D&D 5E Using social skills on other PCs

[Mordhau]

Probably a wisdom roll. Stat checks were a thing back then.

My experience is that trying to detect lies is only ever a thing that happens when someone makes a skill for it.

Sometimes skills open affordances - while I would agree Rope Use is not a good skill, I did see more players trying to do clever things with ropes during 3.0 then I ever saw otherwise. But sometimes these apparent affordances are just bad, like in the case of Insight/Sense Motive.

 

[iserith]

I mean, we both pulled random numbers out of thin air for how often these things happen - 7 out of 10 was yours. The point is, it can happen if you rely on making educated guesses about the player’s intent and the character’s behavior, but it can’t happen when you ask the player to state those things clearly.

And 7 out of 10 is like a C. I guess that's technically passing, but one can do better than that (and easily)!

Considering how many people here say, "I used to play the way you did, and reading Enworld I learned this new way, and it's really fun. I encourage you to try it," you'd think more other people would be just a tiny bit more curious and interested...if puzzled exactly how it works...instead of just looking for ways to prove it would never work.

Because for some "play style" is identity and people will fight you to the death to defend their identity. Typical human stuff.

 

[iserith]

Then why does it matter how they search the stupid desk? You're just having the same outcome with more steps. Maybe accept some people just don't want to engage much with certain pillars to get to the part of the game they find fun. Let them roll (as the outcome is uncertain due to low player input) and move on. A filed roll might still get the clue, just make a mess, noise, or take longer.

Why would the DM present content their players don't like? That doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

 

[Charlaquin]

Considering how many people here say, "I used to play the way you did, and reading Enworld I learned this new way, and it's really fun. I encourage you to try it," you'd think more other people would be just a tiny bit more curious and interested...if puzzled exactly how it works...instead of just looking for ways to prove it would never work.

Heck, I’m one of those people; I just read about it on the old WotC forms rather than ENWorld. But I get it. It requires letting go of a lot of things that we internalize as conventional wisdom.

Player skill vs. character skill? Both are important.
Metagaming? Doesn’t matter.
Checks? Something to be avoided, rather than sought after.
Skills? Just a source of bonuses.

If you’re used to playing in the way that I think was darn near universal during the run of 3e, this style kinda rejects everything you’ve come to take for granted about how D&D is played. No wonder it would sound completely insane. It did to me at first. Took seeing an example of it in action for me to start thinking “that actually looks really fun. Maybe I should give that a try.”

 

[Charlaquin]

Heck, I’m one of those people; I just read about it on the old WotC forms rather than ENWorld. But I get it. It requires letting go of a lot of things that we internalize as conventional wisdom.

Player skill vs. character skill? Both are important.
Metagaming? Doesn’t matter.
Checks? Something to be avoided, rather than sought after.
Skills? Just a source of bonuses.

If you’re used to playing in the way that I think was darn near universal during the run of 3e, this style kinda rejects everything you’ve come to take for granted about how D&D is played. No wonder it would sound completely insane. It did to me at first. Took seeing an example of it in action for me to start thinking “that actually looks really fun. Maybe I should give that a try.”

Also, if you’re familiar with the old Gygaxian “killer DM” type of play, this sounds on its surface very similar - and in many ways, it is. 5e brushed off and revisited a lot of that old AD&D style. So if you’ve had bad experiences with killer DMs, it’s understandable that you would be reticent about this style. You might even suspect that the people advocating for it are secretly killer DMs trying to dress their style up as innocuous and re-normalize it so they can get away with tormenting more players with their pixel-hunting and gotcha games. I think the people who think this are far, far less likely to ever come around on our style, because to them it doesn’t just look bizarre, it looks outright sinister. It’s unfortunate, but I can sympathize.

 

[Lanefan]

To add to this: Per RAW, ability checks are only needed when uncertainty is present, that's what the book says and there's no debate here.

Now, since the DM is the one that determines wheter any given action's outcome is uncertain or not, we can imagine a campaign played from lvl 1 to lvl 20 in which an ability check is never called for and that would still be RAW.

As much as I love the addition of the skill system back in 3e, it did come with the downside of making people believe that skills are like buttoms you have to push. I have seen DMs, especially new ones, asking for rolls for pretty much every action the PCs attempted, no matter how trivial or unconsequential and that bugs me to no end.

Two things:

First, uncertainty is present far more often than some seem to think. It's quite rare that the outcome of any non-simple action is 100% predictable before it happens, and in my view 99% predictable still doesn't count as certain.

Second, if those skills aren't player-side pushable buttons then why are they there in the first place? That's like giving me toys and then telling me I'm not allowed to play with them!

 

[iserith]

First, uncertainty is present far more often than some seem to think. It's quite rare that the outcome of any non-simple action is 100% predictable before it happens, and in my view 99% predictable still doesn't count as certain.

It's up to the DM to decide though. Different DMs can disagree on whether a player's declared action in context succeeds outright, fails outright, or could go either way.

Second, if those skills aren't player-side pushable buttons then why are they there in the first place? That's like giving me toys and then telling me I'm not allowed to play with them!

Unpredictable toys that can cripple and maim you - d20s are not your friend. Ability checks are the last resort, not the first one!

 

[Lanefan]

Every game is not the same. The D&D 5e rules say the player describes what they want to do and then offers a level of reasonable specificity for that. It's not really about being "good" at describing things. You just have to be able to say what you want do accomplish and how so the DM can adjudicate without saying or assuming what your character is doing to achieve their goal.

Some DMs will have a higher or lower bar for what constitutes "reasonably specific", I suppose; so this might in some ways be completely table-dependent.

Another factor is repetition. If you're a new player or playing under a DM you've never played with before it's only natural you're going to be more specific than you are with a DM you've played with for 30 years, because by then you know each other's shorthand and have very likely - even if informally - come to some sort of agreement on SOPs and the like.

 

[Lanefan]

Per RAW nothing says that social skills can be used on PCs.

But is there anything that specifically says they cannot?

If no - and the simple lack of supporting examples doesn't qualify IMO, as the examples are of course written from a player's point of view - then it is and remains a hole in the rules requiring a DM's ruling.

 

[Nefermandias]

Two things:

First, uncertainty is present far more often than some seem to think. It's quite rare that the outcome of any non-simple action is 100% predictable before it happens, and in my view 99% predictable still doesn't count as certain.

Second, if those skills aren't player-side pushable buttons then why are they there in the first place? That's like giving me toys and then telling me I'm not allowed to play with them!

That's for the DM to decide.

I'm going to experiment with the completely diceless approach next year. No ability checks during exploration and social interaction.