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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4316848" data-attributes="member: 30001">This issue comes up all of the time on this board - at least in general.  What happens when the dice rolling interferes with what the DM has in mind as a plot?  In the old days everything was about a sort of versimilitude.  You mapped out the dungeon, and players walked around and tried to find treasure and kill things.  The "secret door problem" wasn't a problem in that case.  There was no plot.  The game session may very well consist of PCs wandering around in the dungeon lost and never finding anything interesting.  That, at least, was the basic ideal model - but from about the very day that it was conceived, various bits of advice trickled in (through side notes in the DMG and Dragon Mag, etc.) about various approaches to what amounted to railroading.Then, after years of describing DnD as some sort of "shared story" game, the DMs consciouness about some sort of "plot" greatly increased.  This plot design thing ranges from a subtle zen-like approach with gentle guiding (eg. either don't put important plot elements behind secret doors, or be prepared for the contingency of the PCs not finding it)  to a heavy railroady type control (the DM fudges the search check or has some deus-ex-machina event occur like a monster walks through the secret door just at the right time).IMO new DMs should come to terms right away with the role that random number generation and plots are going to play in the game.  It would have been nice if this were discussed in the DMG because I often find the core rule philosophy to be somewhat schizophrenic in this area.  IMO the core rules gives out mixed messages - probably as a result of trying to ecapsulate all DMing styles in one ruleset.The one thing that the "olden times" approach had going for it was that was honest.  IME DMs often can fool themselves into thinking that they can get away with doing more fudging than they really can.  The sense of risk and challenge just doesn't exist in a game where you don't allow random chance and player's choices to determine the outcome.  Actually finding a secret door, when the chances are not certain, gives the player the sense that something special has happened.  IMO there's just no way around this - fudging doesn't work as much as people think it does.  If you want players to take pleasure in chance discoveries like this (and you don't have to, there are other possible ways to enjoy the game) then I think you need to "let the dice fall where they may".</blockquote>

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