D&D 5E Using social skills on other PCs

[Bill Zebub]

One error that I think continues to be made, which can lead to different interpretations, is to treat the dice roll, and the success condition, as having something to do with the quality of the effort. (And this is related to the debate about the language used to declare an action.)

Example: when I say that I'm going to attempt to hide, what it really means is that I'm trying to hide from somebody (even if I don't know who that somebody is yet). It's the tree falling in the woods thing: if there's nobody around to notice me, there's no meaning to 'hidden'. (We can dive into that claim if you disagree, but I won't bother unless somebody tries to contest it.)

Whether I succeed or fail at hiding isn't just about my character, it's about my character in relation to other characters (NPC and PC) who might see me.

Translating that to the current context, if an NPC is lying/persuading/seducing/etc., "success" isn't just that they did it very well, but that it worked on the target. A lot of the posts seem to suggest that if, say, the DM wants the merchant to "roll Persuasion" (sic) and rolls high, the merchant was persuasive in an objective sense. But, using goal and approach, the actual goal was to persuade the PC.

The reason I think this is confusing is that some action declarations, "I climb to the top of the wall", "I try to recall who this god is", "I look for tracks of the bear", there is no other character/creature involved. Let's call those "intransitive" action declarations.

In "transitive" action declarations, success is absolutely dependent upon the target. There is no independent/objective successful "hide" or "shove"....or "persuade", "intimidate", etc.

I'm not sure that will make anybody switch sides in this debate, but there have been a number of posts with example scenarios in which I feel like this distinction was not understood.

 

[Bill Zebub]

What did you think of my cases just above, responding to @Swarmkeeper? That is, what do you think of flipping it so it is always the player attempting to do something. So it goes something like -

DM The cells is small, dimly lit, filthy and damp. Each day the jailer brings the curate, who questions, threatens, attempts to bully you and so on. Sleep is hard to get due to them banging the bars at random intervals. They want to know - is it snails, or oysters you prefer?

P1 There's no way I'm giving that information up! I'm going to try and fool them into believing that I prefer snails though.

DM Okay, I'm judging that the challenge here is resisting their bullying. As they keep pressing you, and making you repeatedly answer similar questions. Make a CON check contested by their CHA. You can add Deception and they'll add Intimidation. If you succeed, then you've fooled them, even through the sleep deprivation and constant questioning. If you fail, they see you are trying to deceive them and maybe things get worse.

So in this case, it's player saying what they decide their character does, and DM is deciding what the challenge is, what's at stake. What do you think?

In general I'd rather have things posed so that there's a risk:reward analysis, and the player gets to decide. But an important component is that the player needs to be free to refuse the risk. If there's no choice, there's not really any point to offering a risk:reward scenario. So in the above, what happens if the player says, "Naw, I'll pass."?

 

[iserith]

What did you think of my cases just above, responding to @Swarmkeeper? That is, what do you think of flipping it so it is always the player attempting to do something. So it goes something like -

DM The cells is small, dimly lit, filthy and damp. Each day the jailer brings the curate, who questions, threatens, attempts to bully you and so on. Sleep is hard to get due to them banging the bars at random intervals. They want to know - is it snails, or oysters you prefer?

P1 There's no way I'm giving that information up! I'm going to try and fool them into believing that I prefer snails though.

DM Okay, I'm judging that the challenge here is resisting their bullying. As they keep pressing you, and making you repeatedly answer similar questions. Make a CON check contested by their CHA. You can add Deception and they'll add Intimidation. If you succeed, then you've fooled them, even through the sleep deprivation and constant questioning. If you fail, they see you are trying to deceive them and maybe things get worse.

So in this case, it's player saying what they decide their character does, and DM is deciding what the challenge is, what's at stake. What do you think?

I haven't been reading your exchanges with other posters very closely if at all.

I think the example you provide here seems very tortured, pun intended. I believe exhaustion is the better mechanic to apply to torture situations which would impart (at level 1 exhaustion) disadvantage to ability checks. The player attempts the deception with the exhausted character. The DM, for whatever reason, thinks this action has an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure, at which point they call for a Charisma (Deception) check at disadvantage against a DC (perhaps NPC's passive Insight or a contest or just a set DC). On a success, the NPC believes them. On a failure, the NPC doesn't and things get worse e.g. additional torture is applied, stacking more levels of exhaustion.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It's foolish to believe guidance is RAW: it produces conflicts all through. Particularly from the DMG. But let's look at just one from the PHB.


According to you, this piece of guidance is a rule. Per RAW, every player creating a monk must think about their connection to their monastery. Which is delightfully ironic because that would stand in direct contradiction to another piece of guidance, which is that the player decides what their character thinks.


Let's see...


This is a rule according to you, right. You say that


So every wizard player must create a backstory dominated by at least one extraordinary event. And


DM What is your character's name.
P1 It's Hrukk the Barb...
DM Whoaaa!! Stop right there. You have to put some thought in. You can't just come right back at me with a name.

Or


DM So you're quickly learning that the people of this town are ashamed about the filth and crowding; they see that they are denying their own...
P1 Wait on there (flicks through some pages). Yeah, right. No. People in towns must take pride! No shame for them.
DM ...

Or we can imagine a similar exchange, say with a druid or ranger PC born in a town, but who felt ashamed of denying their nature. Which of course will conflict with other text.

RAW is - "Rules As Written". The clue is in the acronym. It's rules (not anything else) as they are written.

In this regard, you two have gone a bit Upton Park. Let me know when we're able to continue our journey on a sane basis.

By the way, I'm actually 100% with you: there's a hierarchy, with rules at the top, with guidelines and flavor below that. I argued exactly this point much earlier in the thread, and had that basically summarily dismissed by @Ovinomancer, and nobody came in on my side, so I let it drop.

But the problem with taking this approach is that it also undermines basically all the quotes...or in some cases not even quotes but inferences...that your argument rests upon. There isn't even a 'rule' that says the play loop applies to NPCs; we are extrapolating that. There's no 'rule' that says how Persuasion, Intimidation, etc. get applied: there's just suggestions/guidelines/flavor text. And even then it says 'you' in the Player's Handbook, and the section on social interaction in the DMG only addresses PC -> NPC. A bunch of the passages you rely on use the word 'might', and I think it's pretty hard to defend 'might' as a rule, unless followed up by how that 'might' is resolved. (For example, in the chapter on combat in the PHB, the word 'might' is used illustratively to describe what sorts of scenarios might occur, not to define rules.)

So, yeah, sure, let's treat rules as rules. Only PCs can declare actions.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I haven't been reading your exchanges with other posters very closely if at all.

I think the example you provide here seems very tortured, pun intended. I believe exhaustion is the better mechanic to apply to torture situations which would impart (at level 1 exhaustion) disadvantage to ability checks. The player attempts the deception with the exhausted character. The DM, for whatever reason, thinks this action has an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure, at which point they call for a Charisma (Deception) check at disadvantage against a DC (perhaps NPC's passive Insight or a contest or just a set DC). On a success, the NPC believes them. On a failure, the NPC doesn't and things get worse e.g. additional torture is applied, stacking more levels of exhaustion.

Extended out, this is precisely what I was arguing before. 6 levels of Exhaustion is death, so basically the player has five chances to decide if the DM is bluffing. (And breaking before then leaves you a mess for a while.)

Waaaaaaay higher stakes, and more immersive, then "Oh, you rolled a 17, I guess I'll pretend your torture broke me."

EDIT: If the player can't decide and wants to rely on dice, they could ask the DM to make a dice roll, and maybe either contest that with their own, or make a Con saving throw vs. that DC, or whatever. But none of that is in the "rules", it's just a rule-like "random decision generator" to make the choice.

 

[Charlaquin]

Not if one considers guidance to be just that; as something distinct from hard rules.

I mean, there's lots of stuff in there about how the designers think you should play (e.g. high-fantasy heroic, with goodly characters) but going against that (e.g. lower-fantasy gritty with less-than-goodly characters) doesn't to me count as houseruling; it's just ignoring a mechanically-weightless guideline in favour of something that - for that table - one hopes will work better.

Contrast this with changing a hard rule e.g. tweaking the xp chart to slow down levelling or redesigning your game's initiative system. Those are houserules all day long.

Put another way, RAW carries weight. GAW (Guidance As Written) doesn't so much, and this has been true in every edition.

Many of these arguments seem to come from people taking things written as guidance - or worse, taking out-of-context snippets of guidance - and reading them as if they were hard rules.

Oh, for the billionth time! We’re talking about what’s supported, not what’s allowed. Nobody is saying going against guidance in the rukebooks is houseruling. It’s just making a ruling the rules don’t support. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that.

 

[HammerMan]

The problem is that you can't set a DC with the support of the rules because there is no DC that can be set to determine if the PC is influenced by the monster or not. Because there's no uncertainty

there is, and we have shown this repeatedly. YOU rule in YOUR games there is no uncertainty, and as a DM that is fine, as a house rule all good... we showed our part

What you're doing isn't an ability check.

yes it is, it is a roll adding an attribute and skill to determine an action,

Either way - as you've agreed - the player does what they want to do.

as the DM does with NPCs because skills are not mind control...

Not an ability check.

yes it is. You house rule catagories, and silos or what ever for your own play loop but RAW yes they are.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Oh, for the billionth time! We’re talking about what’s supported, not what’s allowed. Nobody is saying going against guidance in the rukebooks is houseruling. It’s just making a ruling the rules don’t support. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that.

I think one thing going on here is that people are interpreting your arguments (and @iserith's, and maybe mine) to mean they are playing wrong, and that we think they should be playing differently*, not recognizing that this is really just about the thrill of the debate and a general love of precision.

*Well, maybe we do think they should be playing differently, but with "should" used in the sense of "You should really try hot yoga; it changed my life!"

 

[iserith]

there is, and we have shown this repeatedly. YOU rule in YOUR games there is no uncertainty, and as a DM that is fine, as a house rule all good... we showed our part

yes it is, it is a roll adding an attribute and skill to determine an action,

as the DM does with NPCs because skills are not mind control...

yes it is. You house rule catagories, and silos or what ever for your own play loop but RAW yes they are.

If it's an ability check, what's the DC the DM sets for an orc intimidating a PC?

 

[HammerMan]

Ignoring RAW for just a moment, it occurs to me that the PC's passive perception score here might serve as a DC for anything involving deception, lying, persuasion, disguise, and the like.

Doesn't work nearly so elegantly for intimidate, though.

i could see that, I also know some sheets have a passive Insight, I am sure more then one DM has ruled this way.