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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5465942" data-attributes="member: 2067">Hm...AKA: "Mother-May-I" Gameplay. "Oh wise and powerful DM, I check the room for traps.""You don't see any.""I move through the room.""A trap is sprung!""WTF?! I CHECKED!""You checked the room. This trap was technically on the ceiling.""The ceiling is part of the room!""No it isn't, you would've had to specificially check the ceiling.""Well, that sucks, and now I am dead, and this game blows."...etc.This works fine if the DMs are universally good, skilled, fair, accurate judges 100% of the time (or even 90% of the time with adequate player trust). But DMs are human, DMs make mistakes, DMs can be biased or needlessly specific. DMs can be rules lawyers going by RAW instead of RAI, both from the books and from what players say. I prefer dice. I also prefer dice as a DM, since that means I don't have to parse what the players are saying as if I was the King's Quest computer.>LOOK AT ROCK"There is no rock here.">LOOK AT BOULDER"There is no boulder here.">LOOK AT STONE"The stone is unremarkable."...I can just say, "How observant are these characters in this situation? DICE! TELL ME!"Easier, faster, less messy, moar dakka....er...more fun.VALID POINT ALERT.It is never a good idea to stick something essential behind a wall that the players may not pass through. It's also a bad idea to bottleneck so that there's only one way to ever learn something. If it's essential, jam it in their craws, either directly, or with multiple, disparate opportunities to discover the same thing. This isn't a problem with spot checks, though, it's a problem with adventure design (which, I'll fully admit, future DMGs need to do a better job on -- though 4e's is not bad). Oh slippery slopes, you are my favorite thing to slide down!This is like saying that if you just have to ask the DM, you will never roll dice, and every game will turn into Amber Diceless.There is a broad middle ground.D&D is firmly rooted in that middle ground, and doesn't seem likely to go off the edge into one-roll adventures any time soon, since those things don't seem like very much fun to very many people, I'd wager.Of course, really, this just points out that all the rules we abide by are arbitrary, which, yeah, we're playing a game, so they are.As diceless systems prove, you can do this pretty easily without dice. You can do all of this without dice. No, dice are there to be an impartial arbiter, to improve trust between the DM and the players, to help the players feel like they have some agency, to help the DM feel like he can make a clear ruling, to resolve things that have a chance of failure. Dice are also there because rolling dice is fun -- the risk, the fear of the unknown, the thrill of a 20 and the agony of a 1. Dice are a useful tool for when you want to bring a character's abilities to bear on a particular task that might not succeed. You can do that without dice, too, but dice are fast useful and impartial and random and all of those things add (to me) significant amounts of fun.Here's a challenge: go play some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game" target="_blank">Amber</a>. Either have fun and enjoy your diceless world of thoughtful, inquisitive players, and don't worry too much about injecting that into D&D, or get back to me when you figure out why it's not quite as fun for you to play as D&D, and tell me why. For me, I don't like Mother-May-I gameplay, either as a player, or as a DM. I prefer to play a game using randomness, luck, chance, and chaos, one that depends on the character rather than the player to be successful (but relies on the player to use the character's abilities in the first place). Depending on the DM's judgement alone causes all sorts of problems and complications. Like any tabletop game, when the DM is an awesome, great, superb, 90th percentile DM, it'll work great anyway. But when the DM is merely average, or only kinda good, or even a little bad....yeah, you've got problems. Dice help solve those problems.Plus, rolling dice is fun so <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> .</blockquote>

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