D&D General "I make a perception check."

[Celebrim]

I hate hate hate that style of old school play.

I will even say I will no longer tolerate it.

I feel like you taken some bad experiences with certain styles of play, gotten bitter about those experiences and then come up with a completely nonsensical position.

I played in a 3.5 campaign with a DM still in 1e mindset. (I was new to the group) we had to search a room he asked for details so I said "I go to check the closet" he has me roll search and that was my jam I was a rogue with maxed out search... I rolled super high like in the 30s and got "You find nothing" while another player checked the bed and another the desk... BUT the one that checked the desk then said "I go to the closest and take the bar off and look to see if it's hallow and if there is anything in it" and then he got a low double digit search check... and found a portable hole full of treasure. I was pissed a little that a 12 or so beat like a 35 but I tried to ignore it until the player said "I remember the DM did this a few campaigns ago...always check"

See, I agree with you that that is bad GMing. Although I run the sort of game you say you don't tolerate, in my game you would have found the treasure and the guy with low character skill wouldn't have, not because I disagree that specifically checking the bar in the closet should provide bonuses to search, but because there is no coherent world where that's better than getting a 20 on a search and your 35 would be better than his 20 on a search. The problem is the GM is incoherent. He's running the character skill so badly that he would be better off house ruling search out of his game than run it the way he does.

And all that is fine and I sympathize, but this statement...

I NEVER want to play a test of me instead of a test of what my character can do again

...is utter nonsense. You don't actually mean that. I get what you do mean, but the statement "I NEVER want to play a test of me..." is literally equivalent to "I never want to play a game." The fact that the game is a test of you is what makes it a game and not a simulation. What you actually mean is that there are specific aspects of the game that you don't want to be a test of you, which is fine, albeit maybe much harder to implement than you think.[/quote]

 

[Charlaquin]

I want to actively look but I'm not sure how my character would do it

You have been actively looking around constantly while exploring the dungeon; that’s why your passive Perception skill applied.

right I want the character skill to prop up a lack of skill I in real life have

Have a little more faith in yourself. Or at least have a little less faith in me; I’m not coming up with crazy logic puzzles you need to be a genius to solve. I’m not even coming up with logic puzzles. I just want to know what you imagine your character doing so I can do my best to determine if it would work or not.

but you don't like that my action declaration doesn't meet some standard of yours... "Look around isn't enough"

Look around is perfectly sufficient. Your character has looked around and I have applied the appropriate rules for determining what your character perceives while looking around and described the results to you. If you want to do something other than look around, you will have to tell me what that is.

I have a task in mind. I am trying to across the table tell my friend that my character can do X but I can not.. I am trying to tell my friend who is running the game that I need to relay on game resources because I can not describe in detail what to do because I don't know (but my character either does or at least may)

I do t need you to describe it in detail, I just need to know what you want to accomplish and how you imagine your character trying to do that.

I can't tell you how Kari casts Detect Magic, just that her character can. I can't tell you how Paul takes a d4 knife and does +5d6 damage when the great sword only does 2d6, but his character know how.

There are some features that allow you to achieve specific outcomes as described by the rules. For everything else, we rely on the basic How to Play rules.

I don't know how to search or look or perceive actively for danger,

Really though? I bet if you tried you could come up with something. Like, you’ve played Hide and Seek at some point, right? I’ve described the environment, now you describe how you want to interact with it to try and find out if there’s hidden danger with it.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Let me try getting away from the perception example because I think the complexity of the situation may be obfuscating the point. Let’s imagine we’ve house ruled the use rope skill into 5e. And let’s say you want your character to tie their shoes. I don’t imagine you would say “can I make a use rope check?” Both because that wouldn’t actually convey to the DM that you want to tie your shoes, and because even if you have a really high bonus to your use rope skill, you might fail, and why would you want to fail to tie your shoes? What you would say is “I tie my shoes,” and you would hope the DM wouldn’t say “ok, make a use rope check.”

the problem is you describe something with no consequence or lack of retrie... I can sit and try to tie my shoes 100 times

but lets take your use rope skill example... (maybe a took kit in 5e)
we have a captured goblin and I want to tie him up so he can't get away. The DM asks "How?" I answer "I am trained and expertise in use rope" but that isn't a detailed enough answer... another character with no use rope skill though can come along and he is being played by a boyscout...he can in detail describe multi knots and how to tie up the goblin...

this is the disconnect for me... if someone has training and ability in something but can't attempt it but someone else with no training and no ability not only can try buy auto pass that ripps me right out of the game

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Then in your "perfect world" you would watch the character play itself and make its own choices entirely without your interaction.

no... just every declaration of intent would be measured by the character ability...

You could in fact do that. You could set the parameters of your character at the beginning of the story and then we could let a bot run your character based on your parameters.

1 no you can't no bot can handle the number of variables... that is why you can't have a D&D video game that acts like a DM.
2 that isn't even close to what I asked for and is DANGERUSLY close to insulting when we just said how civil this has been... please don't ruin it

There would be a lot of tedious rolling and no meaningful choices, so you'd probably want to automate it with a computer program but it could be done.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Every person in this thread who has written in support of the "players describe their actions, GM calls for rolls if needed" play structure laid out by the 5E rules has made clear how and why character skill still matters.

except when they say that a starting character can search for traps as well as a 20th level rogue played for years with maxed skill... you know except then

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Whereas I want the player’s decisions to be the primary factor in their success and failure, with the fickle dice being used as necessary when an outcome can’t otherwise be determined.

those fickle dice I did complain about (was that this thread?) but even if we leave the roll out of it... simply declaring "I am trained in X skill" compared to "I am untrained in X skill"

but we have numbers to compare... I can ask my party "Hey what is everyone's stealth mod?" and get an idea of what characters are good at stealth and what ones are bad.
I can do the same thing with Religion.

 

[Thomas Shey]

222 posts in 6 hours? That's one new post every 1 minute 37 seconds, for an entire morning.


Agree completely. Perception isn't really an action that you even need to call, at least at my table...it's "always on." I assume the characters are always trying to look and listen, and always to the best of their ability, unless I'm told otherwise ("I avert my eyes," for example, or "I cover my ears.") If my players ask to make a Perception check, I usually respond with "You already did."

I think there should be room for "I take a second look around, just in case." (There may be mechanical/probability reasons that's problematic, but its not conceptually unreasonable).

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Let's go back for a minute to the example of the paladin and the rogue who want to hide when the ogre is about to enter the room.

Depending on how and where the characters hide, a roll may or may not be necessary, and there will be different risks and benefits.

as long as both are trying to hide (IMO) the massive difference in character should be accounted for.

If the paladin (heavy armor, disadvantage, low dex) tries to hide somewhere that needs a roll, he's going to have bad odds. The opposite for the rogue. Character skill matters.

If the pally says they leave before the ogre shows up cool... that isn't hiding it's leaving (although I still may have them roll for tthe oger to hear your metal armor clink as you go) but if both are trying to hide...again character skill (IMO) should matter even if not rolling

If either player declares that their character is going to hide in the closet and close the door, being completely out of LOS, they probably won't need a Stealth check at all. That's good!

I don't agree... did they get themselves behind the door well enough? did the ogre hear the motions? does there armor reflect light through the grating on the door oddly?
also why did you choose to be so bad at stealth if you wanted to roleplay hiding?

Edit: Maybe if @GMforPowergamers is tired, or a brand new player and doesn't understand their options, they flat out ask me "Where can I potentially hide?" and I tell them "There's a table you could fit under, a cloak rack in the corner, a closet with a door you can close, and a shadowy corner that's in deep gloom from the lantern on the table, the only source of light in the room."

now that is fine as long as all those options are equal an not a trap "Oh if you chose B you would be fine A and C you would get a roll but D is an auto fail" not so much...

Then they can tell me which of those four options they want. The table and cloak rack require checks. Same with the shadowy corner, but if the ogre moves into that half of the room, they automatically see the character there with darkvision, because there's nothing to actually hide behind.

there we go... gotcha traps. The character should know about darkvision and what it means even if I don't

I may know this ahead of time, but I'm going to feel pretty awkward if I told the player their character hid in the corner, rather than letting them pick their poison.

you could spell out the pros and cons of each though

 

[Celebrim]

yup that's it summed up perfectly

6 stats 3 physical 2 mental 1 1/3mental 1/3physica and 1/3 socail

all 6 are the same
X number of skills... some physical some mental some social and some a mix... all the same

that sums up my argument perfectly.

I know it does, and what I'm telling you is that your argument is just wrong because not only are the 6 skills not the same they cannot be made to be the same and it still be a game. I know why you want to see perfect equality between the skills, but I'm telling you that no matter how much you desire it, it's impossible.

Assuming we are playing a typical "theater of the mind" tabletop RPG instead of a LARP, it's impossible to make a player's physical ability intrude into the game world. My physical ability can only inform play if I'm able to act it out in a LARP, and a LARP will introduce other restrictions on what I can act out owing to inability to create any physical location we can imagine and the danger of doing so if we could.

On the other hand, in the same situation it is impossible to not have the mind of the player intrude into the game. There is no wall of separation that we can erect between the mind of the player and the game world. The player's mind always extends into the game world. It's how the player can interact with the game world. And as long as the player can interact with the game world, some aspects of his judgement, his intelligence and his charisma will extend into the game world. This not only can't be avoided, if we did try to avoid it then the player couldn't interact with his character and it would cease to be a player character.

I mean I have actually heard that argument before (although it isn't what I am arguing at all)

No, it is what you are arguing. It's just a subset of your larger argument that you don't want to engage with because you are so angry because you had a bad DM that ignored your invested character building resources unfairly.

we can never have 100% character skill 0% player skill... I just want to get as close as I can.

I don't think you really do. I think you just want to be justly rewarded for investing character building resources in mental or social skills.

where do YOU @Celebrim draw the line... can I google the chemical way to make old timey gunpowder then have my character with no training or knowledge make it by just saying what I do?

Sure. Absolutely you can. You try doing that in my D&D game though nothing will happen, because in D&D the periodic table has just 4 elements on it - fire, earth, water, and air - and your real world chemistry knowledge does you not the slightest bit of good. But even if we were playing in a real world say 12th century game and the player wanted his character to invent gunpowder, and metagamed the heck out of it in a totally aggressive and dysfunctional manner that suggested he didn't want to play his character and was 100% invested in winning, I'd probably still make him roll a Natural Sciences or Alchemy check or what not to do it well because just because you can read a recipe doesn't mean you can cook.

what about someone that knows how and where to hide (the example of this thread) can someone that has no ability to hide in character benfit purely by out of character knowladge?

Absolutely. If your character can achieve 100% concealment or cover, your are hidden regardless of anything else. And I'm sorry, but that is true of everyone's game. If your character is on the other side of a wall or door from an NPC, you don't expect me to make you roll a Hide check unless the NPC has X-ray vision. So yeah, anyone can hide in the Armoire and hope no one opens it. Only someone with a lot of hide skill can hide in the room well just by standing against the wall or otherwise hiding without perfect concealment or cover.

Are you literally trying to tell me that a character that hides in a chest or armoire ought to be visible to a guard that enters the room because they don't have a lot of hide skill? Are you literally telling me that a GM ought to say "No" to that proposition because in his opinion the character didn't have enough hide skill to think to do that. At my table, one of the meta-rules is called the Kindergartener rule. Anything that you can propose that a Kindergartner might be able to succeed at shouldn't be something locked behind a CharGen asset hurdle. It might be something you need CharGen assets to be good at, like grappling, but if a Kindergartner can do it then everyone can do it.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Less "look around isn't enough" than "You're already looking around. Here's what you see."

so I added "I want to use what my character is good at (perception) but I the player don't know how to do (perception) but I have a declaired intent (find out if there is danger)"


you can insert any action in the game "I attack" "how" "Idon;t know but my fighter should"
I cast a spell How With spell slots? No declair your actions UM... I don't know it's magic my wizard gets it I don't
I

"Do you want to do something more? Like move somewhere else in the room for a different perspective, or interact with any of the objects I described?"

again "I don't know but my character knows how to look for danger, how does that work?"

Once you tell me if your character is interacting with something, or moving some place, I can now give you more info, and reveal any dangers associated with that thing, without it being "I make a perception check to try to find any traps. I rolled a 2." "Ok, you move into the room, walk onto the rug and fall in the pit."

becuse "a 2 you don't find any traps" is so hard to say?