My other thread on this topic is about attributes, and how to portray them effectively. I think that having HIGH attributes can often be harder to correctly portray than low.

With skills you don't often have a problem, you don't need to know anything about auto-repair to make your character roll an "auto repair skill check", but there are a few where this pops up also.

Military tactics skills, supposedly super-high on a character, played by an erwin rommel-wannabe who definitely isn't.  The roll won't be a problem, but the tactic he describes will be.

Diplomacy skills up the wazoo by players who are really just not very diplomatic people. If the player just doesn't "get it", doesn't know how to figure out or cares what the other guy wants, and thinks diplomacy is just "getting the other guy to do what you tell him", then what good is having a high skill value?

Bluff skills on a PC run by a player with no talent for lying; when I ask him (as I'm want to do) "ok, but what do you SAY?" whatever he says will be ludicrous.

With these sorts of skills, I generally demand that the player explain what he intends to do. You can't just say "I diplomatize him good".
And if that "something" is something stupid, then the odds of success will be smaller, as makes sense. I guess you could say its just the PC's own personality making it intentionally harder on themselves, you could have someone with all the diplomatic or bluffing or tactical SKILLS but a personality that demands that they pick the hardest possible way to try to accomplish something...
...only really, its not. Its the player who's a dork. Its not an intentional design choice; the player wants to imagine his character is the military mastermind or the great and respected diplomat or the silver-tongued devil, but the Player's own limitations are getting in the way.

How does one help these players?

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By explaining that in a roleplaying game, a player is expected to make worthwhile decisions, and that while the GM can roleplay that what the player says sounds a lot more convincing than it does, he can't roleplay that something makes sense that doesn't. If someone insisted on roleplaying a tactical genius but has no tactical sense, I'd find ways to let them get die bonuses for their "tactics" skills, if any, but it's up to them to animate the character with an intelligent, military spirit.

Quote from: pawsplay;344432By explaining that in a roleplaying game, a player is expected to make worthwhile decisions, and that while the GM can roleplay that what the player says sounds a lot more convincing than it does, he can't roleplay that something makes sense that doesn't. If someone insisted on roleplaying a tactical genius but has no tactical sense, I'd find ways to let them get die bonuses for their "tactics" skills, if any, but it's up to them to animate the character with an intelligent, military spirit.

On the one hand, yes, I suppose that a GM could interpret a high attribute or skill score as meaning that he's allowed to give that player more "hints" in that area than he would other areas, but that does seem like a lot of work being put on the GM's side of things, and likewise could create some confusion and issues among players.
With GM's NPCs, its fairly easy to "fake" skills or attributes being higher than the GM himself probably has, because the GM can use his "god powers" to retroactively or abstractly influence things, and doesn't always also have to explain how an NPC figured something out or achieved something, it can be more of a fait accompli. With PCs, this isn't nearly as easy.

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I tend to do one of two things in these situations, both of which I am upfront about before running a game.

1.  No matter how stupid their plan/speech/idea (barring something completely incoherent), their skill gets rolled and the numbers matter.  The better they marry their real-world skills to the action, the easier it is.  Stupid should hurt, but I rarely make the difficulty such that a dumb action is guaranteed to fail, which is just gm fiat.  If they roll well and the action does somehow work, I describe the results as them being either lucky or working on pure instinct, pointing out that if their original idea had been well thought out, they would have also gained x, y, z, etc. positive results.  In other words, limit their success to something basic, and draw a hard line under why it was so limited.

 2.  (my favorite) I don't generally "do" front-loaded player narration, but if a player comes up with a good plan/speech/idea, I view that as them "voting" for what kind of content they want to generate as a result.  The better their description, the cooler the result relative to how that player measures coolness.  This requires that I have a good knowledge of the player's desires, of course.  Bad/vaguely defined actions, in contrast, even if they mechanically succeed, will have me exert more GM descriptive power over the result.  As I tell my players: make your actions interesting, intelligent, or at least entertaining (for all of us around the table), or I fuck with your character.  I won't allow my players' characters to be uncool, but if they don't make them cool, I will.

With strategy #2, players who like a lot of autonomy over their characters learn very quickly to summon up their enthusiasm/engagement/general cleverness.  Players who don't care so much about autonomy get to let me take their character for a ride and see what weird stuff happens.

Player outlines a crap plan for a diplomatic debate or a battle or whatever. They roll and suceed so I say that their plan might seem to be ridiculous but that is because we the players/GM are not experts at tactics or diplomacy.

So the battle tactics seems odd, we desert the top of the hill and head down to the boggy area and set up there. You want to push your cavalry through the bog you sure. Yup. okay ...rolls a crit sucess. outcome is that the tactic gives you a huge advantage as the opponent was confused and so followed you into the boggy area thinking to take advantage of your cavalry's seemly poor decision but your tactics worked fine and the cavalry just escaped before the other gys got out and so your archers decimatethem and your cavalry pick them off as they escape .. etc etc ...

Method I use most:
Make Tactics Roll. If made, I tell you their plan, and/or make suggestions about where and how best to attack.

Might allow another if you have time to plan, and tell you flaws *I* see in your plan.

Other Method I use often:
Make Tactics Roll: margin of success produces a number of die modifier uses for the upcoming battle.

Real world tactics are art and skill at the same time. In most military environments there is a side to tactics that is about procedural stuff and about knowledge. What I think most tactics skill represent is the amount of tactical TRAINING a character received, not how much he mastered the art. hence, a high tactics score will help you with the following:

- identifiying enemy troops ("you saw a AT-group and know they always belong to a armour battaillion, it can´t be too far...")
- identifying how and when the enemy is or would act according to his STOP
- successfully interpreting reconaissance results.
- identifying relative value of troop types
- logistics

In a nutshell, the better the tactics roll, the more you will know what the enemy is going to do. It´s the players decision to act on that.

In a way I treat it like I do sensors or listen checks.

To simulate the procedural knowledge of a small fire team tactics skill (like those in Shadowrun) I use the Megatraveller solution (floating bonus to influence dice results).

There are some diplomacy rules here, designed for 3.5 but probably convertible, which are designed to take into account the skill of the character, and of the player.

As for military tactics, I don't know good military tactics from bad, and neither do most players (though some might insist that they do), so it'd probably be better handled by either

i) Just rolling, and then saying "OK, you...manage to lure them into a trap, and win." Or in certain situations by giving or withholding knowledge ("you know that they have no chance of storming the castle, but that disease is likely to break out after about four weeks. Most sieges, however, end with someone inside letting the besieging army in.")

ii) If everyone involved knows the same wargame, you could play a game of that, and the one with higher skill gets the better initial setup, and has longer to take their turns, for example.

(then again some would say I don't know diplomacy, and neither do most players...)

Quote from: Age of Fable;344569There are some diplomacy rules here, designed for 3.5 but probably convertible, which are designed to take into account the skill of the character, and of the player.

As for military tactics, I don't know good military tactics from bad, and neither do most players (though some might insist that they do), so it'd probably be better handled by either

i) Just rolling, and then saying "OK, you...manage to lure them into a trap, and win." Or in certain situations by giving or withholding knowledge ("you know that they have no chance of storming the castle, but that disease is likely to break out after about four weeks. Most sieges, however, end with someone inside letting the besieging army in.")

ii) If everyone involved knows the same wargame, you could play a game of that, and the one with higher skill gets the better initial setup, and has longer to take their turns, for example.

(then again some would say I don't know diplomacy, and neither do most players...)

I think one of the fun things about the RPing hobby is putting yourself in other people's shoes and learning about how they do things.

There isn't much to ancient tactics: hold the high ground, send in the infantry, then send in the calvary, leave in the spring, and don't eat what you bring if you can eat what you find. I feel like players that aren't putting a little work into figuring out what they should be doing in character aren't really playing the game hard enough.

Yes, well, I guess I can't argue with some of what's being said here, since generally what I do is set a roll's Difficulty Level by how poor the original idea the player has is; so if the player is being an idiot, but the Character has a +30 to bluff, he might just be able to convince the other guy that he's actually the Dark God of A Thousand Young or whatever, if he rolls really really high.

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