D&D General Should players be aware of their own high and low rolls?

[Oofta]

It sounds like you’re speaking hypothetically rather than from experience - “I wouldn’t like it” rather than “I don’t like it” or “I didn’t like it.” Or am I misinterpreting? Not that there’s anything wrong with speaking hypothetically on the matter, but in my own experience the way I now run the game sounded to me like it would hurt immersion when I first heard it described, but my experience actually playing that way has been very much the opposite.

This sounds like all the times people tried to convince me to try sushi/shashimi. I'm not that fond of fish, rare meats or horseradish (which is what you get in the US). I let people talk me into it a few times and yep ... hated it.

So I don't get the proselytizing. It's not like it's impossible to understand something without trying it out first, I've played plenty of games that have various approaches including knowing all the details. It's similar to what we did in 4E with skill challenges and I hated it. It made interaction with the world very mechanical and it became a roll playing game instead of role playing.

I get that it works for you. That's great! But it's kind of, I don't know, condescending(?) that you know the true way of doing things and that if we only tried we'd like it.

 

[Mort]

Not if you care about verisimilitude. The point of a trap is to kill people or trap them so you can kill them later. There’s no benefit to making a trap obvious in the fiction. It’s 100% a gameplay thing to signpost traps.

The trap doesn't have to be in any way obvious.

An experienced player/PC could/would know that the area/situation suggests or would be great for a trap (mechanical or otherwise) - that itself can be the telegraph to at least look for one.

 

[Charlaquin]

This sounds like all the times people tried to convince me to try sushi/shashimi. I'm not that fond of fish, rare meats or horseradish (which is what you get in the US). I let people talk me into it a few times and yep ... hated it.

So I don't get the proselytizing. It's not like it's impossible to understand something without trying it out first, I've played plenty of games that have various approaches including knowing all the details. It's similar to what we did in 4E with skill challenges and I hated it. It made interaction with the world very mechanical and it became a roll playing game instead of role playing.

I get that it works for you. That's great! But it's kind of, I don't know, condescending(?) that you know the true way of doing things and that if we only tried we'd like it.

I’m not saying you’d like it if you tried it. I’m saying I didn’t think I would like it before I tried it, and I was wrong. If you tried it, your experience might be similar, or it might be different. That’s the thing, you can’t really know until you try. Obviously if you’re happy with the way you do things and aren’t interested in trying, that’s perfectly fine. But, I want to make it clear to anyone else who might be following this conversation that I also used to think it wouldn’t be fun for the same reasons you don’t think it will be fun for you. Turned out, for me at least, those reservations were misplaced.

 

[Oofta]

I’m not saying you’d like it if you tried it. I’m saying I didn’t think I would like it before I tried it, and I was wrong. If you tried it, your experience might be similar, or it might be different. That’s the thing, you can’t really know until you try. Obviously if you’re happy with the way you do things and aren’t interested in trying, that’s perfectly fine. But, I want to make it clear to anyone else who might be following this conversation that I also used to think it wouldn’t be fun for the same reasons you don’t think it will be fun for you. Turned out, for me at least, those reservations were misplaced.

How would it be any different from 4E skill challenges? Because that's what it sounds like to me in the base structure and style even if you don't do the X successes before Y failures.

 

[Oofta]

I don't run a lot of "dungeons" and only use traps where they really make sense. In addition, I simply rely on modified passive rolls if people are being paranoid to avoid the constant "I check for traps" or "I check under the bed" or whatever. If they are doing a quick search, checks are passive -5, doing a standard search (which will take time) it's passive , when doing a thorough search it's +5. So if you are just walking down a hall at normal pace, it's a quick search. If you want to thoroughly search the room, you can but you'll likely leave traces behind that you searched.

A lot of this is on a case-by-case basis depending on the situation, any time constraints, pacing of the game. Frequently I'll "zoom in" on only the interesting parts and make rolls at that point. So the group is searching the room taking their time, they'll find that there's something weird about a curio cabinet and we'll start rolling and figuring out approach at that point.

I handle a fair amount of exploration in a fairly abstract manner, only drawing out rooms when combat starts or there's a complex trap for example. It's all just my way of keeping the story moving and focusing on the things I find more enjoyable.

 

[Charlaquin]

The trap doesn't have to be in any way obvious.

An experienced player/PC could/would know that the area/situation suggests or would be great for a trap (mechanical or otherwise) - that itself can be the telegraph to at least look for one.

Yeah, there’s a huge sliding scale of how obvious or suble a telegraph can be. Though, my experience has been that the players almost always find telegraphs to be more subtle than I had thought they were. But my benchmark is, a player who falls into a trap should easily be able to identify the telegraph they missed in retrospect. Otherwise it’ll just feel like a screwjob, and nobody likes a screwjob.

 

[Charlaquin]

How would it be any different from 4E skill challenges? Because that's what it sounds like to me in the base structure and style even if you don't do the X successes before Y failures.

I don’t know how to answer this because to me it’s so unlike 4e skill challenges that I don’t even understand how you made that connection.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Not if you care about verisimilitude.

Which I highly advise against in 98% of cases.

 

[Oofta]

I don’t know how to answer this because to me it’s so unlike 4e skill challenges that I don’t even understand how you made that connection.

I was referring to how they were supposed to be handled. That when you started a skill challenge you were supposed to explicitly tell people they were entering a skill challenge, what the target DCs were, what happens if you fail. It was all quite mechanical.

I'm not saying you're talking about doing the same thing, but telling people "Okay there's a trap here, you need to disarm it or poisonous darts will fly out of the wall" is different from "The walls are lined with tiny holes" or similar. Declaring their in a "disable trap" encounter by telegraphing is the same, to me, as declaring people are entering a skill challenge. If someone is trying to disable a trap, I'll change my description of how easy or difficult it is to disable based on what steps they've taken and if they did an investigation how well they did. Describing something as "it looks simple now that you've identified it" is different from "it's a DC 15".

It's a matter of maintaining the fiction, verisimilitude and a sense of being there.

 

[Charlaquin]

I was referring to how they were supposed to be handled. That when you started a skill challenge you were supposed to explicitly tell people they were entering a skill challenge, what the target DCs were, what happens if you fail. It was all quite mechanical.
I'm not saying you're talking about doing the same thing, but telling people "Okay there's a trap here, you need to disarm it or poisonous darts will fly out of the wall" is different from "The walls are lined with tiny holes" or similar. Declaring their in a "disable trap" encounter by telegraphing is the same, to me, as declaring people are entering a skill challenge. If someone is trying to disable a trap, I'll change my description of how easy or difficult it is to disable based on what steps they've taken and if they did an investigation how well they did. Describing something as "it looks simple now that you've identified it" is different from "it's a DC 15".

It's a matter of maintaining the fiction, verisimilitude and a sense of being there.

Oh, ok, I see what you mean. No, it’s not like you’re thinking of. “The walls are lined with tiny holes” is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say “telegraph.” It’s a digetic clue about the presence of… well, something to interact with, it’s not always traps, but traps are a convenient example, included as part of the description of the environment. Sometimes, the players won’t pick up on that clue, or won’t think of anything to do about it, and won’t follow-up with any attempts to interact, simply carrying on (which might end up springing the trap, or might not). Other times, the players will pick up on it and try to interact with it in some way. Maybe a player says something like “I carefully search the area for signs of a mechanism that might activate a trap.” I’d say “ok, that’s going to take 10 minutes and a successful DC 15 Wisdom check. What does everyone else do during that time?” This communicates the stakes: namely, you might spend 10 minutes and not find anything. It also communicates the difficulty, which gives the player the information they need to assess whether they want to gamble those 10 minutes on a random die roll or not, rather than blindly guessing. Now, if this is significantly different than what the player was expecting, they might interject, “oh, I wasn’t thinking I’d spend 10 minutes, I just wanted to do a quick look,” in which case I might reply something like, “that’s fine, but without taking that time, you don’t notice anything beyond what I already described. Is there something else you’d like to do instead?”

It’s just the basic conversation of play. The DC and stakes are just a brief interjection to insure we’re on the same page regarding the fictional activity. But it’s still very much fiction first.