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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7598351" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Ok, two things here: first, remember that at my table “every roll of the dice” isn’t every time they take action. It’s only when they take an action that may or may not achieve their goals, and has a meaningful cost for failure. I’ll grant that if a player did not want to analyze the risk involved when there are meaningful stakes riding on their roll, my game probably wouldn’t be the best fit for them. I’m ok with that though, especially because I’ve never met a player who didn’t. I’ve certainly met players whose characters were reckless, and those players often take risks that the player of a more cautious character would not. But I’ve never had a player object to being told the DC and consequences when something meaningful was on the line.I have made it explicitly clear that I am only talking about consequences it is reasonable for the character to be aware of. Yes, I would remind the player that breaking the door down will be loud and potentially alert any nearby monsters to their presence, or that failing to jump the ravine will cause them to fall in, and how far the fall would be (if they can see the bottom of course, otherwise I’d probably say “an unknown distance” or something.) It May be obvious to me, but I cannot garuntee it is obvious to the player. It probably is, but again with the life preserve analogy. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. It certainly has happened that a reminder of consequences I’ve thought were self-apparent has lead a player to think twice about an action.I mean, if I was going to put hidden poisoned spikes at the bottom of a pit, I’d probably telegraph that with an earlier pit where the spikes were not hidden - maybe with the mechanism that hides them visibly jammed. I want to provide players with the opportunity to pick up on clues, and use that knowledge to avoid future danger or assure future success by making smart choices based on that knowledge, not just by getting lucky rolls. I want them to fall into traps and go “Oh! I totally could have avoided that if I had noticed/remembered/thought about [whatever]!” not to just take surprise damage because they didn’t decide to roll a Perception check on this door in particular, or because they got a low roll. This is what I mean when I say, my style aims to put success and failure in the players’ hands rather than the dice’s.So, sure, if for some reason there’s a pit containing poisoned spikes that the PCs couldn’t reasonably be aware of, no, I’m not going to tell them they’ll fall on the poison spikes they don’t know are there on a failure. But that’s also just not a scenario that’s likely to arise in my games. Again, you already have an example more Germaine to my games: “breaking the door down will alert nearby creatures to your presence,” not “the ogre on the other side of the door will hear you.”I wouldn’t have assumed otherwise.Nobody’s forcing mindsets on anyone here. If my players don’t ask questions and charge forward, great, that’s the action I’ll adjudicate. If in my adjudication I determine that the action they are rushing into has a chance of success, chance of failure, and consequence, I’ll tell them what might happen if they fail, and what DC they need to beat with what Attribute to avoid that outcome. Whether they decide to follow through or reconsider is 100% up to them.</blockquote>

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