D&D 5E Modeling Uncertainty

[iserith]

The "lore check pig pile" is exactly why I'd like to figure out a way to incorporate false negatives. Everybody starts rolling Lore, and pretty soon you have six different answers to choose from. So what do you do? Trust the guy with the high Lore skill.

Or trust nothing the DM says anymore.

We can defeat the pig pile by establishing with our players they don't get to say when they make checks, getting a clear goal and approach, showing willingness to rule automatic success and failure, and for assigning cost to failed ability checks when it makes sense.

 

[iserith]

I don't RC quite that advice, no. The 'first say yes' thing, vaguely. Though, of course, if you wanted to use your "goal & approach" er, approach to gate skill checks, you could, in any editions that had skill checks (and you could use it in others, too, just not to earn skill checks, obviously).

The reason I first used that trick in 4e was just because 4e introduced group skill checks.
5e still has 'em, so...

In the D&D 4e Rules Compendium (p. 125), it says "A player often initiates a skill check by asking the DM if he or she can make one. Almost always, the DM says yes." In D&D 5e, there is no such statement to my knowledge. So how I handle checks differs between editions. Group checks serve mostly the same purpose between editions so far as I can tell, but were probably more likely to come up in D&D 4e because of skill challenges.

I get the concept, but I think it's stretched a bit thin in that case. I mean, if you know something about X, you know it, whether you read it in a book while you were hanging out at the world's greatest library, or heard it from a bard who visited your town when you were 8.

I also don't see how it stop the pile-on effect. "I can't remember ever reading about this in a library." "OK, I try to remember if I ever heard about it in a story..." "I try to remember if I ever learned about it while I was training in the monastery..." "I try to remember if I ever heard about it from adventurers in a tavern..."

I mean, I can see it slowing things down - getting fewer actions, in general. :shrug:

The practical effect of having players establish what their characters are drawing on in order to be given information by the DM is that players will only do that when it makes sense. They know the DM will tell them they straight up fail sometimes, no roll. Most players in my experience aren't going to coming up any old reason to recall lore in every situation.

 

[ammulder]

My vote would be to keep the DC secret. Either a fixed secret DC, or an opposed roll where the opposed part is rolled secretly.

If a player rolls a 23 to tell whether the guard is lying, then they get a clear sign. "They guard can't manage to look at you while he speaks, and he's fidgeting on top of that." There's a very small probability of error -- the guard could in fact be the master thief who's intentionally fidgeting and looking shifty -- but you the PC have received a very clear result and should be able to confident in it. The only chance of error is that you've misread the entire situation.

If a player rolls a 6, then I'd normally give a clear sign of inability. "The guard has quite the poker face. You can't read him." Though if I thought the situation called for humor, I might give an obviously incorrect answer that we can all laugh about because we see the "6" on the table.

Other than the slight possibility of it not really being the guard at all, I think the uncertainty comes in for a roll of 14 or 16 or the like... Pretty good, and likely a success, but hard to be certain. "You can't read the guard's face, but he's started sweating. Yeah, it's a warm day and he's wearing chain mail... but you didn't notice him sweating a minute ago." Or even an 11 if he's guarding the stables not the crown jewels. "As the words come out of his mouth, he doesn't even seem to believe them himself. Though... he is pretty dim-witted, and there's ale on his breath. Maybe it's best not to put too much faith in anything he says."

One of the things that irks me in games is when some task should be well within a character's competency but the necessary roll doesn't reflect that. I think a constant chance of failure that you're unable to eliminate would get to be a drag. There should be some things that are certain. (But I agree that should be closer to the exception than the rule.)

 

[iserith]

One of the things that irks me in games is when some task should be well within a character's competency but the necessary roll doesn't reflect that. I think a constant chance of failure that you're unable to eliminate would get to be a drag. There should be some things that are certain. (But I agree that should be closer to the exception than the rule.)

The DMG suggests that a balance between calling for rolls and deciding on success and failure with no roll is the only approach without potential drawbacks. So really, the DM should be deciding that some things are certain when it makes sense and not calling for rolls. (Nor should the players call for rolls, ever. That's just not smart play in this kind of game!)

 

[Saeviomagy]

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. For example, when trying to determine if a prisoner is lying, mechanically represent the fact that even strong indications of honesty/dishonesty might have other explanations. In other words, The player sees the die roll on the table, but the character is still guessing. The goal is to model that.

Proposal:

When using a skill to determine if a character knows something, but that "knowing" it would realistically mean believing, on a success the DM makes an additional secret roll. If this roll produces a 1, the DM gives the player the wrong answer. The die used starts at d4 and goes up 1 step for each 5 points above the DC that was rolled. If the original roll was a natural 20, the DM rolls 2 dice (of the appropriate type) and only lies if both come up 1.

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.

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

Might I suggest instead doing the following:
1. Rolling the check in secret
2. If the check succeeds, give the player the correct information and an impression of how sure they are, based on how much the check succeeded by.
2. If the check fails but the d20 roll is below 5, give no information.
3. If the check fails and the d20 roll is above 5, give out incorrect information and base the confidence on the roll of the d20, with 20 being absolutely certain and 6 being just a hunch.
4. If the players have advantage, pick whichever roll succeeds OR the lowest roll. If they have disadvantage, pick whichever roll fails OR the highest roll.

The end result of this will be:
Experts will tend to have correct information, and will tend to be confident in it's correctness. They will be more confident when the correct information is something easy for them. When they are wrong, they will tend to have no information. They will almost never have incorrect information for an easy task, but they may still fail. They will only ever be totally wrong and absolutely confident in their answer at extremely difficult to impossible checks.

Those not suited to a task and with no training will often be wrong, but for easy information will be uncertain of it. As the difficulty of a task more outpaces their expertise, they will be more and more certain that wrong answers are correct.

Those completely unsuited to a task and with no training will often be wrong, and are more likely to think they are right.

Now, this might all look like a lot of mechanics to deal with, 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.

 

[robus]

This seems dangerous to me. The players rely on the DM to resolve uncertainty. If the DM is unreliable in that function I can't see the game lasting much longer before the players turn in their sheets in frustration.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I don't agree. I'm making a statement about the NPC: The character was successful in his action and it reveals the guard's body language says he's lying. That is a fact earned by a reasonably-stated action declaration and, in this example, a sufficient result on an ability check. I'm not saying "You think he's lying." I'm saying "He's behaving as if he's lying..." or more directly, "He's lying." There will be no uncertainty with regard to this after I have narrated the result of the adventurer's action. The uncertainty (and the tension, depending on the stakes) happens after the action declaration but before the roll.

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.

I think quality definitely plays into the chance of success, but there are different factors that inform quality in my view. I'm not looking for anything technical, just something clearly stated (goal and approach) that is appropriate for the situation. It can't just be any old thing and we let the dice decide. That gets things backwards in my view because we are charged to first judge the plausibility of an action, decree automatic success, failure, or uncertainty, before we ever ask for a die to be picked up. To that end, there is an element of subjective assessment by design. You can limit that with asking for more ability checks; however, the DMG warns against this and, for good reason in my view if you're into "immersion," - because if players figure out that their decisions don't really matter and it's mostly up to the dice, then roleplaying can diminish.

To be clear, my resistance is to trying to create uncertainty after the ability check is resolved, not so much the format of the action declaration. Though questions DO annoy me.

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.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In D&D 5e, there is no such statement to my knowledge.

None that I'm aware of. Quite the contrary, 5e is very clear in it's description of resolution that the DM calls for checks, iff he chooses not to narrate success/failure.

So how I handle checks differs between editions.

While you're free to do that, I don't feel like there's a requirement, just a different emphasis, in either case. Though sticking to the spirit of 'just say yes,' in the one, and 'rulings not rules' in the other is certainly laudable.

Group checks serve mostly the same purpose between editions so far as I can tell.

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

The practical effect of having players establish what their characters are drawing on in order to be given information by the DM is that players will only do that when it makes sense.

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.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Well, I can't tell you your preference is wrong, but for me, basically gaining no benefit for my action declaration and successful skill check would be pretty annoying. I took a risk (however big or small) to end up just as uncertain as when I started. Not a good trade in my view. Now, if I failed that check and the result was the uncertainty remained, I'd be okay with that.

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.

I would tell them the shortest route to the treasure (and have, recently), but only if they've done stuff to earn that information. And usually the shortest route is the most difficult, right? That's the trade-off.

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.)

Like others, TV reality works for me. It's also a game and to risk something and invest in resources and still not remove uncertainty seems like a huge waste to me.

But it does, as I explain above, remove uncertainty. It just doesn't remove all of it.

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.

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.

 

[Guest 6801328]

If a player rolls a 23 to tell whether the guard is lying, then they get a clear sign. "They guard can't manage to look at you while he speaks, and he's fidgeting on top of that." There's a very small probability of error -- the guard could in fact be the master thief who's intentionally fidgeting and looking shifty -- but you the PC have received a very clear result and should be able to confident in it. The only chance of error is that you've misread the entire situation.

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).