You must log in or # to comment.
My sleepy ass thought the post was about Direct Messaging someone “so you touch the object?”
A Druid PC of mine wanted to determine if his bear form can cross a large gap so I had him roll WIS - he rolled a 5 - I said “you’re confident you can jump that gap”
He jumped. He fell.
Rogue rolls a 3
“There doesn’t seem to be any traps…”
The Rogue:
Reminds me of the inanimate skeleton my players encountered. It had been put in armour and propped up by leaning it against a spear like it was guarding the door, so my players spent 15 minutes trying to guage how much of a threat it was before eventually deciding to all charge it at once. The battle was as quick as it was embarrassing.
I roll all perception, investigation, trap searching, insight & etc behind the screen. So they gotta trust what they get. I sometimes will do a wink and a nod if they do really well, but also sometimes when it’s a crit fail. I think it also works well because we’re playing a horror game, and a lot of horror involves the unknown and not being sure about your senses.
I don’t even think that should be limited to horror; I think that should be boilerplate standard across all tables.
Nobody knows when they missed something important or they wouldn’t have missed it, by definition.
I’m a big fan of “Give me a Deception or Persuasion roll” rule for player interactions too. They don’t declare which one it is out loud. So the other player only hears the number, not whether or not it’s a lie. It curbs a lot of meta gaming.
I really dig the PBTA model.
The door is not trapped.
The player is suspicious of the door.
The player rolls to determine if the door is trapped.
On a failure, it turns out the door was trapped and now there are interesting consequences.
On a success, it turns out that the door was trapped and the player feels good about avoiding the consequences.Every outcome is inherently more interesting.
The only risk to this is players catch on pretty fast, they’re not stupid. It makes the world feel more silly or videogame-y, which can be fine, but it’s a design choice. For more realistic games or settings, it’s better for things to be as they are, the players uncover what was already there (or not).
I always do this. It’s a lot of fun to see the players scheming over a regular wall or door or whatever
Reminds me of Critical Role season one:
They eventually become mighty heroes who defeat dragons and demons of almost literally godlike power and prowess as well as entire armies, but their most dangerous foe ever was…a simple nonmagical door that happened to be locked on a day where the gods of the dice hated them while they all took turns holding the Idiot Ball 😄
Catch me literally always falling for this as a player
