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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7583428" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Again, sounds like the result of the roll can affect the outcome, then.I may not have communicated my point effectively here. I don’t mean to say that players stop searching rooms when I tell them what they do or don’t find without a roll. I mean to say that when I give players as much information as possible - telegraphing traps, telling them DCs and consequences of failure, not asking them to make rolls when the result won’t change anything, etc., I find that the tendency to ask to make skill checks disappears. When my players can confidently predict the potential results of their actions, they are more keen to try to avoid introducing the random element of a die roll into the resolution of their actions. Like I said, since my talk with the player who initially didn’t like being asked to describe her approach to searching for traps, she has gotten quite creative in the approaches she now describes. She has caught onto the fact that, the way I run the game, her understanding of the fictional world and her ability to predict how it will respond to her actions is more reliable than the dice roll. She’s no longer worried about her character having a better understanding of how to look for traps than her, because she knows with confidence that the world behaves in a logical and consistent way, and if she describes something that makes sense to her as a reasonable way to detect something hidden, she has a better chance of that working than a contextless d20 roll will give her.Like Iserith, my players don’t want to make checks. A check has a risk of failure and failure results in complications, where a goal and approach that makes sense in their brains is more likely to just work, and less likely to cause a setback if it doesn’t. In the event that I determine their approach has a chance of failing at achieving their goal and a consequence for failing to do so, I give them the DC and the consequences as a warning. As if to say, “if you go through with this action, these are the odds of success and this is what will happen if you fail. Are you sure you want to do that?” That gives them the chance to weigh their options, maybe consider spending Inspiration, casting Guidance, working together, or coming up with a different approach that might not be so risky.</blockquote>

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