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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7793797" data-attributes="member: 6779196">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.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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