D&D 5E Modeling Uncertainty

[jaelis]

The critical part of the player's contribution here is missing, that is, what the character actually does. "Can my rogue disarm the trap?" is not a statement of action and leaves the DM to either assume what the character is doing (which can be troublesome) or to question the player for more specifics. Reasonable specificity is the key here. It would be unreasonable in my view to expect or demand someone who has poor mechanical understanding to cite exactly how the rogue sets about disarming the trap. But we do need to known some details to properly adjudicate as I see it, at least without the DM establishing for the player what the character is doing.

Like, what do you mean? Of course I can (and would) say "My rogue tries to disarm the trap." but I'm not sure that is really getting at the issue here. I guess what Elf is worried about is what my character is supposed to know when I roll an 18.

 

[jaelis]

Here's where you cite your character's background, profession or ..whatever it is you think gives your character the chance of making something so. For me at least, I'm not looking for a McGuyver Master Plan, just something that helps describe how our rogue might do so.

It can be as vague as, 'He's looking for the dangerous bits and will try to stop them working'' or ''She's searching around the slot in the stone wall, looking for any sign of the mechanism that makes the trap function.''

Intent - Disarm the Trap
Action - Looking for sharp stabby mechanical bits around the slot in the stone wall. She'll use that magnifying glass that was liberated from the bearded nun earlier.

As it turns out, I'm such an idiot that it didn't occur to me to look for sharp stabby bits, or that a magnifying glass might be helpful. But my character has Int 17.

Obviously that's an exaggeration. But if we were talking about arcana check, it's maybe more accurate.

 

[iserith]

Like, what do you mean? Of course I can (and would) say "My rogue tries to disarm the trap." but I'm not sure that is really getting at the issue here. I guess what Elf is worried about is what my character is supposed to know when I roll an 18.

The necessity of the player establishing clearly the goal and approach is something of a side issue, but it's connected to the overall process of adjudication. In any case, I would say if 18 is higher than the DC required to disarm the trap, then the DM narrates the results of the adventurer's action as having disarmed the trap. I think it would be kind of weird to say "You think you disarm the trap..." because (1) that's the DM telling a player what his or her own character thinks and (2) it somewhat takes away a feeling of accomplishment in my opinion.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I wrote a wall of text describing a problem I see in many/most RPGs, with an analysis of some of the typical options for addressing it and why they are insufficient, but then decided to skip most of the rationalization and just propose my solution. If y'all find it interesting enough to debate then we can expand on it.

Goal:

Avoid certainty in situations where characters would only have strong hunches, not absolute knowledge, in order to make subsequent decision-making more meaningful.... In other words, The player sees the die roll on the table, but the character is still guessing. The goal is to model that.

The classic way to do that - which works well, again, in 5e - is to simply take the roll behind the screen. Another thing you could do back in the day is not tell the player whether he wanted high or low (since there were variants that went either way).

If your players really like the feel of rolling dice themselves, an alternate little trick is to roll a d20 behind the screen as a 'seed.' You add it to the player's natural roll, subtracting 20 if the result is higher than 20 - thus you get the flat 1-20 range of a normal roll, but the player has no idea if he actually rolled 'well' or not.

That was still kind of a Wall of Text, huh?

Perhaps a modest fence.

Yup, that was one of the responses which I analyzed in depth in my original version. It went something like this:

Instead of asking 'can I tell if he's lying' you say, 'I look for signs that he might be lying.' And the DM says, 'Such as?', and you say, 'Is he sweating? Is he making eye contact? Does he have any tics?'

That's getting into using the player to resolve the task. In the above example, it makes little difference if the PC is a callow farm boy or an experienced inquisitor.

But I have some critiques of it:
1) It requires the DM to either have material/answers prepared for every eventuality. AND those answers have to vary each time so that the players don't get used to a pattern. That is, if your goal is mine: to leave the players more informed after a successful role, but still unsure.

Nod. Improv is panacea on the DM side of the screen, too, one that's contingent not only on experience/talent/creativity but mood and interpersonal relationships. Some nights you're just 'on.'

2) ...fine-tune answers such that the probability of players guessing correctly correlates to their character's abilities (and dice rolls, where applicable).

That's the player-as-resolution-system pet peeve I keep bringing up. You can do it in broad strokes. When I put a pre-gen Holmesian detective in a set of pregens, I know I'll describe crime scenes and the results of perception checks to him differently than to everyone else. The subtler the difference, and the less familiar you are with the PCs, the less well that trick works.

So what I'm proposing is a mechanical solution to inject the right amount of uncertainty. It's a "roll then narrate" solution rather than a "narrate then roll" approach.

Also, although I wrote it up as the players asking questions rather than stating what they want to do, I could have written it up either way. I don't believe that distinction is relevant to the larger point. But if I'm mistaken I'm eager to understand why.

I think I'm with you on that detail. If a player declares an action, the uncertainty of whether he can succeed is resolved by the die roll. If he wants information, you may need the uncertainty to remain after resolution.

A system like you want could also address part of the 'DM may I' problem, at the price of adding another step to resolution. Players could ask the DM whether their PCs believe they can do something, make a check, and have some idea, but some remaining uncertainty as to whether they're able or not. :shrug:

 

[Warmaster Horus]

I think the mechanic presented is pretty cool. IMHO the ability of a PC to determine something relating to a skill check is heavily in that character's court, not the player so much. If a character is a shrewd judge of behavior and body language with a high Insight skill but the player hasn't watched all the episodes of Lie to Me, then that's what the die roll is for. Good descriptors by the player of what the PC is doing to ascertain their opinion often yields Advantage or possibly even an easier DC.

BTW, that doesn't mean I don't coach players to be demonstrative in their approach to skill use as opposed to a plain skill check. That gets old, but with some players that's what they're comfortable with so you need to nudge them a bit out of their comfort zone by offering the Advantage stick by rewarding a more nuanced approach.

Something like, "I ask the traveller if it's true that the Fountain of Serenity in the High Market of Phlan has restorative powers, to test whether they are indeed from Phlan, because I just made that up and someone from there would know that." That would provide Advantage to an Insight check, while a normal, "I roll an Insight check to see if they're really from Phlan" would not.

 

[jaelis]

The necessity of the player establishing clearly the goal and approach is something of a side issue, but it's connected to the overall process of adjudication. In any case, I would say if 18 is higher than the DC required to disarm the trap, then the DM narrates the results of the adventurer's action as having disarmed the trap. I think it would be kind of weird to say "You think you disarm the trap..." because (1) that's the DM telling a player what his or her own character thinks and (2) it somewhat takes away a feeling of accomplishment in my opinion.

I guess you could also imagine a system like:
- If you beat a DC by 3 or more, then you know you succeeded. ("You disarmed the tra," "The diplomat seems to be lying," "The peasant is clearly intimidated," or what ever.)
- If you fail by 3 or more, then you know you failed. ("You are unable disarm the trap." "You can't tell if the diplomat is lying or not." "The peasant is unimpressed.")
- If you roll is within the DC +/- 2, you aren't sure. ("You were able to manipulate the trap to some extent, but it's hard to be sure if it's really safe now." "You think the diplomat is [check succeeded]/ is not [check failed] lying, but it's hard to be sure." "The peasant seems intimidated, but you aren't sure how reliably he'll follow your instructions.")

 

[iserith]

I guess you could also imagine a system like:
- If you beat a DC by 3 or more, then you know you succeeded. ("You disarmed the tra," "The diplomat seems to be lying," "The peasant is clearly intimidated," or what ever.)
- If you fail by 3 or more, then you know you failed. ("You are unable disarm the trap." "You can't tell if the diplomat is lying or not." "The peasant is unimpressed.")
- If you roll is within the DC +/- 2, you aren't sure. ("You were able to manipulate the trap to some extent, but it's hard to be sure if it's really safe now." "You think the diplomat is [check succeeded]/ is not [check failed] lying, but it's hard to be sure." "The peasant seems intimidated, but you aren't sure how reliably he'll follow your instructions.")

Since I believe players will tend to want to reduce uncertainty as much as possible - after all, that's a smart way to play, especially when life and death are on the line - then all I can see this doing is prolonging efforts in a given scene. If you're not sure of what you know, then you are acting on potentially bad information and that is in my experience something people don't like to do. It seems to me likely that the players will also pig pile on tasks so that everyone can get a chance to roll which I imagine most find to be a situation that is not ideal.

I mean, I see what the goal of the mechanic is and these seem like fine ways to implement it, but what can we predict this will actually do to the play experience?

 

[Guest 6801328]

Could you go into what you mean here? I'm not seeing how this follows.

Oops I left out the 'or' to the 'either': the second part was "...or be really good at improv."

E.g., my players are talking to a guard and one of them says he is going to start looking for signs that the guard is lying. And I think, "ok, how do I give a hint such that this person who has been playing with me for 3 years isn't going to immediately see through."

I think it's fine to give a concrete answer. I'm not sure why one would want to have uncertainty. In theory, the players are always working toward removing uncertainty by their actions. If they've taken the "right" steps to remove it, then I give them what they seek. "Right" in this instance means "reasonable, given the situation," but not necessarily just one correct solution.

Oh, that's a great question, and the answer for many people might very well be "I don't".

The reason I want uncertainty in some situations is that it's what my character would be experiencing, and I feel more immersed if I'm feeling the same thing. Do I know if I climbed the wall successfully? Yes...I'm standing on the top. But do I know for sure whether the guard is lying? No. My character might be very insightful, but he doesn't know with 100% certainty. And if my subsequent decisions depend very much on whether or not he's lying, I want that decision to contain at least some amount of worry. I want the decision to be interesting. If, however you choose to implement it, the result of a skill test is that the DM tells me he's lying, then there's no interesting subsequent decision.

Conversely, if the DM doesn't give me a yes/no answer but only gives me hints to interpret, the usefulness of the clues is going to be effectively arbitrary. Let's say my character has high Insight and high Wisdom and gets a good roll. So the DM gives me some clues that he thinks are appropriate. But are they? Chances are they are either a dead giveaway (again, the "gosh I rolled high and the DM is telling me he looks nervous" scenario) or the DM actually tries to make it an interesting decision so that it's interesting decision. But I find it implausible that any DM can reliably tune such hints to give a probability that from the player's point of view is distinguishable from 50/50 odds...which is the same as just guessing.

Does any of that make sense?

Iserith, I almost always agree with you 100% about these sorts of things. But there's a nugget of something important here, and I hope you turn it around in your mind and consider it.

Oh, and to the point about telling players what they think...I 99% agree. But when dealing with knowledge that includes uncertainty (such as 'knowing' if somebody is lying) if the DM presents only sensory evidence, without interpretation, then you may as well not have mental stats and skills, because at that point it is the player interacting with the DM, not the character interacting with the environment. So in those cases I have no problem with, "It seems to you that..."

Do I really have to develop a schematic for a device that will appropriately challenge the human player, such that it will accurately represent his character's ability to defuse a bomb? I mean, really, even if I put all that time into developing such a puzzle, what are the odds that it will be of just the right difficulty?

I'd much rather just let the player roll a skill check and say, "You figure out that it's almost definitely the red wire."

 

[Tony Vargas]

It seems to me likely that the players will also pig pile on tasks so that everyone can get a chance to roll which I imagine most find to be a situation that is not ideal.

A trick I've tried doing on that point, especially with knowledge checks, going back to 4e, is to tell the group that one character can make a knowledge check, or everyone can make a group knowledge check. The idea being that if everyone listens and defers to the party 'expert' they get either the information as best he knows it, or a simple "I don't know," but if they all start throwing in their untrained speculation and opinions and half-remembered rumors and whatnot, the actual information can be obscured and rendered useless (kinda like an on-line forum, really).

Most of the time I'll just call for a check or a group check up-front, but when there's that pile-on impulse, I pull out the group check.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I think the mechanic presented is pretty cool. IMHO the ability of a PC to determine something relating to a skill check is heavily in that character's court, not the player so much. If a character is a shrewd judge of behavior and body language with a high Insight skill but the player hasn't watched all the episodes of Lie to Me, then that's what the die roll is for. Good descriptors by the player of what the PC is doing to ascertain their opinion often yields Advantage or possibly even an easier DC.

BTW, that doesn't mean I don't coach players to be demonstrative in their approach to skill use as opposed to a plain skill check. That gets old, but with some players that's what they're comfortable with so you need to nudge them a bit out of their comfort zone by offering the Advantage stick by rewarding a more nuanced approach.

Something like, "I ask the traveller if it's true that the Fountain of Serenity in the High Market of Phlan has restorative powers, to test whether they are indeed from Phlan, because I just made that up and someone from there would know that." That would provide Advantage to an Insight check, while a normal, "I roll an Insight check to see if they're really from Phlan" would not.

I'm a fan of "roll then narrate".

Let's say the player rolls a natural 20 on his Insight check. I might say, "Yeah, you know with certainty he's lying. How do you know that?" I'll let the player come up with, "Because he mentioned that he was with the warlock, Eloelle the Brilliant, at the time, but he didn't know that in fact she was in the same tavern I was while this was all taking place."

For those who HATE players having this much input on the narrative, the DM could of course always insert that part him/herself, but I'm a lazy DM and would rather have the players contribute.