Just a vibe check of the Lemmy community with a deliberately exaggerated meme.
A reddit post would get flooded with argumentative mini-essays from folks who can’t string together 5 words in-character.
Sentences like “Can I roll for persuasion?” or worse “I perception the room” are one of my biggest pet peeves coming from players. Tell me what you want to accomplish, I will tell you whether and what you need to roll. I’ve mostly managed to train that behavior out of my players, thankfully. As a newbie DM I used to use die rolls as a crutch – “this is a dice rolling game, so the more dice we roll the more fun we’re having, right?” I thought. I also hated saying no to my players, so stupidly high DCs were a way to shift the blame onto the dice for my players’ failures. As I’ve gained experience, I run a much less dice-heavy game. I very often just let my PCs succeed with no roll required.
The one case where I don’t mind the players asking to roll is when they ask to “INSIGHT CHECK” à la critical role; it’s always fun to see the players so passionately engaging with NPCs.
My complaint is when I have a PC with an insane charisma score and the DM wants me act out the conversation, then I fail in my persuasion without rolling. “The NPC would not be convinced by that”
Maybe I am not being very charismatic, but my PC is! Let me roll for it! You don’t make a mage fail in their spells because they can’t do magic in real life, do you?
The way I see it, there’s nothing wrong with voicing your opinion, especially between games. Saying “hey, I feel like the fantasy of my character isn’t coming to life, is there any way I could get you to take the Charisma score of my character in greater consideration during social interactions going forward?” after a game is a great way to deal with that. That said, there’s only so much that Charisma can account for. No matter how charismatic you are, you won’t persuade a king to give up his kingdom. Your DM likely thinks your arguments are just too weak for you to persuade someone, regardless of your Charisma. Maybe their expectations regarding your wit and roleplay are too high, or maybe you need to re-evaluate your expectations of what is possible in your game.
Yes of course there are limits in the same way that no character can lift a mountain regardless of their strength score.
However, I don’t think it’s appropriate to base the success of my persuasion on my real-life ability to come up with a convincing argument. That’s the whole point of DND, characters can do things that people IRL could never accomplish. If my character is remarkably persuasive, they could come up with arguments more persuasive than my own.
As seen in OPs meme, you don’t base the success of a strength check on the real life player’s ability to lift a big rock or whatever. It’s unreasonable to treat charisma any differently. Personally, I just stopped trying to act out scenarios and saying, “I want to persuade them of this let me roll for it”, because the success rate was much higher.
IMO, if you want players to act out the scenario you need to give a very large fudge factor to the success of arguments based on a charisma roll.
If Brayden says his character tries to lift a heavy rock and he proceeds to deadlift 150kg to demonstrate, heck, I’ll give him inspiration.
Now I want to play a one shot of extreme DND where every skill check has a real life equivalent. Making a DC 25 knowledge check? The answer is in one of these books, you have 15 seconds to look through them.
Players Decide, PCs act.
You tell me what your PC wants to achieve and how. I set the DC to check how well they perform at that attempt (or declare “no roll needed”, because it’s trivial / impossible).
You want to persuade an NPC? Tell me the gist of your argument and I’ll consider how receptive your target is and set a DC for checking how well your PC can present said argument.
(In some cases like “I want to hit them real good with my sword” or “I want to climb up that wall”, no detailed description is necessary, we both know what you mean.)
In my opinion if the player doesn’t tell me their Intent, what they are trying to achieve, how can I assess difficulty? Assess danger? Imagine consequences? I also want the tools for the task they set themselves upon. For the barbarian weapons used, positioning etc. For the talker their arguments. Acting out is not necessary.
Or just use an apocalyptic principle: “to do it, do it”. If the character doesn’t do anything that triggers a move no move is triggered.
