Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Darth Shoju" data-source="post: 3307680" data-attributes="member: 11397">I find they can also speed things up at times. A lot of the time it bogs a session down when a GM spends too much time with one player role-playing something that the other characters aren't involved in. I find that skills like Gather Information are great for this; often when a party hits town the characters go off to take care of different things. While the other characters are re-supplying or casting divination magics or talking to a specific NPC, the party rogue can say &quot;I'm using my Gather Info to spend the day finding out about (whatever)&quot;. That way the DM can roll, take care of what the other players are doing and then get back to the rogue about what he found out. It works really smoothly in my experience.And then when it comes to Bluff and Diplomacy, you still have to give the DM some idea of what you are saying to the NPC. In our group, the less verbose members usually paraphrase what their characters say &quot;I tell the guard captain that we are a traveling band of performers.&quot; The DM rolls to see what kind of reaction we get. At this point even the non-actors often get into first-person role-playing. For those of us who are amateur thespians and start off in-character with some grand explanation, the DM usually reflects that in the roll in some way.I dunno, I guess you can put me in the camp of people who has never believed that social skills hurts role-playing. The people who tend to lean on them weren't doing a lot of role-playing to begin with; at least this way they get to do something outside of combat.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Darth Shoju, post: 3307680, member: 11397"] I find they can also speed things up at times. A lot of the time it bogs a session down when a GM spends too much time with one player role-playing something that the other characters aren't involved in. I find that skills like Gather Information are great for this; often when a party hits town the characters go off to take care of different things. While the other characters are re-supplying or casting divination magics or talking to a specific NPC, the party rogue can say "I'm using my Gather Info to spend the day finding out about (whatever)". That way the DM can roll, take care of what the other players are doing and then get back to the rogue about what he found out. It works really smoothly in my experience. And then when it comes to Bluff and Diplomacy, you still have to give the DM some idea of what you are saying to the NPC. In our group, the less verbose members usually paraphrase what their characters say "I tell the guard captain that we are a traveling band of performers." The DM rolls to see what kind of reaction we get. At this point even the non-actors often get into first-person role-playing. For those of us who are amateur thespians and start off in-character with some grand explanation, the DM usually reflects that in the roll in some way. I dunno, I guess you can put me in the camp of people who has never believed that social skills hurts role-playing. The people who tend to lean on them weren't doing a lot of role-playing to begin with; at least this way they get to do something outside of combat. [/QUOTE]

Verification