D&D 5E Consequences of Failure

[Oofta]

What this says is that something was really at stake. What's interesting is that this doesn't become apparent until the DM is narrating against the PC, either outright or after a roll. It's obvious to you that narrating humiliation without a roll is bad (I agree), but I'm not as clear why sudden humiliation is okay because you rolled dice? Is a bad rol enough justification to enact humiliation is a situation that was no stakes before the roll?

Also, it appears that stakes are being introduced after the die roll rather than as a preface to the roll. The player has no way to tell that the roll may end up with humiliation because the roll acts as a gate for the DM to narrate consequences however the DM wants, with no previous understanding of the stakes involved.

If you count a super atomic nova wedgie that has absolutely no long or short term ramifications other than a story to tell ... well then anything a PC does could be considered as having ramifications.

It's also true I didn't tell the player exactly what would happen. If their PC doesn't know, they don't know. I don't see why that would be an issue instead of simply being a different style.

You know what? Don't want to play this way? Don't. I've gotten a lot of praise for my DMing style and the games I've run over the years, I'm just relaying what works for me to people that might be interested.

 

[Charlaquin]

Am I missing something? What happened to the idea the the meaningful consequence is success, and that the roll is (mostly) to determine whether that success occurred or not?

Sure, sometime failure has a meaningful consequence too - maybe even more so than success - but I always thought the idea of most of these rolls was to determine the subsequent presence or absence of the success condition, watever it may be.

The consequences for failure thing, in my opinion, is mostly just a useful heuristic to insure you don’t waste time on pointless rolls. And as I’ve said before, I believe that if you limit players to one single attempt on any check, that the one check is a sufficient consequence to satisfy this heuristic. I just don’t like limiting retries in that way. I hate it when I’m a player and a DM does it, so I don’t do it as a DM.

IMO your DM blew the call here.

On all of you failing your perception checkes his next words should have consisted of "OK - still no sign of the symbol - now what do you do?"

The adventure wasn’t built well enough to handle that. He’s pretty new to DMing and he’s running Dragon Heist straight out of the book. Maybe a more experienced would have been able to adjust on the fly, or a better written adventure would have accounted for the possibility of us never finding the Zhentarim hideout, but we didn’t have those things, and not finding the door would have brought the campaign to a screeching halt.

"Character building decisions" implies something that was done at roll-up, long before the current moment of play.

...Yes, that is generally when you do things like choosing Proficiencies.

I'd rather talk about "character playing decisions" - i.e. what, given current situation and knowledge - does the character do now. If that's what you mean by "moment to moment decisions" then OK, those come first. Random comes second; it's a dice-based game and luck must have its say.

That is what I meant by moment to moment decisions, yes. And I believe that the action resolution framework I and others use does put that first in terms of what impacts your success and failure. I also believe that the way 5e’s math works out makes random chance have a greater impact on success and failure than character building decisions like what skills you train in. I would prefer that order be reversed, but it is what it is. My point was that, when people complain about that method favoring “player skill over character skill,” I believe what they’re trying to express is a distaste for the fact that it makes moment to moment decisions more important than character building decisions.

 

[Guest 6801328]

If you count a super atomic nova wedgie that has absolutely no long or short term ramifications other than a story to tell ... well then anything a PC does could be considered as having ramifications.

It's also true I didn't tell the player exactly what would happen. If their PC doesn't know, they don't know. I don't see why that would be an issue instead of simply being a different style.

You know what? Don't want to play this way? Don't. I've gotten a lot of praise for my DMing style and the games I've run over the years, I'm just relaying what works for me to people that might be interested.

You said the target might fly into a rage. Is that not a meaningful consequence?

 

[Guest 6801328]

The consequences for failure thing, in my opinion, is mostly just a useful heuristic to insure you don’t waste time on pointless rolls. And as I’ve said before, I believe that if you limit players to one single attempt on any check, that the one check is a sufficient consequence to satisfy this heuristic. I just don’t like limiting retries in that way. I hate it when I’m a player and a DM does it, so I don’t do it as a DM.


The adventure wasn’t built well enough to handle that. He’s pretty new to DMing and he’s running Dragon Heist straight out of the book. Maybe a more experienced would have been able to adjust on the fly, or a better written adventure would have accounted for the possibility of us never finding the Zhentarim hideout, but we didn’t have those things, and not finding the door would have brought the campaign to a screeching halt.


...Yes, that is generally when you do things like choosing Proficiencies.


That is what I meant by moment to moment decisions, yes. And I believe that the action resolution framework I and others use does put that first in terms of what impacts your success and failure. I also believe that the way 5e’s math works out makes random chance have a greater impact on success and failure than character building decisions like what skills you train in. I would prefer that order be reversed, but it is what it is. My point was that, when people complain about that method favoring “player skill over character skill,” I believe what they’re trying to express is a distaste for the fact that it makes moment to moment decisions more important than character building decisions.

I bow before your powers of clarity.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah, that player would be me most of the time: do something just for the merry hell of it, and see what happens next.

Often when I do this my unspoken (and rather metagame, I'm sorry) goal is to get things focused back on the game because I'm bored with hearing other players discuss food recipes or politics or hockey or whatever.

Yeah, characters doing random things for no particular reason is very common in “f-ing around games.” When there’s no clear motivation or goal, players often have to make their own fun.

 

[Oofta]

You said the target might fly into a rage. Is that not a meaningful consequence?

Yes, my completely off the top of my head writing examples as I went along in theory could have had a consequence of someone getting upset. That doesn't mean Jerry would have been in any danger, just that the target would have been angry. Jerry may have even had a pang of conscious and felt moderately guilty if the player thought it was appropriate.

If you have to stretch the entire scenario to the breaking point to "win" the argument go for it. I just see no way anything remotely like this could have happened with a pure narrative style of play.

 

[Charlaquin]

Ooh, can I try? So Jerry is at a bar having drinks with the buddies when someone says he wouldn't dare give a random person a wedgie. Jerry, being the fun loving type decides they will.

As a DM I did not see this coming, I have no plans for it, I'm honestly not sure what to do here. So I let D20s decide. Random target? Check. Low number means someone you don't want to wedgie. Stealth check is probably appropriate to get close along with either sleight of hand for a stealth wedgie or athletics for atomic.

Rolls are made: random target 1. Uh Oh. Hope your stealth roll is good. Stealth and athletics? Both poor. Oops. Now comes the reaction - again low is bad (target flies into a rage).

Reaction check is 20. Phew. The target laughs and gets a 20 on an athletics check to get a super atomic nova wedgie on poor Jerry.

Or some variation therein. There are many, many times when I'm improvising along with letting the dice help set the direction, often in a direction I wouldn't have thought of. Besides, if this were all just narrated I see no way any of this could have happened. Jerry's player may even have been upset because I just decided the target would be the wedgie champion of the entire realms. But now? It's a story we'll talk about later when reminiscing.

While this specific scenario has never happened, similar scenarios have. I also have a lot of scenarios where no dice are rolled.

But see, this added context has now resulted in giving a goal to the wedgie attempt - originally proposed as an example of a random act with no particular goal. We’ve gone from “I just go out and wedgie a random townsperson to see what happens” (by the way, “see what happens” is also a goal) to “I go try and give a random person a wedgie to prove to my drinking buddies I’ve got the stones for it.” That goal may be unspoken, but it’s very clear.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I

Yes, my completely off the top of my head writing examples as I went along in theory could have had a consequence of someone getting upset. That doesn't mean Jerry would have been in any danger, just that the target would have been angry. Jerry may have even had a pang of conscious and felt moderately guilty if the player thought it was appropriate.

Ok. I thought you meant it mattered, like it might turn into a real combat or something.

But since flying into a rage would have simply been descriptive, I really don’t see why you feel the need to roll for it.

If you have to stretch the entire scenario to the breaking point to "win" the argument go for it. I just see no way anything remotely like this could have happened with a pure narrative style of play.

Hmm. Well, I do. Quite easily.

As I mentioned upthread, one of the most colorful, descriptive combats I’ve seen occurred when I required some teenagers to resolve their pvp through narration. They took HP loss and everything.

Again, though, that doesn’t mean I think you are wrong for wanting to use the dice. I just don’t see a persuasive argument articulated for why these scenes couldn’t happen without dice.

 

[Charlaquin]

Also, do people in quasi-medieval fantasy worlds wear underwear?

Undergarments were used in the ancient world. They didn’t really resemble our modern idea of underwear all that closely, but I am also a fan of the “what's said at the table is an abstraction of what’s said in the fiction.” When players make references to modern technology or pop culture or whatever, I just roll with it under the assumption that the character’s are talking about contemporary technology and culture, and that the modern references are a stand-in to better reflect the meaning behind those references to our modern experiences. Like Queen playing at the jousting tournament in Knight’s Tale, obviously they wouldn’t be listening to Queen, but Queen communicates the feel of a sporting event to us 21st century people better than more period appropriate music would.

Or for the lierafiles, like how Bilbo Baggins’ name is canonically Bilba Labingi, but Tolkien transliterates it to Bilbo Baggins because English speakers have different associations with vowel sounds than native speakers of his constructed languages would.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Undergarments were used in the ancient world. They didn’t really resemble our modern idea of underwear all that closely, but I am also a fan of the “what's said at the table is an abstraction of what’s said in the fiction.” When players make references to modern technology or pop culture or whatever, I just roll with it under the assumption that the character’s are talking about contemporary technology and culture, and that the modern references are a stand-in to better reflect the meaning behind those references to our modern experiences. Like Queen playing at the jousting tournament in Knight’s Tale, obviously they wouldn’t be listening to Queen, but Queen communicates the feel of a sporting event to us 21st century people better than more period appropriate music would.

Or for the lierafiles, like how Bilbo Baggins’ name is canonically Bilba Labingi, but Tolkien transliterates it to Bilbo Baggins because English speakers have different associations with vowel sounds than native speakers of his constructed languages would.

I was kinda sorta trying to insert some much-needed levity.