iserith
Magic Wordsmith
It is indeed , but I imagine I'm applying it a little differently than some DMs. I'm only rolling in the first place because of the guards, whereas I think some folks are calling for the roll, and then figuring out what the failure state is once the roll fails. That approach works, I just don't care for it as a core approach to adjudicating actions. Even in that case, I'm probably more likely to just have them find the key, and then announce You hear running footsteps and the clanking of mail in the hall, coming toward the Chancellor's study, what do you do? I'd more likely call for a roll if they heard the running footsteps before they started looking for the key. In the second case the need for a roll, and the consequences of failure, are already established in the fiction.
Certainly I would say that if a DM is following the standard adjudication process, which requires some amount of thought about whether the player's stated approach to the goal of their character has an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence for failure, then he or she is necessarily thinking about what happens on a failure before calling for the ability check.