lesser number of checks called for, and therefore a greater rate of success. Personally, I don’t like to make any assumptions about what a player’s character does when I’m DMing. Even if it seems obvious to me what a player is hoping to accomplish and how, I would rather hear it from them than assume my intuition is correct and risk adjudicating an action that they didn’t want to take. Personally, I don’t expect my players to narrate mental actions. I give them information that I think is pertinent if they have a relevant proficiency, and if they want to know something specific, they are free to ask (e.g. “do I know trolls are weak to fire?” “Sure.”) But generally if you want to learn something you don’t know, you’ll have to take action steps to uncover that information (e.g. “I wave my torch in the troll’s face to see if it reacts with fear!”) Different DMs handle these sorts of things differently. At Iserith’s table, for example, I expect you would be asked to rephrase “do I know if trolls are weak to fire” in the form of an active attempt to recall that information, (e.g. “I think back to my training as a soldier to try and remember any weaknesses they might have.”) And if you left it at that, there would be no argument. But for some reason people who “understand but don’t want to do it that way” ask an awful lot of questions about the way we do it. Not that it really matters, but my interpretation of the rules is very consistent with Iserith’s. He even agreed with me on the point that you took as a house rule. That’s another reason it seems like you don’t understand the way we do it as well as you claim to - when I said that a Wisdom (Insight) check won’t allow you to figure out if an NPC is being deceitful, I wasn’t saying that under my house rules the Insight skill can’t be utilized in attempts to uncover NPC deceit. I was saying that under my (and Iserith’s, for whatever that’s worth) interpretation of the rules as written, checks don’t do anything on their own. They are tools the DM uses to resolve actions that have a chance of failing and consequences for failing. [/QUOTE]
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