D&D 5E Consequences of Failure

[5ekyu]

I just thought of a great way to get players to volunteer more information on their own without me coaxing them.

Player, I investigate the statute.
DM: (Assume the least actionable form of investigation possible). By looking at it from 10 ft away it looks like a statue to you.
Player: I get right up to it and look it over
DM: Give me an investigation check
Player: rolls a 15
DM: you notice that part of the inside mouth doesn't fully touch the outside rim. It looks like this statue is possible made of two different pieces
Player: I stick the end of my javelin in the statue to see if I can pry it apart

Maybe the problem of not good enough player descriptions takes care of itself if you just assume the player does the least amount of work possible when it comes to their actions

See this kinda gets at the heart of it to me. There are posts way back in this or the other recent threads to this point.

The problem with the "i check for traps" followed by the "lose hand" is the Gm jumping all the way past "ooops" without that being an understood thing at that table.

often it seems these "problems" that are so horrendous we need to overhaul resolution and scenes are examples of two strangers sitting down for the first time ever and where the first case is a "well past ooops" moment.

A basic simple concept for me that i started as far back as defore there were "e" attached to AD&D was to never have the first narrative past "ooops" be an actual "ooops".

So, the first, second, third or so on time someone "checks for traps" in a campaign, i give them good solid narrative examples of how both success and fails will be described. This is not "just in a dungeon" but in general across quite a few. We establish how things can play out so that we are using the same language.

So maybe one time they fail a roll and the narration goes farther into touching and they find out there was some dark smudge that smells bad but it wasn't toxic "now." maybe another time they make the roll and see signs of dead insects in a way that makes them stop before touching... spotting some oily paste that they almost missed. After those and a few more times, especially if they see that they can say "only by looking" etc they stop short of the full monty (both good and bad) but that basically it is still gonna come down to the following - is there something they can detect before it goes off or not and that is determined by their skill vs the challenge?

NOTE - the contact touchy stuff is to me a bad example - contact poisons get thrown in really stupid ways IMO - but its such an easy one to use to illustrate the issue. i cant think of the last time i had a contact poison on door or chest kind of situation in an actual game.

But, as a general broad guideline for play, well before a "well past ooops" comes up in my game, the "scope" of actions involved with "check for..." has been shown in play multiple times already, so there is no room for the sudden shock at "but wait i didn't say..." confusion.

 

[Ristamar]

It'd be interesting (and likely more revelatory) to see a "put up or shut up" spinoff thread in which each DM records and posts one of their own sessions that is representative of their play style.

 

[Oofta]

It'd be interesting (and likely more revelatory) to see a "put up or shut up" spinoff thread in which each DM records and posts one of their own sessions that is representative of their play style.

You can read my version of a sample scenario here.

EDIT: This was just one quick scenario that happened recently. It would be interesting to come up with a few others; I don't see explaining how every scenario in a game played out. It would be ... a lot.

 

[Charlaquin]

It'd be interesting (and likely more revelatory) to see a "put up or shut up" spinoff thread in which each DM records and posts one of their own sessions that is representative of their play style.

If I recall correctly, Iserith (or maybe it was Bawylie) has done at least Actual Play with the specific goal of teaching their DMing technique, possibly more.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Whats the purpose of calling something secret if the character will find it?

My favorite part of DMing is telling them, after the session is over, all the magic items that were hidden behind the secret doors they didn't find.

 

[Yardiff]

My favorite part of DMing is telling them, after the session is over, all the magic items that were hidden behind the secret doors they didn't find.

Was this attempt at being funny?

 

[Charlaquin]

Was this attempt at being funny?

It was pretty funny.

 

[Yardiff]

It was pretty funny.

I didn't find it funny, more like poor taste then humor.

 

[Guest 6801328]

It'd be interesting (and likely more revelatory) to see a "put up or shut up" spinoff thread in which each DM records and posts one of their own sessions that is representative of their play style.

I posted this in another thread, but can't remember where, so I'll have to reconstruct it.

WARNING: DRAGON HEIST SPOILERS

First, in the basement Trollskull Manor I added a subterranean leair, behind a secret door hidden behind a wine rack that consisted mostly of those diamond-shaped wine bottle bins, but also 10 "display" cradles that held one bottle each. "For the good stuff." (If I were doing this again I would have prefer to have a variety of hand-outs, including one of the basement showing the wine rack. It couldn't be the only hand-out because that would tip them off too strongly.)

Second, I turned an upstairs room into an old office stuffed with papers and ledgers and books and detritus. The PCs started digging through this, trying to find out the history of the place. I prepared a series of clues that they would discover as a function of both time spent and Investigation checks. I didn't love the Investigation checks (no consequence for failure) but there you have it: I don't always meet the standards to which I aspire. Anyway, I won't spell out all the clues, but the key ones that relate to this anecdote are that they figured out the previous owner must have been attempting some kind of summoning, and they found something that looked like a bar code, with 10 black or white bars. I held my breath here, hoping they wouldn't put two and two together...not yet...and they didn't.

EDIT: Another detail: as part of the thank-you for rescuing Raenar and Floon, they were given a case of fine wine.

Next up, I used The Lady of Trollskull Priory from dmsguild, and to that I added a spooky, 10 year old girl with weird powers of prophecy. They rescued both the lady and the little girl, and in the "thank you" scene the girl said, "I hope you find what you're looking for under your house."

The players all jolted like they had been struck by lightning. They raced back to the house and started tearing it apart. One of them closely inspected the kitchen fireplace, and I asked to explain what they meant by "inspected." He actually nosed around up in the chimney, so I described a curious flu, that looked like it was joined by another flu coming up from below. They pulled out their map of the house, and from the location of the kitchen fireplace deduced on what wall of the basement there would likely be a secret door.

Back downstairs they went, and in re-describing the room, explained the wine rack again. When I got to the part about the display cradles for single bottles of wine, this time I didn't say how many. But one of the players got excited and asked how many. As soon as I said 10 he pulled out his notes and said, "I get oiur case of wine that Raenar sent us, and place bottles in the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 7th, and 9th slots!"

Click!

There was cheering around the table (more than I've ever seen from rolling Perception and being told, "You find a secret door.") . Which I think was due both to the fact that the secret door was a kind of (mini) climax that built up over 2 or 3 sessions, and because they felt good having figured it out themselves. (Even if I did nudge them with the prophecy, although there were still several other ways they could have found it.)

EDIT: The wine bottles, in binary, equalled 666. But nobody figured that bit out, despite having one software engineer and one computer scientist out of four players. I didn't mind gating that behind out-of-game knowledge because it wasn't relevant to the adventure. Pure easter egg.

 

[Maxperson]

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. 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.

That's why I don't tell the players the DC before they roll the die, and in the case of something like forgery where they won't know for a while, they won't learn the DC until it will no longer affect things.

I've seen players proceed with too much confidence on a roll that failed, and proceed with little confidence about a roll that succeeded.