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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 6855094" data-attributes="member: 6680772">Eh, kinda, in a way, but not really. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  That makes it sound like I'm staking out procedural turf that I don't want players to encroach.  Ideally, what I want in a game, whether playing or DMing, is an interplay between the players and the DM in which the DM presents the world, and the players engage with that world, through the DM, as much as possible remaining "in character" -- that is, making their decisions through the eyes of their character.  Taken to an extreme, this is ultimately an exercise in improv.  It's summed up by this description of play in the 5e rules:Now, within that framework, it's understood that for certain situations (some dictated by the rules, others left to the DM's discretion), randomizers are used to simulate swings in probability, and to create outcomes that I do not know beforehand, in order to give the game a more "live" feel, reduce mental workload on the part of the DM, and to take certain outcomes out of the DM's hands, so that the game doesn't consist solely of the "convince the DM" type dynamic that Tony Vargas described below.  If improv is one end of the spectrum, and a rules-bound game such as Monopoly is the other, we're closer to the improv side, but with using the rules and mechanics to facilitate that kind of play.A player who unilaterally makes a check, even when doing so with an "in character" description of their action, is breaking away from the above dynamic.  They are not engaging with the world through the DM, they are engaging with the world through the mechanics.  What that means is that the world is now dependent on, and to an extent limited to, those mechanics.Now, let me add the caveat that it is of course entirely possible for a DM to ignore that engagement with the mechanics, and focus on the accompanying description.  I did this to an extent with the B/X example, saying at one point, "You don't have to roll.  A quick glance reveals there are clear tracks."  In practice, though, I do not favor this.  There is perforce what Neal Stephenson calls "metaphor shear" when that happens.  If the player rolls low, and the DM sets the roll aside, there is typically no problem, because the favorable outcome tends to compensate for the metaphor shear.  (Of course, if this happens too often, players may feel that the DM is fudging in their favor.)  If the player rolls high, then a negative outcome accentuates the metaphor shear.  Overlaying all this is the possibility, nay, the likelihood, that the player is explicitly engaging with the mechanics because that's the kind of game they want.  As DM, I feel I should oblige them, though I feel the game as a whole has been to some degree limited, and my handle on the world (not control) has been compromised.To give another example, I was recently running a game that involved a social interaction.  The players were trying to get information about a particular person from an NPC who had been seen with him.  The NPC they were talking to was improvised on the spot (as will happen), so I had some idea in my head of how he would react to certain lines of questioning, but nothing concrete.  After initially talking with the character reasonably, one player suddenly had his character go ballistic, viciously threatening the NPC, capping off his tirade with a unilateral dice roll, exulting when it came up quite high.Now, this posed several problems for me.  For one, it caught me entirely off-guard.  Had there been no dice roll, I could have digested his role-play, and formulated a response.  In hindsight, with detached perspective, I can say I probably would have called for an Intimidation roll.  But in doing so, I would have already been formulating possible results based on the outcome of the roll.  And since it was some good role-play, total failure would not have been on the table, even if he'd rolled low.  But in the heat of the moment, my mind went blank.  Not only did I have to react to the role-play, but I also had to think, on the spot, of a response that more or less reflected his high roll.  Ultimately, I fiddled with my dice a bit, buying some time, and eventually came up with a response that, I think, worked for everybody and the game continued.  But, personally, as participant in that game, man, did that suck.  Metaphor shear up the wazoo for me.  Instead of working through the interaction organically, I was put to a decision, my options limited.Looked at from an opposite point of view, it would be typically thought to be bad DMing to do the same to a player, which is generally why bluff, persuasion, and intimidation checks aren't usually used against a PC, except perhaps in the rare case of player-initiated contexts.  Or at least, that's how I see it.  I like skill checks as a tool to resolve certain situations, not as weapons for the PCs and DM to wield against each other.  Indeed.  That desire to operate in the "meta" level is the distinction that I (and I think @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=15700" target="_blank">Sacrosanct</a>) were trying to make.This is also an excellent insight, I think.  Thinking back, it seems to fit my experience.  Especially as a B/X player and DM, since the mechanics there are most certainly not physics simulators.Well, certainly the ultimate roots of that kind of play go back to the Thief class, and the steady encroachment since then that if you don't have a particular skill, you can't do that particular thing.  This was reinforced with NWPs in late 1e and 2e, and brought to full flower with 3e.  That said, I'm not exactly sure if that's germane to the issue I'm discussing, in that while this shows an evolution of the skill system in D&D, it is my impression that even through 3e skill systems were represented as a resolution system used at the DMs discretion, rather than features for players to use unilaterally.  4e Essentials did introduce "skill powers", but I suspect that was merely a sign of where things were going, rather than a cause in and of itself.  I could be wrong.  I never played 3e, so I don't know if how it was presented or commonly played might have contributed to this trend, other than, as you note above, foreground mechanics as player-side tools of agency as well as physics simulators.To be frank, I think they are there merely to model probability, and I think this is made somewhat clear in Gygax's DMG, which opens with a discussion of probability and bell curves.  That said, I don't think it had much of an influential effect, as from OD&D through 3e there was a constant movement toward having mechanics that "model" something concrete, rather than just mere probability.  The example par excellence for this is the attack roll.  In OD&D (and default Expert D&D), the attack roll merely represents the probable chance of doing some damage within 1 minute/10 second round of combat.  Within that 1 minute or 10 seconds, the participants were expected to be busy with multiple attacks, multiple hits, multiple misses, multiple dodges, multiple parries.  This was made explicitly clear in OD&D, AD&D, and XD&D.  And yet...first came variable weapon damage, then weapon speed factors, then 6 second rounds, then attacks of opportunity, etc., etc., until now, even with 5e paying some lip service to the idea of multiple undescribed actions within a turn, the game feels like 1 attack roll = 1 swing.  To the point that martial characters get Extra Attacks.Well, I don't necessarily agree with Luke Crane on the Expert Set.  I mean, I agree that Moldvay Basic puts forth a clean, open-but-with-structures game that when you play in that style, creates a certain visceral experience, well described in his posts on his game (and then emulated with Torchbearer); and that Expert does not offer that kind of play.  But I feel that perhaps Crane does not extend Expert the same open mind that he does to Basic, in that he seems to view Expert through the lens of Basic.  I think Cook/Marsh Expert is entirely as fair as Basic when played in the style suggested.  A discussion for another time, perhaps.We've discussed this before, but I think a key weapon in the arsenal of a D&D DM to avoid adversarialism is random rolls.  I think this was in full bloom with 1e and Expert, but began to be downplayed with 2e, as the game moved from "DM as Referee" to "DM as World Builder and Storyteller" (and also from "adventure module" to "campaign setting".  Happily, while 5e has moved back to putting more responsibility on the DMs shoulders, they have lightened that burden in two ways.  One is the increased reliance on campaign-length adventures, such as HotDQ, PotA, OoA, etc.  These provide new and casual DMs with the structure and advice with which they can run the game.  The other is to lighten the homebrewing DM's burden by a great many random tables.But all this is far afield of the topic Sacrosanct was posting about, I think.</blockquote>

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