D&D 5E Players Self-Assigning Rolls

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm impressed.When I give up on a thread, I can't be bothered to post to it.

I do that sometimes too but sometimes a thread is worth just skipping the middle chunk

 

[GMforPowergamers]

It flows just as easily as my example in my view. But you had to assume what the player wanted to do - open the unlocked door.

That's okay with you. It's not okay with me. That it's okay with you is okay with me. We don't play D&D together after all. (Also okay.)

Yes in everyday life we all make assumptions, and it's ok to even be wrong from time to time, don't worry the person will correct you. However since most of the game is about exploration of dungions, and the players are already in one room I can feel pretty confident in me telling if they want to go to the next or not...

 

[iserith]

Yes in everyday life we all make assumptions, and it's ok to even be wrong from time to time, don't worry the person will correct you. However since most of the game is about exploration of dungions, and the players are already in one room I can feel pretty confident in me telling if they want to go to the next or not...

Sure. It just seems like that correction of a bad assumption adds on some unnecessary time to the interaction. Doesn't flow as easy, if you know what I mean. So I'm going to avoid that.

 

[Sunseeker]

It's not snark. My example wasn't a question or a round about way of asking anything. It was what the player is expected to do in the basic conversation of the game.

"Sometimes, resolving a task is easy. If an adventurer wants to walk across a room and open a door, the DM might just say that the door opens and describe what lies beyond. But the door might be locked, the floor might hide a deadly trap, or some other circumstance might make it challenging for an adventurer to complete a task. In those cases, the DM decides what happens, often relying on a roll of a die to determine the results of an action."

^ Also not snark.

Bolded points for emphasis.

Which is exactly what @GMforPowergamers​ is doing.

All the rule you quoted implies is that the character is in charge of their character's actions. I'm not here to beg the DM to allow me to play. I'm perfectly comfortable stating exactly what I'm doing and have no intentions of ever asking the DM if I may do something. It's how you make the game move forward and that's how I enjoy playing. The only thing I've been arguing this entire thread is that statement of action does not necessarily need to be formulated has a statement and that the onus is on the DM to do a bit of translating sometimes.

Saying "I want to do X..." is the same as saying "May I do X..." It's a question because it implies uncertainty about the players ability to take their stated action. The ability to do X or not do X is determined by your character's skills/feats/features/current HP/etc... You don't have to ask the DM to swing your sword just like you don't have to ask the DM to jiggle the doorknob. The doorknob exists, your character has functional limbs, approaching the door and jiggling the handle is fully within the domain of player control and the players ought to act like it. If we're talking about something outside the scope of the character sheet, that is a good place to ask a question. IE: "I want to convert all my remaining spell slots into raw magical energy in an attempt to power this magic device we found."

Now there may be an invisible barrier between the character and the door, and the door may be trapped or there may be other traps or dangers between the player and the door. But the player is fully within their right to say "I walk over to the door and jiggle the handle to see if it is locked." It is the DM's domain to inform them that, with their attention focused on the door, they failed to notice the small rune on the ground along their path, which promptly opens up a pit-trap when passed over, so please make a Reflex Save.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Sure. It just seems like that correction of a bad assumption adds on some unnecessary time to the interaction. Doesn't flow as easy, if you know what I mean. So I'm going to avoid that.

of course a BAD assumption adds unnecessary time, just like policeing phraseing does... so we all try to make GOOD assumptions and at the same time work with each other when we do or don't

 

[Lanefan]

Lanefan that lsst conclusion about "no way of knowing" depends a lot on what someone interprets the roll as.

In most cases when i have say been going thru in a closet, i can come away with a sense of how sure am i that i got into everything or not. Sometimes i looked into everything, sometimes not so much.

Well, if it's your own closet you already have (in theory!) half a clue as to what's in there.

But if it's someone else's closet that you've never looked into before, did you not find a secret compartment in its back wall because there isn't one or because there is and you missed it?

So, as i staed earlier, if i was narrating a failed search roll with a low roll i would describe it with a lot of uncertainty - soaces seemed odd but you could not get to, broken and suspicious edges, parts which slide and stick etc. If someone failed to find something on a high roll, i would describe it with lots of references indicating certainty.

It realky comes down to what one wants to have that YUGE span of 1-20 is representing as to what he believes they player should or should not get from knowing it or not.

To me a factor that big in every task attempted (vs auto fail or auto succes) is not serving the game well as a total unknown or inexplicable trump factor.

I think it serves the game just fine, in that it's realistic. A character looking at a blank wall trying to find a secret door doesn't even know if one is present, never mind exactly where it is.

What you're doing is taking three possible outcomes...

* Success (good quality of execution)
* Failure due to not finding anything even though there is in fact something hidden there (poor quality of execution)
* Failure because there is nothing there to find (quality of execution is irrelevant)

...and intentionally eliminating the middle option from play, leaving only a binary succeed-fail. How does this serve the game at all?

Lanefan

 

[iserith]

Bolded points for emphasis.

Which is exactly what @GMforPowergamers​ is doing.

Except he's doing it before the player says what he or she wants to do. [MENTION=6777696]redrick[/MENTION] pointed this out nicely.

Fine, of course, if he and his players dig it. Not fine for others.

All the rule you quoted implies is that the character is in charge of their character's actions. I'm not here to beg the DM to allow me to play. I'm perfectly comfortable stating exactly what I'm doing and have no intentions of ever asking the DM if I may do something. It's how you make the game move forward and that's how I enjoy playing. The only thing I've been arguing this entire thread is that statement of action does not necessarily need to be formulated has a statement and that the onus is on the DM to do a bit of translating sometimes.

It seems like quite a leap to say that describing what you want to do is somehow "begging the DM to allow you to play."

I've also haven't said that it necessarily must be formulated as a statement. But at my table, the preference is to do so. My quoting of the rules is to show where I get such crazy ideas.

Saying "I want to do X..." is the same as saying "May I do X..." It's a question because it implies uncertainty about the players ability to take their stated action. The ability to do X or not do X is determined by your character's skills/feats/features/current HP/etc... You don't have to ask the DM to swing your sword just like you don't have to ask the DM to jiggle the doorknob. The doorknob exists, your character has functional limbs, approaching the door and jiggling the handle is fully within the domain of player control and the players ought to act like it. If we're talking about something outside the scope of the character sheet, that is a good place to ask a question. IE: "I want to convert all my remaining spell slots into raw magical energy in an attempt to power this magic device we found."

The description of the environment reasonably frames the character's ability to take the action the player describes as wanting to do. The DM then narrates the result of the adventurer's action. Whether or not mechanics come into play to arrive at a result is up to the DM.

Now there may be an invisible barrier between the character and the door, and the door may be trapped or there may be other traps or dangers between the player and the door. But the player is fully within their right to say "I walk over to the door and jiggle the handle to see if it is locked." It is the DM's domain to inform them that, with their attention focused on the door, they failed to notice the small rune on the ground along their path, which promptly opens up a pit-trap when passed over, so please make a Reflex Save.

Yes, "I walk over to the door and jiggle the handle to see if it's locked..." is a description of a goal and approach - what the player wants to do. The rest is the DM narrating the result of the adventurer's action.

 

[DragonKnight88]

It’s seems like some of the people in this thread are just trying to troll each other. The conversation has taken an enormous leap away from the original topic. If your players are always in control of their actions. Then a player rolling a skill before, after , or during a description is a statement of their action. If you as the DM decide to penalize them because they didn’t declare their actions in a multiple option scenarios then I deem that as petty. I have been playing for years and honestly this never came up in our games. I just recently started DMing again for my current group. My players always describe what they are doing. But we also use some common sense.

If my player asks if a door is unlocked I tell them yes or no. They almost always state, okay I’m opening the door. This seems like such a trivial thing to argue about. A number of posters seem to just try to bait the others or belittle others methods. I mean the original question was in regards to how to handle players who self assign a roll. I have two players in my group who are skill monkeys. One of them is playing a rogue with just about every skill in the book. As such when I describe a room and they just roll a skill and say I’m using this skill, I’ll ask them what the roll was, check my notes and see if that gets them something. I mean it’s a game, the point is to have fun.

 

[iserith]

of course a BAD assumption adds unnecessary time, just like policeing phraseing does...

Except that, as several people have already told you, this isn't a problem once the group has adjusted to the approach.

 

[Lanefan]

As do I. I just do it by making failure cost something - usually time, which means more risk of random encounters - or if there is no time pressure, then by allowing the player to succeed.

There is no failure if they succeed.

I don’t allow endless retries. I attempt to insure that retries carry a risk or expend a resource, and if circumstances don’t allow for that, I skip the roll and montage over the process. That said, what determines success or failure in a no-pressure situation is your choices. If you approach something in a way that has a realistic chance of succeeding and no pressure if you don’t succeed quickly, then yeah, of course random chance doesn’t enter the equation. Repetition will eventually brute force through those random factors, so limiting a player by saying “that unlucky roll was the best you could do” is artificial. I could have done better if I’d gotten luckier, and in-Universe there’s nothing that should be preventing me from trying until I get lucker.

Or it means you're simply confounded by whatever it is you're dealing with.

How many times, for example, have you been looking for something in your house and been unable to find it, only to have someone else walk in and point right to it sitting there in plain sight?

Yep, that’s the usual counter-argument for my open-rolls approach. Frankly, I don’t really care about that. If I called for a dice roll, you already know that means I thought your approach had a reasonable chance of succeeding in achieving your goal, a reasonable chance of failing to achieve your goal, and a cost or consequence for failing to achieve your goal. What more is really gained or lost by knowing you rolled low? If you’re rolling at all you already know the DC is low enough you can succeed, but you risk something by trying. Depending on the context, you have a pretty good chance of knowing what the risk is. At that point, all thats seeing your roll result does is gives you an idea how well your character feels they did on that attempt, which helps you decide if you want to risk trying the same thing again, going for a different approach, or moving on. And I’m fine with that. For me, the gameplay experience this style of action resolution creates is well worth the tradeoff of giving the players a bit of out of character information they can use to inform their decisions. Informed decisions with meaningful consequences are, for me, what makes D&D worth playing.

Information has value and should not be given away cheaply.

Does this mean that if in fact there's nothing there (meaning success is impossible) you don't even call for a roll? There's still uncertainty on the player side...and it should be maintained where possible.

I've had players get it stuck in their heads that dammit, there's a secret door in that wall and we're gonna find it whatever it takes. Never was any door, but they'd convinced themselves there was and spent ages looking for it. Your methods would never allow this to happen...again, unrealistic from the characters' point of view.