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.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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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.
I see where you're coming from, and more power to you if that works at your table. In my mind, Charisma accounts for how you present your arguments and how receptive people are going to be, not the contents of your arguments. It's totally valid to say your character could make better arguments than you, but that would depend on intelligence or wisdom (depending on whether they're logical or emotional arguments). So we would typically break character to figure out what the arguments are going to be.
When characters have higher intelligence than their players, I typically collaborate with them in a form of pseudo-metagaming, acting as a supplementary brain for the character. I readily give them / remind them of relevant facts and suggest things that I think might work. For high wisdom characters, I would let them roll an insight check to get a better idea of what emotional arguments might help.
With this, the player can form their arguments before I decide whether we proceed or roll. I realize this might sound tedious, but I think it works well as a way for my players to RP high INT/WIS/CHA characters. And we wouldn't do this for every conversation, only major ones. Sometimes we just want to move things along and I do just assume the character would likely come up with a decent argument, and ask for a Charisma (persuasion) roll
or even Intelligence (persuasion) or Wisdom (persuasion) if it seems appropriate.
I'm not saying our way is the correct way, it's just the way we do things and it works for us. My players don't find it to be unfair.