D&D General Styles of D&D Play

[Maxperson]

Any particular reason why not? And by that I mean an articulated reason.

It's essentially non-magical mind control or the DM playing the PC and deciding what it thinks and does. Those skills are not intended to work on PCs so the DM isn't playing them instead of the player. The player gets to decide if he believes or doesn't believe what the NPC is saying or whether he does or does not do what the NPC is asking.

 

[Maxperson]

That gets unwieldy really fast as you increase the number of modules.

It's really not hard for a DM to see what doesn't work well together. A module that increases reliance on skills isn't going to mesh well with one that makes it harder to successfully use skills. Also, since when did we stop accepting that there are learning curves to games? Simply issue a warning at the beginning of the module section that adding in an optional module can have unintended consequences and/or not work well with other modules, so use with care and be willing to remove an offending module.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's essentially non-magical mind control or the DM playing the PC and deciding what it thinks and does. Those skills are not intended to work on PCs so the DM isn't playing them instead of the player. The player gets to decide if he believes or doesn't believe what the NPC is saying or whether he does or does not do what the NPC is asking.

Did WotC say that, or is that your personal belief?

Since a PC and an NPC with the same level of skill are, I presume, equally good at the skill, why shouldn't the NPC's roll on the PC count the same as the reverse? Why is it not "non-magical control" when the PC uses a social skill on an NPC but it is when the reverse happens?

 

[Hussar]

Did WotC say that, or is that your personal belief?

Since a PC and an NPC with the same level of skill are, I presume, equally good at the skill, why shouldn't the NPC's roll on the PC count the same as the reverse? Why is it not "non-magical control" when the PC uses a social skill on an NPC but it is when the reverse happens?

To be fair, 5e D&D is REALLY adverse to the idea of taking any control away from the players. They have really shied away from anything that would remove control. So, by the rules, social skills don't work on PC's. It's like the old morale rules in AD&D. Only applies to NPC's.

Not something I'm personally a huge fan of. I like the idea that your character can fail morale checks and run away, even if you, the player, don't want to. But then, I'm also a big fan of ceding some control over the actions of a character to the mechanics in order to force players (and myself) to react to things that I wouldn't necessarily think to do.

 

[Composer99]

So one thing I suggested in one thread a while ago, was to give D&D something like the journey mechanic from Adventures in Middle-Earth. And if such a system existed, then I feel some classes, ranger in particular, should have features that interact with this system.

Similarly, if a complicated social combat mechanics existed, then I feel some classes, bard in particular, should have features that interact with it.

And once such integration to the classes is done, you no longer can easily just decide to not use the system, as you deprive classes of their features. Like if you decided not to use the combat subsystem a lot of features would become useless. Highly modular game would best work as a classless game, as then you could freely build the characters only with the building blocks that interact with the mechanics you intend to use. But that would cease to be recognisable D&D, and would greatly affect the ease of use.

Game design is a bit harder than a lot people here seem to think.

Apart from the final line, I am not so sure about this.

D&D already has an extensible mechanic that the game already uses across varying scales of time and space to represent player character efforts to complete tasks where success is uncertain and stakes are meaningful: the ability check, which is used for combat actions, for exploration activity of nebulous timeframes (e.g. the DMG rules for foraging or tracking), for social interaction activity of nebulous timeframes (e.g. the reaction tables in the DMG), and even for the downtime activities found in Xanathar's that span many days of time.

As such, in principle there's no particular reason why ability checks can't be extended to other modular gameplay structures. This would require essentially no integration of bespoke mechanics back into the classes.

For instance, you might imagine:

• A journey/sojourn procedure adapted from AiME Journeys that uses group checks instead of bespoke die rolls to set the journey's tone and to see how it all turns out at the end.
• A procedure adapted from the B/X adventuring day that integrates the DMG foraging and tracking rules as activities the player characters can undertake.
• A procedure adapted from the MCDM RPG Negotiation procedure (which is not quite a social conflict procedure as far as I can tell, but is not far off from one).
• Procedures similar to clocks from indie games, the PF2 victory point system, or 4e skill challenges, all of which can use ability checks, spells (in some cases at DM discretion), or "I win buttons" based on applying knowledge of the in-game fiction (again at DM discretion) to accomplish some of the successful progress through the procedure.

 

[Hussar]

Well, and it's also fairly easy to prove that it's not necessary to hard wire mechanics into the base classes. After all, there are a shopping list of 3rd party books that add a massive number of mechanics to the game without altering base classes. Or, if they do alter the base classes, the mechanics for those alterations are bundled into the optional mechanics themselves.

It's kinda like saying we cannot have psionics in the game because we'd have to change all the base classes to add psionics. But, it's been shown repeatedly that psionics can be added to D&D as a completely modular system that in no way impacts the base game and users can use it or leave it as they want.

So, yeah, I'm going to double down on this. If the presence of mechanical systems results in players abandoning free form play, then it makes some degree of sense that the only reason they were free forming in the first place is because they were not given any choice.

 

[Maxperson]

Did WotC say that, or is that your personal belief?

If you read the DMG the entire social section is aimed at NPCs. It doesn't say outright that they don't work on PCs, but literally nothing indicates in any way that it does. This came up in a thread a year or three ago and I went looking and found a statement by Crawford that social skills/ability checks were not intended for use against PCs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If you read the DMG the entire social section is aimed at NPCs. It doesn't say outright that they don't work on PCs, but literally nothing indicates in any way that it does. This came up in a thread a year or three ago and I went looking and found a statement by Crawford that social skills/ability checks were not intended for use against PCs.

So no reasoning behind that ruling. That's what I was asking about.

 

[Maxperson]

So no reasoning behind that ruling. That's what I was asking about.

The reasoning is that the players control the PCs and the DM controls everything else. The DM should never usurp that control without great reason. For example, dominate person and a failed save. High charisma won't cut it.

 

[Minigiant]

Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on what it is. Not even a 22 charisma can make someone do something that they would never do.

That seems like a DC issue.
There used to be a Fanatical attitude and you could roll very high checks to push enemies to Fanatic

No. If you read the 5e DMG, every example and use of language is PC using the skill/ability check on NPCs. Crawford also confirmed that RAI is for social skills and ability checks not to work on PCs.

RAI, I agree that NPCs cannot force PCs to think a certian way . That's a table choice.

But I think a DM can call or secretly roll for skill checks and change the NPC's description or purposely lie on failure. The classic Passive Insight "For all you know, he's telling the truth "