Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Goblyns Hoard" data-source="post: 3528391" data-attributes="member: 19970">Missywelden - an idea that I picked up right here and that has been working out great for my group is to have each player roll a bunch of d20s at the start of the game - and record the results.  Whenever you need a skill check that you don't want the player to know (or an initiative check - might start using that as well) you just look down the list and pick the next number that they rolled.  The player won't even know that something is going on because you're not rolling anything (just looking at your notes right  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).  My players like this because it's still their actual roll, but they still don't know when they've been successful or not.As to your actual question - it's not really that clear cut.  The basic response is a Plane Sailing put it - whenever you don't want the player to know how well they've done.  So some spot checks are appropriate (have they spotted a clue) while others (have they seen the ambush you're about to spring on them) don't matter so much - cause you can't metagame the combat that starts a surprise round later.As a result you could consider it for Appraise, Bluff, Decipher Script, Diplomacy, Disable Device, Forgery, Gather Information, Hide, Intimidate, Knowledge, Listen, Move Silently, Search, Sense Motive, Sleight of Hand, Spellcraft and Spot.  Obviously not all of these all of the time, and how much you'll have to use them will depend on how much your players meta game.  The reason I use what some might call a large list is that how you interpret the result is important.  With Forgery for example a failure by one - the character might think it's good enough but the player knows it isn't so might try again, while rolling a 1 both character and player would know it's not good enough.  By contrast rolling a 1 on a knowledge check could have them convinced that they know the right information (when they don't), while failing by 1 might have them saying 'I should know this... I know I know this... why can't I remember it."  It really all depends on the situation.</blockquote>

Verification