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

[Charlaquin]

Why would I want to do so, is the question?

For the reasons I enumerated earlier. It reduces waffling, it helps the DM call for rolls when there is actual uncertainty instead of just because an action was declared, and it avoids potential mismatched expectations.

If they look they might find it safely, if they don't look they almost certainly won't find it other than the hard way. But I'm not about to tell them there's specifically a hazard there, though I hope I've long since managed to get across the idea that there's potential hazards everywhere when in the field.

Neither of us tell the players directly that there’s a hazard present. I just insure that it’s possible to determine that there’s a hazard present based on the description of the environment. Another benefit of this approach is that it rewards players for paying attention to the description of the environment.

If I'm setting net snares in the woods I'll know where they are...and if they work as intended they'll be easy to find later because they'll be hanging from trees with game animals (or trespassers!) inside.

Ok. We’re talking about dungeon traps though.

Allow me, please, an example from a module I just wrote and ran over the last few months. It's long, so I'll s-block it if I can figure out how.

Spoiler: Interesting hallway

Situation: Party have been asked to check out an abandoned villa, mostly to try to figure out what became of another adventuring group that went in there a few momths back and never returned. They've just come through a secret door to get to this point, in the villa's carved-from-bedrock basement.

Here's the narration - I'll give it all at once here, but it was given piecemeal at the time as the party's light sources allowed:

"The 5-foot-wide hallway runs about 50 feet and ends in a door. There is also a set of elaborate double doors about halfway along the right hand wall. Even as non-trackers you can tell nobody has been in here in quite a while, as any tracks would be obvious in the dust." (they didn't have a tracker in the group)

Seems simple, right. So, here's the DM-side elements.

1. The double doors on the right lead to the family crypt, and though they can't be opened by normal means the means to do so (a special key) are findable in more than one way as there are multiples of this key.

2. Roughly across from the double doors is a secret door leading to a rough tunnel, the tunnel runs about 70 feet to a ladder that goes to an outbuilding; this being a bolthole for escape should the manor be attacked or invaded.

3. The door at the end of the hall is a fake and leads only to a bedrock wall. About ten feet short of that "door" is a 5x5 foot area of floor that isn't there, covered by a permanent illusion of the floor continuing. Below this is what the original owner installed as a deep pit trap, to catch and hold invaders; since then and without anyone's knowledge it was converted into a chute trap with a built-in teleporter, leading to a prison cell far far away.

3a. Arriving in the prison cell at the end of the chute starts a whole other adventure, ready to rock as part of the same module if the PCs go down the chute and left for later if they don't (other elements found in the manor would ideally eventually lead them there anyway, and if not then so be it - I run something else).

The only possible "tell" here is that the illusionary patch of floor wouldn't have any dust. The owner didn't want the secret door found thus there's no reason to telegraph its existence.

End results in play:

The PCs never really bothered with the crypt doors, instead deciding to go straight for the door at the end. They also never paid any attention to the floor. I secretly rolled for the Elf's built-in chance of noticing the secret door on passing by it, no luck. And the party's Thief, on blowing a few rolls, went down the chute, eventually followed by the rest of 'em in a more controlled manner once they realized the Thief was gone. Once there they busted out of the prison, knocked off some Yuan-ti, rescued some other prisoners, and found the two surviving members of the original group they were looking for.

So, a secret door and a very significant trap in the same hallway. What do you make of that?

I would say the lack of dust on the section of floor is a sufficient telegraph for the illusory floor trap, or would have been, if you had actually mentioned it in your description. If the dust in the rest of the hall was heavy enough that non-trackers could tell at a glance nobody had been there, it should be heavy enough that its absence on a section of the floor should be conspicuous at a glance to non-trackers as well. I would also consider adding something to the description to hint at the presence of the secret door, though maybe the lack of dust on the floor could serve double-duty there. Lack of dust on the floor to indicate a hidden door is a pretty familiar trope. But telegraphs also don’t have to be that direct. With good environmental design you can use a dungeon to create telegraphs by context and implication, the typical example being the secret room telegraphed by the apparent empty space on the map left by the room it conceals.

 

[Hriston]

This is a concept that keeps resurfacing in my head every now and then, should the players be made aware or not of their own and each other’s dice rolls in certain situations? Are there certain situations that by all logic should remain a mystery to me if I actually succeeded or not but that 19 showing on my D20 all but confirms I’ve got it well in hand, that the dice tells us more about the results than by any rights they should.

Consider the classic scenario: I’m trying to bluff a guard at the gates, “we’re just a group of humble travelers seeking refuge for the night” you roll your dice and...it’s a 3, but now you know it’s a 3 you know you flubbed, The guard is turning back inside to call someone else probably, crap! Quick get the wizard to cast charm person on them!

But should you really know that the guard wasn’t fooled in that situation, and if you didn’t know you failed why did you cast charm person? How many times would people just stand there and let the results play out?

It’s metagaming, but i think it’s such a minor and commonplace form of it that we often don’t recognise it as such, We’re so accustomed to knowing all our own rolls that the idea of not knowing them seems entirely alien.

Did we fail our investigations in this office or was there just nothing to find? Did you disarm the trap with your thieves tools or is it still active? Did you correctly identify these flowers as either medicinal or poisonous? Did the rogue just succeed their death saving throw or roll a crit 1?

So should there be more situations where players aren’t clued in to their own rolls for more natural reactions? What are your thoughts?

Yes, of course players should know if they succeed or fail. What's the fun in playing a game where you don't know if you won or lost?

 

[hawkeyefan]

The thing with lots of obstacles, traps being a primary example, is that the GM designs them to be a challenge for the players. That’s why they’re there. Yes, we apply a coat of fiction onto it… these ruins belonged to a culture that sought to guard the treasures within, etc… but the fact is we’re playing a game and the GM is creating obstacles for the players.

So why act like that’s not relevant?

As I’ve already mentioned, the details I share with players don’t correlate in a one to one way with the details available to the characters. What’s more important to me is that I inform the players in a manner sufficient to “equal” the amount of information that would be available yo the characters. And because what the players know is limited to what I communicate to them, I think it makes sense to give as much information to the players to make up for my imperfect and incomplete descriptions.

I understand that for some people, knowing a DC can be anti-immersive (or whatever we want to term it), but I dislike the assertion that’s true for everyone. It is not true for me and not for my players.

There is nothing bad about admitting that we’re playing a game, and to acknowledge the mechanics of the game. The GM certainly doesn’t think that way… holding players to a different standard in that regard seems odd.

Mechanics are representative.

 

[overgeeked]

Right, but knowing has several gameplay benefits.

For people more interested in immersion and verisimilitude those “benefits” actively hinder what we want from the game. No amount of “but the gameplay” is going to change our preferences.

We’re all clearly talking past each others’ preferences. You want to center the game aspect and make that be a smooth experience. For me, and a few others here, that literally doesn’t matter at all. Immersion and verisimilitude are all that matter, gameplay be damned.

 

[overgeeked]

Adjudicating failed checks as "progress combined with a setback" instead of nothing changing about the situation (and thus encouraging a dogpile). I've mentioned this in several posts, including my first one in the thread.

Awesome. That is one example of one kind of metagaming.

Now, expand on that and explain to me how all the other kinds of metagaming are the referee’s fault and how to stop the players from being able to metagame.

 

[Oofta]

For people more interested in immersion and verisimilitude those “benefits” actively hinder what we want from the game. No amount of “but the gameplay” is going to change our preferences.

We’re all clearly talking past each others’ preferences. You want to center the game aspect and make that be a smooth experience. For me, and a few others here, that literally doesn’t matter at all. Immersion and verisimilitude are all that matter, gameplay be damned.

I also question how much knowing the details really helps. Sure, I know it's a DC X so I have a Y percentage chance of success. Is that better than saying "Given your skill level it should be easy?"

Part of the reason I say that is because once in a great while, what the PC perceives is not accurate. Let's say I have a trap. The PC did an investigation check and got a 17. I know that the DC was 20, but I also noted that on a 15 they recognize it is a trap. To them it looks fairly easy. The tricky bit is that as they start to disarm and get a 15, which again is not the difficult DC 20 they needed to because they didn't hit the investigation threshold so they underestimated the difficulty of the trap. They hear an unexpected "click" and because they missed something.

If I had told them that the trap was a DC 15, they now call shenanigans and rightly so because they got a 15. If I left it vague, the difficulty was just a bit more difficult than they expected. Note that in my scenario this is where I'd likely go into a sequence of checks to emulate a tense moment instead of just "boom you're dead" but how to do traps is a different story.

Different strokes and all, but I just don't see enough advantage to having numbers appear. Knowing the target numbers for skill challenges and other details always bugged me, I don't think this would be any different.

 

[Charlaquin]

For people more interested in immersion and verisimilitude those “benefits” actively hinder what we want from the game. No amount of “but the gameplay” is going to change our preferences.

Except, immersion and verisimilitude are also of paramount importance to me, and are a big part of why I run the game as I do. So while we may indeed have distinct preferences, immersion and verisimilitude aren’t the key point of that distinction.

We’re all clearly talking past each others’ preferences. You want to center the game aspect and make that be a smooth experience. For me, and a few others here, that literally doesn’t matter at all. Immersion and verisimilitude are all that matter, gameplay be damned.

What I’m arguing is that gameplay can be served without harming immersion or verisimilitude here.

 

[overgeeked]

I also question how much knowing the details really helps. Sure, I know it's a DC X so I have a Y percentage chance of success. Is that better than saying "Given your skill level it should be easy?"

Part of the reason I say that is because once in a great while, what the PC perceives is not accurate. Let's say I have a trap. The PC did an investigation check and got a 17. I know that the DC was 20, but I also noted that on a 15 they recognize it is a trap. To them it looks fairly easy. The tricky bit is that as they start to disarm and get a 15, which again is not the difficult DC 20 they needed to because they didn't hit the investigation threshold so they underestimated the difficulty of the trap. They hear an unexpected "click" and because they missed something.

I I had told them that the trap was a DC 15, they now call shenanigans and rightly so because they got a 15. If I left it vague, the difficulty was just a bit more difficult than they expected. Note that in my scenario this is where I'd likely go into a sequence of checks to emulate a tense moment instead of just "boom you're dead" but how to do traps is a different story.

Different strokes and all, but I just don't see enough advantage to having numbers appear. Knowing the target numbers for skill challenges and other details always bugged me, I don't think this would be any different.

For me, the players’ experience should as closely match the characters’ experience as safely as it’s possible to do. I want immersion and verisimilitude. The mechanics are a barrier to that. Whatever mechanics they are, they are best left as in the background as possible. I actively avoid talking in game-speak, using passives when I can, only rolling when I think it’s necessary, only calling for rolls when I have to, all to keep engaged with the fiction as much as possible. In the fiction, in the world, immersed as much as possible. Anything that gets in the way is shoved aside. Play worlds, not rules.

 

[overgeeked]

What I’m arguing is that gameplay can be served without harming immersion or verisimilitude here.

It is not possible for me to disagree more. All the things you’ve suggested would immediately break immersion and verisimilitude.

 

[Oofta]

Except, immersion and verisimilitude are also of paramount importance to me, and are a big part of why I run the game as I do. So while we may indeed have distinct preferences, immersion and verisimilitude aren’t the key point of that distinction.

What I’m arguing is that gameplay can be served without harming immersion or verisimilitude here.

Which is all well and good, for you. It would harm immersion and verisimilitude for me and I still don't see much, if any, advantage. Is knowing a specific target number really any different than a description ranging from "You could probably do this in your sleep" to "The odds of success are slim and none and you suspect Slim just left town"? In addition, sometimes the odds are simply unknown to the PC and it's a shot in the dark.

It's like combat. When combat starts, I'll let them know if the opponent looks heavily armored or exceptionally quick but I don't state an actual DC. After a round (and a few hits or misses) or so I'll let them know just to move things along. Saving throws? I have everyone roll first before I tell them the DC and the effect because that moment of tension is fun.