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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6672737" data-attributes="member: 22424">For the same reason you might roll to see if a PC can bash down a dungeon door to get to some treasure - if they succeed then the story goes one way, and if they fail then it goes another.And please understand that I'm not saying you must roll for such things. I'm saying that you might roll for such things, and especially in those cases where the outcome is relevant to the story.Unless the roll is literally without consequence then it always has stakes; it's just a question of how big they are. Even if the PC immediately retries and succeeds, they've still lost whatever time is taken in the first attempt.Of course, there's a point where those stakes are small enough not to be worth bothering with (such as requiring a roll to bash down a door when the PCs can just keep retrying until they succeed). But the threshold for that will differ for different groups, and will even differ for the same group at different times.Why do they need to know the stakes? They want the information that's gated by that knowledge roll. Deciding not to attempt the roll just means they go straight to the "fail" case.I suppose one could consider it worthwhile to reduce the number of rolls in the game, such that every individual roll becomes that much more meaningful. But given the frequency that D&D resorts to using the dice anyway (because of the prevalence of combat), it really doesn't seem to be the game for that approach.Sorry, I find that entire construction absurd. Because the Cleric can't personally identify this icon we have to go consult a sage?That's not what I said. If the PCs fail the roll then they have to find some other way to pursue the story. Or, indeed, they can abandon it, in which case it wasn't the dice that made that choice.Because there are many potential fun adventures out there, where the choice of which one actually plays out dependent on emergent gameplay. If the Cleric identifies the icon right away you get one particular story; if the Cleric doesn't then you get a different story - which may well be just as much fun.Because failing the roll doesn't mean they can never ever play through the cult scenario. It means they have to find another way to engage with that scenario. It's not about Gygax's example of finding that one secret door into the hidden dungeon rooms, it's about determining which of the several doors that lead into those rooms.And I think that's something that's missing in this discussion. I simply would not present an adventure gated on the PCs finding a single secret door, or successfully identifying a single religious icon, or otherwise predicated on a single stress-point. That's bad adventure design. So if they fail that roll it doesn't stall the adventure, it simply redirects it - you can't go that way, so go another.(Although there does, of course, come a point where the PCs have managed to squander every other possible route to their goal, and that religious icon turns out to be the last possible chance. But if we've got to that point it's because they've blown a whole bunch of other chances, so fair enough. Because while I want my PCs to succeed on their quests, I have to allow them to fail.)</blockquote>

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