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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7742122" data-attributes="member: 996">They're both perfectly fair expectations in certain styles of play.  If a game is run 'above board,' all mechanics in the open, 'stakes' and situations known to all players, then it's fine.  Deception isn't handled by the DM tricking the players and the players progressively getting wise to the DM's personal style of trickery, it's handled by a check that models the cleverness of the characters' and their adversaries, and the results played out accordingly.The reverse, keeping players in the dark and letting them make decisions based on 'role playing' their characters, doesn't necessarily even require there be mechanics 'behind the screen.'  The DM could just make everything up - the players face a series of described situations, make decisions, and face the consequences of those decisions, whether the consequences are determined by the DM in advance, by dice in the moment, or by DM whim in the moment is immaterial to the experience, since the players don't know what goes on behind the screen.     IDK.  Where is the suspense supposed to come into it?  Before the roll or after it?  Because, if there's a success, the suspense is over.  If there's a failure, you still don't know what's going on, the character thinks nothing in particular is going on, but the player knows he failed a roll.  Then something happens, or not.  Sounds kinda like the movie, really.  The character on screen hears a noise and thinks nothing of it, but the viewer knows that the character wouldn't be on screen, and the noise wouldn't be audible to the viewer if there was nothing going on...   If they were just about knowledge, like retrieving data from a hard disk, they wouldn't be checks, you'd either know stuff or not.  But information is more than data.  It's bringing data into context and applying it.  Doctors don't make diagnosis simply by remember what they learned in medical school, but by thinking about it and deciding which symptoms are important - and biases creep into that process, because they're human.  That's the kind of thing that, in games, gets abstracted down to mechanical tests. I recall D&D games back in the day being run that way. That might've helped, back then, encouraging something more fun that rampant continual paranoia.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Sounds conflicted. When did we get away from that.  Any check that uses a mental stat is going to involve what your character is thinking and/or judgements he's making.  Any check that's at all abstracted is likely to include, or could conceivably generate visualizations of fiction that include, what your character is thinking and model judgements, even decisions, he's made.  Erasing all the mechanics that /could/ lead to that would not leave you with a lot of game.  Puzzles, for instance, are a classic part of D&D, and you've already jettisoned them. The key to retaining/expanding what the game can handle without interfering in the way players imagine their characters is that transition from what the results of a resolution were, mechanically, to how you visualize it and integrate it into the narrative.  If the game leaves enough flexibility in that phase, the issue you're worried about can be avoided.  In D&D, it's mostly been an issue, what mechanics represent have generally been locked down in the rules with rules and flavor hard to tease apart.  But, in the WotC era, that's softened in different ways.  In 3.x you had the privilege, as a player, of describing your character & his gear, so you could do some 're-skinning,' with the somewhat obscure Spell Thematics, you could even change how his spells appeared.  In 4e & 5e, there's a lot more latitude.  In 4e fluff was segregated from rules text & keywords, so you were free to describe how a power worked in whatever way fit the character best.  In 5e, the DM narrates the results of all resolutions, so he has unlimited latitude to make them fit the story as he sees fit.  In other games it also varies.  Hero System, for instance, uses the concept of 'special effects' to let player define what the mechanical powers they buy for their characters actually represent, while in the superficially similar GURPS mechanics are 'reality checked' in the design phase. That'd be a way to 'improvise' a deceptive action in a system that doesn't give you effects-based tools to model such things, and it'd be a fairly 'immersive' one.  The player is being fed information such that his experience will as closely as possible mirror that of the character.  He gets a sense of making choices and facing consequences, but it's false, 'illusionism' game theorists like to call it.  The 'secret roll' is a big part of keeping the illusion - any secret roll could really be checked against a DC/contested-roll/whatever, or it could just be a 'placebo' there to make the player think the Dice Gods are choosing his fate, when really the DM has slaved his destiny to the story, but, either way, Game Theorist Logic, goes, the player's 'Agency' has been compromised.Personally, I think 'illusionism' is a fine way to run a game, especially one where the rules may not work so well all open & above board.  Older games were often run that way, without anyone going to the trouble of extensive Theorizing and jargon-invention in on-line echo chambers.  I also think taking it above board and using effects-based rules can be a fine way of modeling the same thing.  In Hero System, for instance, a character who's especially tricky might have a heavily-limited Mind Control power they can use to influence their enemies with the special effect that he's just preternaturally deceptive, or in 4e D&D, the whole complicated contested check thing could be tossed in favor of a power that simply slides an enemy and has flavor text that suggests trickery (but could be re-skinned if a player were choosing it for his character).</blockquote>

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