I try to strike a balance between player skill and character skill. I'll give a description, then if the players want to search, they tell me what they're looking for or what they're looking at. In the case of the room from the OP, to find the secret panel one would have to investigate the moose head with an Int/Investigation check. The player decided the moose head was important enough to check, but the character knows what to look for about it.
D&D General Perception, Search Rolls, and Game Style (thinking about expectation for how rules play out at the table).
- Thread starter el-remmen
- Start date
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
This doesn’t quite scan. Being a coroner is rather more specialized knowledge than how to look around the room. A closer match might be that you don’t expect them to be a detective, and with that I would agree. Fortunately it does take a detective to be able to describe searching a room with reasonable specificity.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
The flip side of that is pixel bitching. There's absolutely no way I'd ever want to deal with that style of gaming again. There's got to be a middle ground between describing everything in perfect detail (aka "mother may I") or skipping the description and just rolling dice.
I think the key in your post is "reasonable". Different people define what's reasonable specificity.
Pretty much this - my players come to the table in part to be something they aren't in real life. I'm not going to make success depend on how well the player knows things...
Especially because, well, are any of us ourselves forensic experts, or something? No? Well, then we don't really know what's most plausible either, now do we?
Thus, if they give me a description that's narratively fitting, that's cool.
Heck, in Gumshoe games, you don't even have to roll dice....
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
The predictable thing about these sorts of discussions is that "reasonable specificity" is usually interpreted by a lot of posters as "players must be subject matter experts in the given skill proficiency and spell everything out to an exacting degree." It's really weird what some folks consider "reasonable."
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Reasonable is the key, yeah. I’d wager most of us would have a definition of reasonable that’s within the same ballpark.
el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
And yes of course, "reasonable" detail and reasonable description of how the character interacts with the world. Heck, sometimes I will describe this room and it does not say "there are fireplace tools" but it says there is a fireplace. A player asks if there are any and I either decide the best I can based on what I know of where they are or give it a 50/50.
RangerWickett
Legend
My stance is to let the player's decisions matter, because while I'm the arbiter of the world, we're doing collaborative storytelling. When a writer tells you a character does something, that action should matter - to mood, to characterization, to plot, or something.
Likewise when a player says they search a room, I'll maybe ask for clarification to add some texture to the scene, but if they just say they make a search check, I'll use my power as the narrator to guide them to the in-narrative actions that will achieve their implied goal. They want to find hidden things, so if there's a hidden compartment behind a moose head, and they've said their searching the room, I'll highlight things to draw their attention to it. Then they'll narrate specific actions to investigate the head, which then makes any discovery they have feel like their choices produced it.
The dice are . . . not that important. Honestly, out of combat, I weight dice maybe 10%, and weight player intention like 70%. The final 20% is the surrounding context - did they make a character to be good at this, is it going to affect the fun of the rest of the players, etc.
Like, in speech act theory, there is locution (what is said), illocution (the intent of the words), and perlocution (the result of the words). The classic example is "Is there any salt?" The locution is a question about the presence of salt. The illocution is a request for someone who has salt to hand it over. The perlocution is that the speaker gets salt.
I feel like a major part of my role as narrator is to understand the illocution, and ensure that the locution leads to the desired perlocution.
Likewise when a player says they search a room, I'll maybe ask for clarification to add some texture to the scene, but if they just say they make a search check, I'll use my power as the narrator to guide them to the in-narrative actions that will achieve their implied goal. They want to find hidden things, so if there's a hidden compartment behind a moose head, and they've said their searching the room, I'll highlight things to draw their attention to it. Then they'll narrate specific actions to investigate the head, which then makes any discovery they have feel like their choices produced it.
The dice are . . . not that important. Honestly, out of combat, I weight dice maybe 10%, and weight player intention like 70%. The final 20% is the surrounding context - did they make a character to be good at this, is it going to affect the fun of the rest of the players, etc.
Like, in speech act theory, there is locution (what is said), illocution (the intent of the words), and perlocution (the result of the words). The classic example is "Is there any salt?" The locution is a question about the presence of salt. The illocution is a request for someone who has salt to hand it over. The perlocution is that the speaker gets salt.
I feel like a major part of my role as narrator is to understand the illocution, and ensure that the locution leads to the desired perlocution.
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