Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
A guard notices your attempt. You strain yourself and take damage. A wandering monster appears and you're still manacled.I think this bears repeating. I don't think a failure of a check maintaining the status quo means there should be no check. It's quite illogical to me to say that every failure must have a negative consequence.
In this case there was a possible positive outcome for success, I can't imagine what a penalty could be that would make sense.
It's not hard if you make the mental leap to bad things must happen to then come up with bad things. It's endemic to the mindset that checks are just checks to not be able to see a consequence. Another point for "our play isn't the same except for some wording."
Again, you confuse your play for ours and assume our games do not provide the same kinds of satisfaction. I put it to you that mimicking the fiction of a police procedural does not rest on a specific preference for mechanical resolution. I get that kind of fiction just fine with my methods. Yours is not the only way to run an exciting or interesting mystery. The difference is what points get mechanical resolutions and, indeed, what actually counts as the mystery.Yep. I don't believe insight equates to mind reading. If it did and was admissable as evidence then it would solve every mystery with a simple "Did you do it?" Now that would be boring.
But some of the responses make it sound like people have never read a mystery or watched a police procedural. Some of the questioners coming out of the interrogation saying things like "I think they're lying" or "They're hiding something, we need to figure out what" is just par for the course. Even if they use insight as magical truth detectors they still have to find proof.