D&D 5E Modeling Uncertainty

Saeviomagy said:

The problem here is that
1. 5e characters are already clowns when it comes to their specializations, let alone things they are not proficient at. Having good stats and an easy DC, you already fail 20% of the time. Now you're saying that an additional ~20% of their successes will be failures, only worse, because they now don't know they failed. At this point I'd just be giving up on skills as a player.

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Once again...I'm suggesting this only be used on a small sub-set of skill tests. Namely, those tests in which players are counting on intuition or interpretation, where they want to know if their character "knows" something, but they really mean "believes" something. See the few examples I put into the OP.

So, no it wouldn't be an additional ~20%, it would be some additional percent of a rather small percentage.

2. Somehow characters who are poor at skills get less bad information.

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Well, yeah. Those who are less likely to trust their judgment at all are also less likely to have bad judgments.

Apparently some of the worst judges of lying are cops who think they're really good at it. Go figure.

but honestly I think that the hardest part of any system like this is coming up with incorrect but believable information to hand out to each player in the first place.

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Agreed, which is why I designed a system that is purely stochastic, in which fluff is just fluff. It does not depend on the DM's ability to improvise or give convincing evidence or anything (other than keeping a straight face).

Elfcrusher said:

Well...I think we *do* mostly agree. I don't actually think that "He's behaving as if he's lying..." breaks the rule of never telling a player what his character.

Where we differ is that I believe at a deep level that statement really is telling the player what his character thinks...or, at least, how he interprets/processes sensory input. Because "He's behaving as if..." requires interpretation. Another observer might reach a different conclusion. So it really is telling him how he "thinks".

I'm not sure I have a hard and fast rule for when it's ok and when it isn't, but this one is ok.

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We have to go back to the action declaration to examine whether we're telling the player what his or her character thinks. In this case, the character successfully detects clues that the NPC is lying. It doesn't need to be any deeper than that. It's pretty obvious to me when we're really telling a player what his or her character is thinking e.g. "You think he's lying."

Elfcrusher said:

Even so, there's a difference between saying "you've gotta come up with something plausible", which I'm ok with it, and "I'll adjust the DC depending on how plausible it is", which generally I'm not ok with it.

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Is the DC always the same no matter how a character tries to break open a given door in a dungeon? Bear in mind that advantage/disadvantage or other bonuses to the check is effectively changing the DC.

iserith said:

Is the DC always the same no matter how a character tries to break open a given door in a dungeon? Bear in mind that advantage/disadvantage or other bonuses to the check is effectively changing the DC.

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No, but I believe it should be a matter of rules, not DM whim.

Do you ever adjust attack DCs if the player describes a particularly creative way of going about it, that's not covered by the rules?

Elfcrusher said:

The benefit is that before your chance was 50/50 and now your chance is 3/4 or 5/6 or 7/8 or whatever the new odds are. You succeeded at improving your odds of guessing right. Where is written that you get everything you want if you succeed at a task?

I'm not saying it's wrong to play the usual way, just that I don't think the difference is really that black & white.

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I'm not a math guy, but from a player's perspective, it would seem to me you're no less uncertain after the roll because I can't be sure the DM is telling me the truth. Depending on implementation of the house rule, the die may have instructed him or her to "lie."

Elfcrusher said:

I guess it depends on how you define "earn". Does saying, "I look to see if he looks nervous" count as 'earning' the information about the guard lying?

(And, for the record, no: I don't think the shortest route usually is the most difficult.)

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Regardless of risk, you earn it by making a good judgment on what to do in the situation and for succeeding at the ability check. In some cases, the action declaration alone will earn the removal of that uncertainty. Not having to roll is a reward for the player.

Elfcrusher said:

I for one don't find it very rewarding to attempt to "know" something, using language I know my DM approves of, roll one die, and have the DM grant me the information. I don't feel like I did anything very clever, or played particularly well. It's kinda formulaic.

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I think it helps if you examine the practical outcome of doing it this way as I've mentioned with regard to pig-piling skill checks or otherwise repeating tasks with uncertain outcomes. Further, in this sort of interaction, the player is establishing information about his or her character, typically about the character's background. I find this a much better place for players to flesh out the character than in their own heads or in a backstory that nobody, least of all me, wants to read.

Elfcrusher said:

And my objection to the TV reality is less about the reality and more about the absence of interesting suspense. Uncertainty is what makes games fun. You go into battle figuring that you've got pretty good odds of beating the BBEG, but you don't know for certain that you will. In the battle you spend a resource, or use a turn healing a companion, or make some other choice not because you know it will turn the battle in your favor, but because you know it will improve your odds of winning the battle.

And maybe that's one of the reasons that practically everybody likes combat more than any other part of the game.

I want exploration and interaction to have the same kind of tension as combat does.

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As I see it, the tension lives in the stakes and in the moment between the action declaration and the die roll. Combat is exciting in my view because there's so much at stake, usually life and death. If you make the stakes of an exploration or social interaction challenge at least as important as that, then I imagine you'll get what you want without fiddling with how the ability check resolves uncertainty.

Elfcrusher said:

No, but I believe it should be a matter of rules, not DM whim.

Do you ever adjust attack DCs if the player describes a particularly creative way of going about it, that's not covered by the rules?

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Yes, of course, I do. Why wouldn't I?

Remember, in this edition, the DM is the game.

iserith said:

Yes, of course, I do. Why wouldn't I?

Remember, in this edition, the DM is the game.

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Interesting. I wouldn't have expected that to be an "of course" answer. Nor would I have expected explicit authority to do so to be a rationale.

I pretty much never adjust DC's. For one thing, I don't want to get into a debate about what's plausible. But I also don't want to bog the game down with players attempting to finagle a +something bonus.

I might adjust them downwards if the circumstances suggest it. "Go ahead and try, but the blizzard is going to make it tough."

On the one hand this feels way off-topic, but I suppose it is another facet of differing views about action resolution.

Elfcrusher said:

Interesting. I wouldn't have expected that to be an "of course" answer. Nor would I have expected explicit authority to do so to be a rationale.

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I've given other reasons why I think it's a good practice in this thread, not just that it's compatible with that the game tells us to do. The DMG gives some other good reasons why it is this way. Whether or not anyone agrees that it's good or that the reasons make sense is, of course, a different story. I myself go with the path of least resistance when it comes to choosing my games: I adjust my expectations and change the way I play based on the game so that everything works smoothly without needing to work on changing the game. If I don't like the outcome, then there are always other games.

I'm running a D&D 4e one-shot next month and I'm having to tell my D&D 5e players who want in on it that all those guidelines for play I gave them for our regular 5e campaign mostly don't apply. I certainly don't want them trying to play D&D 4e as they play D&D 5e because I won't be DMing it the same way.

Elfcrusher said:

I pretty much never adjust DC's. For one thing, I don't want to get into a debate about what's plausible. But I also don't want to bog the game down with players attempting to finagle a +something bonus.

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There is no debate though in my experience, if your players trust you. So obviously one of my major focuses is on being trustworthy as DM. I can't have the players thinking that what I (the DM, not some NPC) am saying is always true. And even if there is an objection by the player, then that suggests to me some other issue, typically of the DM and player not being on the same page as to the context of the situation which itself could have arisen due to some other issues at play (player not paying attention, DM not being clear, etc.). In cases where the DM isn't sure he or she adequately communicated the context, it's easy to just go with the player's understanding.

Elfcrusher said:

On the one hand this feels way off-topic, but I suppose it is another facet of differing views about action resolution.

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It's all connected, man.

Tony Vargas said:

I see no meaningful differences between them as far as that one mechanic goes.

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Interestingly, the D&D 5e entry on group checks is a little more specific than the D&D 4e one as it relates to the PCs actually needing to be able to help each other which plays into the DM making a subjective (but hopefully fair and consistent) judgment.

Tony Vargas said:

When it makes sense that the DM might go for the roll (or narrate success), sure. That's a matter of what makes sense to the player, and what the player thinks might make sense to the DM, and it's shaded by their personalities and relationship.

So I can see how it could discourage declaring actions in general.

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Just the ones that don't make sense.

Elfcrusher said:

The problem with this is that it's subjective on the part of the DM. Let's say the DC is actually 24, so the player failed but doesn't realize it. How does the DM choose between, "You don't notice anything amiss"...leaving the player with a 50/50 chance of guessing right...and the result above, which intentionally misleads the player into choosing the wrong answer?

I think if you start drawing out decision trees you'll realize there are only 3 possible outcomes using the hidden DC method: a nearly 100% probability the player guesses right, a 50/50 chance, and a nearly 0% chance.

The DM might try to drop hints that will create an intermediate probability, but the player is either going to think those hints are obvious (leading to 100 or 0) or non-obvious (leaving him at 50/50).

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I'm a little confused. If the player rolls a 23, and I follow your original suggestion and the "special die" comes up a 1 so then I lie to the player, does that also reduce to either 0, 50/50, or 100? Assuming you're going to say it doesn't, how is it different than I secretly determine a DC of 24, they roll 23, and I lie to the player? Either way, the player sees a really good roll, and is given a lie.

In my case, the lie is because they misunderstood the situation to begin with, and they were dealing with a master rogue only posing as a guard, and thus the lie is justified. (If there wasn't such a setup, the 23 would have been a runaway success.) In your case, some dice the GM rolled in secret just ripped them off. Is that better? (I would claim, no.)

In any case, the players always have their own roll to refer to. If it was high or low, they have a pretty good idea of success or failure (but normally not 0 or 100). If their roll in the middle, yeah, it may be more 50/50. But they can accurately gauge their own confidence in their performance! If they roll a 12, they may figure the DC was probably 10-ish, but not feel confident enough to take drastic action on that conclusion. If they roll a 6, even if I tell them the truth they're not going to act on it. Regardless, if they felt the social interaction was insufficiently conclusive, they might look for some other action to either support or refute their conclusion from that social interaction, or look for something besides the social interaction to support or refute their intended plan of action. But that's OK -- the first round of combat didn't resolve it, so you go on to a second.

Elfcrusher said:

Once again...I'm suggesting this only be used on a small sub-set of skill tests. Namely, those tests in which players are counting on intuition or interpretation, where they want to know if their character "knows" something, but they really mean "believes" something. See the few examples I put into the OP.

So, no it wouldn't be an additional ~20%, it would be some additional percent of a rather small percentage.

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Your mechanic is:
Roll to see if you succeed.
If you DO succeed, roll to see if you still fail anyway.

If someone is competent and apt at a skill (ie - a starting character with proficiency and a 16+ stat), then they have a roughly 80% chance to succeed at an easy task. Which in itself is ridiculous, since an easy task is "something joe blow can succeed at half the time" and a proficiency requires ~2000 hours of active training (in the case of tool usage).

Under your rules, they then have an 80% of 25% chance to super-duper fail the check and get incorrect information while being told it's correct. And the chance that they super-duper fail gets worse the better they are at doing the task.

Well, yeah. Those who are less likely to trust their judgment at all are also less likely to have bad judgments.

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And why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet?

Apparently some of the worst judges of lying are cops who think they're really good at it. Go figure.

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That's actually probably an example dunning kruger effect: Fundamentally if you're completely incompetent at something, then you'll think you're better at it than you really are. It's not that those cops are bad at it because they think they're good at it: it's that they think they're good because they have no idea what being good at it really means.

The other end of the scale is that when you're an expert at something, you tend to assume that there's more out there that you still don't know, and therefore that you are less competent than you really are.

That said - you're still not going to decide that despite being an expert you won't even consider a basic question for fear of getting it wrong and not knowing, which is what your system simulates.

Agreed, which is why I designed a system that is purely stochastic, in which fluff is just fluff. It does not depend on the DM's ability to improvise or give convincing evidence or anything (other than keeping a straight face).

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Um, yeah, it does. You have to come up with plausible false evidence. Which you then give to someone who succeeded on their check.