D&D General Should players be aware of their own high and low rolls?

[billd91]

Is it though? Do you not recognize when you’ve done a poor job at something you’ve attempted or when you’ve done an excellent job? Why shouldn’t the PCs be able to do the same?

Depends on the task. If I’m under pressure to bake something special for the finicky king, I’d know if my merengue wasn’t sticking to the custard or if my soufflé fell. I might even know if I didn’t produce a terribly convincing lie… but I might not know how gullible the person I’m lying to is.
And that’s the crux of the issue here. There are situations in which the PC would have limited information, and then so should the player.

 

[Charlaquin]

Depends on the task. If I’m under pressure to bake something special for the finicky king, I’d know if my merengue wasn’t sticking to the custard or if my soufflé fell. I might even know if I didn’t produce a terribly convincing lie… but I might not know how gullible the person I’m lying to is.
And that’s the crux of the issue here. There are situations in which the PC would have limited information, and then so should the player.

There are plenty of reasons a character might be able to get good sense of whether or not the person they’re lying to is likely to believe them, without having to know how gullible that person is.

 

[billd91]

There are plenty of reasons a character might be able to get good sense of whether or not the person they’re lying to is likely to believe them, without having to know how gullible that person is.

There are also plenty of reasons they might not. Similarly there are plenty of reasons they wouldn’t know if they had simply failed to find a secret passage or that none existed.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And THAT is the problem...

The player should not know the following:

Because that is metagaming.

What? Why? If I roll a 3 on the die, I think if’s perfectly reasonable to read that as a worse outcome than if I’d rolled a 19. Why would you not treat it this way? I mean, if the DC is openly declared or not, this still seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Reading this as metagaming just seems to be making a problem where none exists.

It depends on what you are doing. Sometimes yes, but the point is (normally) you are always trying to do your best, right?

In the guard example, the PC would try to be as convincing as possibly when lying to the guard. Will the guard buy it or not?

This is the problem with d20 rolls. The result is BINARY. Succeed or fail, that is it. Beyond that, the number shouldn't matter.

The roll was a 3, with the +5 bonus an 8 total. Maybe the guard is gullible and that was the DC, or maybe it was higher.

After the roll is made, the DM describes the immediate outcome. The player then reacts or not before the scene moves on.

Now, I suppose in the guard scenario, a roll of 3 and the DM describe your attempt at bumbling and the guard obviously doesn't believe you. But then the DM is giving away additional information.

Well yes… a GM is supposed to narrate the results of a roll.

Do you need an Wisdom (Insight) check to read the guard's reaction to know if you succeeded or not? Maybe. Or perhaps you use Passive Insight for that? It is up to each DM to decide how they want to run it, really.

Certainly sometimes success or failure is obvious. Trying to pick a lock, for example. Either it opens (you succeed) or doesn't (you failed). Arm wrestling someone--you win or lose--success or failure is obvious. But many things like searching for traps are not obvious. At best, you believe there aren't any traps, but until you proceed you won't know for certain.

That’s not really true. I just searched my bedroom for a katana. I am certain there are none here.

Consider this example: a PC searches for traps and rolls a total of 21. The "belief" the PC has is pretty confident, right? Why...? Because the player knows the roll and thinks the DC was 20 or less.

Now, returning to the guard example, the player rolls a 3 (8 total), and probably thinks they failed. So, they react and ask for the charm person before the DM indicates the guard IS actually fooled because the DC was actually 8! If they had waited for more information, their reaction might have been, "Boy, I can't believe that actually worked!!!"

Why not just say, “Before you call out for the wizard to cast charm, you realize this guard already believes you! Seems he’s a real dimwit!”?

True story in AD&D: I had a player try to convince a patrol that he was also a guard, just out of uniform. The player bumbled his role-playing and said (and I quote!), "If I'm not a guard, then where's my sword?" I rolled the guards reactions and the result was abysmal! So, it actually worked! We still laugh about it.

Which brings me to my final thought about all this: the player shouldn't roll, period. This is where passive scores should be used. Assume the player has 10 (or 11, maybe 15 with advantage, etc.) and the DM rolls to see if the guard is fooled. The PC always tries their best, right? So, maybe that would be a better way.

Sure! But then, who even needs players? The GM can just make all the decisions as well as the rolls!

Adjudicating failed checks as "progress combined with a setback" instead of nothing changing about the situation (and thus encouraging a dogpile). I've mentioned this in several posts, including my first one in the thread.

Depending on the circumstances, for things like searching and the like, I tend to not allow more than one roll for a task. I just look at it as the sum total of the effort. No more rolls from anyone.

 

[Lanefan]

Then telegraph it in some other way. Its not hard to come up with plausible reasons to hint at a trap’s presence if you want to do so.

Why would I want to do so, is the question? If they look they might find it safely, if they don't look they almost certainly won't find it other than the hard way. But I'm not about to tell them there's specifically a hazard there, though I hope I've long since managed to get across the idea that there's potential hazards everywhere when in the field.

Sure, but regardless, a trap’s creators need to be able to find and circumvent their own traps.

If I'm setting net snares in the woods I'll know where they are...and if they work as intended they'll be easy to find later because they'll be hanging from trees with game animals (or trespassers!) inside.

Allow me, please, an example from a module I just wrote and ran over the last few months. It's long, so I'll s-block it if I can figure out how.

Spoiler: Interesting hallway

Situation: Party have been asked to check out an abandoned villa, mostly to try to figure out what became of another adventuring group that went in there a few momths back and never returned. They've just come through a secret door to get to this point, in the villa's carved-from-bedrock basement.

Here's the narration - I'll give it all at once here, but it was given piecemeal at the time as the party's light sources allowed:

"The 5-foot-wide hallway runs about 50 feet and ends in a door. There is also a set of elaborate double doors about halfway along the right hand wall. Even as non-trackers you can tell nobody has been in here in quite a while, as any tracks would be obvious in the dust." (they didn't have a tracker in the group)

Seems simple, right. So, here's the DM-side elements.

1. The double doors on the right lead to the family crypt, and though they can't be opened by normal means the means to do so (a special key) are findable in more than one way as there are multiples of this key.

2. Roughly across from the double doors is a secret door leading to a rough tunnel, the tunnel runs about 70 feet to a ladder that goes to an outbuilding; this being a bolthole for escape should the manor be attacked or invaded.

3. The door at the end of the hall is a fake and leads only to a bedrock wall. About ten feet short of that "door" is a 5x5 foot area of floor that isn't there, covered by a permanent illusion of the floor continuing. Below this is what the original owner installed as a deep pit trap, to catch and hold invaders; since then and without anyone's knowledge it was converted into a chute trap with a built-in teleporter, leading to a prison cell far far away.

3a. Arriving in the prison cell at the end of the chute starts a whole other adventure, ready to rock as part of the same module if the PCs go down the chute and left for later if they don't (other elements found in the manor would ideally eventually lead them there anyway, and if not then so be it - I run something else).

The only possible "tell" here is that the illusionary patch of floor wouldn't have any dust. The owner didn't want the secret door found thus there's no reason to telegraph its existence.

End results in play:

The PCs never really bothered with the crypt doors, instead deciding to go straight for the door at the end. They also never paid any attention to the floor. I secretly rolled for the Elf's built-in chance of noticing the secret door on passing by it, no luck. And the party's Thief, on blowing a few rolls, went down the chute, eventually followed by the rest of 'em in a more controlled manner once they realized the Thief was gone. Once there they busted out of the prison, knocked off some Yuan-ti, rescued some other prisoners, and found the two surviving members of the original group they were looking for.

So, a secret door and a very significant trap in the same hallway. What do you make of that?

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, that’s a great way to think about it. I don’t know if it would be “more realistic” for all those traps to have been so well hidden that Indie would have just blundered into them. But it definitely would have been a worse movie. Likewise with D&D. The fun part of traps is in the finding and the disabling or avoiding.

Some traps can be more obvious, sure, but then they kinda cease being traps and instead become hazards (yes there's a difference); and the ones in Indiana Jones are more to build up audience tension than anything else. They work for that.

But an RPG is not a movie. You're not watching Indy trying to get through, safe in the meta-knowledge he'll make it somehow; you're trying to BE Indy with no idea whether you'll make it through or not and no meta-knowledge to help you out.

 

[Lanefan]

I would say that on any given action, I would rather succeed than fail, but in the bigger picture I don’t want to always succeed at every action I attempt. The genuine risk of failure is necessary to make the successes meaningful, which is why D&D uses dice instead of pure narrative action resolution.

Agreed.

I’ve definitely seen players who are like this. In my experience, it appears to be pretty common in games where the players can’t make meaningful predictions about the likely results of their actions. When the results feel unpredictable, the best way to enjoy the experience is to embrace the chaos with reckless abandon.

To me the bolded sums up the whole essence of D&D, and why it's worth playing.

 

[S'mon]

I always do open rolling, the PC knows how well they did. They may not know the target DC though. They probably don't know the result of a fail.

Edit: I do quite often use variable DCs for stuff like detecting a secret door, like the gambling rules in the DMG where you roll 2d10+5 for the DC. Conversely, where there are repeated attempts at the same task I mostly use Passive/Take 10 scores, as indicated in the PHB under Adventuring.

 

[Oofta]

Oh, ok, I see what you mean. No, it’s not like you’re thinking of. “The walls are lined with tiny holes” is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say “telegraph.” It’s a digetic clue about the presence of… well, something to interact with, it’s not always traps, but traps are a convenient example, included as part of the description of the environment. Sometimes, the players won’t pick up on that clue, or won’t think of anything to do about it, and won’t follow-up with any attempts to interact, simply carrying on (which might end up springing the trap, or might not). Other times, the players will pick up on it and try to interact with it in some way. Maybe a player says something like “I carefully search the area for signs of a mechanism that might activate a trap.” I’d say “ok, that’s going to take 10 minutes and a successful DC 15 Wisdom check. What does everyone else do during that time?” This communicates the stakes: namely, you might spend ten minutes and not find anything, as well as the difficulty. Now, if this is significantly different than what the player was expecting, they might interject, “oh, I wasn’t thinking I’d spend 10 minutes, I just wanted to do a quick look,” in which case I might reply something like, “that’s fine, but without taking that time, you don’t notice anything beyond what I already described. Is there something else you’d like to do instead?”

It’s just the basic conversation of play. The DC and stakes are just a brief interjection to insure we’re on the same page regarding the fictional activity. But it’s still very much fiction first.

But even telling the DC would bug me. I don't want to know the DC ahead of time, it would take away from the tension and turn it into a calculation.

If it’s going to take time I might communicate that ahead of time but it wouldn't automatically be "it will take ten minutes". If they try to disarm a particularly difficult trap, I'd have them roll and base the results on that. Once they start it may be "this is going to take a bit to disarm" if they want to know how long that could require another investigation check.

Let's take picking a lock as a real world example. Sometimes you can open a lock quickly, in just a few seconds. Most mundane locks can be picked given enough time, with locksmiths saying it can take up to a half hour or so. The result of the check to pick the lock indicates how long it will take, roll high enough, you get it right away. Roll low and it's going to take a while

Once picking the lock doesn't work immediately I'll let the player know. But they don't know exactly how long it will take, it could take 5 minutes it could take half an hour, I may do a hidden secondary roll at this point to determine that. Perhaps the lock will never open because it's a fake lock simply designed to slow them down and they didn't do or failed an investigation check to notice the alarm trigger.

So I'd handle that as "It doesn't open immediately, you know sometimes locks can take quite a while to pick. Do you want to continue, and for how long?" Typically we'll go in intervals after that, starting at "It's been 5 minutes, continue?" I'd probably increase the increment and after a half hour has passed if it's a fake lock "You really think it should have opened by now but maybe it's just particularly difficult?"

In case of traps either it works immediately because they find the button that disables it. Other times I handle it somewhat like a skill challenge in that I'd probably have some intermediate rolls. If I make it a complex trap it may require multiple people and skills. What I wouldn't tell them is that as they start to disarm the trap that they will trigger a block that's going to start descending that they can hold for a moment but that someone strong needs to hold for a minute or some other solution like a spell. Then if it's a particularly devious trap a valve opens on the other side of the room where someone else has to figure out how to shut it off because the rogue needs to keep their hand on the lever he's trying to reset and so on.

With most of the checks, nobody knows ahead of time how much effort is required. They just know the block is descending, the valve is opening but there seems to be some writing on it and so on. Give clues as to what's going on, but he clues are going to be from the perspective of the PCs.

Since traps don't have a glowing set of numbers over them, the PCs don't know what the target is or the results. They only know what the PC knows. At least that's what works for me.

 

[Charlaquin]

There are also plenty of reasons they might not. Similarly there are plenty of reasons they wouldn’t know if they had simply failed to find a secret passage or that none existed.

Right, but knowing has several gameplay benefits.