D&D 5E 5e consequence-resolution

[Bill Zebub]

So...they rot in jail for the rest of their lives?

This is beginning to feel like willful misinterpretation.

Assuming none of their varied attempts to escape succeed, perhaps The People’s Front of Cormyr stages a bold rescue if they swear to join the cause. Perhaps the king offers them amnesty in exchange for them undertaking a dangerous mission. Perhaps there’s a revolution and the prison is stormed and all the prisoners freed, but they have to fight weaponless through a riot. Perhaps….

Honestly I’m a bit puzzled that I need to spell this out.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Which is why the OP's idea of marrying the front end of 5e's task resolution to the back end of conflict resolution is really nothing more than justifying another GM story injection point while keeping players in the dark about how things work.

I think I agree with this, when applied to the example of tying success/failure to the contents of the safe.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think I agree with this, when applied to the example of tying success/failure to the contents of the safe.

Yup. If we take the declared action as attempting to pick the lock on the safe (a very cromulent 5e declaration), then what can we expect we get on a success? We pick the lock, open the safe, and discover the contents (as imagined by and provided by the GM). If we fail? Now the GM feels as if they need to make that failure count in some way, and will be narrating a failure not at all related to the action of picking the lock, but instead some larger issue that is cared about. It's amping the failure state with no corresponding increase in the success. The player cannot make what's in the safe be what they want on a success, because that's still the GM's purview!

This is why I characterize it as a thin cover for "rock fall" injections. It's always going to be worse for the PCs, it's always going to be arbitrary and not related to the understood stakes of the action, and not really changing anything, because the GM already has the say on what's in the safe (for example) so do they really need this to say that the safe is empty at all?

When the game is already nearly entirely GM Says, especially for setting/adventure material, conjecturing a way to make things more painful for the players by dint of justifying a larger set of consequences seems like it's just looking for more excuses to punish players.

All that said, the idea of consequences on failure is 100% fine -- but they need to be either very clear what's at stake by explicit statement or clearly indicated by the fiction.

 

[Hussar]

If it works for you, then great, but that's definitely not how it is supposed to be done. And I wouldn't like it. It puts the GM in awkward position of having to decide the DC and stakes after they know what the player has rolled.

Meh. I find the whole “stakes” thing gets so overblown.

Most of the time it’s pretty obvious to everyone what the stakes are and what the player is trying to achieve. This whole “you have to set stakes” and whatnot just seems like making things far more complicated than they need to be.

And as far as “supposed to be done” I’ve largely rejected that. People’s interpretation of how skills are “supposed “ to be done in 5e is so far removed from my experience both as a dm and layer that I just have zero interest in what I’m “supposed “ to be doing.

 

[Hussar]

Just to add to my last point because I was thinking a little bit more.

I find the 5e skill system to be probably the weakest part of 5e. The skill system is vague, relies almost entirely on DM fiat and free form roleplay just to resolve basic tasks, and is largely pointless because the players have this giant magic system sitting right over there that bypasses most of the skill system and does so without relying on free form roleplay and DM fiat.

So, when I don't really have a problem with the players saying something like, "I try to convince the guard to let me pass, Persuasion 15" it's because I know and they know that it really doesn't matter. The DC is entirely arbitrary - based on whatever I happen to feel like, because the rules certainly don't give much, if any, actual guidance on determining DC's. The success and fail states are entirely arbitrary - as @Ovinomancer calls it, "rocks fall" based on whatever the DM feels like at the time. The players have zero control over anything, and are basically just throwing numbers at a problem until the problem goes away.

There's no difference between

Player:"I persuasion the guard to let us pass 15"

and

Player:"I talk to the guard to let us pass"
DM: Ok, what do you say?
Player (comes up with some sort of plausible narration)
Dm: Ok, we'll make that a persuasion check. If you succeed, he'll let you pass, if you fail, he's going to call for more guards to come. DC 15.
Player: Roll.

Other than the second way takes a lot longer to resolve. Either give me a skill system that actually has any real guidance or teeth in it or just forget about it and go freeform. The 5e skill system is largely pointless.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I find the 5e skill system to be probably the weakest part of 5e. The skill system is vague, relies almost entirely on DM fiat and free form roleplay just to resolve basic tasks, and is largely pointless because the players have this giant magic system sitting right over there that bypasses most of the skill system and does so without relying on free form roleplay and DM fiat.

So, when I don't really have a problem with the players saying something like, "I try to convince the guard to let me pass, Persuasion 15" it's because I know and they know that it really doesn't matter. The DC is entirely arbitrary - based on whatever I happen to feel like, because the rules certainly don't give much, if any, actual guidance on determining DC's. The success and fail states are entirely arbitrary - as @Ovinomancer calls it, "rocks fall" based on whatever the DM feels like at the time. The players have zero control over anything, and are basically just throwing numbers at a problem until the problem goes away.

There's no difference between

Player:"I persuasion the guard to let us pass 15"

and

Player:"I talk to the guard to let us pass"
DM: Ok, what do you say?
Player (comes up with some sort of plausible narration)
Dm: Ok, we'll make that a persuasion check. If you succeed, he'll let you pass, if you fail, he's going to call for more guards to come. DC 15.
Player: Roll.

Other than the second way takes a lot longer to resolve. Either give me a skill system that actually has any real guidance or teeth in it or just forget about it and go freeform. The 5e skill system is largely pointless.

I take the second route because I want to know how they try to persuade the guard. If they use information in the game to use an approach that is very likely to succeed…well, that’s more likely to succeed. Ideally I don’t need the skill system at all: the players have been paying attention and say something very persuasive. At that point I don’t see what it adds to the game to give it an 80% chance and leave it to the dice. It just works.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Worst case scenario? Maybe. I rarely have TPKs or TPPs (total party prisoners?) but it can and has happened.

Honest question: Why?

You are the DM. You have the power to say, "y'know what, this campaign can keep going if you guys want it to. What do you think?"

Just because things get dire and long-term (possibly permanent!) consequences arise, doesn't mean the story has to end. Hell, that could be the start of something insanely epic: a journey out of the underworld, or (as Bill Zebub showed) being forced to serve someone the PCs oppose or hate, or being indebted to rescuers who they may not actually like (yet), etc.

That there are alternatives does not mean the PCs are golden boys and girls who literally never fail at anything ever. Alternatives can get progressively worse and nastier nearly ad infinitum.

I'm honestly not sure what you're saying. You say there will always be an alternative, I point out that it's not always the case. Somehow that turns into "PCs always win" ... but there are always alternatives ... but they don't win ... I don't understand what you're trying to say.

YOU are the one who keeps saying "the PCs always win"! That is YOUR phrasing which I keep repeatedly rejecting as unfair, inaccurate, and frankly insulting to my position.

And of course there are always alternatives. But by being "alternative," they aren't the same. They may have costs (sometimes nasty and permanent ones). They may require compromise or sacrifice. E.g., consider the "Justice Lords" episode from the Justice League cartoon; the Lords are willing to kill, while the League is not. Even with the League having a slight numbers advantage (because their Flash is still alive), it's clear the Lords are willing to do whatever it takes to win, and the League would unequivocally lose in a straight fight. Something has to give. They choose to compromise on a different moral issue: they agree to accept the help of Lex Luthor, in return for securing him a full pardon for his crimes (because, in context,  this time, those crimes actually stuck, and he's been in prison for a while.) Through that pardon, Lex is able to go into politics and cause all sorts of terrible mischief, leading to almost all of the subsequent problems for the following seasons (aka "Justice League Unlimited.")

This is an example of taking an alternative with HUGE costs, ones that legitimately define the campaign. Though, obviously, in a TTRPG context the plot is not so perfectly planned out in advance, so which costs, sacrifices, or compromises will end up being campaign-defining and which ones will end up footnotes is unclear in the moment. But the process of making those choices, of deciding what really matters, of handling individual task failure (hence fail forward...and hence ACTUALLY FAILING AT TASKS SOME OF THE TIME), is where the most interesting and significant choices of the game will be made. Not whether you try to bluff, intimidate, or persuade the guard.

It rarely ends a campaign for those PCs although it can. More likely is they just fail to achieve some goal and have to pursue other completely unrelated goals.

Okay. Why make it so goals have one single point of failure and then zilch? That seems pretty boring to me. Why not instead make things more complicated? Give the players the choice to pursue this goal at the cost of giving up on another, or spending/destroying a valuable resource, or breaking a promise to an ally, or swearing fealty to someone they hate, or...

All of these things can be massive failures in the players' eyes, but ones they take on willingly, securing a Pyrrhic victory because they tried everything else and nothing worked. How is that not absolutely avoiding players always succeeding at everything ever?

I don’t think you are reading the actual words I wrote.

I would never have a challenge with a (single) prescribed solution.

Okay. Why does "escape from being trapped" not count as that, but "get through the entrance to a place you need to go" does? I don't see how these two are not entirely symmetrical in this sense.

Big successes or failures will rarely hinge on a single roll but they can.

Okay. See above: why not make it more complex than that?

This is beginning to feel like willful misinterpretation.

Given how many times people have explicitly said that I am advocating that players should always succeed, despite me explicitly and repeatedly rejecting that notion, you shouldn't be surprised to know that I feel the same way. Like... how many times do I have to say, point-blank, zero embellishment or equivocation, "players do not have to always succeed ar everything they attempt," in order for it to actually get the message across? And yet three people (yourself, Crimson Longinus, and Oofta) have repeatedly replied with (paraphrased) "well I'm not interested in players never failing/always succeeding."

Assuming none of their varied attempts to escape succeed, perhaps The People’s Front of Cormyr stages a bold rescue if they swear to join the cause. Perhaps the king offers them amnesty in exchange for them undertaking a dangerous mission. Perhaps there’s a revolution and the prison is stormed and all the prisoners freed, but they have to fight weaponless through a riot. Perhaps….

Honestly I’m a bit puzzled that I need to spell this out.

I'm not the one saying that players should just absolutely, totally, unequivocally fail with literally nothing else and zero change of situation here!

I gave it as an example because of exactly the things you describe: that the PCs' failure, which is still a failure, does not come at the cost of "welp, guess the game is over because plans A-C failed." Instead, it comes at some other cost: indebtedness, servitude, loss of allies or resources, failure to secure and protect the things that matter to the characters, damage to the world (whether locally or globally), compromises to the characters' morals or principles, being forced into a Sophie's choice or "damned if you do, damned if you don't," suffering tarnished reputation...

There are so, so, SO many different things you can do that still sting, sometimes badly, that don't just halt play in its tracks. So why are people so welcoming of "yeah sure, just let play grind to a total halt on this" when there's an enormous spectrum of better, more interesting costs and, yes, FAILURES than "you literally just fail and literally nothing happens," the phrase I have repeatedly used and which people have repeatedly defended as what they want to see?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I take the second route because I want to know how they try to persuade the guard. If they use information in the game to use an approach that is very likely to succeed…well, that’s more likely to succeed. Ideally I don’t need the skill system at all: the players have been paying attention and say something very persuasive. At that point I don’t see what it adds to the game to give it an 80% chance and leave it to the dice. It just works.

I believe Hussar is saying: "Okay. So why not just use that all the time?"

 

[Oofta]

Honest question: Why?

You are the DM. You have the power to say, "y'know what, this campaign can keep going if you guys want it to. What do you think?"

If the PCs do stupid things repeatedly, it can lead to a TPK or everybody being imprisoned. Them's the breaks. The few times it happened, the group just laughed about it and we moved on because they realized that one way or another the group was just FUBAR. I should note this has only happened 2-3 times in all my years of DMing (in one case there was a sole survivor who ran away fast enough to escape). So far less than once a decade.

It's not like it happens often, but if death and failure are on the table then so are TPKs or imprisonment. If they aren't on the table then the PCs always win, at least in the long run.

Just because things get dire and long-term (possibly permanent!) consequences arise, doesn't mean the story has to end. Hell, that could be the start of something insanely epic: a journey out of the underworld, or (as Bill Zebub showed) being forced to serve someone the PCs oppose or hate, or being indebted to rescuers who they may not actually like (yet), etc.

That there are alternatives does not mean the PCs are golden boys and girls who literally never fail at anything ever. Alternatives can get progressively worse and nastier nearly ad infinitum.


YOU are the one who keeps saying "the PCs always win"!

See above. If the group can never truly fail that means that they always win. It's a two sided coin, you can't have both.

And of course there are always alternatives. But by being "alternative," they aren't the same. They may have costs (sometimes nasty and permanent ones). They may require compromise or sacrifice. E.g., consider the "Justice Lords" episode from the Justice League cartoon; the Lords are willing to kill, while the League is not. Even with the League having a slight numbers advantage (because their Flash is still alive), it's clear the Lords are willing to do whatever it takes to win, and the League would unequivocally lose in a straight fight. Something has to give. They choose to compromise on a different moral issue: they agree to accept the help of Lex Luthor, in return for securing him a full pardon for his crimes (because, in context,  this time, those crimes actually stuck, and he's been in prison for a while.) Through that pardon, Lex is able to go into politics and cause all sorts of terrible mischief, leading to almost all of the subsequent problems for the following seasons (aka "Justice League Unlimited.")

This is an example of taking an alternative with HUGE costs, ones that legitimately define the campaign (though, obviously, in a TTRPG context the plot is not so perfectly planned out in advance, so which costs, sacrifices, or compromises will end up being campaign-defining and which ones will end up footnotes is unclear in the moment. But the process of making those choices, of deciding what really matters, of handling individual task failure (hence fail forward...and hence ACTUALLY FAILING AT TASKS SOME OF THE TIME), is where the most interesting and significant choices of the game will be made. Not whether you try to bluff, intimidate, or persuade the guard.


Okay. Why make it so goals have one single point of failure and then zilch? That seems pretty boring to me. Why not instead make things more complicated? Give the players the choice to pursue this goal at the cost of giving up on another, or spending/destroying a valuable resource, or breaking a promise to an ally, or swearing fealty to someone they hate, or...

Sometimes if you try to open the safe and can't, you can't and you don't get whatever shiny thing was inside. The only consequence is you didn't get the shiny. Other times you may take a risk and try to lug the safe to somewhere that you can bust it open or any other number of options.

It depends on what I thought was a logical scenario. If I think an NPC would have a safe, they have a safe. If they have the means, it will be a safe with a good lock. What the PCs do about that safe is up to them. If they believe it could have secret documents proving the NPCs guilt and they can't open the safe then they have to find some other proof if they can. It's a plot point that comes up in fiction all the time.

In other cases they may have asked the wrong people questions (probably after failing a few things along the way) the safe may be empty. Maybe the NPC gets away with whatever dastardly deed they have planned, this time.

All of these things can be massive failures in the players' eyes, but ones they take on willingly, securing a Pyrrhic victory because they tried everything else and nothing worked. How is that not absolutely avoiding players always succeeding at everything ever?

So how are you not saying that the PCs always win if they can never fail? This is what confuses me. Either the DM sets up scenarios with backup ways of succeeding to the point that they guarantee the PCs will eventually succeed or they do not. I wouldn't purposely set up a scenario with a single point of failure, but multiple points of failure? The PCs do something stupid even though I've literally warned them it was unlikely to work? The players can always do what they want in my game, even if that leads to complete total utter failure.

Suppose the PCs are trying to stop McEvil from blowing up the parliament building. After failed investigations, bad planning, deceptions checks that fail and so on McEvil succeeds on their nefarious plans and blows up the parliament building with their beloved patron inside. Does it suck? Yes. But now they have a nemesis and will stop at nothing to hunt them down and bring McEvil to justice.

I don't create artificial barriers to success, but I don't create artificial alternatives to achieve success either.

Okay. Why does "escape from being trapped" not count as that, but "get through the entrance to a place you need to go" does? I don't see how these two are not entirely symmetrical in this sense.


Okay. See above: why not make it more complex than that?


Given how many times people have explicitly said that I am advocating that players should always succeed, despite me explicitly and repeatedly rejecting that notion, you shouldn't be surprised to know that I feel the same way. Like... how many times do I have to say, point-blank, zero embellishment or equivocation, "players do not have to always succeed ar everything they attempt," in order for it to actually get the message across? And yet three people (yourself, Crimson Longinus, and Oofta) have repeatedly replied with (paraphrased) "well I'm not interested in players never failing/always succeeding."


I'm not the one saying that players should just absolutely, totally, unequivocally fail with literally nothing else and zero change of situation here!

I gave it as an example because of exactly the things you describe: that the PCs' failure, which is still a failure, does not come at the cost of "welp, guess the game is over because plans A-C failed." Instead, it comes at some other cost: indebtedness, servitude, loss of allies or resources, failure to secure and protect the things that matter to the characters, damage to the world (whether locally or globally), compromises to the characters' morals or principles, being forced into a Sophie's choice or "damned if you do, damned if you don't," suffering tarnished reputation...

There are so, so, SO many different things you can do that still sting, sometimes badly, that don't just halt play in its tracks. So why are people so welcoming of "yeah sure, just let play grind to a total halt on this" when there's an enormous spectrum of better, more interesting costs and, yes, FAILURES than "you literally just fail and literally nothing happens," the phrase I have repeatedly used and which people have repeatedly defended as what they want to see?

You seem to think that failure means the end of a campaign. This is just foreign to me. Even if the PCs fail to stop Bob the Evil Wizard from becoming a powerful lich, it just means that there's a new powerful lich in the world. Maybe it will have some other impact on the campaign, maybe it won't. Maybe Bob will become a nemesis for the next campaign. But in most cases the PCs are still alive. There are still threats, nasty no-goodnicks that need to be brought to justice. Failure rarely is an end.

Then again, I almost never do apocalyptic campaigns. Save the city or region? Prevent something bad from happening to a lot of people? Sure. World ending destruction? No. Yeah, the PCs failed and an evil emperor now sits on the throne. It's not the end of the world. Or the campaign.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Just to add to my last point because I was thinking a little bit more.

I find the 5e skill system to be probably the weakest part of 5e. The skill system is vague, relies almost entirely on DM fiat and free form roleplay just to resolve basic tasks, and is largely pointless because the players have this giant magic system sitting right over there that bypasses most of the skill system and does so without relying on free form roleplay and DM fiat.

So, when I don't really have a problem with the players saying something like, "I try to convince the guard to let me pass, Persuasion 15" it's because I know and they know that it really doesn't matter. The DC is entirely arbitrary - based on whatever I happen to feel like, because the rules certainly don't give much, if any, actual guidance on determining DC's. The success and fail states are entirely arbitrary - as @Ovinomancer calls it, "rocks fall" based on whatever the DM feels like at the time. The players have zero control over anything, and are basically just throwing numbers at a problem until the problem goes away.

There's no difference between

Player:"I persuasion the guard to let us pass 15"

and

Player:"I talk to the guard to let us pass"
DM: Ok, what do you say?
Player (comes up with some sort of plausible narration)
Dm: Ok, we'll make that a persuasion check. If you succeed, he'll let you pass, if you fail, he's going to call for more guards to come. DC 15.
Player: Roll.

Other than the second way takes a lot longer to resolve. Either give me a skill system that actually has any real guidance or teeth in it or just forget about it and go freeform. The 5e skill system is largely pointless.

The arbitrariness of the DC system is a different beast than "rocks fall." "Rocks fall" is standing in for overriding GM fiat as to conclusions without any ability from players to engage.

I've found the DC system to work well with a few ground rules -- 1) DON'T ROLL until I ask, because we need to set stakes and that's what the rules say anyway. 2) SET STAKES. Be clear with what's going on. 3) DISCUSS the DC -- the GM proposes, but players should have some feedback as to what's going on -- if they feel things are not right, it's because there's a mismatch in the understanding and that needs to be discussed. Can't tell you how many times I've tossed out a "sounds hard" and gotten "are you sure, because...." and then I go, "totally right, moderate it is, gimmie the roll."

5e is not a "if you do it you do it" game. I've had some of the worst experiences in a "hot table" game where the GM leapt at utterances and gleefully engaged consequences. I was often that GM.