Game Systems that Allow Skill Resolution with No Roleplaying

[Janx]

I don't know about you, but I've been using passive perception checks in various games for about forever, to indicate what information the character has without taking special measures. It isn't that they've been applied backwards, it is just that the first application of passive perception has already been done. And, honestly, it *has*, unless the characters are walking around with their eyes closed, ears plugged, and so on, they *do* perceive quite a bit of their world without making active checks.

Indeed. I would expect this to be going on as a protection against DM brevity in description. As with the example of the hawk flying out of the tree. The GM left the height/distance from PC out of the description. generally it's not needed until the player thinks it is/tries to do something that makes that info needed.

However, it is obvious that the PC would know this already.

So the moment the PC starts trying to do something nonsensical like stabbing a bird flying 20 feet above him, I would intervene and correct the information gap.

If the PC is acting on something he "might" know, I might already have rolled perception checks (I do that for hidden doors when a PC enters a room ahead of time so I can include a clue in the description or not).

Part of my practice might sound like retconning actions, but I really prefer to avoid making my players take very stupid actions that basically mark their PCs as idiots and lower the overall quality level of the campaign due to a simple communication mistake.

 

[redrick]

I call GM shenanigans on this one. The fact that it was 20 feet overhead would have been perfectly obvious to the character, without needing to take extra care to determine the fact, but the GM failed to adequately describe it. Penalizing the player for that is not really fair.

Fair. The combat scenario is contrived, and unsuccessfully at that. I was attempting to illustrate that the existence of a resolution mechanic doesn't have to encourage calling out random abilities without at least some attempt to determine if those abilities are applicable. And it doesn't have to be incredibly detailed or creative. A player doesn't have to describe a complex combat maneuver, just, "Can I reach the group of goblins with a burning hands spell? Ok, I cast burning hands on those goblins." That's more engagement with the game world than, "Religion. [roll]. Arcana? [roll] History? [roll]." And even the least role-play-y players at my table do that automatically in combat, which is the most crunchy part of the game we're playing. (D&D.)

So this is, what, the DM punishing the player for not being more descriptive? Maybe that works for some people, but it seems like making the game less enjoyable for a player would only cause him to engage less with it, and thus would be self-defeating.

Yeah, again, bad example on my part. I would never actually punish a player for not being specific at the table. I would just ask a follow-up question to make sure the player knew what was going on.

I will make players re-roll dice that they roll without a clear indication of intent, because I think that is an important sequence of events. Player states action and intent. GM responds, possibly with follow-up questions and caveats, calls for a roll. Player rolls. I guess that could be considered punishment if the player had made a really good roll, but it doesn't consume any in-game time.

So, to bring it back to Mark CMG's original post, it's not clear to me, from that excerpt, that the player knew what she was trying to do when she made these ability checks. Or, if she did know what she was trying to do, she didn't bother to communicate that to the GM, which is a problem, since it's the GM's job to determine the outcome of the character's actions. I mean, clearly, her meta-intent is clear — she's performing an ability check so the GM will tell her what is going on. But that doesn't tell me anything about what the in-game challenge is for her character, or the amount of time taken. I mean, she performed 3 ability checks right up front. If her character wracks her brains at all like I do mine, that gelatinous cube would have been engulfing me half-way through my mental review of Griddlebock's Manual of Floating Aberrations. (Or is this a gelatinous cube laying in wait for adventurers to crowd around it?)

Regardless, it's the job of the GM to elicit more information from the players about what they are doing. It's the GM's job to remind players of things that the players should see and know that would most likely be affecting their decisions. (Like, to counter my above example, it's the GM's job to say, "I guess I didn't make that clear, but the blood hawk is 20 feet in the sky and you can't reach it with your sword. Do you want to switch to a ranged weapon?")

 

[Mark CMG]

I don't generally think so. The die roll subsumes both what the character has been taught, and what they remember at the moment. Thus, you can get another roll if you get substantial information later.

That seems contradictory to -

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/knowledge

Retry? No. The check represents what you know, and thinking about a topic a second time doesn’t let you know something that you never learned in the first place.

So, in the case of PF, it suggests that stress or faulty memory cannot have been the reason for a failed attempt, or you'd get a try later when conditions have changed. They don't seem to include your caveat for "substantial information." Or is this specific to another system? (And which one?) Is that your own house rule twist and, if so, what constitutes it?

 

[delericho]

Recently a GM described an example of his game as...

Perhaps not the best example. In a case like that, I'd expect the players to ask what they know about that monster, at which point I'd tell them which skill to roll - I wouldn't expect them to start rolling the skill first. But that's maybe a nitpick.

How do systems that encourage this type of play sit with other GMs?

For me, it depends on the importance of the roll. For a fairly unimportant 'throwaway' moment, I'm happy with the players just rolling and then I'll tell them the result. For something more involved, I would prefer them to add a bit more description themselves.

For me, though, I think the ideal is if the game is filled with what the Alexandrian refers to as "associated mechanics" - games where it's easy for the player to roleplay because the mechanics of what he's doing matches the fiction of what he's doing. An example would be a 'sunder' attack - simply by telling me that that's what he's doing, the player has already added some (a little) roleplay information.

(Another, possibly better, example might be something like the "Firefly" RPG's ability to spend plot points to create Assets and thus roll extra dice - by spending the plot point, and telling the table what the plot point is being spent on, the player is automatically adding to the in-game fiction.)

 

[Umbran]

That seems contradictory to -

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/knowledge

Aside from how we are not speaking of specific games, but of games in general....

Ah, but look up what retrying is: "Try Again: Any conditions that apply to successive attempts to use the skill successfully. If the skill doesn't allow you to attempt the same task more than once..."

Thus, if there's a change in the situation such that it isn't really the same task, then rolling the skill again should be allowed. Knowledge checks are implicitly, "Given the current data, what do I know about this?" To do otherwise leads to nonsensical results. Let me give an example to illustrate....

GM: You are sneaking up the corridor, and see a man in a grey uniform in the middle of the chamber that opens ahead of you. His back is to you.

Player: Do I recognize the uniform?

GM: (rolls die) No.

Player: I continue to sneak to the end of the corridor, and then around the perimeter of the room.

GM: As you go, you see the man has a band on his left arm you could not see before - it is red, with a white circle on it, and in the circle is a swastika...

As if this new piece of information would not allow a retry? Thinking about the exact same thing, without any new information or relevant change in situation, may not be fruitful. But if the character gets new information, notably different tools, or the like, I think a retry should usually be allowed.

If you don't buy that, let me take the logic to the extreme: If knowledge checks are really literally not dependent on the situation, then they aren't dependent on the character knowing the monster is present at all! The player could then make knowledge checks on all the monsters in the dungeon before entering, and prepare based on that information. But no, you probably won't allow the player to check until they actually see the beast, and have some information about it.

Ergo, the check must, to some degree, be based on what information the character has, and getting more information makes it a different test.

 

[Mark CMG]

So, for you, the knowledge check isn't based on what knowledge he has, it is based on what he can perceive and tying it to the knowledge he has? He might be aware of a particular military uniform but if he fails the check, he just didn't see enough of the uniform to have the knowledge that the person he is seeing is wearing that uniform. If the person turns around, you'd give him a "retry?"

 

[SirAntoine]

I really like that kind of encounter. My D&D players would have assumed it was a monster and attacked it. I don't think any of the rules should prevent this kind of encounter.

 

[MarkB]

So, for you, the knowledge check isn't based on what knowledge he has, it is based on what he can perceive and tying it to the knowledge he has? He might be aware of a particular military uniform but if he fails the check, he just didn't see enough of the uniform to have the knowledge that the person he is seeing is wearing that uniform. If the person turns around, you'd give him a "retry?"

That's probably not the best method, simply because constantly generating re-tries just means that sooner or later he'll roll really high. An alternative option would be to impose a penalty on his check based upon him having incomplete information, and note his margin of failure. If he failed by less than the penalty you imposed, then when he does see the additional detail, you can turn that failure into a success.

In most cases I wouldn't bother getting so finely-detailed, though - generally, the characters will look at a thing, see it reasonably clearly, and be able to make their knowledge checks on that basis.

 

[Zhaleskra]

I'm a fan of "things that would be obvious require no rolls". At the same time, I do prefer players at least tell me a little about what they're working on learning before rolling. It doesn't need to be full speech if the player is shy, it just needs to answer "what kind of answer are you looking for?"

 

[Mark CMG]

I'm a fan of "things that would be obvious require no rolls". At the same time, I do prefer players at least tell me a little about what they're working on learning before rolling. It doesn't need to be full speech if the player is shy, it just needs to answer "what kind of answer are you looking for?"

That can provide a bit of internalized RPing. "Being from the city of Such-and-such, and knowing their flag has a seven-pointed star, I start looking for those in the mural of the night sky . . . or anything else I might notice."