D&D 5E (2014) Consequences of Failure

[Xetheral]

Does this come up often for you, that a PC is sneaking around, and a hidden NPC is searching for them? I can’t say it does for me. I would imagine the NPC would be too focused on remaining hidden to also be searching. If players have to pick one task or the other when exploring, shouldn’t NPCs have the same limitation? I don’t know, doesn’t seem like a major concern with the way I set up challenges.

So I'm a big believer that you can do one thing well. If you are focused on sneaking about you can not also be focused on searching out for hidden enemies. The most likely outcome when you have two groups focused on not being noticed is they pass each other like ships in the night. They might notice each other passively, but generally only if someone rolls poorly.

Isn't the point of scouting to gather information while remaining unnoticed? I find the idea that one can't perceive threats while being stealthy to be rather bizarre. Even the 5e travel rules don't prevent a party moving stealthily from using their passive perception: you only get denied that if you're mapmaking or foraging or the like.

And passive perception is defined in the rules as the DC for stealth checks. The odds that an opponent successfully evades your notice is not affected by whether or not the oberserver is taking the search action. The action just gives the observer another chance to notice the sneaking character.

I would also note that insufficient lighting can obscure a potential observer from the character being stealthy. A potential observer out of hearing range, standing in a darkened room and looking out a second-story window, is not going to be noticed by a character trying to use stealth to be unnoticed as they move through a crowd below. Similarly, the stealthy character may be within visual range of the observer, but not vice-versa (e.g. observer is an Eagle-Totem Barbarian).

And yes, while the original question wasn't aimed at me, in my games this comes up all the time. Locating the enemy before they locate you is critically important to being able to engineer an encounter on favorable terms (or avoid an encounter altogether).

As a typical example, consider a scenario where the party is trying to approach an enemy fortress unseen by either the scouting patrols or the occupants of the fortress. Failure would be devastating: the enemy will know they are under attack, and can quietly prepare their defenses, making what might have been a series of manageable, separate encounters into an unwinnable mass brawl. But unless the party loactes all the scouts and has a way to observe the occupants of the castle, the party will never know if they've been successful or not until the trap is sprung (or they reach their target and find it unawares).

 

[Oofta]

Sorry? How about this. Everyone who thinks telegraphs should be overt enough that players never fail to pick up on them, say aye.

Shouldn't that be a new thread and a poll instead of post number 360 on a thread most people don't care about any more? If you actually want even a semblance of a balanced response anyway. Not that any poll here is going to be particularly representative of the D&D gaming population, just better.

 

[Charlaquin]

Shouldn't that be a new thread and a poll instead of post number 360 on a thread most people don't care about any more? If you actually want even a semblance of a balanced response anyway. Not that any poll here is going to be particularly representative of the D&D gaming population, just better.

Seems unnecessary to me. I can tell you with complete confidence that few to none of us on the “goal and approach” side of the fence think telegraphs should be unmissable.

 

[FrogReaver]

Seems unnecessary to me. I can tell you with complete confidence that few to none of us on the “goal and approach” side of the fence think telegraphs should be unmissable.

And if that’s true it was miscommunicates very badly earlier in this thread. I didn’t pull that idea out of thin air. One of you all were arguing that there’s no need for a defect traps check because all traps would be telegraphed.

 

[Charlaquin]

As a typical example, consider a scenario where the party is trying to approach an enemy fortress unseen by either the scouting patrols or the occupants of the fortress. Failure would be devastating: the enemy will know they are under attack, and can quietly prepare their defenses, making what might have been a series of manageable, separate encounters into an unwinnable mass brawl. But unless the party loactes all the scouts and has a way to observe the occupants of the castle, the party will never know if they've been successful or not until the trap is sprung (or they reach their target and find it unawares).

And exactly what meta-game do you think calling for a Stealth check in this scenario would give away?

 

[Guest 6801328]

And if that’s true it was miscommunicates very badly earlier in this thread. I didn’t pull that idea out of thin air. One of you all were arguing that there’s no need for a defect traps check because all traps would be telegraphed.

Right. And missing the telegraph means you probably trigger the trap.

Next up: player skill vs character skill. Film at 11.

 

[chaochou]

I also want to discuss the "Do I know about X?" scenario, too. That's a tougher one.

It's not a tougher one to do, given the right system. But it is a tougher one to discuss, simply because it cuts between paradigms of play which share little overlap.

Generally then, if you want meaningful consequences of failure for a knowledge roll, you only make the roll at the point at which a character takes some action based on that knowledge.

In other words, if a frog-thing is hopping towards your character, you don't say (a) 'I'll make a knowledge check' you say (b) 'I'll hurl a flask of flaming oil at it, because I remember these frog-things burn real easy.'

Obviously, there are all kinds of interesting meaningful failures for (b). Frog-things might be resistant to fire. Or explosive. Many options.

The obvious sticking point is that many systems are predicated on the idea that success at (b) doesn't make susceptability to fire true - many people would say that's made true by the GMs notes or the Monster Manual. They will deny the player ever gets the authority over content.

So if you leave authority for content or situational creation with the GM, failed knowledge (or perception or arcana etc) checks deny learning what the GM has already decided, while successful ones allow for passive receipt of information.

But a successful knowledge roll can be used within an rpg system to share content authority at that moment. If that happens, you can end up at (b).

Similarly, although stealth has been discussed in the thread it's worth noting that a stealth roll could be accompanied by this statement 'I hide behind the old boxes stacked in the corner'. And the roll can be used determine what happens next. In this case the roll is determining whether the player is allowed situational authority to add some previously unnoticed or unimportant old boxes into play, or whether the GM gets to deny, complicate or aggravate this situation in some new and unexpected way.

Such play is perfectly normal, functional and fun, albeit quite removed from most D&D play (with, perhaps, the exception of 4e skill challenges, which were themselves an outlier).

 

[FrogReaver]

Totally agree about trap design, and I avoid putting un-telegraphed traps into my own adventures. Sometimes it takes new players a while to get used to that, and they still want to "check for traps" on every door and container for a while.

One of the telegraphing tramp quotes I was looking for wasn't very hard to find. The implication here obviously being that players don't need to check for traps at every door because I telegraph traps. But if players can miss the telegraphs then there is still a good reason for them to check for traps at every door. So my assumption was that you telegraphed traps in such a way that obviously couldn't be missed. Apparently that's incorrect. Yet, it wasn't made up - or done in an attempt to diminish your position, it was the correct conclusion to draw from the things you had told me thus far about your playstyle.

 

[Charlaquin]

And if that’s true it was miscommunicates very badly earlier in this thread. I didn’t pull that idea out of thin air. One of you all were arguing that there’s no need for a defect traps check because all traps would be telegraphed.

Hard to say without digging up that part of the conversation, but at a guess, I would say that’s probably a misreading of something said in answer to a demand for a specific example of play.

Here is generally how the process works. When there is a trap that the PCs might or might not be able to detect, the DM includes a hint about its presence in the narration. Often these are more overt earlier in a dungeon and more subtle further in once certain patterns have been established, but that’s not a hard rule or anything. If the player picks up on the hint, they might decide to do something to follow up on it, in the form of a goal (such as finding the trap) and an approach (such as prodding things with 10 foot polls or whatever.) If the player doesn’t pick up on the hint, it is quite likely that they will fall into the trap.

 

[FrogReaver]

It's not a tougher one to do, given the right system. But it is a tougher one to discuss, simply because it cuts between paradigms of play which share little overlap.

Generally then, if you want meaningful consequences of failure for a knowledge roll, you only make the roll at the point at which a character takes some action based on that knowledge.

In other words, if a frog-thing is hopping towards your character, you don't say (a) 'I'll make a knowledge check' you say (b) 'I'll hurl a flask of flaming oil at it, because I remember these frog-things burn real easy.'

Obviously, there are all kinds of interesting meaningful failures for (b). Frog-things might be resistant to fire. Or explosive. Many options.

The obvious sticking point is that many systems are predicated on the idea that success at (b) doesn't make susceptability to fire true - many people would say that's made true by the GMs notes or the Monster Manual. They will deny the player ever gets the authority over content.

So if you leave authority for content or situational creation with the GM, failed knowledge (or perception or arcana etc) checks deny learning what the GM has already decided, while successful ones allow for passive receipt of information.

But a successful knowledge roll can be used within an rpg system to share content authority at that moment. If that happens, you can end up at (b).

Similarly, although stealth has been discussed in the thread it's worth noting that a stealth roll could be accompanied by this statement 'I hide behind the old boxes stacked in the corner'. And the roll can be used determine what happens next. In this case the roll is determining whether the player is allowed situational authority to add some previously unnoticed or unimportant old boxes into play, or whether the GM gets to deny, complicate or aggravate this situation in some new and unexpected way.

Such play is perfectly normal, functional and fun, albeit quite removed from most D&D play (with, perhaps, the exception of 4e skill challenges, which were themselves an outlier).

I want to say that I dislike this approach but it is a valid way to have meaningful consequences for knowledge checks, it just does so at the expense of other elements I prefer.