D&D 5E Consequences of Failure

[iserith]

Might turn that sort of thing into recon/research/ investigation. You don’t recall any lore - you have to go find something out.

Right. Downtime will be more of a thing in this campaign and Research or Carousing can turn up info. It's just "what info?" This is what I have to examine to make sure these options are actually useful. I won't have canon and will be making stuff up as we go, often just building on what players may sometimes assume to be true. So I have to weigh that as just a way to verify assumptions so players can count on them or... I don't know, something. Probably it will have a lot to do with uncovering little known routes and dungeon details. Fodder for another day. Still another three months to go on my current campaign.

 

[Campbell]

Telegraphing is a way to tell players what is at stake in the situation. It makes the consequences clear so you do not need to make up consequences on a failed result. It should be obvious what happens if they fail to overcome the adversity before them or do not engage with it.

Think of a telegraph as a threat that you intend to make good on. This creates an environment where the GM does not need to pull punches. It actually pressures the GM to follow through with their threats because it becomes blatantly obvious when you are pulling your punches.

Apocalypse World calls these soft moves and hard moves. A soft move implies what may happen. A hard move means there is an irrevocable change to the fiction. You use soft moves to set the scene and show players what may happen. You go to hard moves when they have either acted or failed to act to show the repercussions of what they did - both positive and negative. Hard moves do not necessarily have to be bad things.

I would not use telegraphing for conflict neutral dungeon exploration. At the very least any sort of telegraphing would be at a higher level like "There are a lot of kobolds - Expect traps". I think the sort of exploration rules seen in B/X or Pathfinder 2 are better for that. I think largely when you go from just approach to goal and approach it is important for the changes in the fiction to reflect on the goal. Otherwise you really do not care about what the goal is. It's not really an input into resolution. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where we deeply care about what the character wants that is conflict neutral. Just by going there, inside their head, conflict is bound to arise naturally.

 

[Charlaquin]

To me, the difference in those two statements is that one is stating an approach to a goal and the other is asking to make an ability check to achieve a result. That's not a meaningful difference to some, but it wouldn't be appropriate at my table. After all, an ability check is not an action. Plus the method I recommend has some additional benefits as previously noted.

Yeah, I get that for sure. The difference between an action and an ability check is not lost on me, it’s just that in this situation the functional difference seems minimal to me. There are definitely some advantages to phrasing lore recall in action form - as mentioned, it reveals character background details in a fairly organic way. It also gives the DM something to adjudicate, as opposed to just approving or disapproving a request to make a check. But I still dislike it for the same reasons I dislike players asking for checks. It doesn’t feel like the character is actually doing anything. To me, a player describing an act of recollection and a player asking to make a knowledge check come from the same place - either I haven’t sufficiently described something in the environment and they want more information about it, or they think they know something out of character and want permission to act on that knowledge. They’ve just found a way to word that request that makes it superficially resemble the declaration of an action.

At least, that’s how it feels to me. Clearly it works well in your games, and that’s awesome. Just wouldn’t be my choice.

 

[5ekyu]

I always assumed telegraphs in video games were because of limits of the genre. Both fidelity and distinguishing between "real" and "background" objects. The visual fidelity of games still doesn't match the real world, a lot of what you see in video games can't be interacted with.

That and it's sheer amount of information that is thrown at a player. In a D&D game you may have a handful of hidden door, in a video you can have several objects that may be important per minute.

I assumed its because moving cursors around looking for a blip was boring.

Consider tho iirc BG2. If you had a thief or similar type with detect traps, you had the ability for trapped ateas to spawn red aura. If your character did not, then most all of the time you did not get that.

Sometimes hazards and secret stuff were obvious before the risk/observation. Sometimes they took certain passive abilities. Sometimes they took active abilities like interaction with NPCs or items prior or before.

If i want to look to video games that spotlight kinds of things i look for, thats one.

That said, it also had "tab to get all the blue auras" and that is not.

 

[iserith]

It doesn’t feel like the character is actually doing anything.

I mean, it's certainly not the same as walking a tightrope to get from one building to another or scurrying from shadow to shadow as quietly as possible to surprise an enemy. But it's something a character is doing - trying to draw upon an experience to recall specific, useful lore. It's just not physical and thus less obvious.

Going back to the original post and out of curiosity, do you think your objection might be rooted in not seeing a meaningful consequence for failure and not so much in the character "doing something?"

To me, a player describing an act of recollection and a player asking to make a knowledge check come from the same place - either I haven’t sufficiently described something in the environment and they want more information about it, or they think they know something out of character and want permission to act on that knowledge. They’ve just found a way to word that request that makes it superficially resemble the declaration of an action.

Those are reasonable concerns to have in my opinion as to why a player might want to have the character recall lore. "Do I know anything about...?" is often either permission-seeking to take an action or a failure on the part of the DM to provide enough context to act meaningfully. When I play in other people's games, that's usually what is happening. The DM's ability to describe the environment or certain table conventions encourages this result. A frequent complaint of players who play in my games who then go on to play in other people's games is "OMG, the other players are asking so many questions!" It's very noticeable.

Generally speaking, in my games, it's an attempt to verify an assumption the player has. A player might know that flumphs are vulnerable to psychic damage and this thing before them looks like a flumph, but dangit, that wily iserith sometimes changes monsters or maybe this one with the magical beret on is actually immune to psychic damage. Or they're looking at what I've described (telegraphed) and have a theory, but want to firm things up before acting. So in either case an attempt to recall lore or to make a deduction might help them. And usually they just succeed because there is often no meaningful consequence for failure. But sometimes there might be and so they roll.

EDIT: Changed "more" to "less" obvious.

 

[Oofta]

In my own games sometimes I broadcast, sometimes I don't. Sometimes broadcasting is direct, sometimes it's just a general "you know you're going into a dangerous area". If I am broadcasting, I try to make it really obvious.

If I think Joe the guard is bad at lying, I'll ham it up to the point where everybody at the table knows he's lying.

I wasn't asking if you agree that it's a problem.

I was only asking if you agree/acknowledge/understand (take your pick)...

1. That there are implications for rolling dice in the absence of negative consequences for failure.
2. That the consequence of "only one person gets to roll, once" is different from in-game, fictional consequences.
3. That, while you may not care about any of those implications or feel they adversely affect your game, they exist, and they may conflict with valid stylist preferences held by others.

In other words, that I'm not just making $%@# up in order to be a jerk.

If you're still not clear on why that's true, and you believe it may be true, I'm happy to try to spell it out again.

Depends on what you mean by negative consequences of failure. I think that can mean simply not progressing.

I assumed its because moving cursors around looking for a blip was boring.

Consider tho iirc BG2. If you had a thief or similar type with detect traps, you had the ability for trapped ateas to spawn red aura. If your character did not, then most all of the time you did not get that.

Sometimes hazards and secret stuff were obvious before the risk/observation. Sometimes they took certain passive abilities. Sometimes they took active abilities like interaction with NPCs or items prior or before.

If i want to look to video games that spotlight kinds of things i look for, thats one.

That said, it also had "tab to get all the blue auras" and that is not.

Yep. If you moved slowly enough, you'd pretty much always detect the trap with a rogue in the party at lower levels. Maybe that's where I got the idea of tying speed with passive perception checks.

 

[5ekyu]

Some of that is definitely true wrt the limits of the medium.

But some of it is inherent in the gameplay experience. You can’t win at PunchOut without reading telegraphed attacks.

But let’s go further. What’s the distinction between a telegraph and a rumor of a dungeon with a treasure and a lethal guardian overheard at the local tavern?

How about the NPC in Legend of Zelda who warns you “Dodongo hates smoke”? Or the villagers in Ravenloft who fear “the devil”? That’s all telegraphs too. Some of them are immediate, some of them are more remote - all of them inform the players of something coming.

At this point the term telegraph is being stretched so far as to be meaningless.

That has come to this point before in other threads, maybe this one even.

I look at it this way.

Any scene with an obstacle that "anyone" can overcome with no reference to the character in my games is not gonna be important. Its not gonna be one that eats up our valuable screen time.

So, a "secret door" thats telegraphed in its scene wont be that intrinsically important. The players might be able to use it in ways that help - maybe its a good spot to rest - but its not that big a feature.

Its scenery and so has import by what it reveals and how you use it.

The notion some have expressed that the finding or missing is no fun and the key fun is what happens once they find it - that to me is amazingly limited and hits a few of my peeves. So i dont use that in my games. I rarely play in games where thats the expectation.

But thats me.

 

[Krachek]

What is the purpose of placing secret things that players won’t find and sometime won’t even have a clue of their existence?

 

[robus]

Essentially, I want to give consistent signals so the players learn. In my game, mimics breathe, so the cleric (trained in medicine) often checks objects for signs of breathing. He’s learned what the telegraph means and can capitalize on that when adventuring.

Just had a mimic in my game and I'm curious as to how you telegraph its presence? The mimic was in a crypt full of sarcophagi and was mimic-ing one in order to guard a secret door. Given that mimic's are indistinguishable when immobile what would have been a good way to alert the PCs to the threat? They'd already encountered some animated armor so knew the crypt was dangerous, but this one definitely felt like a bit of a "gotcha" when it suddenly pounced.

 

[Oofta]

What is the purpose of placing secret things that players won’t find and sometime won’t even have a clue of their existence?

I wouldn't say "won't find", rather "may not find". If a secret is critical, I don't make it secret.

But a secret passage that they may find that the murderer used to get away? Sure. If they find it on the first pass the investigation bypasses some other clues. If they miss it, they'll find it later.