Why do you insist on assuming that by asking for perception they are not listening at the door, peering through the keyhole, and smelling for the odor of blood and iron?
I don’t. I insist on
not assuming the characters are doing things the players haven’t told me they are doing. If they want to listen at the door, peer through the keyhole, abs smell for anything unusual, they should tell me that.
The approach of asking for perception is only less effective if you refuse to acknowledge what the character would be doing. Rolling perception isn't gibberish that needs decoding. There are clear ideas of what that means.
It’s not gibberish that needs decoding, it’s incomplete information. If all you tell me is that you “make a Perception check”, that does not tell me what you wish to accomplish or how. That only tells me that you think your proficiency in Perception is relevant in this situation. Duly noted, but I am not a mind reader, nor am I interested in trying to guess what you want to accomplish that you think your Perception proficiency might help you with in this situation, or how you plan to go about it. Now, I could guess. Given that you’re at a door and you think your Perception is relevant, I can assume you want to know if it’s safe to open the door and you plan to use your senses to try to determine if it is so, maybe by listening, smelling, touching, or tasting. I can probably guess that you don’t plan to lick the door. But do you touch it? Assuming you do opens me up to “but I didn’t say I was touching it!” or touching it springs a trap, and assuming you don’t opens me up to “but I didn’t say I wasn’t touching it!” if you miss information that you would have needed to touch the door to uncover. Besides that, it is not my place to say what your character does. If you want to look through the keyhole, tell me. If you want to touch the door, tell me. I will not make assumptions about what your character is doing. It’s not my role as DM, and overstepping my role can lead to problems.
Apologies, typing quickly and I forgot a section. This entire example was based off this argument that failing a roll should be worse than not attempting the roll in the first place.
So I should have added "add they fail the roll" to the part about rolling perception. That is my error.
It’s cool.
And from what I was given to understand in [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION] 's post, you are wrong. That is not enough of a consequence to call for roll. If failing the roll is no worse than not rolling, you should not call for a roll.
I disagree that it’s not a consequence. If you don’t listen at a door, you don’t know if there is anything on the other side. If you do listen, and you hear nothing, you now know that there is nothing making noise on the other side. You have gained information which may lead you to mistakenly believe there is nothing on the other side. Now, I’ll leave that up to the players to decide for their own characters, but personally I consider that a consequence. Something has changed as a result of the attempt failing, and that change is for the worse. Obviously other DMs are going to have different thresholds for what they consider a meaningful consequence.
Most players are smart enough to consider silent monsters, considering there are a large number of them in DnD. So, failing to hear anything does not mean they will feel safe.
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, that’s not for me to decide.
Also, you have cut your players options in less than half. By having them say they listen at the door, you are only considering what they may hear.
They will have to give you an entirely separate action and resolution for if they see anything by looking through the keyhole.
And then another for feeling the door to see if there is a temperature differential. Or whatever else they may try.
Is there something wrong with resolving those actions sequentially?
So, who says they couldn't mitigate the risk with guidance and the like anyways?
Sure they could. In my experience, however, they don’t tend to. Before I adopted the goal and approach style, players only ever spent Inspiration on death saving throws, and they either never used guidance and/or worked together, or they did so on every roll. With the goal and approach style, players have enough information to consider whether or not to use those resources, and do so when they feel it is appropriate.
Who says they "have no choice" especially since they are asking to roll. Who says they can't try other approaches to give them better chances?
You make assumption at your own risk.
So first off, it seems I have misconstrued the way you handle checks, and for that I apologize. There was someone I was discussing this subject with who earlier said something along the lines of “if you try to pick the lock it’s a thieves tools check, if you try to freeze the vials with Magic it’s an Arcana check, if you try to break the chest open, it’s an Athletics check,” essentially suggesting that in the example given, a check had to be made for the trapped chest to be open, and that different approaches would only affect what skill was used. My mistake for conflating that argument with yours. That said, if you don’t tell your players the DC of the check and the consequences for failing, how do you expect them to know if a different approach might have better chances? If all you say is “make a Perception check,” without telling them the DC or what happens if they fail, do you honestly expect them to say, “wait, nevermind, I want to try something else”? Worse, if
they say “I make a Perception check. 14.” they’re
deffinitely not weighing the risks - they can’t even know whether or not there are risks, let alone what the risks are or if another approach might be less risky.
Except in the example you gave... you just did. You callled for a roll where the only consequence of failure was that they did not hear anything. That is not a direct consequence in the way they were being discussed earlier. That is simply not knowing, and defaulting to the state you were in before the check was wrong, according to the arguments I've been responding to.
Again, different DMs will have different standards for what they consider a meaningful consequence, but personally I consider “I have listened and heard nothing” to be worse than “I have not listened.” That’s a meaningful change in circumstances, for the worse if there is something they might have heard but didn’t.
Why would players not be allowed to know something if they have the background to know of it?
Why would players know something that is obscure and took your BBEG 30 years of searching to uncover?
Exactly. So why would you leave whether or not they know either of those things up to a dice roll?
I was responding to the idea that simply "have them give a reasonable answer to why they know it" is fundamentally flawed. Reasonable answers are easy to come up with. Which means a clever player could position their character to "reasonably" know everything.
There are absolutely things that it is not reasonable to know. Sorry, the Raven Queen’s mortal name has been erased from history, you’re not going to come up with a reasonable explanation of how you know it. On the other hand, there are many things that it is perfectly reasonable for your character to know, and I’m not going to say you should have to roll a die to see if you know them. Either it’s something that makes sense for you to know, in which case why allow for the possibility of failing to know it, or it’s something that doesn’t make sense for you to know, in which case why allow for the possibility for you to know it?
Why do you assume that I am adding uncertainty?
Why is my thinking that a locked door might require a lockpicking check mean that I am going to allow shouting to work or knock to not work?
If an approach is certain to work, then it is certain to work. Whether I imagined lockpicking as their answer or not.
Yes, clearly.
Again, sorry, I mistook you for someone else I was having a similar discussion with upthread.
Did I ever say that I didn't? But most skill checks would require rolling at some point. If they don't, why are we talking about skill rolls?
The statement “Most skill checks would require rolling at some point” speaks to a fundamental difference in the way you and I view skill checks. In my view, all skill checks require a roll, but not all actions require skill checks to resolve. Skill checks aren’t things that are out there in the wild, waiting to be overcome with a high enough roll or bypassed with a clever alternative. They are a means of resolving actions with uncertain outcomes.
Because I wasn't responding to the wiping of the handle. I was specifically, in my original post, responding to the poor handling of "You fail" given by the GM.
I was offering an alternative to the GM's narration of failure.
But you can’t just isolate the resolution from the action like that. You’re arguing that the DM should have narrated the failure differently, but there shouldn’t have been a failure to narrate in the first place. In order for there to be a failure there needs to be a check, and in order for there to be a check there needs to be an action with an uncertain outcome, which there was not in the example. That was the point of the example - to illustrate the absurdity of calling for checks without taking into account the player’s goal and approach.
But, wiping the handle does not reveal the blade trap.
See, you are limiting the players to only using one method. They have to individually ask each different approach, and then you may or may not call for a check on any one of them.
Ok, setting aside the fact that there was no blade trap in the poisoned handle example, if there is a blade trap, it should be Telegraphed so that the players know to look for it, otherwise it’s just a gotcha. I fail to see the problem with working through a series of actions to examine a door, and calling for rolls when there is uncertainty in the outcome. Sounds like the game working as intended to me.
Okay, so I'm only going to respond to this once.
It wasn't my example. It was Elfcrusher's I believe and fully called out to be overly sarcastic.
I never called for any check, I even said that wiping the handle would have auto-succeeded, which is why I was ignoring the wiping the handle because it made it an unassailable event.
The only thing I did to get this pile on was that I thought the way the DM narrated the failure was poor (You failed, take poison damage) and that I would have approached that narration differently, if we had agreed a roll was needed.
So, I have nothing to defend here, since you are making false accusations of me.
This is a very strange hill to die on. The Example was a case of illustrative hyperbole, being used to show the kind of scenario that can happen when DMs put the cart before the horse. It’s not even that absurd of an example, I have literally seen such things happen in game, where a player describes an action that should not have a reasonable chance of failing, the DM called for a roll, the player rolled poorly, and the DM narrated the player doing something stupid like tripping to account for the failure the dice said occurred. You cannot say how the DM “should have narrated the failure” without implicitly validating the DM’s decision to call for a roll. It makes no sense to ignore the player’s action and say what the DM should have done “if we all agree a roll was needed” because the point of the example was to present a scenario where we could all agree that a roll wasn’t needed and shouldn’t have been called for.
