D&D 5E Consequences of Failure

[iserith]

Sorry, I don't buy this - assuming the players are paying attention and know your 'tells' (which inevitably becomes the case after playing with a given DM for any length of time) you're outright telling them "here's where the interesting stuff is".

I've noticed that people who say this don't use telegraphing as a technique. But people who do use telegraphing as a technique have a very different experience that refutes this assertion.

So I'm just going to have to say that's not a likely outcome based on my experience.

Here's a huge preference divide between us, I think, in that I don't see "gotchas" as unfair in the least. Sometimes you'll see it coming, sometimes you won't, and most of the time there's a chance of one or the other depending on some dice rolling and greatly influenced by stated approach.

Yes, many DMs don't find "gotchas" to be unfair. I wonder how those numbers line up with players' perception of them particularly when the consequences are not trivial.

Encouraging players to pay attention and DMs to be more dexscriptive - always a good thing! Nothing wrong with SOPs, though - far better than having to go through the whole process every time, and it's only realistic that adventurers, having once been exposed to hidden dangers, are always going to be on the lookout for such.

An SOP is by definition "going through the whole process every time." It's a procedure for dealing with routine situations. The issue is: Do I want my game to be seen as requiring a routine for dealing with exploration challenges? I don't. It gets too stale in my experience.

There are many things that are by default not obvious. Secret doors are one. Motivations and rationales behind NPC (or even PC) actions can be another. Hidden traps are another. Need I go on?

And while those telegraphing clues you give do invite further investigation of those particular areas, the flip side is that the areas without those clues aren't getting the same attention - which realistically they should be.

Stating that there's a secret door on the north wall - obvious. Saying that the NPC wants to kill the king - obvious. Embedding a clue in the environment that may indicate the presence of a secret door, trap, lurking creature, or hidden object - not obvious. Additional exploration is required to see what the clue is telegraphing and the players may or may not engage with it at all.

True, and sometimes this is great! But not every time.

Sometimes there's going to be the deadly trap that has no clue provided as to its existence. Sometimes there's going to be the NPC who lies through his teeth and give the PCs no reason to suspect anything. Sometimes there's going to be the secret door that if left unfound means the whole mission is a failure, and they don't find it. These things would happen now and then in reality, so why not in the game?

Because I'm not engaging in a simulation of unfair reality. I'm presenting a fair game.

 

[Lanefan]

... here are some things that have long bugged me about some of the more traditional ways of rolling dice:

Rolling for things like stealth or forgery before an adversary tries to detect it:

This gives the player too much information about their probable success.

The forgery one is open to debate, but for the stealth one the PC is likely enough to realize she's not being as quiet as she'd like to (for whatever reason) simply by hearing how much noise she's making - before ever reaching a danger point; and can take proactive steps to maybe make herself quieter (and thus give herself another roll).

E.g., in the case of a really low roll, the player now knows they are likely going to fail with that attempt. So you either let them keep trying until they get a roll they like, or you force them to "roleplay pretending to not know they failed", which is not a form of roleplaying I like. Or if they roll high, they proceed with too much confidence, which I think is less fun than a little bit of uncertainty/paranoia.

The roll, for me, doesn't just tell me how well they are actually doing; it tells me how well they think they're doing. This one would be true for the forgery as well: the PC thinks she's done great on a high roll, not knowing she's in fact blown something which will bite her if the reader rolls high on perception later.

Making zero-consequence, "no progress" ability checks, such as "looking for traps" or knowledge checks:

Again, if the player rolls low the only reason to not keep rolling until you roll well, or for everybody in the party to chime in with, "Can I roll, too?" is to arbitrarily disallow it. That feels artificial to me, and it also creates a split between the character's state of mind and the player's state of mind, in the sense that the character thinks they gave it a good shot and is reasonably sure of the result, but the player knows it was just a bad roll. That's something I care about.

On the flip side, if the player rolls a natural 20 they have no doubt about the outcome, but the character might still have doubts. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's no traps...but, you know, I might have missed something." Again, that sort of "being in your character's headspace" is important to me.

You're making a fine argument for having the DM do the rolling and narrating success-failure-uncertainty off the results. Player-side rolling does lead to some problems like you note - secret door searches are the worst for this.

Now, in all these cases the DM could be making secret rolls, but that's also something I find distasteful.

Hmmm...can't help you there.

A totally fair reaction to both of my constraints (shared headspace, no secret rolls) is "Well, if you're going to be so picky no wonder you have problems." But that was exactly my reaction to the requirement about random outcomes in the wedgie scenario: well, if you're going to insist you get a random result, no wonder you can only see one way of resolving it.

The wedgie example might not be the best here, as that particular scene-set is ripe for random (and silly!) results - let the dice fly!

 

[Oofta]

I think "gotchas" is kind of a loose term. Being surprised because your passive perception is too low or you flubbed a roll? Not a gotcha. Don't want to be surprised? Take the Alert feat. Want a better chance to notice a secret door? Increase your perception.

Tell your DM you're investigating statue with a gaping hole for a mouth and the DM tells you that you lose your hand as the stature bites it off because the DM decided you put your hand in without verifying? That's a gotcha, and a Bozo-no-no.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Nice, and all you really meant was that all six open from the left-hand side. I like that.

Now I want to make a scenario just to tell them "You see Six dexter looking sarcophagi" and see how they respond

 

[Lanefan]

So, you could say that telegraphs in video games are used, at least in part, to communicate to the player what is or isn’t important to pay attention to, right? I would argue that this is also a valuable function in D&D. There are a ton of environmental features that get described in a session of D&D, many of which are mostly window dressing. I’m sure we’ve all had that time the players latched on to some odd little detail, convinced themselves it was important, and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to interact with something we really just tossed in there for flavor. Telegraphing helps avoid that.

I see no good reason to avoid this. If the players latch on to a red herring and chase it around all night then so be it - DM the red herring as if it's important until and unless they realize they've gone wrong somewhere, and try something different.

Again, just the sort of thing that would happen in reality.

The video game argument holds no water - video games are generally designed for a different level of attention span than I want at my table.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Now I want to make a scenario just to tell them "You see Six dexter looking sarcophagi" and see how they respond

Serial killer sarcophagi!?! Please let us know how that goes!

 

[Campbell]

A telegraph is not interesting stuff. It is a straight up threat of future danger. It says if you do not address me or fail to address me in a way that removes the danger stuff will happen and you most likely will not like it. It also does not require you to address it or determine how you should address it. I have a lot of experience using these sorts of techniques. Sometimes players choose to ignore the telegraph because they do not want to risk dealing with the situation or because they have other priorities. Sometimes they turn the situation to their advantage perhaps by luring monsters to the trap.

Over all it is difficult to lead players do something in particular when you have no agenda for what you want them to do. I am just presenting a situation that demands their attention if only to decide to ignore it. That too will be meaningful.

In the last game I run of Blades in the Dark the players were on heist with one of their allied crews. As a result of some failed rolls the allied crew was captured. At one point I described an NPC leveling their pistol at the head of the leader of the allied crew. That was the telegraph. They opted to do nothing and make a break for it. I then described the leader of their allied crew getting shot. Let's just say the crews were not allies after that day.

Techniques should be judged on the basis of the play experience they are meant to deliver. It is not a black mark against a given set of techniques that they fail to deliver a play experience they were never designed to deliver.

For instance while things like meaningless checks, fudging dice rolls, and manipulating the setting to achieve certain outcomes are not features I want in any game I play or run it does not mean those techniques have no value. It just means I have zero interest in the play experience they engender.

For my part I do enjoy conflict neutral techniques sometimes, but only in the scope of Moldvay B/X style games where the GM acts as a referee without an agenda for how things should work out.

 

[Lanefan]

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

Three reasons:

One, to potentially reward careful searching and exploration.
Two, to provide a situation where the party could end up realizing they've missed something and either have to re-explore, or return to the adventure later, or call the mission a failure.
Three, for the sheer merry hell of it.

 

[iserith]

A telegraph is not interesting stuff. It is a straight up threat of future danger. It says if you do not address me or fail to address me in a way that removes the danger stuff will happen and you most likely will not like it.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. One can imagine telegraphing the presence of a secret door and the players ignoring it to no ill effect. The purpose for telegraphing it in this case is so that the players have a chance to engage with the clue and figure out it's related to a secret door rather than rely on rote procedure.

 

[Lanefan]

Because there is a line in the DMG in a paragraph explicitly about tasks ordering ale and walking on a floor that are so trivial - thst sentence in that paragraph soecifically calls out failure consequences as needed for there to be a roll.

Those examples are situations where all three of the success condition, the failure condition, and the action(s) required to achieve either are trivial, thus no roll required.

But any uncertain situation where success is significant but failure is trivial (e.g. searching for a secret door), or where success is trivial but failure is significant (e.g. steering a ship such as to miss a reef) requires a roll, I'd say.

Or because in some of these cases, a gm somewhere might allow auto-success on repeated rolla.

That one's on them.