D&D 5E Consequences of Failure

[Bawylie]

Yes, but this is the other side of some of the resistance you see.

The point about this being a un-navigated viewpoint change is valid. And on top of that, how you say things matters, especially in plain text. What you see as "decent clowning" is to someone else a callback to something that really, really cheesed them off. You are effectively connecting a change of viewpoint to a painful past experience.

And people wonder why some folks push back?

That’s probably accurate.

I was myself “cheesed off” by the FDA.

I can’t believe you’d bring it up.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Dude, I said "Not it!" in the last paragraph. By the rules, that means someone else has to do it.

What you missed is that while you were standing there saying, "not it," everyone else had taken two steps back.

 

[Charlaquin]

Thanks for clarifying again. I guess I don't see any relevant distinction between "checking" and "looking" at my table where all traps can potentially be noticed without risking triggering them. Any character is going to try non-risky methods first, so I don't see the value (at my table) of asking them to specify whether their approach "checking the lock for traps" involves looking in the keyhole (triggering a Wis (Perception) check) or probing with thieves tools (triggering a non-check resolution based on the mechanics of the trap): it's always going to be the former unless the player is making a mistake that the character would know better than to make.

That makes sense, I can see why you would do it that way.

I don't see a practical distinction between always telegraphing a trap and setting a passive perception DC of 0 to notice the trap. Either way the trap always fails: the primary threat is removed and the trap turns into a terrain obstacle.

Again, telegraphs are missable. My ideal for telegraphs is the “hard but fair” feel of the soulsborne games. Where you may well miss the hint and walk into a trap, but if you do you can easily realize what the hint was. The reaction to falling into a trap, in my opinion, shouldn’t be “damn, if only I had rolled better/had higher passive Perception” but rather “Oh, I should have seen that coming.”

One possible distinction I see would be if you only telegraph traps to PCs, and let NPCs blunder into traps that cannot be detected via Perception and without the benefit of telegraphed foreknowledge. If so the purpose of the distinction makes sense, but it's such an overt form of PC plot armor that I wouldn't be comfortable with it at my table. (For reference, I don't cap a PC-made trap's potential bonus, so NPCs might autofail their Passive Perception checks unlike PCs, but that's a much subtler form of plot armor.)

Well the dungeon’s inhabitants generally know where the traps are, and may well have set them up. I don’t get a lot of PCs making traps. But if I did, or if like the PCs brought an NPC hireling into the dungeon with them or something, yeah, I’d set a passive Perception for them to realize a trap is present, and then have them roll Perception or maybe Investigation to see if they can find how to avoid or disable it. It wouldn’t be very fair for me to have NPCs notice traps without reference to their stats because I actually do know their locations.

I’m also not terribly worried about this method being “PC plot armor.” I’m more interested in creating a desired experience than in preserving ”simulationist” consistency between the rules for PCs and NPCs.

Out of curiosity, do you run a lot of uninhabited dungeons with still-functional, self-resetting traps? The telegraphing methods you describe would only rarely work at my table: almost all my dungeons are inhabited, so the signs of the trap would have been removed when the trap was reset, and the occupants certainly aren't going to advertise their defenses. The rare uninhabited dungeons that were still sealed would have pristine un-triggered traps, and unsealed ones exposed to the elements that might have previously triggered will rarely have been built by a culture with enough engineering expertise to make durable trap mechanisms, let alone self-resetting ones.

Sure, in the exceptional dungeon where it makes sense I'll happily include an already-triggered trap and its grisly outcome, but my motivation for doing so would either be adding flavorful color, or else telegraphing the likelihood of other traps in the same facility. At that point the trap itself isn't a threat.

The idea behind the already triggered trap with the dead person next to it is purely to be a telegraph. It signals that there are traps of this nature in the dungeon and to watch out for them. That kind of thing is likely to be encountered once, early on in a dungeon, but further in you’ll have to rely more on context cues.

I suppose if you need a diegetic explanation for that, the guy who got killed by that early trap was probably an adventurer or other grave robber, but the traps further in are untriggered because other adventures haven’t successfully delved this deeply yet. Or maybe some of the traps are self-resetting, maybe the monsters in the dungeon reset them. It’s not really terribly important to my mind, because again, my goal is to create a desired experience, not a simulation of a real place.

May I ask how you make use of Passive Perception at your table? It sounds like characters with high Passive Perception at your table are no more likely to notice traps than any other characters?

I mostly use passive scores as the DC for actions NPCs take against PCs. So, if an urchin tried to pick your pocket, he’s going to have to make a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check against your passive Wisdom (Perception), and on a failure, I’ll narrate his hand making a grab for your coin purse, or give some other kind of clear signal that he’s doing it. If an NPC lies to you, he has to make a Charisma (Deception) check against your passive Wisdom (Insight) and if he fails I’ll describe him stammering, or his voice cracking, or sweat glistening on his brow or something to indicate that he’s nervous.

For a while I did also use Passives to gate telegraphs as well - you’d only feel the draft coming from the secret door if your passive Wisdom (Perception) was high enough, for example. But what I found was that it only served to make certain features of the environment impossible to find. Either I set the DC higher than the highest passive Perception in the group and they would never find it, or I set it lower and play proceeded as described above, where players might or might not find it depending on if they pick up on the hint. Pretty soon I found myself not setting any DCs higher than the highest passive Perception in the group, and not long thereafter I realized there was no point in setting those DCs in the first place.

 

[iserith]

What you missed is that while you were standing there saying, "not it," everyone else had taken two steps back.

Dang it.

It would be weeks before I could contemplate working on it given my current pipeline. It might be worth like-minded people huddling in PMs to sketch out the bits that should be included.

 

[Charlaquin]

Okay, I've done a bit of organizing thinking on this, and here's the rub: If you're going to use goal and approach as a method, you must present a game that offers handles to the players to propose goals and approaches. In short, yes, it's part and parcel of the method that you must change how you present situations. If you're only going to call for rolls for things that are uncertain and have a risk of failure, then it's incumbent on the DM to present uncertain situations with consequences of failure. This doesn't work if you just have hallways that may or may not be trapped, as what happens is that players are now asked to do repetitive goal and approach declarations and this gets old fast. It's easier handled in an ask-for-roll approach as the entire exercise in the fiction is abstracted and pushed off onto the mechanics to get past this repetitive play and move to the bits with heft.

Goal and approach require that the DM change the presentation of the game. You have to present challenges that prompt the players into action. This is different, as most games just have the DM present the description of the room and have other information gated behind the obligatory skill checks. You either gain the information or you do not, and this affects the actions your take and if the things you did not notice affect you and now call for new checks or if you engage what you have noticed via other checks. Goal and approach, though, doesn't work at all with this presentation -- you must provide a handle on the action for the players. As such, it requires a form of framing more akin to more narrative-style games where you present a dynamic situation with a clear call to action and then say, "what do you do?"

Yes, this method misses some of the things that the ask-for-rolls does -- they are completely different styles of play. What's missed, though, are the things that no longer make sense in terms of goal and approach play. I don't miss that my players ask for rolls, fail, and give me the opportunity to create new fiction to describe their failures because my method does this well, just in a different context. My method creates consequence based on what the players express rather then what I, as DM, think. I find this preferable. I have to do a bit more work on the front end -- I have to provide a clear call to action in my scene framing and this isn't trivial -- but I offload a lot of work on the backend as I'm now just reacting to the players and following their lead through the scene. This is very different from the much more DM mediated experience of asking-for-rolls and using rolls to gate information and provide tension. Both are very valid ways to play. Neither can recreate the experiences of the other. That's actually a big selling point for me -- most of my pain points with D&D came from the heavy DM load and I find goal and approach lightens that considerably and presents play that I enjoy very much. YMMV, and that's part of the coolness of this hobby.

This, by the way, is what I’m trying to get at with my “don’t just ask ‘what do you do,’ ask ‘what do you do about’ something” koan.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

This, by the way, is what I’m trying to get at with my “don’t just ask ‘what do you do,’ ask ‘what do you do about’ something” koan.

And, often, to ensure spotlight sharing: ‘what do you, specific character, do about’...

 

[Guest 6801328]

I imagine most experienced GM with varied backgrounds have seen good and bad things from a variety of systems and playstyles and drawn bits from then as they play, with different groups and the like.

This is very true.

A lot of the systems I played in the old days, especially MERP, Traveller, and Top Secret, either didn't noticeably play differently from D&D, or I (being young and foolish) didn't read the rules carefully enough to realize they were supposed to. We played all the games as essentially re-skinned versions of each other.

In more recent years, playing and GMing other games, espeically Dungeon World and The One Ring, opened by eyes to how differently games could feel, and that I had a latent, nagging dissatisfaction with the old way that I hadn't paid much attention to because I thought RPGs "are just like that".* Some folks here (Enworld) opened my eyes to the fact that 5e really was intended to support a different approach. And as I slowly master this new way of playing D&D, I'm enjoying it a lot more.

*Sort of like how a lot of apparent shortcomings of democracy are really artifacts of the specific rules we use, not the concept of democracy.

 

[Charlaquin]

Dang it.

It would be weeks before I could contemplate working on it given my current pipeline. It might be worth like-minded people huddling in PMs to sketch out the bits that should be included.

I’m up for helping

 

[Guest 6801328]

Okay, I've done a bit of organizing thinking on this, and here's the rub: If you're going to use goal and approach as a method, you must present a game that offers handles to the players to propose goals and approaches. In short, yes, it's part and parcel of the method that you must change how you present situations. If you're only going to call for rolls for things that are uncertain and have a risk of failure, then it's incumbent on the DM to present uncertain situations with consequences of failure. This doesn't work if you just have hallways that may or may not be trapped, as what happens is that players are now asked to do repetitive goal and approach declarations and this gets old fast. It's easier handled in an ask-for-roll approach as the entire exercise in the fiction is abstracted and pushed off onto the mechanics to get past this repetitive play and move to the bits with heft.

Goal and approach require that the DM change the presentation of the game. You have to present challenges that prompt the players into action. This is different, as most games just have the DM present the description of the room and have other information gated behind the obligatory skill checks. You either gain the information or you do not, and this affects the actions your take and if the things you did not notice affect you and now call for new checks or if you engage what you have noticed via other checks. Goal and approach, though, doesn't work at all with this presentation -- you must provide a handle on the action for the players. As such, it requires a form of framing more akin to more narrative-style games where you present a dynamic situation with a clear call to action and then say, "what do you do?"

Yes, this method misses some of the things that the ask-for-rolls does -- they are completely different styles of play. What's missed, though, are the things that no longer make sense in terms of goal and approach play. I don't miss that my players ask for rolls, fail, and give me the opportunity to create new fiction to describe their failures because my method does this well, just in a different context. My method creates consequence based on what the players express rather then what I, as DM, think. I find this preferable. I have to do a bit more work on the front end -- I have to provide a clear call to action in my scene framing and this isn't trivial -- but I offload a lot of work on the backend as I'm now just reacting to the players and following their lead through the scene. This is very different from the much more DM mediated experience of asking-for-rolls and using rolls to gate information and provide tension. Both are very valid ways to play. Neither can recreate the experiences of the other. That's actually a big selling point for me -- most of my pain points with D&D came from the heavy DM load and I find goal and approach lightens that considerably and presents play that I enjoy very much. YMMV, and that's part of the coolness of this hobby.

This is really well put.

The trap I've fallen into in this thread (and others) is to take the offered scenarios...which occur in ask-for-rolls games...and then try, at the last second, to "convert" them to goal-and-approach.

 

[iserith]

This is really well put.

The trap I've fallen into in this thread (and others) is to take the offered scenarios...which occur in ask-for-rolls games...and then try, at the last second, to "convert" them to goal-and-approach.

To be fair, it would totally be possible, if not likely, for wedgies to come up in my games. Whether or not an ability check would come into play to resolve anything wedgie-related just depends on the situation. In the abstract, I couldn't say. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.