You’re right. It isn’t really a problem, more a matter of preference. I don’t find that particular failure result to be meaningful enough. I want failure to mean they go the wrong way. And since I run a fairly transparent table, the players, upon seeing the result, will know the PCs went the wrong way and are lost. Now, I don’t tell them which way they went instead, but it would be nice if it was possible to get the result that they went the wrong way but have no reason to believe they didn’t go in the desired direction. The only way I can think of to get this result though is with a hidden roll of some kind, perhaps against the PC’s passive Survival score, but I’m not really inclined to do this. Maybe I’ll try it out and see if it works for my group.
I think you create yourself a lot of complications by doing this:
- You will have to dictate players what they do without them having stated it "You take the wrong path and now are lost" or even be forced to lie to them "You find some tracks and follow them, they lead to a stream." (it's the wrong path but you don't tell them)
- The player knowing something bad happened is not actually more meaningful then the players not knowing what to do: If you told them on failure "You see three possible paths to take, but can't find any signs of which the correct one is.", then regardless which path they take, correct or wrong, they will feel unsure and that feeling actually is meaningful, because on success, they would be confident
The easiest example is actually "I check if the NPC is lying". Now some DMs would now think "The NPC is lying so if the roll fails I tell them he is telling the truth" and then they are like "Hmm, but then I need to hide the roll because otherwise if they roll a 1 they can assume they've failed and consequently assume the NPC is lying anyway". But if you hide the roll, the whole situation becomes pointless. You will tell your players either "The NPC is lying" or "The NPC is telling the truth", but since you've hidden the roll result, the result is completely meaningless to the players. They don't know if their DM is lying to them or not! Bad!
Also consider this: The players will now evaluate the result based on their success and fail chance. If the PC has high insight, they'd assume the DM is telling the truth since it's more likely. If the PC has low insight, they'd assume the DM is lying. That means a low skill is actually better than an average skill, because the farther away from a 50/50 chance you get to easier to tell what happened.
All of this is so much easier to handle if you set yourself the rule to never hide rolls and adjust your replies accordingly. On a high success: "You're absolutely sure the NPC is lying", on just-about success "You notice some signs that the NPC could not be telling the truth", on failure "You seem to be unable to tell if the NPC is lying or not". The failure here is actually a lot more meaningful, because the players will need to continue the adventure not knowing if they can trust the NPC or not at all, whereas on success they'd be confident about it.