pathfinder

I, and my players, tend to like actually role-playing what their characters do. Not just saying "I'm gonna schmooze" and rolling a die to see the result.

I see people talk about running downtime like this,and exploration like this, too, and I scratch my head.

It's always been pretty clear to me that these sections of the book are for the GM, to give them tools to consistently adjudicate player choices, not to give players a value menu to order from

So, you do your roleplay, the GM sees what you're doing and maps it on to some Activity, and the Activity tells them how to decide how effective you were, mechanically.

Like, if a player ever told me that they were going to "use Avoid Notice", I'd just tilt my head at them and ask them again what their character was doing, and that I'll figure out what that means, mechanically. Because maybe they don't get to Avoid Notice because they've tailed for the last 20 miles by someone they themselves didn't notice.

This was maybe one of the bigger downsides to having both player and GM facing material in the same book, I think.