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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8824319" data-attributes="member: 6779196">You don’t have to tell the player that it’s guards. From your use of “prowling” I’m guessing you’re imagining a stealth situation? The context leading up to the check should make it clear that the character is in danger of being seen by something (same as how the context leading up to a perception check should make it clear there’s something to perceive, etc). You can just say “make a DC 14 Stealth check. On a failure something will hear you.” Simple.If the outcome is certain, there shouldn’t be a roll in the first place. The nature of the dice roll insures that the player will not be certain of the outcome. But they should have some idea of what’s at stake and how likely they are to succeed, just as the character would.Personally I don’t have any interest in judging the “authenticity” of anyone’s roleplaying. But even if I did, I don’t agree that telling the player the stakes gives them any more certainty than their character ought to have.I’m not convinced there are any such moments.Simply knowing the DC and stakes is not perfect information, because you don’t know what the result of the d20 roll will be.“The DC is 15” only lets you know your odds of success. This bridges the gap between what the character should know (being aware of their own capabilities and being able to directly perceive the environment) and what the player can know (being limited to abstract game mechanics and the DM’s verbal description of the environment) in order to approximate the character’s ability to guess if they’ll be able to accomplish the task or not. The die roll represents (among other things) the possibility that the character’s assessment was wrong.Or you cut right to the chase and say what the stakes and odds are. No risk of such misunderstandings, no need to “mulligan”Anything.Why not? No reason it can’t, and doing it that way has a lot of benefits, as I’ve already innumerated.Just like with traps, if they’re looking for secret doors in the first place, they should already know there’s a secret door to be found, because they’ve picked up on something in the description of the environment that indicates it. If they mistakenly think they’ve picked up on something, no need to roll due to no chance of success. They just spend the necessary amount of time and fail to find anything. If they’re searching everywhere as part of their standard operating procedure, use a passive check, as the PHB recommends.See the above paragraph.</blockquote>

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