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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7835318" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Ahh, gotcha. See, my understanding of architecture is little enough that I would not have thought about that. Heck, I had assumed by “structural” you meant “structurally sound” rather than asking about whether it was load-bearing.One of my core conceits as a DM who asks players to describe their actions in terms of goal and approach is that I recognize they are probably not experts on many of the things their characters are, and neither am I. I don’t really know that much about architecture, or locksmithy, or engineering, or whatever, so I don’t expect a high degree of technical specificity in action declaration. It is ok to leave the details abstracted, as long as I can tell generally what you want to accomplish and how. So, I would encourage the player, rather than asking about their character’s knowledge of architecture and whether they would recognize if the wall is structural before attempting an action to try to bring it down on their enemies, just tell me what you want to accomplish and how your character goes about it generally. “I want to bring this section of tunnel down on our enemies. Can I do that by applying my knowledge of masonry and smashing key sections of wall?” is a beautiful action declaration.So, what I do is I just call for ability checks. I never ask for an ability (skill) combination, instead leaving it to the player to suggest if they think one of their proficiencies would be applicable, whether it’s normally tied to the ability in question or not. So, if you’re examining the wall for structural integrity, I would probably ask for a Wisdom check rather than Intelligence, but you could absolutely suggest that your History proficiency apply, citing your knowledge of historical architectural styles helping you determine which walls would most likely be structural in this style of building. I might even say, “oh, in that case roll Intelligence rather than Wisdom” if that felt more appropriate to your approach.Nah, I wouldn’t have that use up your action in combat, for precisely this reason.What I see as the difference between our approaches to 3 is that in your approach the player is asking the DM if their character has certain knowledge and if they do, to leverage it to achieve a desired goal, whereas in my approach, they are declaring that they have this knowledge and intend to apply it to achieve a desired goal. Perhaps a subtle distinction, but I think an important one as I believe my approach maintains a better flow of the basic pattern of play. Ideally, in my view, the pattern of play should stick as close as possible to what is described in How To Play:1. The DM describes the environment2. The players describe what their characters do.3. The DM describes the results of the characters’ actions, then starts the process over from 1.Players asking questions does not fit this pattern, and interrupts its flow, so should be kept to a minimum. Ideally, the players would never need to ask questions, but communication being imperfect, it is sometimes necessary for players to ask clarifying questions about the description. Otherwise, I favor declaration of action with the goal of learning what more you want to know, rather than asking if you know it.As an aside, another thing that interrupts this pattern is making checks. This is why I prefer only to call for checks to resolve the outcomes of actions that are both uncertain and have direct consequences for failure. Rolling dice, adding up bonuses, and comparing the results to a DC all interrupts the flow of play, and so I endeavor to keep that to a minimum.Ahh, I think I have not made myself clear. I definitely don’t decide ahead of time which walls in a dungeon are structural. As mentioned earlier, I am no architect, and would have no idea how to do this justice. Rather, I meant to express that, if I had planned as part of an encounter for the underlying structure of the dungeon to be relevant - for example, if I planned to use its potential collapse as a hazard, or for the monsters to use this tactic against the players, or something along those lines, I would telegraph that in the description. I was also speaking hypothetically, as I can’t say that’s something I’ve ever done, at least not that I remember. But yeah, if the players come up with the idea to try to bring the tunnel down on their enemies, I would prefer they just assert that they want to apply their character’s architectural knowledge to damage the walls in the appropriate places to compromise structural integrity, rather than asking me if their character knows which spots those might be first.Interesting. I guess where my perspective differs is in the idea that a randomly triggered encounter or complication is “created” where it hadn’t existed before. In theory, any such randomly triggered event is one that should be possible in the context it occurs in. There are rats in the dungeon, so randomly determining that the party encounters a pack of rats doesn’t seem to me like creating rats where they didn’t exist before, it’s just randomly determining when and if the characters come across the rats that definitively exist there.If it helps, I tailor my complication tables to the locations where they are going to be used. I’m not just rolling on a generic random encounter table, and I may not even roll to determine the encounter at all. Rather, I’ll have a list of complications that are appropriate to the dungeon, and when the tension pool indicates that a complication should occur, I will choose a complication I feel is most appropriate to the current context. Maybe I’ll use a dice roll if there are many equally-appropriate options. But to my mind I’m certainly not creating events at random, I’m randomly determining when events that are likely to occur in this dungeon do so.I think I get it. It sounds to me like what you want is for those random encounters to be drawn from the ranks of the dungeon’s inhabitants, such that if you encounter 3 wandering Kobolds now, there are 3 fewer Kobolds in the barracks when you get there later. A lot of old-school dungeons worked that way. That I can totally understand, although to me it seems like there’s no way as a player you would be able to tell the difference.Where you’re losing me is with the implicit assumption that because the tension pool was used to determine when an encounter happened, that the tension pool must have been used to determine whether or not the creatures involved in the encounter exist. Clearly those creatures must exist in the dungeon, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to encounter them there.</blockquote>

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