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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7292530" data-attributes="member: 6779196">No one is saying they make up chances of failure that wouldn't have otherwise existed.Can you please stop doing this? It's condescending and rude.Knowledge that you didn't find a seam does absolutely give you information about the presence of a secret door. It tells you with absolute certainty that the seam of a hidden door is not there. Granted, that does not necessarily mean that there isn't a secret door, but if there is one, it apparently doesn't have a seam. Now, keeping in mind that my goal is not to thwart you but to give you opportunities to make meaning decisions and interact meaningfully with the world, if you're a player in the game and not a person on the internet trying to poke holes in my argument, this should probably tip you off that there is most likely not a secret door. If your concerned that there might still be a secret door that doesn't have a seam, you're welcome to try something else to give you more information about a secret door. You could try the flour trick to find out if there's a draft from a secret door. You could try tapping on the walls listening for a hollow spot. You could try looking closely for variations in the stonework. Whatever. But keep in mind, I want secret doors in my games to be detectable by common sense methods.Not enough information.  You're cherry picking an example I intentionally left overly simplified in direct response to your complaints that my answers were too full of lengthy prose to try to use it as an example of my methods not giving enough information. This makes it really difficult to continue this discussion under the assumption that you are arguing in good faith.Oh my god, WHO CARES? We're here to play a pretend game together, not to take a medical exam. I give information with the intent of helping you make decisions with confidence that the world will behave in an internally consistent way, not to trick you with "Haha! You thought the pain receding meant frodo was getting better, but secretly it was the kind of poison where that means it's getting worse!" My relationship with my players is not that kind of adversarial.I'm going to convey information through in-world description. And I'm going to do it in a way that empowers the players to make informed decisions. So, yeah, if the attempt is successful, I'm going to describe that in terms of its directly observable results, such as "his fever starts to break" or "his symptoms subside", regardless of whether or not that's true of all poisons in real life. If it's not working, I will convey that through directly observable results as well, "There's no noticeable change." If this is because it's some kind of magical poison that can't be cured by mundane methods, I'll endeavor to convey that information as well. "This seems strange to you. You're familiar with poisons and their herbal remedies, and this really should have worked. Some other factor must be at work here." And then Investigation might be able to tell you that it's demonic in nature or whatever. First of all, you don't need an Int (Investigation) check to get confirmation that you didn't find a seam in the secret door example. If you recall, I said that I would tell the player they are 100% certain there is no seam if they asked, and that they could be as confident as that knowledge makes them that there is no secret door. And again, keep in mind that I'm invested in the players' ability to make informed decisions, so I'm not going to try to trick them with seams that can't be found or whatever. Second of all, if the player asked how sure they were the herbal poultice was helping, assuming a die roll wasn't involved, I would be equally happy to confirm, they are 100% confident it is working (or is not working, whatever). If a die roll was involved. This could also likely be determined logically anyway, since if I don't call for a dice roll it's because the action had no chance of success or no chance of failure (or no consequence for failure, but this action clearly does). So if there wasn't a roll, it's pretty easy to work out that you are 100% confident in its success or failureIt occurs to me that this is a pretty terrible comparison, because in the check for secret doors example, the goal is to gather information, whereas in the herbal poultice example the goal is to cure a poison. It has much more direct and obvious results. Remember, this whole tangent started because we were talking about rolls with hidden information, where the character might not know how successful their actiYou don't need problem solving skills to correctly interpret my descriptions if you're not assuming I'm acting in bad faith, trying to trick the players.More like the follow up skill for Perception, but yes. I do tell players who haven't played in my games before that I run the relationship between Perception and Investigation differently than a lot of DMs they might have played with before do, and specifically that for me Perception gives you direct sensory information and Investigation allows you to interpret that sensory information. This does mean players who are very confident in their own problem solving and lateral thinking skills will often skip Investigation and players who want that insurance policy make it a high priority.</blockquote>

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