clearstream
(He, Him)
Something this makes me think of is the idea of submitting ourselves to the game, just so that we can enjoy the experience it offers. What has been called the lusory attitude. The player adopting the lusory attitude, when told they are intimidated acts accordingly for the pleasure of doing so.I'll say it again: it's not that the DM can't use the rule on 174 to say, "The Orc successfully intimidated you. Consider yourself intimidated." It's just that the player has 100% authority in deciding how to interpret and act on that, which makes the Orc's dice roll an environmental cue, not a mechanical state change.
Why roll dice at all? The content - or my contention perhaps - is that emergent narrative is interesting. I like that the aspiring paladin might fall to an orc's arrow - just by misfortune. I enjoy in particular stochastic or biased-chance systems. So I don't mind that if the player-character wants to lie about X and the inquisitor wants to figure out if they are lying, it's deception against insight. As DM I could always just decide, and the rules support that. I just see no reason to do so.No contradiction. (And, in my view, a pointless rolling of dice. If the DM wants the orc to be intimidating, make him/her intimidating.)