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Message: <blockquote data-quote="M_Natas" data-source="post: 9186966" data-attributes="member: 7025918">You present two extremes here.Mechanics only (just a Charisma role without explebation) and pure roleplay to success without mechanics.For myself, I'm totally fine with the second one but not with the first one. But - for me you don't have to method act to make an argument. You just have to tell my how you wanna persuade the NPC. What is your angle? You don't have to play it out in character with a funny voice but at least tell me if you wanna bribe him or bond over the fact that your moms have the same name or something.Which leads me to Matt Mercers ruling. I haven't seen the Live Show so I'm going off from what is written in this thread:I'm from the school of DM that doesn't allow players to declare skill checks. They need to tell me what their character is doing and I decide if a check is needed and what check is appropriate.Now in battle, most action declaration are very mechanical, because in 90% of the time, an action declaration in battle is also describing exactly what the character is doing (like attacking the orc with a sword,  casting a fireball and so on).So, as long as I as the DM understand, what the characters is doing in the Game World, I'm fine. He can try it.Fiction first, mechanics second.So, now we have some game mechanics that can become very disassociated with the game world.So, Marishas use of sentinel was such a disassociated mechanic in this case, because it was mechanics first."I press button x and the giant monsters speed gets reduced to 0".But it does not tell us what the character is doing.So I would have stumbled over that rule in that specific case, too, because the player is attempting something that is not covered by ingame character action.I would guess the declaration of the use if the sentinel mechanics created a disassociation in Mercers head. He just couldn't imagine how the character could do that.That's why he asked Marisha to clarify. To reassociate the mechanic with the ingame world.That's why I encourage my players to not think in game mechanics but to think in what your character would actually do in the game world.So, be that said ... during combat I probably would have let it slide or maybe even come up with my own explanation to reassociate the mechanic to the game world, but sometimes your brain is just blocked and you can't think of a way when you are playing at the table right now. You have some seconds to make a decision,  you can't really take more time to think or the players get bored ... or the 60000 viewers in the stadium or the million viewers in the stream ...Edit:Also to add - Spells work better for a lot of DMs, because when a player declares that his character is casting spells XYZ, the character in the game world is exactly doing that. It is a mechanic that is strongly associated with the game world.</blockquote>

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