D&D 5E Players Self-Assigning Rolls

[Lanefan]

Ultimately, yes, this will be the result regardless of the approach they describe, although it will be conveyed in response to what they describe doing. For example, if the players approach is, “I take a handful of flour from my bag and walk along the wall, sprinkling flour as I go to see if a draft disturbs their decent pattern” then I will respond, “you make your way carefully around the room this way, thoroughly checking the length of each wall for signs of a draft, but the flour is not blown off its descent path at any point.” Or, if their approach is, “I place the edge of my dagger against the mortar between the wall and the floor and drag it all the way down the wall, looking to see if it catches on anything or slides into a seam anywhere.” My response would be, “As you drag your blade across the mortar, you don’t feel any irregularities that might indicate a secret door or catch.”


Correct. And to be clear, I don’t treat rolled actions as a chance to inflict a negative state. What I do is allow players to be successful on any task where failure wouldn’t have a consequence anyway. Or to put it another way, if there’s no reason the player can’t keep trying something until they succeed, I save everyone the time it would take to roll over and over and just narrate them eventually succeeding.

I don't; as I always assume the roll you get represents your best attempt, possibly of many, and you're simply not going to do any better than what's indicated by that one roll until and unless something materially (e.g. someone else helps you search) or mechanically (e.g. you gain a level) changes. There ain't no such thing as 'take 20' round here.

How confident are they that the flour wasn’t disturbed or the dagger didn’t catch in anything? 100%.

Absolutely.

I arrive at that answer by evaluating the player’s approach and its chances of achieving the desired outcome. If you drag your blade along the mortar of a wall that has no seam, there is no possibility of finding the seam of a secret door.

Correct.

You can be 100% confident that there is no seam in the mortar, and as confidant that there is no secret door as the knowledge that there is no seam in the mortar makes you.

Faulty reasoning.

You can be 100% confident that you did not find a seam. However, you can not be 100% confident that there is no seam there to find; only that whether a seam is present there or not, you didn't find one.
[MENTION=6919838]5ekyu[/MENTION] - to your point about combat rolls vs. non-combat rolls - they're different things. With very few exceptions, combat die rolls and their narrative outcomes are both easy to tie together and obvious to all. Many non-combat situations are similar e.g. a failed die roll for climbing a wall has immediate and obvious narrative consequences.

However, in many other non-combat situations the die rolls and their narrative outcomes are not easy to tie together and the narrative outcome(s) may not become obvious for some time, if ever at all. Thus, what the players and characters get is the narrative (i.e. what the character observes) without player-side mechanical rationale. The secret door example is one such. Most social interactions involving die rolls should be another: while role-playing an interaction the player states out-of-character that she'll be trying to intimidate the thief into revealing who hired him; the DM rolls the intimidate check and works the results into her role-playing of the thief.

And yes this means you have to trust the DM to do these things in good faith...but if you don't trust the DM, why are you even there?

If the player turns up nothing on a 20, there shouldn’t have been a roll.

EDIT: Oh, you probably meant a total of 20, not a natural 20. Nevermind.

I meant natural 20, for what it's worth; and yes there should have been a roll. There was doubt before the roll, and in this case where a 20 came up depending on the circumstances there's either less doubt or no doubt remaining after the roll.

An example where narrative outcome is immediately obvious and thus the player rolls it: a character trying to lift a portcullis. She's not sure if she can do it (hence, doubt) but gives it her best shot. She rolls a 20 on the die. Portcullis rattles a bit but otherwise doesn't budge. Doubt removed. Now if she still has reason to think she should have been able to lift it she might start looking for, say, something holding the portcullis in place - a restraining spike, perhaps - the finding and removal of which would give her another roll to lift it as something has both materially changed (the spike is out) and mechanically changed (the DC just went down by a whole bunch).

Lan-"out for a day and this thing explodes"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

Exactly, you get it. Finally.

A character and a player can make an assumption, act on that assumption and the GM tell them the results of that action without it being a federal case.

First time I've agreed with you in this thread, I think.

The same is true of other things...like secret doors. A character/player can assume there's one in that wall, search for it, fail to find it, and never know if that assumption was right or wrong.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

A player of mine is playing... well, imagine the body of Conan with the brain of Sterling Archer.

He sometimes makes spontaneous Intelligence or Wisdom saving throws against himself, to decide whether his character recklessly says or does something he shouldn't.

Given the nature of the character, "smoother" would not be an entirely accurate word for the effect of this on the game. It is, however, a positive effect. Most importantly, the player enjoys being able to be surprised by his own character.

This is cool! I do a similar thing sometimes, as do my players now and then - low Wisdom is so much fun!

However, these not-always-serious rolls aren't quite the same as the other types of self-assigned rolls being discussed here, in that with these rolls you're only rolling against yourself rather than against the DM or the game or some element within it. And, as you're also going to be the author of whatever narration comes out of said roll-against-self the DM doesn't need to be involved and doesn't need to ask you to roll...though she may make you wait your turn to narrate your results.

It's the same as a DM rolling to see how an NPC responds to something a PC says or does.

Lanefan

 

[Maxperson]

If an action would auto-fail or auto-succeed then no roll is required.

If someone makes a roll anyway, they just wasted their time. Reality doesn't change from certainty to uncertainty just because someone asks about it.

You say that if the outcome would be auto-success/failure but the player rolls anyway, the universe responds by making the outcome in doubt when there was no doubt before the player rolled the d20, even though the PC in-game didn't do anything yet.

So, for you, the act of rolling changes an auto-success into something that might fail.

The very same logic means that the act of rolling also changes an auto-fail into something that might succeed; changing 'no doubt' into 'doubt'.

So I now have a 5% chance (at least!) of achieving impossible things simply by rolling a d20! Cool! A 5% chance of flying by flapping my arms, or having a wish come true without all that labourious getting to 17th level and learning the spell!

Not quite.

Once a roll happens, I set a DC. For something that would auto succeed, that DC if very low. Sometimes so low that the PC still can't fail. The same with auto fails and high DCs. A 20 on a skill check isn't always a success.

 

[robus]

Going with examples from upthread, though, there are other cases where choosing the wrong approach from the many possible would lock you out from success. If you're looking for secret doors, and there are at least two methods by which you could do that, then choosing the wrong one means that you fail; if the DM lets you initiate a roll without specifying the method, then you have a chance to succeed regardless of which method the door is concealed by.

Skipping straight to the roll gives you the benefit of your character's expertise within the world, beyond the mere imagination of the player. If the DM allows you to. Which isn't a given.

As a player, I have no idea how my character would go about using the Arcana skill to detect a magic item. But if that is a thing which they can do, which we are assuming is the case in this example, then the character does know how they would go about it. When the player says that they want to make an Arcana check to determine if this thing is magical, what they're really saying is that they want their character to perform whatever action corresponds to the mechanic of using their knowledge of the arcane to determine the properties of an item, even though the player doesn't know what that entails.

It's essentially giving the character the benefit of the doubt, even though the player doesn't know as much as the DM does about how the world works.

If there are secret doors and the PC is looking for them i’d be a pretty poor DM if I didn’t give them some hint that they’re on the right path. Perhaps because they’re near the secret door the sword edge doesn’t find the door but they do catch a slight change in the air in this location? Or notice something else that gives them a hint to try another approach.

 

[robus]

This is cool! I do a similar thing sometimes, as do my players now and then - low Wisdom is so much fun!

However, these not-always-serious rolls aren't quite the same as the other types of self-assigned rolls being discussed here, in that with these rolls you're only rolling against yourself rather than against the DM or the game or some element within it. And, as you're also going to be the author of whatever narration comes out of said roll-against-self the DM doesn't need to be involved and doesn't need to ask you to roll...though she may make you wait your turn to narrate your results.

It's the same as a DM rolling to see how an NPC responds to something a PC says or does.

Lanefan

Right, the player has added their own mini-game to make role-playing that character more entertaining and surprising.

 

[robus]

I don’t make pre-emptive rolls because I consider that impolite to my DM, full stop. I often consider it counter-productive because the people who pre-empt the DM with a roll are in my experience the exact same players who don’t bother to explain what they’re doing, they just announce a high result and expect the DM to let them succeed. They’re Also IME the same people who roll, and if they get a low roll don’t say anything and pretend like they didn’t make a roll, and then roll again more publicly if the dungeon Master DOES later call for a roll (a.k.a. Cheating your guts out).

I’ve never sat at a table where a player auto-assigned rolls outside of combat in order to make the game smoother (if you’re one of those people and I game with you you’ll show me something new) Most who do want to make the game run smoother usually wait for the DM to call for a check, or just ask if a check vs. skill X would help, and then make the roll.

This I think is the key reason why it should be discouraged, it opens the door to “creative” dice rolling. Pre-emptively rolled high? Keep that ready for when the DM asks for the result. Rolled low? Just forget it ever happened and award yourself advantage by rolling again when the DM asks.

 

[jasper]

I have agree with [MENTION=6775477]Shiroiken[/MENTION] “The primary reason is to prevent the "dice determine everything" mentality that some players adopt” over @5eku “how does "the player rolled ahead" have any effect on the GM”.
Rolling ahead interrupts the dm while he is giving out information. The player nor the pc knows if a roll is needed. I even a player roll a knowledge check to determine the correct hallway to take. This is after I told the group to listen, take notes, and repeated the data dump three times. So he wanted a die roll to supersede what was a player choice.
Or being Snaky…
5ekyu “ The tall dark handsome strange tells of the tell tale heart in which ….
Jasper rolls, die hits the table. “That is 12 so 16 on insight so I know he is lying, 14 I going to use deception to shake him down for more money, 15 on sleight of hand to pick his pocket for the needed map, 12 on initiative and I ready my ray of frost if he has a higher initiative!”.
Or Jasper, “ the party enters the room, is 40 by 40 has statue of a dragon that appears, …..”
5ekyu dice hitting the table, “ I rolled a 15 so that is 20 on perception are there any secret doors?”
Jasper, “ to be really life like. In fact when 5ekyu starts to check the dragon statue for secret doors, the dragon drops the illusion. 5ekyu is surprise everyone else is not. Roll init. “
Bluntly wait until I the Dm have called for a roll. If you throw dice beforehand I will be calling for rerolling even if you guess correctly what roll I was going to ask for.

 

[cmad1977]

Nothing can help stupid, I guess. Its shinny because its very ornate and pretty, and its a decorative weapon. But you didn't investigate it first, did you?

Or keep it from posting on the forum I suppose.


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[cmad1977]

Dice rolled before I ask for a roll are usually ignored.


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