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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 7001767">Because it's the product of study and specialized knowledge, not intuition and hunches.  Or, to dive a little bit deeper, if you make a mistake building a bomb it's because you made a mistake.  And the dice roll says you didn't make a mistake. The underlying principles are not bayesian or stochastic.  But if you're trying to intuit whether a guard is lying, even if you've been foolish enough to pay for a course in how to detect lies you're still applying probabilities, not certainties.  "When people behave such-and-such a way it probably means they are lying."So even if you apply those principles without making a mistake they still aren't guaranteed to produce the right answer.How's that?That reduces the chances, and also reduces the character's confidence that they will succeed, but has no change on their confidence that they have succeeded.  Again, you may not want that sort of uncertainty in your game (which is understandable because it's not, as far as I'm aware, baked into any RPG) but I do, which is why I started the thread.Yes, there are various ways to introduce the kind of uncertainty I'm talking about; the difference becomes the probabilities that are generated.Also in this specific scenario, you could roll the check at the point of the wire cutting, so the PC is deciding solely on how good he is at the task in question. That does leave the PC without any interesting options to mitigate the effect of a poor roll though.The only way I see this scenario as being interesting is this:1. present it.2. player makes a roll to see if he knows which wire to cut. Whether his roll is good or bad, he isn't likely to be confident in the answer unless you've done something like told him the DC up front.3. optionally the DM rolls an opposed check to add some extra uncertainty, which could cause the bomb to fail despite the player botching his roll, or cause the bomb to explode despite him doing well at it.I'm not sure how your extra rule would help here. If the PC is only just beating the DC of the device, there's already uncertainty. Heck, if your narrative is strong, he's not going to be confident that he has the device beat because he doesn't know the DC.As noted previously that's an erroneous characterization.  If you are good at something then on any given attempt you still have a higher probability of succeeding.Almost.  There are different kinds of uncertainty.Seriously?  Choosing Insight as one of your skills suddenly becomes a bad investment?  Sheesh.Oh, ok, so it was the first version.  I don't know why you think this is hard.  Remember that the fluff in this case is purely fluff.  "You think he's lying because he won't make eye contact."  "You think it's the left passage because you think you feel a slight draught." "You think it's the red wire because your bomb disposal instructor told you that 66% of the time it's the red wire."  Whatever.  Unlike the approach where the DM is trying to actually convey the probability with the rationale, in this case the believability of the rationale has no impact on the player's understanding of the probabilities.  DM: "You think it's the red wire because last night you had a dream where everything was red."Player: "Yeah, whatever.  I beat the TN by 7 so I have a 1/6 chance of being wrong."Again, if that's the case, why does the skill apply to it at all? And why do all insight checks fall into the "just a hunch" bucket?(Funny you mentioned 3 wires...see my next post, which is what I logged on to write.)It's not impossible to get the duke's nickname wrong.  The difference is that thinking somebody lying is a hunch (see above) not a retrievable fact.  I mean, the duke's nickname COULD be a hunch and if, depending on the scenario, the DM decided that uncertainty would add to dramatic tension, this rule could still be used.  Similarly (or conversely), whether or not the guard is lying might not really have much impact on the story, in which case I wouldn't bother with the uncertainty.  Why do I sense so much hostility from you toward this whole idea?  Or is it hostility toward me personally?</blockquote>

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