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 canāt string together 5 words in-character.
I feel like youāve missed the point of the comment youāre replying to
No, a barbarian is not expected to deadlift IRL. But if a barbarian walked into the middle of a situation and declared he was going to solve it with Athletics, without explaining how he was going to do that, he would be met with blank stares. You need to state intent. āIāll use Athleticsā is meaningless. āIāll pile up these boulders into a staircase so we can climb over the wallā is a course of action.
Similarly, āIāll use Persuasionā is meaningless. Worse, are the people who just say āIāve got proficiency in all the charisma skills, so Iāll just use whatever oneās most effectiveā lol. āIāll use my wit and charm to convince the guard that we have been invited to the castleā is a course of action. āIāll use facts and logic to convince the guard that it is in his best interest to allow us into the castleā is a course of action. I donāt care if youāre charismatic in real life, but if you canāt even summarize what youāre trying to say, how is the rest of the game world supposed to respond to it? āIāll Persuade themā is only the first half of a sentence.
This makes sense but I think still has a small problem. Someone with good real life people skills is going to be better able to put together a cogent argument, or understand the social dynamics and where to apply pressure.
I donāt really know how to solve this. It quickly becomes a āplayers making these decisions is the whole gameā thing.
But I do think that if you have someone whoās trying to be a social face without the real life skills, it is okay for the GM to give more hints. Remind players that the knight respects honor and honesty, that the thief is scared and just wants to eat, and so on. Hopefully from there even a shaky player can figure out being honest with the knight is a better move than deception.
Iāll use facts and logic to convince the guard
My next character is definitely Ben Shapiro in disguise
