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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7609000" data-attributes="member: 97077">It's frankly hard to say what's at the core of this discussion anymore. What I do know is that if you want to call "thinking" an action, then because of the rule that players determine what the characters think, then there can be no ability check here since there is no uncertainty as to the outcome. The character thinks what the player says he or she thinks.I don't see any complications with that rule. You don't ask for checks if there's no meaningful consequence for failure. Easy peasy.The characters, as established by the players, think that earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage. There is no uncertainty here and thus no check. They might be right, they might be wrong, but there is no action declaration here to recall lore.If you call for a check, you are de facto stating that the characters are attempting to perform a task with an uncertain outcome and meaningful consequence for failure because that is when the rules say the DM calls for a check. But only the players may describe what they want their characters to do. If the DM does it, that DM is overstepping his or her role. There are no "knowledge checks." You may be thinking of some other game, perhaps D&D 4e. In D&D 5e, players can attempt to recall lore or make deductions. Those are the tasks that might call for an Intelligence check, when there's an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure. The DM doesn't ask for the checks until the players describe their characters as attempting to perform those tasks because that's how the play loop works.The players in this example didn't describe their characters as performing a task to recall lore or make deductions, so there's no check in the first place and no need to determine if there are meaningful consequences for those tasks."Meaningful consequences" are determined by the context of the situation in which the PCs find themselves, so in the abstract it's not easy to say what might be a meaningful consequence for failure on a task to recall lore or make deductions. In context, however, it might be very important to be able to recall a fact and that failing to do so has meaningful consequences. In many cases, however, there won't be and so the DM just says whether the character recalls the lore or makes the deduction. Maybe he or she does and maybe he or she doesn't.In the example I gave upthread from my Eberron game, the meaningful consequence for failure of figuring out if the substance covering the boxes was indeed brown mold was damage. The warforged was using his integrated tool to investigate it. With a failure on the check, the experiment goes awry, the brown mold grows at an exponential rate, shatters the test tube, and the character takes some cold damage. However, that would have been ruled as progress combined with a setback. The substance is confirmed to be brown mold, but at the cost of some hit points. As it happens, the check succeeded.As you do not like the rule for meaningful consequences for failure being a requirement of a check and you also appear to declare actions for the characters so far as I can tell, then yes, you will most likely have more Intelligence checks in your game than in mine. But that doesn't mean my game has none. Verifying one's assumptions often entails recalling lore or making deductions, after all.Perhaps under your table rules, that is the case. But under the rules of the game, the DM is not properly adjudicating the only action on the table - the barbarian going to buy the scrolls. The reason given for doing so is completely irrelevant to the adjudication process. If the player has said nothing about why the character wanted to buy the scrolls, would you have asked for a check?I neither like nor dislike your usage of terms. I point out that it doesn't exist in this game, but does exist in other games, because a lot of DMs in my experience do not revise their approaches when moving from game to game to, in my view, the detriment of their understanding and discussions of the game they are playing. Asking for a "knowledge check" before the player even declares an action to recall lore or make a deduction is an example of this.I think there's some bias at play here. While I've seen this sort of thing go wrong, I've also seen it go right. It depends on the players. My regulars would certainly be fine with it because of the culture at our table in which the expectation is that you accept and build while pursuing the goals of play.I worry about achieving the goals of play, that is, everyone having a good time and helping to create an exciting, memorable story as a result of play by performing the role of DM to the utmost of my ability. Anything else seems superfluous, especially what some people call "metagaming." That is a self-inflicted problem in my view.On one hand, one could say this appears to be a player who does not understand or buy into the genre (e.g. sword and sorcery) and that warrants an out-of-game discussion. On the other hand, the DM can simply adjudicate the action by having the shipwright explain that the sort of thing the PC wants to do isn't possible. The shipwright might believe that such a ship would never float and, besides, there isn't that much steel in all the kingdoms of the realm to build something that big. "Now stop wasting my time, you lunatic!"What I wouldn't do is tell the player he or she can't do that or ask for a check to invalidate the action declaration.</blockquote>

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