Quote Originally Posted by Pleh View Post
There are two school of thought: social should be roleplayed, social should be mechanically abstracted. Both are valid, but if you have a mechanical ruleset, players can set it aside to roleplay instead at any time. If you don't have rules, then it's much harder to compensate when a player expects their character to be a smooth talker, but isn't sure how to play it out in a given scenario.

Ultimately, I find it more useful to have rules you might not need for every game dialogue then need rules you don't have.

Yes and no. Martial Combat is very all or nothing, too. Your attack hits or it doesn't. You either die or keep on living.

My point is that perception can be gradual like martial combat, too. You fail a check snd a stick snaps loudly below your foot. The guard might immediately notice you, turn hostile, and initiate combat. But we're missing an opportunity for engaging gameplay if that is what failure always looks like. Instead, the guard turns to investigate the noise, rolling to try to locate the source. R
The rogue counters with a maneuver to dive behind cover to hide, then the next round of checks begins.
I think the only thing we really disagree on is whether DND works for social interaction and the sort of ability based checks that perception is an example of. You could say that a climb check is as, or more hit-or-miss than a perception test.

I think I agree that the rules for those things in DND aren't great. But I think if they were stronger, more mechanically robust, that would be worse. I think it works as is, but maybe the designers should have explained how a single missed test doesn't automatically mean you should roll for initiative. Or that you fall to your death. Or that you get swindled on the horse trade.

But then on the other hand, I think those rules are entirely deliberate on the part of the DND designers. I think they felt (100% guesswork here) that giving stealth to rogues was game breaking enough, and giving them the chance to recover from a failed check would be just horrendously OP =)