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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8474268" data-attributes="member: 16814">I'm putting together coherent and thematic paragraphs.  You're breaking these down line by line.  That's not necessary to engage the points I'm making -- it's a rhetorical trick to break things down and scramble the results.  This is clear in that you're not actually advancing a counter position throughout, but rather trying to dismiss or discredit specific sentences and force conversation into my defense of those individual points of attack.  This muddies everything and allows for some rhetorical judo.  I should know, I've done it myself before.  I had thought that this discussion was better prior to the engagement of Fisking because we were actually trading positions rather than engaged in the rhetoric.I didn't actual misrepresent your argument.  My prior construction goes to the heart of the issue while yours above is framed towards a different goal of explanation.  You're trying to make the argument that the GM cannot frame as uncertain what a player will decide to do and this has never been a point of contention from me.  Never.  So if that's you're argument, it's moot.  It is, however, exceedingly clear that the GM can either directly impose or use check results to impose all kinds of constraints on the PC decision space, e.g. if a monster knocks you prone you cannot decide to walk to the other side of the room.  So, nothing in your construction addresses or deals with this outside of the first assumption when paired with the Roleplaying Rule.  And that's getting conflicted by the rules for ability checks.Those very ability check rules are specifically called out for use by both monsters and PCs.  The text of the rules explicitly states, and I'll quote, "[e]very task that a character or monster might attempt in the game is covered by one of the six abilities."  Using your assumption about text and rules this states clearly that monsters can attempt tasks in the game and that such task are covered by the six abilities.  CHA is one of those six abilities.  A monster could undertake a task to convince a PC or intimidate them consistent with this statement.  That would be resolved using the ability check rules.  The outcome would be as binding on a PC as on a monster, which is to say not very much.  It would appear the player has as much ability to ignore/thwart/sidestep the outcomes here as the GM would.Finally, on the insight vs deception, your counterargument was specifically addressed in my initial argument and noted why it fails.  Unless I'm using some kind of encoding where a description of a glance or bead of sweat in a location can be decoded by the player as a puzzle to solve the riddle of what the result is, describing things in terms of what the PC notices is either being intentionally vague and not providing clear information OR it's just obfuscating the fact that you are tell the player what their PC thinks.  The latter is the most common result.  To be clear, the three cases are:1) provide a clear player side puzzle by using a known encoding of description of body language to meaning2) provide an unclear player side puzzle by not using clear encoding, just description of body language which the player then has to figure out/guess the meaning of3) provide clear information about the target's state of mind but avoid using words like "you think" but rather things like "they're sweating a lot and appear like they are not being honest."3) here is just telling the player what the PC thinks while avoiding words.  1) and 2) are, for me, right out as things I don't want to engage in.  If this is your answer, then we can have that discussion, but it's going to entail similar statements about honoring success that I just had with another poster.</blockquote>

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