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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1537581" data-attributes="member: 5171">So, um, consider me dense.  Are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me?  I completely agree with you that it should be a middle ground, but I think we might disagree on what exactly constitutes a middle ground.  I don't think many people would try to argue that you should get to hit the monster in combat without rolling for it just because you described your attack really well, but there seems to be some feeling that, in important areas, this is okay with interpersonal skills.Note: I don't force diplomacy rolls every time someone opens their mouth.  That's not what the skill is for.  The skill is specifically for attempting to influence the attitudes of others towards you just by personality.  If you save the life of the king's daughter, you don't need to make a skill check to improve his attitude toward you.  Or, heck, you can, and if you can get better than 3, it improves.  If you have hard evidence of an assassination plot, you don't need to roll Diplomacy to prove it when you show your evidence to the law -- or again, you roll it with a "don't roll a 1", unless the guy you're showing it to is already inclined to mistrust you.  Interpersonal skills can easily be misused.The main reason I'm continuing this is that I sense something disturbing in what you're saying.  I'm not saying that it's wrong, but it's different from what I do, and I want to explore it.  Your attitude, grossly oversimplified in this example, seems to be:- I act out the situation, and then I hope that the dice don't mess up my roleplaying.I prefer the other method:  I roll the dice first, and then I roleplay the result.  Just like I'd change my flavor-text if I described an attack and then rolled a "1", I consider "describing the way in which I botch something" to be an incredibly important aspect of roleplaying.  In my philosophy, if roleplaying only means "describing how I succeed", then that's not really roleplaying.  You are playing the role of somebody, and sometimes that somebody screws up a check or roll, and, for anyone who believes roleplaying to be important, faithfully characterizing the flavor of a really bad roll is just as important as faithfully charactering what this character's version of a natural 20 looks like.By the same token, if a player complains to me that his Fighter can't be the dashing swashbuckler that he visualized because I won't let him fudge skill checks in order to do acrobatic stuff in combat, then my response is that the player did a bad job of translating his character concept into a D&D character class.  I'd rather revamp his character as a Fighter/Rogue, a swashbuckling Fighter variant from UA, or even just a fighter with a lower Strength, a Higher Dex and Int, and more skills, some of them cross-class.  After all, I wouldn't fudge the rules to let his fighter character throw blasts of fire from his hands, even if it was an integral part of his character concept.  I'd suggest that he take a couple of sorcerer levels.What are your feelings about this?</blockquote>

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