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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7496764" data-attributes="member: 4937">In no fashion have I ever said that a DM ought to say what a PC is doing.  It is after all a player's character.My contention with you is that in no fashion do ability checks, skill checks, savings throws, or any other fortune test necessarily state what the PC is doing either.  I'm struggling really to understand that contention of yours.  In the 30 years I have playing, I've never had anyone intrinsically link the idea of a roll to a PC action as if every action implied a roll or every roll implied an action.  And when I listed out ways to railroad your players, never did it occur to me that an approach was 'call for an ability check' or 'call for a skill check'.  Many abilities and skills represent always on sorts of things that are used to resist or overcome obstacles passively, without a need to call them out.   If the game is taking place in a salt pan in ferocious heat, I'm going to be calling for Survival checks or Endurance (or some equivalent check depending on what the system calls them) regardless of whether you take an explicit action or not because the ability check doesn't represent in a direct way what you are doing, but rather only how you resist what is being done to you by something - in this case the elements.   Now of course, I concede that you could decide that you don't want to win the check, and you want your character to deliberately do things to fail that test, and I would allow that, but generally speaking that's an exception that basically has never ever come up and if it did, I'd resolve it as "taking a zero on your check".   The fact that I called the test still doesn't force an action on your part.Maybe I'd understand your position better if you explained to me a common game circumstance were a DM calls for ability checks that do impose unwanted actions on the player?  Or perhaps we should go back to that RPG loop again.   Because there is an different decision making loop you can use that if misused does do what I think you are actually complaining about, but it's not one I've ever seen applied to a game of D&D - and frankly its so modern that it probably never even entered into the mind of Gygax, whose examples of play (and whatever his faults, Gygax gave very clear illustration of the processes of play by example) never touched on it.</blockquote>

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