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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ClaytonCross" data-source="post: 7795474" data-attributes="member: 6880599">I don't have to be able, as a person in real life, to describe an action I don't know how to do in real life in an imaginary game where you set the rules out come and I have no feel in the minutia to care about the out come. If you ask ME to describe how I disarm a trap or ME to persuade someone to give us information... it breaks my immersion because I then stop and have this awkward moment of... I don't know how to do this and I can't see or feel out the characters in your mind. You force me back to reality completely pulling me out of the immersion trying to figure out how to convince YOU to let me role some dice and worried I will auto fail because I am not persuasive and do not know how to disarm traps in real life. It may make it better for you as GM if I add flourish to the story, but as a player it hurts my experience to be forced to be intimidating. Do you ask how every player does every skill? You describe looking around? You describe pushing that heavy door with athletics? Do I need to write up some sheet music for my performance check? Again... I am not saying your wrong for your style of play. I am saying for some of use... being forced to your style of play does the opposite of what it does for your. I want to role, and if you want to add flourish to the effects of how the role effects it (Like Mathew Mercer does) then you can play your way and I can play mine. However, making my character checks about me as a player voids the idea that I play this game to escape the real world to be immersed in fantasy by forcing me to use personal flaws in my character and be judged by them.... instead of the character state block intended to represent the skills of the characters have that I often don't.That's right, YOU know where it is and how it works, so why can't I just take "a normal search action" to start? Why do I have to pull out of my character and try to guess what it is you want me to do as a player? If you want an immersive description for YOUR trap and I don't have any idea as a player, why can't I just role for disarm trap then you, knowing your trap, describe how it is disarmed or triggered? You can still have your immersive description but your asking me to describe your world but if I am wrong as a player I could get my character killed. I wouldn't tell another player how to play there creation being there character. As far as I am concerned your trap is just another NPC I don't control. When you say, nothing stops me form following up though, your wrong. If I roll the rock based on thinking the there might be a trap and nothing happens.... I have to assume there is no trap and continue into it. If your having me check, and check, and check for every possible trap... how do I know if a find a trap that is already triggered? Unless of course you just tell me the out come … which you could do with just a skill check role and save a lot of player confusion pain and without drawing out a simple trap for way more longer than ether of us want. I have seen this in multiple games. GMs who want what your suggesting then get annoyed that now the players can't except that a trap is sprung, that can move 5ft with out describing a 5 minute spill of how they test that 5ft for traps.... because they can't just role and move on. I have seen a hall with 2 traps devolve into 4 hours of describing every thing we do because one of those trapped nearly killed one of our players on an auto fail because he described how he opened a box wrong. I am not say this has happened at your game or how for you to have fun. Only that I have seen the door swing the other way. Forcing player creativity for the sake of immersion is not fun for the player. Encouraging creativity when a player is inspired with inspiration or just mentioning how awesome it is, on the other hand is great.  There's cover!?!? lol. I just mean the world is as the GM describes it. If its activated and players don't say they take cover because you never mentioned it but in your mind its there then they are penalized for being players, however if they are given a save based on character skills and on success you describe how they jump behind cover then they don't have to know what the GM knows and its the skill of the character and not the players inability to read your mind that is tested. If player fall back because of a bad check... is it because they performed a check and you described the danger? If so, you are already doing some of what I do, just for me check means roll. I don't ask a player how they do something, I let them add how and perhaps might add a bonus such as advantage for a good description, but I let the dice roll so that the characters skills are always tied to the check. An automatic success will be due to their characters passive skill level and an automatic failure only happens when a player tries something I will not allow them to achieve. For example, if a player says. "I tell a guard to kill himself, I roll persuasion 27" … I reply, "you manage to confuse the guard slightly before he gets angry, you have persuaded him that you the guards next target". So they might cause an opportunity attack on that guard but they failed to convince the guard to just kill themselves. The effect of the role may very, but I will try to apply some effect from a good roll if I can and I can think of something that makes since.  I understand that, but my agreement is that I prefer to keep a divide between the player and the character. I keep game world options in the game world. I will also apply logic in game, but when I GM, they role for disarm traps and I use my knowledge of the trap to describe the failure or success of disarming the trap based on the logic of my knowledge of the trap and how it could be disarmed or triggered by accident. I still reward cleaver player descriptions, but instead of auto fail or success, I only grant advantage or a bonus to the check and/or save if they are cleaver. I do not penalize character skills checks due to bad player description or understanding of the trap that only exists in my head. So require a check or not does not remove the logic or creativity of players. If I made the same trap, and my players wanted to try the same solution, I would allow them to try assuming they have a method and something to plug the whole with. However, the difference between your method and mine is that any description is just for an understanding of what they are doing so I can set a DC for a check. A solid plan might effect the DC of the check or of the saves an number of ways... but there will be skill check roll to see if they pull it off most of the time. A good description might reduce the DC, add a bonus or advantage to the roll for the check, or failure might have advantage on the save. The times where they do not get a roll it is because there characters passive skill is higher than the resulting DC so its not based on the player but the characters skill level vs the DC.... did a good description result in that? It can, but I will not auto fail them based on their description. To me that is steeling player agency of character design and gets into the territory of rail roading player characters based off of player descriptions of based off of their understanding of what only exists in my head. I need players to get a roll, so that they know their character choices and not their player descriptions are what determine out comes. At the same time, because descriptions never negatively impact DCs players are encouraged to use them but not required to.  But that's just how I view it from my perspective. So if you disagree with that, I am not saying you are wrong, I am just saying this is how I feel about this issue.Again, This is just my style. I have no problem with you doing it differently and if your players are happy at your table … then please enjoy. If you notice annoyed players and want to test my style that's fine to, but I can't know you or your players so that is of course a judgement you have to make and if you try my way it might be that players don't like it. My players are fine with my method, and I have seen problems with your style... but not every time I have seen it used, so I am aware that with some tables it can work fine. Its just the times it has gone bad it was painful so its a method I personally avoid.</blockquote>

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