D&D 5E Is "perception" even a good concept?

[Wiseblood]

It's hidden way, way in the back of the 1e DMG, can't recall ATM if it was an actual glossary or something. I might just be able to check that when I get home...

Edit: Got impatient and looked up the OSRIC version, relevant quote: "This percentage is predicated on a caster of 11th level of experience, and should be varied by 5% upwards or downwards per experience level of the caster above or below 11th respectively." Not as messy as I remembered.

My memory of the surprise rules is rolling a d6 on each side (or for each character, I'm honestly not sure), which was very similar to rolling initiative, so hopefully I'm not conflating those. There was an odd disconnect between notations like "is only surprised on a X" vs "Surprises on a X through X+n," which I don't recall being confused by in the past, so maybe there's a clear way to resolve the contradiction that I've just forgotten? I also vaguely recall extreme cases where the die type changed to d8, so you could have a better than 5 in 6 chance of achieving surprise, or less than 1 in 6 chance of being surprised...

Initiative, on a d10, OTOH, I recall vividly, from a Leomund's Tiny Hut article that included several such variants that were very popular in my area in the early 80s.

But any of those might be 20/400 hindsight...


On point, I don't have any trouble remembering how to roll initiative in d20. Perk of a unified resolution mechanic: easier to remember.

1e DMG explains a lot I was looking in 2E. Funny that it was also a bit messy lol The more things change...

 

[iserith]

It's possible that we might just not be understanding terminology here.

What's your definition of a gotcha?

A gotcha is when the DM blindsides a character with something the player had no ability to avoid through conscious decision-making. The DM withholds information and the player then has his or her character blindly wander into the gotcha.

Telegraphing, which is an art to be sure, is giving clues as to what's coming. The players may pick up on them or they may not or might pick up on them and make erroneous decisions based on the information they have. But as long as you provide them, then it's a fair challenge. The player can look back and say "Shoot, that's why that skeleton's skull was crushed back a ways. I should have investigated a bit more." If you don't provide those clues, it's a gotcha.

A gotcha is not a real challenge. The best hope a player has to avoid them is to either be very paranoid and hope the DM lets that paranoia pay off and/or to pump up whatever skills the DM uses to resolve whether the character gets smacked in the face by a gotcha. So to bring this back around to the topic of the thread, this is another reason why players might pump Perception - because if the DM uses passive Perception as the characters' defense against gotchas, then it makes sense to maximize the heck out of it.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Side-note about all the 1e talk: Most folks think 1e is "messy" because they try approaching it as a "one roll" or "one mechanic" solution. It's not. For example, if a Monster "surprised others 8-in-10" and PC's are surprised "1-2 in 6", except for the Dark Elf who is "1-in-8". DM rolls for the monster...gets a 4; PC's potentially surprised. One player in the group rolls 1d6 for them...gets a 1; all are surprised...but...the dark elf player rolls his own d8; he gets a 6. This all simply means that everyone except the drow is surprised. Simple.

Many rules in 1e are like this. When you get "conflicting methods between [whatever]", it just means you roll for each 'thing' separately. Or, to put it another way, things get "grouped by mechanics" as opposed to titles (e.g., if there were two Drow in the group, ONE of them would roll for both of them...the two drow are a "group of mechanics").

Ok...back to the thread!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[KarinsDad]

A gotcha is when the DM blindsides a character with something the player had no ability to avoid through conscious decision-making. The DM withholds information and the player then has his or her character blindly wander into the gotcha.

Telegraphing, which is an art to be sure, is giving clues as to what's coming. The players may pick up on them or they may not or might pick up on them and make erroneous decisions based on the information they have. But as long as you provide them, then it's a fair challenge. The player can look back and say "Shoot, that's why that skeleton's skull was crushed back a ways. I should have investigated a bit more." If you don't provide those clues, it's a gotcha.

A gotcha is not a real challenge. The best hope a player has to avoid them is to either be very paranoid and hope the DM lets that paranoia pay off and/or to pump up whatever skills the DM uses to resolve whether the character gets smacked in the face by a gotcha. So to bring this back around to the topic of the thread, this is another reason why players might pump Perception - because if the DM uses passive Perception as the characters' defense against gotchas, then it makes sense to maximize the heck out of it.

I'm still not quite there.

What is the difference between a gotcha and a surprise? Is a gotcha something bad that happens and a surprise something good that happens? I see little difference between the two words.

Why is it important for the player to always be able to avoid some things vis conscious decision making?

Could you please give a few concrete examples? Far as I can tell, a gotcha is something the DM wants the players to know something about ahead of time and a surprise is something the DM does not want the players to know about ahead of time. Is there something more to it?

 

[Tony Vargas]

A gotcha is when the DM blindsides a character with something the player had no ability to avoid through conscious decision-making. The DM withholds information and the player then has his or her character blindly wander into the gotcha.

Or presents deceptive information. Classic monsters like the Gelatinous Cube and Gas Spore existed to be gotchyas. "You see skelleton floating towards you..." "You see a spherical creature with multiple stalks radiating from it's top..."
... then there was the Crypt Thing.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Why is it important for the player to always be able to avoid some things vis conscious decision making?

If you walk down a hallway and then die, then it doesn't feel like your choices mattered at all, and then what's the point of even playing a game? A big part of the expectation for how an RPG is played is that your decisions actually matter in determining what happens.

"If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are... a different game you should play." RPGs may not have formal win conditions, but dying unceremoniously is widely taken as a loss.

Could you please give a few concrete examples? Far as I can tell, a gotcha is something the DM wants the players to know something about ahead of time and a surprise is something the DM does not want the players to know about ahead of time. Is there something more to it?

"Gotcha" is gamer jargon for a specific type of surprise, which is particularly surprising and overwhelmingly bad. To the best of my knowledge, "surprise" is just a normal word with its typical meaning.

An anecdote from an early play example describes a player character walking down a hallway, and then opening a door. Upon opening the door, a ghoul reaches out and paralyzes the character, who is then dragged into the room and devoured. That's an example of a gotcha trap, because there's no way that the player could reasonably have seen it coming, and the only way to avoid it would be through an extreme degree of paranoia (e.g. opening all doors from twenty feet away). If the door smelled faintly of death, or if there were claw marks around the door handle, then it would no longer be a gotcha because it wouldn't take an unreasonable degree of paranoia to suspect something dangerous nearby. Likewise, if ghouls had previously been spotted in the vicinity, it wouldn't take an unreasonable degree of paranoia to expect them somewhere. If the ghouls were on the other side of the room, and the character had a chance to react before being instantly paralyzed, it wouldn't be a gotcha.

Another example of a gotcha trap is the rot grub, which is a tiny little maggot that hides in dark places and kills anyone who touches it, because again, the only way to avoid it would be through an extreme degree of paranoia (e.g. never touch anything that you can't clearly see and examine for several minutes). A third example is the illusionary false floor, which can't be detected until you're falling through it. Cursed items can also fill this role, if there's no way to discover the curse beforehand and no way to end the curse before it kills you (necklace of strangulation).

If the DM includes those sorts of traps in their game, then the only players who survive for very long will be the ones who spend an hour to examine every empty room, and the end result of that is you spend a four hour session in examining four rooms of which one might contain an object of note. By not including those sorts of traps, the players get to move through the environment more quickly, so you can spend more game time on the interesting things and less time just trying to stay alive.

 

[KarinsDad]

Or presents deceptive information. Classic monsters like the Gelatinous Cube and Gas Spore existed to be gotchyas. "You see skelleton floating towards you..." "You see a spherical creature with multiple stalks radiating from it's top..."
... then there was the Crypt Thing.

I actually like giving deceptive information to my players.

Not all of the time, and even not often, but once in a while. It forces them to not assume that they are always in safe mode.

For example, maybe 9 out of 10 non-enemy NPCs tend to be relatively truthful and possibly even helpful. But once in a while, the 10th NPC lies through his teeth and unless the players figure it out or one of the PCs makes an Insight check, that NPC can lead them off on a wild goose chase or create some other type of havoc.


Ok, so a gotcha is so bad that it usually results in death or a major setback for the one or more PCs without them having decision making input into it?

Gotcha!

 

[Lanefan]

Right, so "surprises on a 5" tries to sneak up on "surprised on a 1" ... I don't remember how that was resolved?

The PC always rolled (or was rolled for). If the PC was doing the sneaking, then she surprises on a 5. If something's sneaking up on the PC then she's surprised on a 1. Monsters and opponents in theory didn't get to roll.

No idea how it was supposed to work if PCs were sneaking up on eath other - which I've seen more than once.

I thought so. I can't even remember if you wanted high or low. I vaguely remember you could tie.
But the key difference was that you rolled it every round. So you could lose initiative one round, win it the next, and act twice in a row.

I think high went first, and some things coud tie but not others (part of the messy I referred to earlier). By RAW I'm not sure if it was rerolled every round.

Then again, the example of combat given in the DMG contradicts some of this anyway, as good ol' EGG wrote it one way and played it another.

Cyclical initiative has issues that traditional initiative doesn't, and vice-versa, independent of the resolution method used to determine who won initiative.

Even non-cyclical d20 has problems; on this I speak from expereience having been in a game that tried it.

Lanefan

 

[iserith]

I'm still not quite there.

What is the difference between a gotcha and a surprise? Is a gotcha something bad that happens and a surprise something good that happens? I see little difference between the two words.

Why is it important for the player to always be able to avoid some things vis conscious decision making?

Could you please give a few concrete examples? Far as I can tell, a gotcha is something the DM wants the players to know something about ahead of time and a surprise is something the DM does not want the players to know about ahead of time. Is there something more to it?

In this context, a gotcha would be as I defined it in my last post. A surprise happens when the players are given the clues and either dismiss them as irrelevant or make erroneous conclusions about them and come to find out they were wrong. What differentiates a gotcha from a surprise comes down to whether the DM telegraphed the reveal sometime earlier.

I'm not sure if you're a fan of Game of Thrones (the show in this case), but I think the plot twists there are a good example of this. Something stunning happens and you're surprised. (Maybe a friend even posted a video of you crying and cursing at the TV because your favorite character just got butchered.) But then you start to think back about any clues that were dropped in previous episodes - and you will find them. You kick yourself for not seeing it sooner yet you can't be mad at the writers because it makes total sense in hindsight. In other cases, something stunning happens and you saw it coming because you were paying attention and made some good deductions. That's also very satisfying, to be proven right. It's win-win either way from the audience's perspective because the plot twist was telegraphed. If something crazy happens and there were no clues whatsoever that it would occur, that's often seen as a plot hole which for many isn't very satisfying.

Use of gotchas by the DM will tend to cause players to increase their defenses against them and that usually means pumping Perception and sometimes Insight maybe (or being extra paranoid and thorough). So if that is not something the DM wants to see, then getting away from using gotchas will definitely help. This is pretty tangential to the thread topic if we delve much further into the subject of gotchas, but if anyone wants to start a thread on it I will participate. We've definitely had those discussions before but it's been a while.

 

[iserith]

Or presents deceptive information. Classic monsters like the Gelatinous Cube and Gas Spore existed to be gotchyas. "You see skelleton floating towards you..." "You see a spherical creature with multiple stalks radiating from it's top..."
... then there was the Crypt Thing.

It depends on how that information is presented, but yeah, for sure. Gelatinous cubes can be telegraphed by a section of the dungeon having been scoured clean, floor to ceiling, especially if that contrasts with previously explored areas, plus an acrid smell in the air from its acidic form. For the gas spores, throw a dead goblin covered in mold on the ground, sprouting with weird fungal eyestalks. (That latter one is fun because it turns into more gas spores in a week's time if the PCs don't do something about it.)

I actually wrote a short-form scenario involving gas spores and a beholder zombie here.