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="pemerton" data-source="post: 6802355" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is a well-known approach to search checks where the GM rolls the dice behind the screen whether or not there is something to find, so that the players don't know whether a failure to find something indicates that there is nothing there to be found, or that there is something there to be found but they missed it.The most recent time I read discussion of this technique was yesterday, on a current "fudging" thread on the ENworld 5e board.I can't remember if Moldvay advocates this technique in his Basic rules. I'm pretty sure that it is recommended in GMing advice from that era, though.Not using that technique is an application of the techniques that are typical of RPGing that uses "fail forward" - it travels with "say yes or roll the dice", "let it ride", etc.I don't follow. If you succeed you find the mace, and can enchant it. That is also the story developing. Just differently.I do see how it works and why it appeals to you. I just prefer that it ends up with a "thruth" that has been consistant and there from the start.I don't agree with this.Was Frodo courteous at the dining table? The LotR books don't tell us (as best I recall), but they contain information from which this can be extrapolated.Or, more significantly, was Faramir a good husband to Eowyn and father to their children? The books don't tell us this either, but we can extrapolate this also. Different readers might reasonably form somewhat different views, based on different readings of what has been written, but it doesn't follow that these views are arbitrary, or that the information from which they are extrapolated is "meaningless".Not everything in a fictional work needs to be written down in concrete terms in order to be a tenable object of reasoned conjecture.</blockquote>

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