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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5825164" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree. To borrow terminology from Burning Wheel, intent plus task makes for a skill check. Sometimes elements of these will be implicit from the context ("I greet the Queen with as much charm as I can muster - my Diplomacy roll is 23, including +2 for my successful History check to recall appropriate forms and titles.") Sometimes they will not be, and the player needs to provide them (perhaps with help from the other players and/or the GM, depending on the practice at a particular table).But it does affect the outcome. It changes the fiction. If it really doesn't matter how the PC is bringing it about that the Queen is well-disposed (polite greetings, complimenting her shoes, mentioning that he played a minor role in the coup that brought her to power), then why are we bothering with a roll at all? It sounds like nothing is at stake.This seems to me to relate to a slightly different but important point. It seems that a lot of D&D players use skill checks not as action resolution mechanics, but as scene framing mechanics - the Perception check is used to oblige the GM to reframe the scene as one in which my PC sees the interesting stuff, and the Diplomacy check is used to oblige the GM to reframe the scene as one in which an obstreborous NPC is no longer an obstacle to the PC's goals. Who will use Perception checks this way? Someone who doesn't like "find the hidden silver bar in the torch sconce" play. Who will use Diplomacy checks this way? Someone who doesn't like "role playing" encounters.I don't have a strong view on the merits of these sorts of mechanics, although my gut feel is that the GM should be framing scenes the players are interested in in the first place. Mabye the mechanics are important in a play environment in which GMs are using a lot of pre-packaged, untweaked scenarios. Anyway, I agree with you that if Diplomacy is being used in this sort of "reframing" way, then requiring "roleplay" is pointless and self-defeating.But anyway, I think it would improve these sorts of mechanics if the ruleboosk spoke more frankly about what they are for, and didn't try to pretend that they are about action resolution.My interpretation of your "going deeper" is that it is about wanting to use social skills as a genuine action resolution mechanic, rather than as the sort of "reframing device" that I was talking about just above.I think this may be fair of 3E. I don't think it is fair of 4e, which (i) notes that Diplomacy is normally part of a skill challenge, and (ii) in the skill challenge rules requires that the GM frame the situation in fictional terms, and that the player's mechanical engagement with the situation also be framed in fictional terms (with the GM having final veto rights). Page 42, and the "skill variants" mentioned in the Rules Compendium, also pretty clearly require fictional framing in order to invoke a skill.I've played a game with the possibility of catastrophic failure on every skill check - namely, Rolemaster. I don't dispute that it can produce an interesting game. I don't think that it always does let alone that it tends to produce a more interesting game - sometimes it produces a less interesting, because, frustrating game.I tend to prefer the possibility of catastrophic failure resulting from poor choices - preferably, poor choices deliberately taken because for some reason the player wouldn't choose otehrwise -  rather than poor rolls. This is another reason why framing skill checks by reference to the fiction matters, I think.</blockquote>

Verification