The Angry GM released an article today in which he (among other things) proposed one of the cleanest, simplest, and most effective answers I’ve ever seen for the issue of “Player Skill vs Character Skill”. I wanted to start a discussion on the idea he proposes and see what other people think, but there’s gonna be some background reading, so fair warning. I’ll start with a summation of the problem Angry has posited an answer to, move into a summation of his proposed answer (as I understand it), offer a few comments of my own, and then open the thread for discussion. Consider this your “Yurei ‘Bout to Type Lotsa Words, Time to Bail Out’ warning point.

1.) Player Skill vs. Character Skill, or “The Charisma Check Problem”
A strong and growing trend in today’s games is what some folks call “roll-playing”. This notion is anchored in the idea that a tabletop RPG allows you to embody anyone you can imagine – if you can stat it, you can play it. Roll-players actively attempt to minimize the player’s impact on the character; these are the sorts who are mortally offended at the idea of metagaming and who absolutely hate when the player has read any sort of material related to the game. To these folks, the character is the only thing that exists and your job as a player is to subsume yourself within the character, ignoring yourown knowledge and persona as much as possible.

This is often demonstrated via ‘the Charisma Check problem’. Very, very few players, in real life, have the trained panache of a high-level bard. When they say they want to convince an NPC of something, or persuade their way past an obstacle, they object (often vociferously) when asked “Okay. How do you persuade them?” or “okay, what do you say?” These players point to the large Charisma score on their sheet and say “this character has much better Charisma than I do, I should be allowed to use their Charisma instead of my own – they say whatever would work, and we figure out if it happens with a die roll.” They wish to skip conversations, avoid pinning their own player-words on their character, and utilize the character’s numbers in lieu of their own conversational skills to try and Pass The Check.

The other commonly accepted/defined school of thought, by contrast, is that the character is an avatar of the player. What the player knows, the character knows. What the player says, the character says. The character is effectively a skinsuit inhabited by the player, with only what separation the game absolutely requires. A GM is not about to bust out a padlock, hand you a set of picks, and say “okay – make your thieves’ tools attempt”, but they’re also not going to let you get away with Rolling For Brain. They will not put ideas in your head for you, that is your job as a player.

This latter school is seen as unnecessarily restrictive by many players, and backlash against it gave rise to the former school. One of the most common protests is that someone of average intelligence cannot play an exceptionally intelligent character in the ‘Skinsuit’ model – their character’s intelligence is limited to their own, no matter what the number on the sheet says. This holds for all mental scores, but Int and Cha are the two that often find themselves in contention.

I could go on about this issue, but hopefully this is enough framing to move on. In short summation, however – nobody ever seems to agree on where the divider between ‘Player Skill’ and ‘Character Skill’ should fall, or if there’s even such a divider in the first place.

2.) Angry’s Answer: “Characters Gather Information and Execute Actions; Players Draw Conclusions and Formulate Strategies.”
Angry’s latest article posits this statement as the clean, clear, and firm dividing line between Player Skill and Character Skill. Since I know nobody’s going to read the article, allow me to summarize:

In Angry’s games, characters are extensions of the player. They do not have their own separate brain; they think with the same brain the player does, because it’s physically, biologically impossible to do anything else. However, the character exists within the world of the game. The player does not. The character interacts with the world and is the one that grew up in it, and as such the character is what secures information. The character’s training, background, species, skills, talents, and abilities are what determines what they know and how well they can perform any given task.

There’s a concept, originally invented by Air Force military commanders, called the OODA loop. It stands for “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.” The loop breaks down how one turns information into action – they Observe something, they Orient themselves around that information, they Decide how to proceed, and then they finally Act. This is a super useful concept for this discussion because each step in the OODA loop lies solely within the domain of either the Player or the Character, and yet the entire loop is required to get anything done. The character and the player have to work together to complete the loop and play the game.

The first step of the loop - ‘Observe’ - belongs strictly to the character. The character interacts with the world, they perceive it, and they obtain information about their surroundings and situation. This information is fed back into their brain – the one they share with their player, remember – and the loop moves to the next step.

‘Orient’ belongs strictly to the player. The player takes in the information their character obtained and interprets it to create a mental image of their situation. Once oriented, the player understands what’s happening in the world (ideally, at least), and moves to the next step.

‘Decide’ also belongs strictly to the player. Once oriented, the player must decide how to proceed and what to do with the information they’ve obtained to move towards their desired result. This is one of the contentious points, specifically the one that stymies/vexes ‘Roll Players’, but more on that below. Regardless – once a decision is made, the loop moves to the next step.

The final step of the loop, ‘Act’, belongs strictly to the character. The player’s decision from the last step is fed back through the misty gates of fantasy to the character, and they execute the decision made by their shared brain to the best of their abilities. Whether that means die rolls are involved is another matter, but the character is what determines the success of the action, not the player. This is the other contentious point in the loop, and the one that vexes ‘Skinsuit’ players. Again, more on that below.

Once the entire loop is completed, you return automatically to Observe as your character sees/experiences the result of their action and passes that observation back to you-the-player, and so on and so forth. The whole thing happens at high speed, and less neatly, hundreds and thousands of times you do literally anything...but also when you’re playing D&D.

3.) What Some Random Wordy Ghost on the Internet Thinks

I honestly think this approach is rather brilliant. It’s something I’ll be using in future games, both as a player and as a DM, especially since it so clearly illustrates the weaknesses of both Roll Play and Skinsuit games and helps each side understand why their approach is flawed. To clarify:

Roll Players break the game at the ‘Decide’ step, and do so because at no f$&%ing point does “Can I roll an Intelligence check to see what my smart character would do?” work. That is effectively an attempt to skip the ‘Decide’ step of the loop altogether and foists the job of playing the character off onto the DM. Once you do that, the DM must then execute their own entire loop and arrive at their own decisions and actions, since they can’t think with your brain and thus use the bits of the process you’ve already bothered to go through. Outside of being manifestly unfair, this also breaks the game because the DM is not the character or the player. They are the DM. They have no business making that decision, and frankly if they have to play your character for you based only on rolls of a d20 and what they know of your character sheet, then there’s no reason for you to be at the table at all.

Skinsuits break the game at the ‘Act’ step because they often try to override or co-opt their character’s skills and abilities. They use their own charisma to woo the DM, or they try and use their own background, training, and expertise to accomplish things their character has no real way of doing. This isn’t an issue of metagaming – metagaming is a filthy lie and no DM should ever bother with it. It’s an issue of world consistency. The fantastical realm of fantasy your game takes place in is its own world with its own rules, and the character grew up there. If the character is now an expert plumber that uses their plumbing training to flood out an ancient dungeon? The game is not set in Fantasy Realm any longer – it’s set in your basement in Idaho where your DM is upset because your foppish bard’s only experience with sewers should be complaining about their smell.

Characters obtain information. Players decide what to do with that information. Characters execute the decision. Clean. Simple. Easy. Perfect. Or close enough to perfect, at any rate. It offers an excellent framework for figuring out whether someone’s being a tool. Knowledge is shared in the singular brain possessed by both player and character; skills and training are not. DMs who give players guff along the lines of “your character doesn’t know that trolls are vulnerable to fire!” are bad DMs and should work on improving. Players who try to flummox their DM with “Look, I’m a plumber, I know fluid dynamics and I can show you the math – this will work” are bad players and should work on improving. Players and DMs both who substitute rolls of the dice for any of the steps in the loop are bad and should work on improving.

Does any of that make any sense to anybody else? What are your folks’ thoughts on the whole thing?

My gut reaction is to say, "Well, of course."  I didn't know anyone was playing any other way.  That's how roleplaying games work.  I'm not even following how you're suggesting someone would even attempt to play differently.  The core dynamic is as you describe it - the DM describes the world the character is in as the character perceives it, the player decides what the character will attempt to do, and the character attempts it.  How else would you do it?

Trust me.  Other people play very differently, all the time.  A good friend of mine DMs a lot in a pretty good-sized D&D Discord server; virtually all the players in that server substitute "can I make a [X] check?" for describing their actions.  Hell, most of them don't even bother with the description; they just throw the dice and expect the DM to use whatever they rolled.  If the roll goes poorly, the better among them will simply carry on as if nothing happened; the less talented will contrive reasons to keep trying the roll.

I've also seen plenty of people insist that the player's own natural abilities of reason, cognition, and mental ability should never, ever impact their character.  That only the dice are fair, because the dice ignore the player and care only about the character.  They roll excessive checks, demanding a check for damn near anything the player decides to try and do, so they can try to "filter out the IRL world" and get pure, undiluted character by murdering any and all plans the player decides on with dice.

I've seen tons of ways this concept gets cocked up and people fail to grasp what some folks believe is the inarguable fundamental basics of role-playing.  Heh, frankly I'm expecting to hear from some of them in this thread and am curious indeed to see where people disagree with what constitutes "The Basics".

I think this is an argument that can never be won, because it comes down to how folks fundamentally view roleplay. 

For example, in the old MMORPG days, the games were rather slow, and actions could be queued up. The character's abilities mattered, not the player's. You could not "juke left" with your PC and avoid a hit. In City of Heroes, for instance, if an enemy shoots at you and you run around the corner, the shot, if it has already rolled a hit, will follow your character around the corner and hit anyway. Many players argued that this felt like "their character was playing the game instead of them," and hated it. They wanted to be able to dodge out of the way with their own manual dexterity. Other players complained that this made the player's ability matter more than the character's. There was no reconciling these 2 positions. Some folks like it when the player's ability/skill matters; some like it when the character's matter instead. And some people like the middle ground where both matter to some degree.

The main thing that needs to happen is people who play together, need to decide what is right for them and their table. If the DM whose group likes to call out rolls and find ways to re-roll and just keep rolling till they succeed, and everyone including the DM is having fun playing that way, who are we to say no to that? I personally wouldn't want to play that way, and I don't think my fellow players at my "virtual" table would, but I'm not going to tell another table how to run their game.

Ultimately this is a conversation for each table -- how much "player" matters vs. "character." There is no "right" way to do it, with all respect to Angry. Just because Angry thinks the O-O-D-A is the best way to approach an RPG, doesn't mean everyone else is going to like doing it that way. Some people just come to eat pretzels, drink beer, and roll dice.

To be fair/clarify: I'm the one who drew the connection to OODA, not Angry.  This was a relatively quick, minor facet of his overall article, but one I found very fascinating and which stirred a lot of interesting thought.  The way Angry described his process mapped immediately in my head to OODA.  

While it is true that every table has its own stride, I feel like this could still be a meritorious discussion to have.  I'm not imposing this view on anyone else's game, simply asking opinions and discussions we can, ideally, all learn from.  The server I mentioned earlier is overwhelmingly beer-and-pretzels play - slapass last-minute one-shots are the order of the day, silliness abounds, and consequences are a myth.  That community treats the game as a lighthearted escape to blow off steam from their stressful lives, and I wouldn't ever try and take that away from them.

I'd stop playing tabletop games altogether before I ever played that way myself more than once in a blue moon...but I wouldn't take it away from someone who loves it, either.

I guess what I'm trying to say is not that you are imposing a view on anyone, but that this argument has been around for decades and I don't see Angry's post as being able to actually solve it, because it's about what you enjoy in an RPG, and there is a sliding scale with "all character no player" on one side, "all player no character" on the other, and dozens of notches in between. None of those notches is objectively better or more correct than any other notch, so all that's left is what you like as a table.

You asked in your title, did Angry just solve this argument? My answer is no -- it can't be solved. 

That's fair enough.  Heh, I simply found myself enchanted with the idea that someone proposed an actual, visible, actionable line instead of just screaming about why other people are denying them their fun.  "Here's an actual description of where the boundary is/should be", the man said, and I found myself strongly agreeing with a lot of what he proposed.  The character is responsible for interacting with the world, the player is responsible for thinking. 

I hate when DMs get strict and obnoxious about 'metagaming' and cast judgment on me or other players for enjoying this hobby and owning/reading books in it, all "how dare you know things your character doesn't know, that's cheating! DX", or pull the nonsensical "you need to pass an Intelligence check before you're allowed to make a plan in this situation instead of panic", or do the "let's roll sixty Perception checks a game because I don't believe in Passive scores or just, y'know...people seeing stuff that's smack obvious in front of them".  It's absolutely stupid and it detracts from and drags down games.  It comes back to me wondering why I'm at the table at all if I'm not allowed to decide my character's actions and have to consult the dice and the sheet for every last stray thought that goes through our shared head.

Yeah, seems fine. Charisma checks still matter. The player needs to make the persuasive argument. But the Charisma check tells you how silver-tongued they were about it.

Persuasive argument sets the DC.

Charisma check decides if you pass it.

That is all. Sometimes you can swindle someone into something not at all in their interest with a web of persuasive flattery. Sometimes you can present a win-win scenario, and the person still rejects it, because you offended them so badly with your lack of etiquette.

So my Bard wants to convince the troll to let us into the cave. The troll is clearly showing signs of being insecure about his big hairy feet, and if my Bard were to reassure him that his feet aren't ugly, that would probably help. Maybe it would in fact be the only way to have a chance here. But I'm not picking up on the clues. My brain isn't connecting those dots because my own social skills don't match up with my Bard's.

Should my DM explain to me that complimenting the troll's feet is the correct play, because my character would know that? Or should they keep quiet, because they're trying not to play my character for me?

And how do we rectify the disconnect caused by John's genius Wizard always making dumb decisions because John isn't himself a genius?

I don't feel like anything has actually been solved here.

What I do is sort of a combination of the player and character's skills. If the player wants to make a Charisma check, then they first have to speak in character and talk to the person they're trying to persuade/deceive/intimidate/etc. Then they roll a check to see how well their characters said it. That way, the player is roleplaying, but they also get the benefits of their character's stats.

I make players roleplay social interaction, but I allow Int checks to give clues on mental puzzles. (Probably because when I RP I’m a more social person than a mental one.)

Ironic or timely, these were posted in the past week:

I think this method should be "fine" for most games.  Angry DM I just don't get why he needs to frame it that way, I mean, I guess it's a schtick.  I don't feel OODA loop really applies to TTRPGs because you're not actually playing in real time (and you're not trying to "beat" the DM).  Video games sure and other places where twitch or getting ahead of your opposition is important, sure.  But OODA loops don't really work in a collaborative situation.  I've also seen OODA loop be forced on people who competed just fine and actually caused a stuttered/meta/frustration of performance.  It's an ok thought experiment to see applied to things, but shouldn't be doctrine (though it sort of is in some fields).

I guess I don't see this as solution to a problem, because I just don't see the issue, which sure has been beaten around this and other forums as a real problem.  

Just me, but sometimes the skill mechanic is a coaching tool, where the roll is asked and the DM provides some modeling of how they see an INT/CHR/WIS character may perform.  DM just gave that player tools for future plays where the check won't be requested by the player.  I had a player playing a Whisper Bard for the first time who was trying to use their class feature to talk someone out inspecting a vessel.  Not a lot of role play was offered before the feature was invoked but I pulled out a variation of Dr. Who's "Doesn't she look tired?" and after that success it nudged the player's understanding of their function.  

The role-playing comes in your Orient and Decide phases.

Whilst it is possible for the player to come up with a lot of strategies, the role-play comes from deciding how the character would "orient" based on the available data, using the concepts available to that character.

The player could come up with many different possible scenarios for the decide phase, but if these are outside the general knowledge of what you would expect your character to know, then they shouldn't be put forward as how your character would act.

A lot of other game systems have a stat named something like Knowledge, rather than Intelligence, so that the dice roll can represent what the character might know.

I will check Ginny's videos when I can, though I'm expecting some cringe.  Ginny's a good gal, but I don't believe it's really possible to 'fake' a mental score/attribute/ability higher than what you, yourself possess.  Especially 'Intelligence', if one persists in treating Intelligence as 'cranial horsepower' rather than learning and education.  As someone who lives the high Int/low "Wis" life every day, I can say there's absolutely no way for me to effectively fake the easy, serene awareness, perception, and affinity for my surroundings as a traditionally portrayed high Wis character.  I'm one of those folks who will spend ten minutes searching for my phone in increasing anger before slapping a pocket and encountering plastic.  I do not, ever, get to be the sharp-eyed survivalist who sees danger coming from a mile away, through a forest and behind three different hills, based on nothing but a slight shift in the patterns of a few leaves blowing in the wind.  Half the time I feel fortunate I can find my clothes after I sleep for a night.  My brain simply doesn't work that way, and it's increasingly painful to anyone around me/playing with me if I try and play one of those.  Same as how I will never be the snappy, happy, rapier-witted bard with a perfect ditty for every occasion.  That is a discussion I've had many times before though, and wasn't necessarily the thrust of this thread.

As for OODA - in brief, I don't see the process as focusing on speed.  Yes, both fighter pilots and corporations use the original OODA methodology as a means of emphasizing speed by rushing through the steps as fast as possible, but I believe the methodology itself - Observe, Orient, Decide, Act - is an excellent explanation of what has to happen every single time someone must turn Information into Action.  Speed is not relevant to D&D, no (unless your DM does combat speedball style, which more DMs absolutely should), but you must still start by Observing something, then Orienting on that information, before Deciding what to do with it and then turning that decision into Action.  It just so happens to very neatly align with how the player/character interaction works and gave me a really neat insight into how to handle that interaction in the future, especially with players that are extremely mechanically inclined throughout their whole-ass lives and are constantly pushing at the boundaries of what they can get away with.

Quote from Farling>>

The role-playing comes in your Orient and Decide phases.

Whilst it is possible for the player to come up with a lot of strategies, the role-play comes from deciding how the character would "orient" based on the available data, using the concepts available to that character.

The player could come up with many different possible scenarios for the decide phase, but if these are outside the general knowledge of what you would expect your character to know, then they shouldn't be put forward as how your character would act.

Oh, I get it, but I don't think OODA loops are a superior cognitive model for any other type of deliberative thinking.  "Oh, fighter pilots use it!" is a compelling sell until you realize playing D&D (or a slough of other activities where the OODA Loop industry has attempted buy in) isn't at all like flying a F-16 (let's remember the OODA Loop was largely construed as a way to contend with conerns about the data overload given fighter pilots of 4th generation air superiority fighters, or if you don't remember now you know).  The OODA Loop is reductive, and TTRPGs entertain, quite literally, a much broader array of cognitive capacity in the human mind.  That's why AI researchers find TTRPG a sort of holy grail in machine learning (whereas OODA Loops and other limited parameter game theories are sort of old hat).

Anyway when the player in the OODA model applied to TTRPGs gets to phase A, it's not a do or die moment.  A DM or other player can go "wha?" and additional minds can inform the decision making process if collaborative deliberation and examination of a character's action at a table is encouraged (we do that right?).  OODA Loop implies situational awareness (where Angry DM is incredibly presumptuous in their capacity to give it all to his players) will lead a high functioning mind to assert the dominant position, or get pinned by the opposition's superior position.  But we're not dogfighting (although interestingly, the Aerial Combat system in Arcadia Volume three does very much incorporate OODA Looping type behavior into its mechanics). If you stall or flame out, or go below the combat deck, your DM and fellow players can help your recover.  

A lot of other game systems have a stat named something like Knowledge, rather than Intelligence, so that the dice roll can represent what the character might know.

Yes, and we do this in D&D too, right?  Maybe too much of my formative gaming was playing systems where knowledge checks were a thing, but it's how I roll.

This is an order I commonly use. It works well for our table.

A situation comes up. I (DM) describe the details and ask for a specific roll. If a roll isn't needed or if failing to make the roll results in the game screeching to a halt, I don't ask for a roll. Let's assume I'm asking for a roll. As the DM, I decide what you roll. Obviously, some things are common sense. 

Step 1. Roll the indicated check. Player grabs the die, rolls it, refers to his character sheet, adds (or subtracts) appropriately, then tells me the total.

Jim: 13 + 5 Persuasion. I got an 18.

Step 2. I already know if an 18 is sufficient to convince the guards to let you into the room, but I don't tell the players. The DC is still a secret. I simply say, "18. Good roll. So what exactly are you going to say to the guard? Like, will you use any first names? Reference something important to the guard? What's your posture. And the rest of you..are any of you standing as though ready to draw and attack or are you passive?" I can float around the back and forth of it all, but I'm looking for player input at this point. I already know what the character came up with (an 18).

Step 3. The player, whether Jordan Belfort or not, chimes in with details. Yes, the roll was made but there hasn't yet been a determination of whether that was enough (to convince the guards). So I wait. I get input. I have ideas on what I'm looking for but I keep it open ended. Maybe you (as the player) surprise me with something. Something I hadn't thought of. Something that I didn't realize would have been important to the guard. Whatever.

Step 4. After hearing player input, I determine if the DC changed (up or down). If what you said was shit, the DC became 19 or 39. It doesn't matter. The 18 roll wasn't enough and I say, "yea, the guards don't seem to budge. He barely regards you and you see them tighten up on their polearms." If you said something clever, witty, or simply made me or others laugh, the DC just dropped to a 17 (or 4). It doesn't matter. The 18 rolled was enough. "The guards nod, grumble a bit, but ultimately step aside. They do not open the door for you though."

What this does for us is blur the lines between player and character input. Was the 18 ever actually high enough? Was the PC actually good enough? Was it something the player said? Who knows. 

I hate when DMs get strict and obnoxious about 'metagaming' and cast judgment on me or other players for enjoying this hobby and owning/reading books in it, all "how dare you know things your character doesn't know, that's cheating! DX"

You knowing something your character wouldn't know: No problem.

You demanding to have the character act, in character, on something you know that the character wouldn't: Now we have a problem.

I prefer players to ask things like, "Would my character have ever heard of a Mimic before?" I'm perfectly willing to negotiate with the player about whether the character would or not. But the "Monster Manual" does not exist, IC, in my world, so players should not have their characters act as if they had read it.

Also, I'm not down with the player buying the adventure we're on and reading all the secrets and plot twists and mysteries before we even get there.

Quote from BioWizard >>

I prefer players to ask things like, "Would my character have ever heard of a Mimic before?" I'm perfectly willing to negotiate with the player about whether the character would or not. But the "Monster Manual" does not exist, IC, in my world, so players should not have their characters act as if they had read it.

Also, I'm not down with the player buying the adventure we're on and reading all the secrets and plot twists and mysteries before we even get there.

 I like to think of it as a difference between spoilers and metagaming.

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

This is often demonstrated via ‘the Charisma Check problem’. Very, very few players, in real life, have the trained panache of a high-level bard. When they say they want to convince an NPC of something, or persuade their way past an obstacle, they object (often vociferously) when asked “Okay. How do you persuade them?” or “okay, what do you say?” These players point to the large Charisma score on their sheet and say “this character has much better Charisma than I do, I should be allowed to use their Charisma instead of my own – they say whatever would work, and we figure out if it happens with a die roll.” They wish to skip conversations, avoid pinning their own player-words on their character, and utilize the character’s numbers in lieu of their own conversational skills to try and Pass The Check.

In my eperience, the problem is the other way around (or at least, used to be). 

When I started playing RPGs, there were many, many people who were good at persuasion and debate who would dump CHA, then give a well-reasoned and excellently argued speech, and get upset when the GM wouldn't have it work. The same went for real-world skills like survival, herbalism, science and so-on ("It doesn't matter if my character doesn't have survival skill, I've just told you how my character dresses and cooks the deer, so we all get a good night's camp.")

Quote from Yurei1453 >>

I will check Ginny's videos when I can, though I'm expecting some cringe.  Ginny's a good gal, but I don't believe it's really possible to 'fake' a mental score/attribute/ability higher than what you, yourself possess. 

Should prolly watch the 2 minutes of videos before making assumptions than because they are decent suggestions on finding the middle ground between "I roll to persuade" and making some long winded speech.   And ways to try to take advantage of your Int like making suggestions to ask your DM if your character would know something about the area n having your character research things instead of just impulsively jumping into situations

Decent quick suggestions, not perfect for everyone but than again nothings gonna.