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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7160143" data-attributes="member: 996">Modeling the character is central to assuming a role distinct from that of the players, themselves.  D&D doesn't give fantasticly evocative mechanics for that outside of spellcasting and the occassional cool class ability or feat, much of the time it's just d20+bonus vs a DC.  But, if that's all you've got to work with, that bonus needs to matter enough to evoke the character.  In the sense of the game being played at the table, you're always challenging the players, they make choices about & for their characters to meet the challenge as presented by the DM.  In the sense of the fiction being generated, it's the characters who are being challenged and who succeed or fail based on their own abilities.In the context of Seramus's post, though, there's a kernel of truth.  Old School, the game lacked spelled-out(npi) mechanics to model many abilities, especially outside of combat & spellcasting, so a player would describe exactly what the player did, and the DM would decide if he'd done everything right or not.  It could get silly - a ranger being unable to light a fire, for instance, because the player's boyscout training wasn't the same as the DM's.... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />   'New' School (since 2e non-weapon proficiencies?  S&P?  since 3.0 skills at the latest) there are some mechanics that players can use to designate a character being good at something, even if the player (or DM) has no clue about what that realistically entails.5e, of course, being all D&Ds for all D&D fans, splits the difference, with the DM free to narrate success/failure based on the action declared (player 'challenge'/resolution) or call for a check (character 'challenge'/resolution).  Not only does that allow the DM to embrace 'Old' and/or 'New' schools of challenge to whatever degree he cares for, it establishes the central/vital function of the DM in all resolution, laying a firm foundation of DM Empowerment.</blockquote>

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