How do I avoid meta gaming a failed perception roll? My character doesn’t know he failed it 7/10 but I do and now I’m crawling along the dungeon floor licking the stones trying to figure out what the frick I missed
How do I avoid meta gaming a failed perception roll?
Simply don't cheat.
Don't look at what you've rolled.
this is generally why the gm rolls for things like that
TPBP
Players should never roll perception, ever. Same with tracking or anything else they shouldn't know if it works or not.
Tracking can be a different matter. You might follow the wrong trail, in which case it shouldn't be immediately obvious, but "You're unable to pick up a useful trail." would be clear to someone attempting to track another person.
Sure, but it's more of a a point of a difference between "I rolled a 20 and the dm said no tracks" vs "I rolled a 1 and the dm said no tracks". The player not knowing what you rolled makes the difference as to whether they want to waste more time checking around. Any player that rolls a 1 will find any excuse as to why they need to try again. Now any player that rolls a 20 will never ask to roll again for any reason. Time is a resource, things are happening and the more you waste, the further you enemy gets towards their goal. That feeling of uneasiness keeps the players on their toes and invested far more than them knowing for certain how it will all turn out. I mean, who's invested as a level 20 char slaughtering 6 hp goblins all day?
Generally speaking, if a person fails a Tracking roll and their character can't pick up the trail, they shouldn't be making further rolls to try and find one - they already had their roll to determine whether or not they could successfully track someone, and they failed. So any GM worth the name shouldn't be letting them keep rolling until they inevitably get a good roll.
Of course, if you're playing with people who can't resist trying to act on OOC knowledge, then by all means keep such rolls hidden.
>Players should never roll perception, ever.
Either all rolls should be in open or no roll should be in open. If character shouldn't know how well they've searched the room, they shouldn't know how well they've swung the sword.
Nah. Combat rolls already have rules differences compared to non-combat.
As someone that unfortunately only plays online, I fricking hate how you can't do hidden rolls. The players being able to do their own rolls but only the GM seeing the rolls could be one of the few benefits of the format, but no, they all have to be moronic.
Foundry has that as a feature
Fantasy Grounds had that as a feature almost 20 years ago. What?
What the frick you moronic Black person every dice bot has that function and has the whole time
When I was younger and I was GMing, sometimes I'd ask all the players to make a perception roll randomly just to frick with them. It was great.
Everyone knows what you're doing and it isn't clever
Dude, I was 20. Chill.
If sometimes the random rolls actually are relevant, then the players can't know for sure.
I remember I was reading Deadlands and they offered similar advice for fricking with players to build an atmosphere of horror and sow distrust
>players can become Harrowed
>basically if your cowboy dies and you've got enough XP, a spirit might resurrect them as a zombie
>you get to go on living and get all kinds of supernatural powers
>but you also have to fight for control with the spirit that's inhabiting your corpse
>if a Harrowed player makes a roll for control, the GM should take them into another room
>even if they succeed on the roll
>"just so you know, everyone really enjoyed the breakfast you made a few days back"
>return to the room
>don't ever tell the party what you and the Harrowed player discussed
>party now has to wonder if it was something innocuous or if they failed the roll and are now under the influence of a malevolent spirit and will treat this undead gunslinger with the same distrust and discomfort they'd experience IRL
If you were cautious enough to make a perception check, you're cautious enough to not do anything notably stupid even if you don't notice the Fireball trap.
Secret rolls are gay, and I think less of any system that uses them.
Secret rolls in systems that include a possibility for the GM to give you false information are actively terrible and should be avoided at all costs.
Just pretend it didn't happen. Who cares?
Worst case scenario is you miss out on a single round of combat/take miniscule damage; best case you miss out on some completely pointless flavor text.
Solved by hidden rolls or DMs properly using passive perception. Remember that having disadvantage (from insufficient lighting, moving quickly or being distracted) gives -5 to the PP score, while somehow having advantage gives +5.
As others have said, this is why things like Perception and Stealth are rolled privately by the GM, not openly by the players. You in-character don't know that you've missed something, and likewise it won't always be obvious in-character if you've failed when you're trying to hide/sneak.
Frick all of you.
DMs should be using passive perception
If the players want to search for a hidden enemy, trap or secret door THEN they can use their action to make an investigation or perception check.
If you are being asked to randomly roll perception your DM is a fricking shitter.
if we're not being pressured for time there's no reason to not search each and every room
I thought you were an adventurer, not an underwear thief.
No u. The DM can pre-roll the goblins stealth or use a digital dice roller.
The ONLY time the players should be rolling perception is if they've asked to do so. Everything else should already have a set DC. If you've made a room, you should have already determined that the spellbound is hidden and has a DC of 21, and the poison trap has a DC of 15 or whatever.
And the DM should NEVER roll perception for them. If the DM starts rolling dice for player characters he may as well kick them out and start playing with his doll collection instead.
>And the DM should NEVER roll perception for them.
Player decides on character action, DM processes result of the action. Player's agency is not harmed by making some or even all the rolls on DM's side.
>Player's agency is not harmed by making some or even all the rolls on DM's side
I'd like to direct you to the fudging thread for some prime examples of why that's a shit idea
Inconsequential, if DM wants character to fail, he can make it so without fudging the roll - just raise DC to be out of reach. The possibility is always there regardless of how open or not the rolls are.
Don't touch my fricking dice, loser. You get to roll for every other creature in the game. If that's not enough for you write a novel.
Uppity playoid thinking that the dice are his weapon against GM tyranny, rather than a tool the GM graciously allows him to use so that he has the pretense of agency.
You should consider yourself honored to wipe my cheeto stains from your table, you two bit organists monkey.
Lmao seething playoid. Mid, you are here for a show sit the frick down and pay attention.
You're a fricking moron if you think the GM rolling or hiding rolls equates to fudging.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think they won't. Most DMs are the worst possible example of humanity, they don't need another incentive to abuse their power.
It's one of the few good things about 5e. 3.x to my memory did not have passive spot/listen.
You're a moron. Passive Perception is either used against an enemy's Stealth, in which case there is still a roll and it's still secret, OR against something with a static DC, in which case the player wouldn't be rolling regardless.
So yes, if a player is investigating and wants to roll Perception, it should be rolled secretly (so they don't know whether or not they missed something OOC).
And if something is rolling Stealth, it should be done privately (so the players don't know that someone is stealthing on them OOC).
>So yes, if a player is investigating and wants to roll Perception, it should be rolled secretly (so they don't know whether or not they missed something OOC).
Why? They don't know if there was anything to miss. If you roll in every room and get a 3 in an empty room, you still haven't missed anything. You're just a timewaster.
As said here
the problem OP is putting forward is people who go off of meta-information. If they'll assume that "I didn't find anything because I rolled a 3" rather than "I didn't find anything because there's nothing to find", it's better to keep it secret.
> If the DM starts rolling dice for player characters he may as well kick them out and start playing with his doll collection instead.
The GM rolls for things that will affect the PCs on a regular basis. Declaring "You notice the ogre hiding behind the curtain" is no different from rolling secretly and THEN declaring "You notice the ogre hiding behind the curtain." And vice versa for telling the PCs they don't notice anything.
>the problem OP is putting forward is people who go off of meta-information. If they'll assume that "I didn't find anything because I rolled a 3" rather than "I didn't find anything because there's nothing to find", it's better to keep it secret
Then they need to be dissuaded because they're playing the game wrong.
If we have to sit there rolling until they get a 20 so I can say 'you still find nothing', we fricking will.
>If we have to sit there rolling until they get a 20 so I can say 'you still find nothing', we fricking will.
4e just lets you take 10 or 20 when if searching a room if you have no time constrains or threats. If you're being chased or on a time limit then tough luck.
Taking 10 and 20 are from 3e, Anon. I don't doubt that 4e has them too, but they're an invention from 3rd edition.
In 5e specifically, you can only roll once. In fact only ONE player rolls. One or more others helping gives advantage. This part I am not the biggest fan of, as there should be more given for each helper, but it does streamline it. And whatever the roll is, it is it's kept. But then, no one plays 5e as intended.
>But then, no one plays 5e as intended.
Does anyone play any system as intended? I mean really, do they?
I suppose not. But the issue is, people complain about a game being bad, when they don't know the rules. This is especially evident on Ganker. People complain about casters being too strong, but if you play it as intended they're actually weaker than martials. Same with it not being lethal. A lot of stuff like that just aren't true if played. Just end a session on a short rest, or habe a whole session BE the short rest. I've posted a 7 session adventuring day, and that could easily be cut down to 5 or even 4 sessions if the players didn't joke about as much as my players do and they were 3 hours long, not the 2 I usually do, and cut the short rest session. I could post it again if anyone wanted to.
I mean, a simple +2 per person would be mathematically worse than advantage which is, on average, +5. So with three helpers you get +6. So it's not better but it is more consistent.
>This part I am not the biggest fan of, as there should be more given for each helper, but it does streamline it.
If a number of helping people gives to great a benefit, almost any out of combat check will be a guaranteed success because the whole party is capable of helping. At that point, why bother having these checks?
I've used random "roll for perception" for little extra things. Like party is at a tavern after the first adventure and I might ask them to roll for perception. Those who pass notice a couple of shady characters trying not to be noticed. What the characters do with the info is up to them. If all of them fail, then there's no real consequences, as they'd be meeting the characters formally later on anyway. Just making it a flat "your number is the biggest, so you spot them" feels like taking agency away from the player.
What part of
>you shouldn't be doing those rolls yourself
did you not understand?
>DM
Oh, I see, you're a moronic drone. Nevermind.
Eat shit. I can make a check whenever I have an action, frick you
>ooh but you'll know whether the score is low or high
Who gives a frick? have a nice day.
Oh, but an angry little deone you are, my my. Better go back to plebbit, time for bed, chop chop.
>If you are being asked to randomly roll perception your DM is a fricking shitter.
This is 100% correct.
Wrong. The roll score is simply akin to the level of certainty that the player character has in their search. If I roll a 4 and get told that I don't detect a trap, I don't know whether there's a trap or not. If I roll an 18 and am told that I don't detect a trap, I still don't know for sure, but I am more confident in my search. The player is rewarded for a good roll, but there's still a choice to be made and they could be wrong either way. It's the same if I'm told I detect a trap too. If I roll poorly, I might infer that there was more to find, but I might also guess that the DC was simply low. This is no different from real life. Sometimes we search for things like our misplaced keys and feel like they must be somewhere simple nearby. And sometimes we search for things and feel very certain that we've looked everywhere and they must be somewhere odd that we haven't looked yet.
Perception checks aren't there to remove careful searches from the game, they're there to sometimes save you the trouble of carefully searching.
First of all, you shouldn't be doing those rolls yourself. But secondly; divorce yourself from the character, have the character always act as would be appropriate for the character in itself, and don't be a metagaming homosexual.
It's not that fricking hard.
Wait, players aren't supposed to roll for perception?
Just a question regarding GMing.
>3 party members are tracking a monster
>all evidence leads us to a swamp
>we decide to explore the swamp (roll to seach it)
>first character rolls badly
>"you find nothing"
>second character rolls high
>"you find nothing"
>third character rolls two criticals and decently (system has it that if you roll a critical, you roll again and tally the results)
>"you find nothing"
Now, is it too much to ask from the GM that if someone rolls well, even if there's nothing there, to underline that this is not the place and we should search elsewhere? Because simply stating "you find nothing" does not mean the monster isn't there (especially since we have no idea what kind of a creature it even is), just that we can't find it via the means we were searching with (basic senses).
I follow up my descriptions with how confident the player character is in their search. I base it on a second DC I arbitrarily set based on various factors like what they are looking for, are they even looking for it, where are they looking, and whatever else I want.
So the first character, implying they failed both DCs (sometimes I have the second DC be lower than what they are looking for:
>You found nothing and worst you have a sense there is something here.
If it was a case where they did pass the second DC but not the first, i would say:
>You found nothing and get a feeling you won't find anything else.
Assuming the second character passed the DC of the search I set but failed the second DC, I would say:
>You found nothing but you know that it can be hard to find things in the swamp.
If they passed both DCs, I would say:
>You found nothing and don't see anything related to what you're searching for.
Since the third character critically succeeded I would tell them:
>You don't find what you are looking for and feel confidant you won't run into any surprises based on the evidence. During your search, you did find what would be the only cave in this swamp.
I have also done the "You find nothing" for all three levels and just let the players figure out what it means but I haven't done that in a while.
Depends on who asked for the Perception roll.
If the GM asked you to roll knowing that no roll no matter how high would give you anything, that's just bad GM-ing.
If you rolled unasked, try asking this time for some kind of Deduction roll to have your characters think what could have they missed.
>If you rolled unasked
Not a thing in any decent system.
We don't roll anything the GM doesn't call for. It was a long time ago, but as I recall, we just announced that we'll be exploring the swamp for signs of the monster and the GM told us what to roll. After the rolling we did ask the GM for some clarification and he just replied with "you find nothing" to all our inquiries.
Weird and nonsensical behaviour. Maybe he thought it was a prank? I hope he either got better or stopped GM-ing.
A critical success should mean the search was so utter that there shouldn't be any doubt as to wether or not the thing you are looking for is there or not.
If the DM cannot reasonably give you any further clues, he should at least put emphasis on just how not-there something is. The best way to do that is to also put emphasis on the rolls that do not pass, such as the search job being sloppy, or it being hindered in some way, or perhaps they got a bit lost and tired searching.
When looking for something in an untouched area, it's typical to follow a small trail of disturbances. If something really wasn't there at all, it would be good to point out the lack of disturbances for a critical success, lack of tracks, lack of any rational or realistic sign that the thing you were looking for is there.
While a poor roll would also not turn up any such things, the result of that roll would be difficulties getting in the way, like the character is out of their depth in the environment and doesn't even know where to start looking, or maybe they got stuck in the bog and spent the rest of their time trying to navigate their way to safety, something like that.
The reason this is the best way to do it is to avoid players chomping at the metagaming bit so hard that their teeth break. If all that happens on a low roll is "you find nothing", they're going to assume their character's eyes simply didn't see the thing, and something must be there. It creates an irrational paranoia in the PC as extention of the rational paranoia the Player feels, and the game becomes super, megaduper clumsy.
>Allowing multiple characters to try the same check
Why even bother? How can you possibly fail at anything when you have five or six chances?
>six pairs of eyes have six chances to notice something
That just means that everyone's pigeonholed into rolling their best skill and having no other contributions. Shit's gay.
Your studied wizard might fumble a Knowledge check because he can't have studied literally everything while the Rogue remembers a relevant factoid overheard in the bar. Your sharp-eyed ranger could be mistaken about what direction he could be searching for while the near-sighted alchemists wipes his glasses and just happens to look at the right spot at the right angle.
I'm not even gonna read your post. You are a moron.
>How can you possibly fail at anything when you have five or six chances?
Easily, the dice have no mercy. Also, what good does it do for the rest of the characters if only one of them spots something and doesn't tell them? Do you treat your party as a single entity that line dances everywhere?
The simple act of finding nothing off a crit should be proof positive that there's nothing to find. Assuming good dm and a system that has crits as guaranteed success. In systems where crits are not guaranteed successes but your player's stats are good enough then yeah you should be giving a "you've checked extremely thoroughly and are sure there's nothing here" to confirm there's nothing to find.
I'd assume even if a critical was a success, there'd be limits to what you can succedd at regardless. A character with no magic can't just announce they'll cast a fireball and because they rolled a critical, a fireball materializes. If a monster can phase out of existence, no amount of searching via conventional means should reveal it.
FUN FACT
Just because you roll high on perception doesn't mean there is anything of note to perceive in the first place! Thus rolling low doesn't mean you absolutely missed something, but rather you don't know if you missed something important.
The fact that there's absolutely nothing of note is noteworthy.
in a roundabout way yes, perfectly clean room in the middle of some dank dungeon is very much suspicious
Yeah if you're a frickin morono completidad
I agree. But OP is trying to find what he "missed" (crawling around licking stones) because he "failed" the roll, but there may not be anything to miss in the first place. OP is taking
>failed roll => something important I couldn't find
when really it is more like
>failed roll => you don't notice anything important (there might be, there might not)
I think if you take in that context, it should be less distressing. After all, how many times IRL have you been looking around for something, and it is nowhere to be found because it wasn't even in the room you were looking? If I had super vision it wouldn't matter because the item was never in the room I was looking for in the first place. Sometimes life really has nothing to note. If you want to spend your time turning over everything, fine, but just like IRL, someone may come along and say "bro come on we gotta go, stop ripping up this room. You already tried enough". And so too the session and your teammates will be the same.
Lot of dumb Black folk in this thread. OP, just don't metagame. If you're incapable of separating the knowledge of your character from your own, please look up "how to increase IQ" and "how to stop my homosexual urges".
If a roll is done in the open, the result (failure or success) should be obvious to the players. You know if you successfully hit with your sword, or successfully kicked down the door, so those roles should be done in view of the players, as there is no risk of meta knowledge.
If a roll is done secretly by the GM, it is to prevent the players from obtaining meta-knowledge that would be unknown to the character, because they can see the dice. If the character succeeds, the player and the character know something is there. If the character fails, the character and the player should have no idea if something is there. It's a perfectly appropriate way to prevent players from getting meta-knowledge.
In 5e, when it comes to stealth, the DM should be rolling stealth against the parties Passive Perception. They should have it written down too, so that they don't signal a sneaking monster by asking "what's everyones passive perception?". It is also appropriate for the DM to roll Perception when a PC is actively searching for something, like a secret door in the wall.
you just described the exact reason i like to have players make random perception rolls all the time for things that aren't actually there.
What if they pass the checks? That sounds really tedious.
They can't pass a check that doesn't have a difficulty, anon.
DnD sounds really stupid.
Almost any game allows the GM to frick with the players by asking for pointless skill checks, it's not using to D&D.
The games I play have the players know if they succeeded a check or not, because they know what they roll for. If your players know they succeeded a check and you - again - tell them they didn't see anything, that will just result in them not caring about the game.
Maybe true, but again not unique to dandd.
Guess you've got shit players then
If I periodically go "Hey Anon! Uh, nothing." you will eventually stop reacting to it, and me saying this every 2 minutes will be a waste of time.
Yeah, but what are you gonna say if they roll a twenty on a bullshit check? Either they find something or they now know there wasn't anything to find.
players only get perception/notice rolls when they take an action that would require those skills
>I press my ear to the door
>I stop and smell the air
>I wet my finger and hold it up to feel air currents
you get a perception check
>I walk down the hallway
you do not get a perception check
Do you have more of these bullshit trap images?
(By bullshit I don't mean it's bullshit that he dies for carelessly leaping to a dangling rope without prior inspection, I mean bullshit that it was set up like this in the first place.)
It's from Grimtooth's Traps. Like 2 or 3 books full of shit just like that. All done in a sarcastic "killer gm" style.
Thanks. I'm sure I've seen a few pictures from it posted when I first started coming to /tg/ back in the day. Makes me feel oddly nostalgic.
Any time, anon.
>Like 2 or 3 books full of shit just like that
More like 12 or more at this point.
I'll give you an example of what I have done in an actual game
I flubbed a perception to detect a trap on a door
When asked what I was going to do, I said open the door
Usually all it takes is being a well-adjusted adult and/or not acting like a petulant child
You play a game that doesn’t force you into primitive mind games and deals with perception in better ways, like dungeon world or fantasy world
How about you stop being a metagaming homosexual.
Picrel.
If you cannot avoid being a homosexual weaponise players metagame to your advantage as following:
>PC asks to inspect the room and gets adjudicated a perception roll to which gets a very low result
GM: "it takes you about 15minutes to look around but you can't find anything worth of notice. It seems strange though, you have an eerie feeling of wrongness, maybe there's more in this room than what meets the eye... or your mind is just playing tricks on you, what do you want to do?"
>If the player asks to press on searching
GM: "this may take double of the time you employed before and a negative adjustment to the roll, your character already has approached the end of his wits in figuring out if there's actually something wrong or not in this room"
My group has a running gag for this sort of situation where our characters just say loudly "Looks like everything is fine forever!" and acting like that.
people who dislike secret rolls are fricking moronic
people who like secret rolls are fricking moronic AND israeliteed