NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7806404" data-attributes="member: 6779196">There are a few reasons. One is that this is the kind of failure state that kills momentum. Like the example earlier in the thread where my friend who’s learning to DM called for a Perception check to find a location that we needed to find to progress. Being more experienced than my friend, I build my adventures in such a way that if one avenue gets cut off there are other ways to proceed, but these situations can still really take the wind out of the players’ sails.Not knowing something is also a dissatisfying end state, because it only maintains the status quo. It’s the same outcome as if you just hadn’t rolled, except that I guess now you know you don’t know. If failure only means “no progress,” I prefer for the attempt to consume a resource, and an in-universe resource, not a metagame resource like a limited number of attempts or a building penalty on repeat attempts.In my games, if a PC is literate with the script and fluent in the language it’s written in, they can read it with no uncertainty. If they know the script but not the language (not typical, but can happen with exotic languages that use the same scripts as common languages, and when the writer intentionally used a different script to disguise their message), that can be translated with enough time, and a successful check if time is a limited resource. The translation will be imperfect, however - I’ll give the general meaning of the message, but not the specific phrasing.</blockquote>

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