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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7497852" data-attributes="member: 4937">I suppose so.  In an 'ideal' system I suppose we'd make a second secret 'wisdom' check after failing any sort of mental social skill check in order to determine how oblivious the character actually is to his own failure - he doesn't realize his joke wasn't funny and went over like a fart and he's the only one laughing, and so forth.But seeing as we are usually testing perceptiveness in the first place, I prefer to just simplify and make a single die roll.  If that die roll is secret then its up to the player to be oblivious to his failure or not as he sees fit, and I don't have to tell them how to react and risk playing their character for them. For a great many mental tasks we simply do not have any feedback regarding how well we are doing until trip over the metaphorical or literal tripwire.  Not giving the player the actual roll of the fortune die to determine observation skills is simple and obvious way to simulate this, and its pretty much been the normal procedure on 'find trap' sort of rolls since I was in elementary school.  Rather than leading to complication, it greatly simplifies things for all participants. Meh.  I don't really see the point of that, though as a player I wouldn't object to it.   Stealth is an opposed roll, so it really depends on the DC more than anything else.  The 1e 'Find Traps' roll on the other hand had a fixed chance of success, and there it was essential.  It's a bit less essential in 3e than it was in 1e because of the expectation of varying DCs, but I still prefer to stick to established practices of play that I've learned over the years are good for everyone.I prefer to make the roll and give the narration, and let the player act according to the narration rather than the roll.   That way, if I roll a '1' and I say to the player, "He's definitely lying", he has no way of knowing whether he rolled a "20" and caught a liar, or whether he fumbled and now believes the honest person is lying.   Indeed, in a real sense it is always and only the narration that matters.  A player never really needs to know what the mechanics or the fortunes were that led to the narration, it's just that often it does know harm to let them know and saves a lot of time at the table to distribute that burden around the players rather than forcing the GM to make so many dice rolls.</blockquote>

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