D&D 5E Players Self-Assigning Rolls

[5ekyu]

Nope. My position is simple. If it's not explicitly allowed, then it's a house rule to include it. The DM is the only one allowed to call for rolls unless he house rules things to be otherwise.

Gotcha...so using a lasso to well lasso a horse is only possible as a house rule? Or is there a page in the phb dmg that describes it?

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[5ekyu]

As a way of demonstrating why players initiating rolls is a bad strategy.

Let's say I'm playing in a game where the DM does allow players to initiate their own rolls, and I find a cool shiny sword. Let's also assume, as the above example does, that this DM allows Arcana checks to be used to tell if something is magical or not.

Now, if I want to figure out if the sword is magical, I could say, "I make an Arcana check to see if it's magical," I open the door for that roll to turn out poorly, and for the DM to say "You can't tell" based on that result. But if I instead say, "I study the sword carefully, looking for runes, markings, or other signs that someone may have placed an enchantment on it," I don't open that door. Of course, the DM might say "Make an Arcana check to see if you find anything," at which point I'll make the check and abide by the results. But I'm also inviting the DM to decide "you know, that action you just described doesn't have a chance of failure. You see some runes engraved on the hilt that say 'Flametongue' in Draconic." Waiting for the DM to ask for a roll, even if you're allowed to initiate rolls on your own, gives you more opportunities for automatic success.

How does your player initiated check result in opening the door if as was suggested nobody adds failure when it was not there just cuz roll?

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[Charlaquin]

In your example, waiting for the DM to initiate rolling would also give more opportunity for automatic failure. If it's a magic sword, but it's not the kind with runes or markings on it, then searching for runes or markings would automatically fail, where examining it through unspecified methods might succeed.

Sure. Looking for runes was the only approach I could think of for how to use Arcana to try and achieve the goal of "find out if it's magical." It's not a great example because identifying items as magical isn't normally a function of the Arcana skill, but I ran with it because it was what had already been under discussion.

 

[Maxperson]

Gotcha...so using a lasso to well lasso a horse is only possible as a house rule? Or is there a page in the phb dmg that describes it?

You seriously think every DM allows it? Just because it's a very common house rule, does not make it a rule.

 

[the_redbeard]

Even as someone who’s a staunch supporter of “The DM always calls for the rolls” play style, this argument really rubs me the wrong way. As a 4e fan, I got told the same thing about “why are you playing D&D, clearly what you really want to be playing is WoW” too many times during the edition war to ever feel comfortable telling someone else to go play another game. People play D&D for all sorts of reasons, and we shouldn’t presume to know what other people want better than they do. I’d much rather argue for why I think my style is fun than talk down about other people’s preferred styles.

I played a good deal of 4e but I never ran it. I had a 3.5 campaign going and we all wanted to see what happened with it. I did though, take parts of 4e and put them into my 3.5 game, including Skill Challenges. I know, everyone hated them, but if you run your skills more narratively it was a lot of fun. I ran them like montages: I would present a big challenge scene (like a chase, but one of the most memorable was escaping from a city that was being attacked by druids that sent these huge tree roots up from below that wrecked the city), and the players would describe a potential obstacle and how they would avoid it. I'd them know of their chances and the potential problems from a failure and they would decide if they took that action. Then we'd count successes and failures to see if they won/escaped/whatever.

Anyway.

Take a 4e skill challenge: you tell your players of a skill challenge and then they go ahead and immediately shout out skills and rolls? That would seem to ruin the whole damn point of the game, especially your role in it, would it not? That's the point I'm getting at here. At the very least it makes the DM feel superfluous. I'll admit to having an emotional reaction to it.

DnD from its beginnings and even explicitly* in this edition, has been a game in which the DM describes an environment, the players state an action for their characters and the DM adjudicates the result. Players self-assigning their rolls interrupts and steps on the role of the DM.

In between the announcement of player character action and the result being known there's a lot that goes on that assuming, self-assigning a check and making a roll skips.

*As pointed out by another poster, page 174 of the Players Handbook. "The DM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure."

 

[Charlaquin]

How does your player initiated check result in opening the door if as was suggested nobody adds failure when it was not there just cuz roll?

Like this:

If Joe really wants to check for secret doors and wants to use the mechanics of the game (ie: roll those pretty dice of his) I'm not going to tell him not to. It doesn't take any greater expenditure of time on my part or Joe's part to roll the dice and narrate the results, as opposed to simply narrating the results without rolling the dice. IMO: as a player it feels more interactive to roll the dice and be told the result, than to just be told the result. From a DM side, players rolling dice gives me some opportunities to be creative. Maybe I didn't have any secret doors there. Maybe his good roll discovered something else. Maybe his bad roll triggered something dangerous.

 

[the_redbeard]

So. To be clear. Your position is if something is not explicitly allowed in the rules, it is not allowed AND if anything not in the rules is allowed then everything is allowed?



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You're not talking about home brew content, you're not even talking about an optional way of handling or interpreting something. You're talking about messing with the foundation of the game: DM describes a situation/environment, Player chooses a response, DM adjudicates response. You're messing with that base procedure which is the role of another participant. I don't tell you how to play your character, and I don't let players take actions away from other players either. I won't tolerate it from a player at my table.

 

[Maxperson]

This might help you understand why the lasso idea is a house rule. First, not all DMs will allow it. Even the ones that do, though, don't have rules for it so they have to create those rules. One DM might require a simple dex check. Another an athletics check of some sort. The third DM might make it a to hit roll. The fourth DM might make it a combination. Roll to hit to see if the rope hits the horse, and then a dex or athletics check to get the noose over the head. A fifth DM might add in a strength check to hold onto the rope. And so on.

 

[Charlaquin]

I played a good deal of 4e but I never ran it. I had a 3.5 campaign going and we all wanted to see what happened with it. I did though, take parts of 4e and put them into my 3.5 game, including Skill Challenges. I know, everyone hated them, but if you run your skills more narratively it was a lot of fun. I ran them like montages: I would present a big challenge scene (like a chase, but one of the most memorable was escaping from a city that was being attacked by druids that sent these huge tree roots up from below that wrecked the city), and the players would describe a potential obstacle and how they would avoid it. I'd them know of their chances and the potential problems from a failure and they would decide if they took that action. Then we'd count successes and failures to see if they won/escaped/whatever.

Anyway.

Take a 4e skill challenge: you tell your players of a skill challenge and then they go ahead and immediately shout out skills and rolls? That would seem to ruin the whole damn point of the game, especially your role in it, would it not? That's the point I'm getting at here. At the very least it makes the DM feel superfluous. I'll admit to having an emotional reaction to it.

Interestingly, this is exactly why I hated Skill Challenges back then. 4e was the first game I GMed, and I had only played with GMs who let the players initiate the rolls most of the time, so I followed the only examples I had. And Skill Challenges felt terrible for reasons I couldn't put my finger on. I would present a situation to my players and they would just kind of pick Skills they had high ratings in to roll. And then those rolls wouldn't have observable results until enough successes or failures were accumulated to resolve the whole Skill Challenge. Now that I have more experience and better DMing skills, Skill Challenges wouldn't be so terrible. Actually, there are times when they would still be quite useful, and I do borrow the X successes before Y failures mechanic in my 5e games. They run much more smoothly when each action is described to me in terms of the narrative and I can determine the most appropriate roll to resolve those actions and give specific feedback as to the results, also in terms of the narrative.

 

[5ekyu]

Some of the recent posts highlight a big part of the issue i have with the "linking" of roll with failure.

it boils down to this: How something is determined within the game and at the table mechanics-wise does not need to be handled differently depending on what the possible outcomes could be. They really dont. It also causes "issues" and "concerns" even for some of those proposing it.

"getting fewer chances at auto-success" has been mentioned several times - pointing to the issue that lets say "playing the GM" so he gives out as many auto-successes as possible is a "good strategy." if you make a roll you "open the door"... etc. Maybe if its one way you wont even know how confident your character is in the result.

But lets take a different look.

In my games, if you decide to check a shiney sword and a sword with runes on it for magic (by whatever means there is that involves a check for success) then for the player and for the character the process will remain the same. narrate, describe, declare , check, adjudicate etc etc.

There was no "we didn't roll so auto..." there was the exact same process regardless of the underlying truth.

I as Gm don't change my mind because a dice got rolled on whether you can succeed or can fail because the roll is a measure of performance, not a testimony to failure chance existence.

When it is done in my system, your character ends up with a result and a degree of confidence in that result based off how they saw their performance, be it high degree or low degree.

The way i have interpreted the "dont have to roll if impossible" and "dont have to roll if too easy" is by comparing it to old days where that kind of thing was unclear. Every had a Gm have your space marine roll to use a phone book? i have.

those "dont need to roll everything" kinds of rules cropped up a while back and in general started to cover the "just stop making them roll for silly crap."

But somewhere over in indie land of gaming theory they started to morph into a more philosophical mandate - "dont make them roll if..." became "cannot roll unless..." in some peoples minds, alongside the "must have consequences and failure stakes" which at least seems to have not crossed into DND yet officially.

So, yeah, no, i am not going to make you roll for phone books or for tieing your shoes or walking acroiss the street or wiping your bum without falling off the stoop.... but i am also not going to let the rules allowing that exclusion to force a second means of resolution for actions and skills that is dependent not on what is being attempted and how that is done but on the underlying final answer.

The lets go to visit grandma at her house route to grandma's house will be the same, whether or not grandma is home when we get there.

You the player don't have to worry about me changing my decision on auto-success or not, or if i will be "influenced" to make it less likely for you to get auto-success because we will be using the same process either way.

The "best strategy" is not keeping quiet and hoping the Gm will give you more auto-successes but will be to have a good idea, a good plan, a good way to get it done "in character", "in the game" using the story, the scenery, the narrative, your character's strengths and the mechanics to get the best possible odds which do include auto-success and aut-failure where appropriate.

If the result of the de jour definition of roll-to-failure relationship is that "dont ask for rolls cuz if you wait the gm may give it to you without you needing to roll" which really smells to me like "playing the GM" then i consider that a serious freaking flaw and drawback to that whole system, because the players should be , IMO, thinking of the marriage between story-narrative-mechanics and not "what gets the best yields out of the gm".

If someone were to say "hey, dont ask about treasure at the table. Wait. cuz if he does it by email later there is always more." would you be highlighting that as good roleplaying game activity? good "strategy". System working great?

Anyway, thats how i see it.