D&D 5E (2014) Consequences of Failure

[iserith]

An alternative to the potential observers example is don't do that in the first place. Make something happen in the scene the player can have the character respond to rather than do it "off-screen." The PC is spotted by a nefarious-looking sort who then darts off in the other direction. What do you do? Maybe they run after them. Maybe they don't. Maybe they do and catch him. Maybe they don't. But that solves your "metagaming" concern right there. DMs are almost always the cause of their own problems with "metagaming" and frequently their chosen solutions just make it worse (or shift the "metagaming" somewhere else).

 

[Celebrim]

Agreed, but only to a point: if the DM errs and lets something slip the players still have a chance to preserve the integrity of the situation by choosing not to act on that information.

Perhaps sometimes. But what I was trying to show is that in the general case the integrity of the situation has been irreparably harmed anyway, and nothing that the players can choose to do can repair it. That is, choosing to not act on information is functionally the same as choosing to act on it, because either way you can't know how you would have acted without it. There are plenty of cases where the player could plausibly have still acted in the same way in absence of the information simply because it's a reasonable thing to do. If you are insisting that they don't act on the information, then you are insisting that the player deliberately play in an unreasonable manner. That is, you are insisting that if you didn't leak the metagame knowledge that the player would have failed, and so you are insisting that the player deliberately fail.

It took me until I was in my 20's to realize that all the arguments at the table about metagaming were my fault, not the player's fault, and that I ought to own that responsibility and that by failing to own that responsibility I was in violation of Wheaton's Rule.

 

[5ekyu]

Based on these responses I fear my point (and the connection to the topic of this thread) may have been lost in the exchange of posts. To summarize, here's a fleshed out example and an explanation of my point:

The PCs have succeeded at their goal of fomenting large-scale civil unrest, but were identified while doing so. They know the king's spies will be looking for them, so they decide to lay low in a safe house. They receive a desperate request to meet from an ally of theirs, so the PCs decide to take the risk of sending the sneakiest among them to meet the contact. After considering various routes, the chosen PC decides to make her way over a bridge that is packed with rioters. She suspects (but does not know for certain) that the bridge will be watched. She declares her goal is to make it across the bridge unspotted and her approach is to blend in with the crowd, not hurrying, gradually moving across the bridge in time with the natural fluctuations in the crowd.

So far, so good? I think everyone would agree that there is a meaningful consequence for failure to get across the bridge unseen. And if (and only if) someone is watching, there is also an uncertain outcome. There are two competing approaches being discussed:

(1) Narrate the PC's journey over the bridge, and only call for a stealth check if/when she approaches within sight of a potential observer. If she makes the check, narrate the success. If she fails and there is an immediately-visible result from the failure, narate the failure. If she fails and the result from the failure is not immediately visible (but may be crucially important later), narrate the same result as the success. Whatever the check result, the cost of this approach is that player now knows whether or not the bridge is watched.

(2) Call for stealth check first, regardless of whether anyone is watching. Narrate the character's journey across the bridge exactly the same way as in #1. The cost of this approach is that the player knows the check result, and thus knows that it was likely they were observed if an observer was present, even if there was no immediately-visible result.

Both approaches are perfectly consistent with requiring the players to state their goal and approach rather than simply declaring a type of check. Both approaches are also perfectly consistent with only rolling when there is a meaningful consequence for failing to achieve the goal. So both approaches are within the bounds of the assumption of the thread. Both approaches also involve giving the player information the character does not have (i.e. metagame information). (As @Charlaquin points out, these are slightly different varieties of metagame information.) My point is that even within the playstlye assumptions of this thread, different posters will have different ideas about which option is preferable.

I agree with your premise and conclusion but i have a dufferent take on 2.

I would resolve it as the player rolls the check, knows his total but since tey do not know the DC they do not know whether it is success or fail.

Is the bridge unwatched?
Is the bridge watched by one hapless stooge with moderate common perceptiin and a disadvantaged situation? DC is like 5.
Is it watched by several scouts who have skill working together, using the chaos themselves? DC like 20 after advantage.

But what the player does know is how well their effort is going. They know their total. Their character sees the narrative equivalent of that such as "smoothly moving from cluster to cluster" or "chaotic mess tosses you around, exposed briefly several unpredictable times, impossible to really look for spotters" and all sorts of places in between.

So then they get to choose to continue or change up. Push on or try a new approach now that they see hoe its going.

The key being, the player-side die roll info is given in-game narrstive that informs the character to make choices based on the results.

So, no handing of meta-game info because the roll is made manifest in the scene.

In my games, i do this, tell them up front session zero this is why they can use the roll in making in-character decisions and we avoid this issue.

Combining that with frequent use of some progress with setback goes a long way towards handling the issue of having hidden info and informed choices both in play.

 

[Celebrim]

DMs are almost always the cause of their own problems with "metagaming" and frequently their chosen solutions just make it worse (or shift the "metagaming" somewhere else).

On that we have perfect agreement.

An alternative to the potential observers example is don't do that in the first place. Make something happen in the scene the player can have the character respond to rather than do it "off-screen." The PC is spotted by a nefarious-looking sort who then darts off in the other direction. What do you do? Maybe they run after them. Maybe they don't. Maybe they do and catch him. Maybe they don't.

Sure. That's a perfectly valid set up to a scene and if you went that way I'd not at all fault the DM. A DM can always decide that the PC spots the nefarious looking sort and make the challenge be, "What do you do about this information?" and not "Can you get the information?" It might not always be the best approach, because not having perfect information as the player is much like not having perfect information as the reader of a novel - at least some of the enjoyment is tied to not knowing everything. But it is one of several valid approaches to making for a fun session. Which choice is the right one is an art and not a science.

 

[iserith]

Sure. That's a perfectly valid set up to a scene and if you went that way I'd not at all fault the DM. A DM can always decide that the PC spots the nefarious looking sort and make the challenge be, "What do you do about this information?" and not "Can you get the information?" It might not always be the best approach, because not having perfect information as the player is much like not having perfect information as the reader of a novel - at least some of the enjoyment is tied to not knowing everything. But it is one of several valid approaches to making for a fun session. Which choice is the right one is an art and not a science.

My general thought on this is that there's a multiverse of stuff the player is not going to know so I don't need any additional techniques to plunge them further in the dark. Even if I'm completely transparent, there will be times when the player still doesn't put 2 and 2 together or take the most optimal action in the face of what they do know. And if the entirety of the difficulty of my challenges are predicated on not knowing stuff, man, I just created a bad challenge and shame on me.

It's just not even worth worrying about in my view except to warn the players not to act on bad assumptions based on "metagame thinking" and that the smart play, if they're into that sort of thing, is to verify those assumptions though in-game action before acting on them.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I think the reason you're struggling is that you want some kind of perfect, internally consistent theory...you're trying to axiomatize set theory, as it were...and you're assuming others are trying to do the same thing. Nope. I'm perfectly fine with useful heuristics. If there are any paradoxes, that's why there's a human DM adjudicating/improvising.

So for you, the real distinction between the two scenario is how much time the PC's have to think about what they want to do?

Nope. The difference is that in one case the environment isn't changing (as determined by the DM) but they have the option of "poking it", as it were. And in another case the environment is changing, and they have to react to it.

At some point in both scenarios, the players have to undertake some sort of action that involves risk. Heck, it would be easy to imagine that if the player in the first scenario does nothing, the player is accepting the risk that the orc let's out a loud snore and wakes from his nap, so again, I see no fundamental difference between the two game states, and it will always be possible that for any feature you add to the game state that I can show an equivalent feature can exist in the other one.

If the orc let's out a loud snore and wakes up, the environment has changed. (That may or may not force a response, depending on where the PCs are at that point.)

But even if I accepted that the player in the first scenario has time to dither or even if I credited as a large distinction, how does this distinction pertain to your original post? How does the amount of time the player has to think over his approach - assuming in the two cases that the time really does differ, which it might not in reality - really alter how we are going to handle it once they decide on what it is?

Because you were incorrect in concluding that, for me, it's about the amount of time.

Again, it seems you think I have similar goals to yours, and thus you keep conjecturing incorrectly about my position. What I find especially strange is that my position is so close to others', but you don't seem as upset about that. Odd.

A bunch of 5e magic items reset at dawn. I imagine, based on what you're posting here, that this really bothers you, because the solar cycle is a continuous trigonometric function. We can use the limit to argue that there's no meaningful distinction between two adjacent infinitesimal points, and thus the distinction between day and night is an illusion, and there is no clearly identifiable moment that counts as "dawn". Q.E.F.D.

Sorry, but "resets at dawn" works just fine for me.

 

[Charlaquin]

So you're saying that your players never play beyond their characters' knowledge, when the player knows more? If yes, you are blessed with excellent players!

Not at all. I’m saying that I stopped worrying about whether or not my players were playing beyond their character’s knowledge, and the results were overwhelmingly positive.

But if no, then how can they claim to be playing true to their characters? As in, seeing the fiction through their characters' eyes and (as far as possible) using only the knowledge those characters would have; in full awareness that sometimes that knowledge might be based on information that is either outright faulty at source or has been misinterpreted by the PCs/players.

And if they're intentionally not bothering to play true to their characters, what's the point of having characters?

Role playing is the act of imagining yourself as another person and/or in another situation, and making decisions as you imagine you or that other person would in that situation. If those decisions are informed by details that you or that person wouldn’t have access to in that situation, you are still role playing. In fact, doing so may make the role playing experience more interesting. When you decide not to act on information external to the character, you are doing so intentionally, because you think it will lead to a better experience. When you decide to act on information external to the character, you get to come up with an in-fiction justification for why the character made that decision, which may be equally enjoyable. I’m not interested in trying to police how my players choose to enjoy the act of role playing.

Even if the PCs are in no position to be aware that an observer is present?

That would lead to an exchange similar to this, every flippin' time:

DM: "There's a hidden observer on the rooftop, roll for your stealth"

The “there’s a hidden observer on the rooftop” part is wholly unnecessary. You could just ask for the Stealth check. And yeah, that will indicate that there is an observer somewhere, and since you haven’t included details in your narration about any creatures that might be observing player A’s character, they can easily surmise that the observer is hidden.

There was a time that I would have considered this “giving away the game.” Now the players know they’re being observed even though their characters wouldn’t. And I took it for granted that, that was a bad thing. But I never really interrogated what was so bad about it.

What comes of the players knowing they’re being observed? Well, they might start looking for the hidden observer. They might take action to shore up their attempts at concealing their presence. These are not things that it would be unreasonable for characters hoping to pass unobserved to do, so I don’t see this as breaking character. It’s also engagement with the fictional scenario, which is in my evaluation the object of the game. So, really, good things are coming from the players having this information, and the bad things I imagined would come from it were significantly overblown in my mind.

So, now instead of thinking of this kind of thing as “giving away the game,” I think of it as letting the players in on the game. The players can’t interact with the game without knowing there’s something to interact with. So why hide that fact?

 

[Bawylie]

Of course, that solution introduces the new metagame issue that if you only call for a roll when there is a potential observer, any time you call for a roll you reveal the presence of a potential observer.

Either approach creates a metagame issue, and I think people just disagree as to which one they feel is more problematic.

How do you hide from some observer whose location and field of observation you’re unaware of? How can you block a line of sight whose origin you do not know?

If the concern is that players will assume all stealth rolls indicate the presence of something to hide from, then I propose just making dice sounds at random intervals behind the screen. But, really, why bother?

As a skulker, I perhaps take regular care to move quietly as a precaution, and stick to shadows and back-alleys as a matter of course, but rolling for that absent any potential observer seems pointless. Once again like gambling without money.

 

[Charlaquin]

An alternative to the potential observers example is don't do that in the first place. Make something happen in the scene the player can have the character respond to rather than do it "off-screen." The PC is spotted by a nefarious-looking sort who then darts off in the other direction. What do you do? Maybe they run after them. Maybe they don't. Maybe they do and catch him. Maybe they don't. But that solves your "metagaming" concern right there. DMs are almost always the cause of their own problems with "metagaming" and frequently their chosen solutions just make it worse (or shift the "metagaming" somewhere else).

Exactly. That’s why in my initial post about rolling Stealth when it’s relevant included the Metal Gear reference.

 

[Umbran]

I don't think there's a meaningful difference between "failure" and "not succeeding," but the game does mandate that your failure or lack of success must have a meaningful consequence in order for there to be an ability check.

Well, see here's the point - we started this framing saying (either explicitly or implicitly) that something bad happens if you don't act ("The bear looms over you menacingly, drooling as it opens its mouth...."), and asking what, if anything, you want to do about it. The consequence is the first thing you are told about.

The case of no consequences for not succeeding would be like the GM saying, "Okay, folks, there's nothing going on. How do you respond to that?" It isn't a meaningful question.