Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmartkdr2" data-source="post: 8427362" data-attributes="member: 7017304">I think I'm getting hung up on the spell/nonspell line, which doesn't make sense to me. Some spells do what you say and just happen, (not charm person), and some let you try to do something you might not have been otherwise able to do - but that statement is not exclusive to spells. Wanderer (the Outlander feature) and Natural Explorer just work, and unless the dm shuts the feature down the dm is forced to accept them and narrate them as working. Other features change how you roll. Charm person creates a specific result (a defined mental state in the target) if the saving throw is failed, and Menacing Attack creates a specific result (likewise a defined mental state in the target) is the saving throw is failed - but you seem to be insisting that these two things are fundamentally different in terms of how the player is interacting with the fiction, because one is granted by the spellcasting feature and the other is granted by the Maneuvers feature. I will accept the idea that ability checks, by their nature, have less power than class/race/background features, because they are not explicitly actions you can take. There's no persuade action - there's you talking to a guard and the dm deciding how that goes, possibly calling for a roll. Now, if your real point is: "some features and abilities grant players greater power over the fiction than others" - I don't disagree (although I still fail to see the point of the distinction, since they all fit in OP's framework the same way). If you're point is still "features called spells interact with the rules differently, even when they have the same rules," I flatly disagree.</blockquote>

Verification