Examine is either advantage or a clean disarm. “You find the bypass” or “you understand enough to make breaking it easier. Never do you roll simply to allow another roll
Examine is either advantage or a clean disarm. “You find the bypass” or “you understand enough to make breaking it easier. Never do you roll simply to allow another roll
I usually bake that sort of thing into a player's passive investigation skill.
my preferred MO if a player says “i investigate for traps” i always ask how; it doesn’t have to be super specific, but without some kind of indicator how they’re interacting with it (and “i just examine it closely with my eyeballs” is fine) we don’t progress to rolling
it won’t work for everyone but my table is pretty immersion heavy and we do fine
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Examine is either advantage or a clean disarm. “You find the bypass” or “you understand enough to make breaking it easier. Never do you roll simply to allow another roll
I had one guy crit his investigation check (we do those at my table) on a crossbow trap and asked if they could take it with them to set up later. I said sure and they ended up using it a few times to cover their backs during combats. Kind of like the turrets in Aliens.
my preferred MO if a player says “i investigate for traps” i always ask how; it doesn’t have to be super specific, but without some kind of indicator how they’re interacting with it (and “i just examine it closely with my eyeballs” is fine) we don’t progress to rolling
it won’t work for everyone but my table is pretty immersion heavy and we do fine
I think that's what he was going for but my problem with this is that I don't actually 1. know 100% what I'm looking at, I don't have a 3d model of the door or sarcophogus in front of me, and 2. I'm not an experienced investigator while my character is. I think it should be reasonable for me to say "I do what my character thinks would be best to do"
It's like asking me to describe how I check for glyphs of warding, to me
i dunno, I just do? My own real life lack of understanding how thieves do shouldn't hurt my character
Spending most of my time on the DM side, in modules traps always say how they work, so it's really easy to describe how the thief disarms it, I don't describe them searching for every possible kind of trap, I say "you find a hidden wire underneath the lid of the chest, even the slightest movement will set it off", I don't ask "how do you examine this chest for traps" because if I did regardless of how high their investigation is they're probably going to pick something that will set the trap off
it's not a penalization of your player vs character knowledge to ask for more interaction than "I investigate *roll dice*"
i wasn't at the table but it sounds like he was looking to play pixel bitch and hit you with a gotcha, which isn't fair play
my rogues aren't master trapsmiths either in real life, but to me "I do what character would do best" is a cop out, just like "I charm the guard" is a cop out
you don't have to craft a speech to charm a guard, but you can describe the idea you want to convey ("I put on my best smile and engage in some small talk"), or say the words (I say 'bla bla bla' and distract him with small talk for 15 minutes), and supplement the roll. the same goes with searching a room or looking at a device for a trap. "I closely inspect the box" isn't some herculean leap of deduction to get where we need to go, because to make traps engaging you have to allow wiggle room for people to get lucky or outsmart the trap, otherwise it becomes a "I roll to find trap, 31." "You find trap and disarm it."
if we ask for a minimal level of engagement, we can reveal information about the trap, and the players can talk about it and do a little puzzle solving, and try weird shit, and suddenly traps become memorable and interesting.
the game is about defeating monsters, exploring dungeons, overcoming traps, and gathering loot at its core; if we aren't giving traps substance, it's basically just any other skill check to gloss over, so... why have them at all?
My girlfriend and I had some fun with the package of breakfast oatmeal and considered how metal the name BRINTA sounds. Grunting the name and adding gory nicknames in the mix. We settled on Brinta Skullbreaker. So we rolled up a female Goliath barbarian (berserker) who is part pit fighter, part opera singer. She has the gaudy viking helmet with horns and the weird animal skin bodice with decorative skulls (her latest role in whatever Faerun has instead of Ring der Nibelungen), has the love for glorious battle and is as much about performing on a stage as she is about becoming the kind of stuff operas are written about.
I never bother with writing elaborate backgrounds, but I gave her a few plot hooks: a bond with her travelling theatre troupe and (as part of her entertainer background) and she has love letters from adorers sorted in a binder by region and social standing. There ought to be an admirer in every city and region she visits who could either complicate matters or open a door somewhere.
it's not a penalization of your player vs character knowledge to ask for more interaction than "I investigate *roll dice*"
i wasn't at the table but it sounds like he was looking to play pixel bitch and hit you with a gotcha, which isn't fair play
my rogues aren't master trapsmiths either in real life, but to me "I do what character would do best" is a cop out, just like "I charm the guard" is a cop out
you don't have to craft a speech to charm a guard, but you can describe the idea you want to convey ("I put on my best smile and engage in some small talk"), or say the words (I say 'bla bla bla' and distract him with small talk for 15 minutes), and supplement the roll. the same goes with searching a room or looking at a device for a trap. "I closely inspect the box" isn't some herculean leap of deduction to get where we need to go, because to make traps engaging you have to allow wiggle room for people to get lucky or outsmart the trap, otherwise it becomes a "I roll to find trap, 31." "You find trap and disarm it."
if we ask for a minimal level of engagement, we can reveal information about the trap, and the players can talk about it and do a little puzzle solving, and try weird shit, and suddenly traps become memorable and interesting.
the game is about defeating monsters, exploring dungeons, overcoming traps, and gathering loot at its core; if we aren't giving traps substance, it's basically just any other skill check to gloss over, so... why have them at all?
this is all framed with a "your mileage may vary"
I think it's completely reasonable for the dungeon master, not the player to know the answer to the question does the rogue have to touch the chest to check if it is trapped
as an aside, would you just not let someone on the spectrum play a high charisma character or would you have them automatically fail at checks for inadequately explaining how they convince someone of something
you can demand engagement in the poetry layer without making it a pixelbitch scenario
“I persuade the guard” is low effort
“I put on my nice smile and sweet talk the guard”
both are highly abstract, neither are difficult to do, but the second one actually engages with the world instead of just being a “pull lever, roll dice, process result”
it applies to traps, it applies to combat
and some people and groups are fine with pull lever roll dice, and that’s fine too, but i think it makes for a really boring game for everyone if the game amounts to a string of dice rolls end to end, and it certainly doesn’t help the DM or the players if they want to create a story that’s unique and all their own
and lastly, if you think demanding engagement equates directly to someone banning playing a character type, or failing a roll automatically because of their real life situation in a gotcha moment, that speaks to a lack of trust and that’s a shame
Explaining how you persuade a guard should give an opportunity for Advantage, if the party use leverage that they are aware of (likes and dislikes, current concerns, political leanings), but that stuff should be available knowledge in-game through investigation or an Insight check
Although "should" is a term that I probably shouldn't (hah) use, as your table, your rules
On the subject of traps: I haven't looked at the trap disarm rules in a while, and might even be thinking of 4th Ed, but isn't there a thing where if you fail a trap's DC by enough then Bad Shit happens? I assumed that took care of the whole "how do you do it" scenario, as a slight fail means that your character knew enough not to trigger the trap, but a big fail means that your character's hand slipped, or cut the wrong wire, or whatever
I have seen traps that specify fail states, but only in Warhammer Fantasy, where in Shadows Over Bogenhaven there's a door with a handle that triggers a pit trap unless the player opening the door specifically says that they are turning the handle the other way
But that's 1st Edition bullshit that WFRP has running through it like a stick of rock, like how you can lose experience if you fail an Intelligence check when trying to level up
if you want to do it that way there's nothing stopping you
neither your way or my way is spoken of by the rules, so it's up to you how to do it
but to me, skipping straight to a die roll leads to "I turn on my trap radar" style play where people are just rolling dice and comparing numbers
i derive my fun from the poetry layer, and that style of play sucks all of that out into the void
YMMV
i just don't think it's a stretch to ask players to add just a little bit of how they're doing something, because if you look at it from the opposite direction, it helps the DM to give direct feedback in line with whatever they roll
for example:
"I think there's a trap, I want to investigate."
"How? What are you doing?"
"I'm going to get close to the statue and inspect it carefully" *roll roll* "28"
"You don't see anything out of the ordinary, but as you get close to it you hear a strange click-click of a mechanism inside the statue's head."
"Oh shit, I'd like to disarm it with my thieves tools." *roll roll* "13"
"As you go to disarm it..."
etc etc
it makes things an actual obstacle rather than some die rolls we pass over. if you want them to be that, that's fine, but i'm not interested in that, and i think probably some folks out there feel the same way, and it doesn't require you to be sherlock fucking holmes to give some extra bits to help the GM breathe some life into the world
I agree, but in the above scenario with the statue, would you deal with the look-then-disarm type of player any differently than the go-straight-in-with-a-probe type of player?
This is me cannibalising your methods, in case you were worried that I was being judgy
You know how sometimes a player might roll dice and then say "I'm making a Stealth check, I got a 28"? That doesn't fly with me. You never get to roll dice before you tell me what the dice are for. Because how do I know what's what you were actually trying to accomplish? Also, if you're rolling dice without saying anything first, that means you're probably interrupting another player's actions or interrupting me in the middle of scene-setting. If you want your character to perform an action at that moment, you can at least be polite enough to tell everyone that you want to perform an action first. This is a collaborative experience here.
Something I try to enforce with players regardless of the system we're playing is that when you want to roll the dice, you have to tell me what your character is doing first. Because you might think you know what sort of check you want to perform, but if you can't tell me in even basic terms how your character would be accomplishing it, maybe it's not actually the right skill to making the check? And if you do have a good idea of how your character is performing an action, guess what? That might affect the difficulty of the check, or lead to me saying you don't even need a dice roll to accomplish something.
When I GM I am always trying to operate as a fan of the players, and the more the players give me to work with, the more I can be a fan of theirs.
Heck, you don't get to roll the dice until I ask you to!
Sometimes for the benevolent reason that there's no fail state so it's simpler to let you succeed!
Sometimes
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
We've moved on a fair bit from override's example. I agree with most of what's being said now, but I would be super mad if I said "I want to find out if the thing is a trap" and my DM said "do you touch it?" and I said "I dunno whether that's a good idea but my character would, what does his long experience as a treasure hunter tell him" and the DM said "I need to know if you touch it." That's pretty different to me from asking me to narrate.
If my DM said this gadget could only be explored with acrobatics or thieves tools and not with investigation that would be more reasonable. Same if they told me the answer to whether I touched it wouldn't have a mechanical impact and he was just trying to get me to give a little more detail.
If you want to throw puzzle shit at me, fine, but it should be clearly marked, and I want you to give some non puzzle stuff to me that uses my players skills at some point
We've moved on a fair bit from override's example. I agree with most of what's being said now, but I would be super mad if I said "I want to find out if the thing is a trap" and my DM said "do you touch it?" and I said "I dunno whether that's a good idea but my character would, what does his long experience as a treasure hunter tell him" and the DM said "I need to know if you touch it." That's pretty different to me from asking me to narrate.
If my DM said this gadget could only be explored with acrobatics or thieves tools and not with investigation that would be more reasonable. Same if they told me the answer to whether I touched it wouldn't have a mechanical impact and he was just trying to get me to give a little more detail.
If you want to throw puzzle shit at me, fine, but it should be clearly marked, and I want you to give some non puzzle stuff to me that uses my players skills at some point
that's because at the outset i explicitly said (and have restated) playing from a position of "hah, GOTCHA dumb player" is shitty
but I also don't agree with low-effort "I want to disarm trap" "Ok" "I got a 28" "You disarm the trap" sequence
and i vehemently disagree that "puzzle shit" should be clearly marked. i am not behooved as the GM to tell you the HP, AC, and immunities of my monsters, nor do we allow our players to look at the DM and say "my 18 int wizard would cast the best spell at this monster."
that's lazy
seriously, have none of you guys played Dungeon World/PBTA games?
the game's mantra is "to do it, you have to do it" (@DarkPrimus above touched on this, he laid out this philosophy in his post)
I agree, but in the above scenario with the statue, would you deal with the look-then-disarm type of player any differently than the go-straight-in-with-a-probe type of player?
This is me cannibalising your methods, in case you were worried that I was being judgy
yes, absolutely--part of the reason i ask for a "how" in my framing is so i can give them actionable information that will vary based on their attempt, because the goal is to portray a world at my table as much as it is to play the game
if a player says "I want to smell the statue as my investigation" and rolls a 30, vs "I prod the statue with my fingers" and rolls a 30, the information they get in return will be different. it will lead to the same place, probably ("you find a trap!") but the devil's in the details. how a character does something on screen is just as defining and fleshes out the world and offers more value to the table than "I roll investigate"
edit: i should also clarify that with both players rolling a 30, they won't suffer harm as part of the trap. but the narrative result they get will be different on the poetry layer. if the trap is set off by touching in my notes, maybe they set off the trap and avoid the harm completely. maybe the person that sniffs the trap (the smell rogue) smells the grease of the mechanisms and disarms the trap with his array of smelling salts. i dunno! the point is the outcome suits the input of the player and feels like a world and not a computer that calculated a pass/fail
as an addendum, being a fan of the characters is one of the most important parts to making this approach work
like, if you operate under the assumption that there's One Solution, and your players narrate into the Not Solutions and you punish them, that's just dirty pool any way you cut it, and you're going to look like an ass
i'm arguing that the "ideal" way is somewhere in the middle, where the player provides a few dashes of flavorful input, and the DM takes that to season the result and tailor it to the character's methods to make the world feel real and like their actions matter
and i'm not saying i hit the mark all the time, either! but i think your success factor goes up when you treat it as a world to explore, and that the die roll governs the pass/fail, and it's our job to make the situation interesting so the character looks good and the player feels good (or sometimes you do the opposite)
example: in my recent session my party was on like, level 3 of the dungeon, with each level having been more assholey in the trappery
he rolled a 26 on his trap finding and i said that he stepped on a plate (because he assumed they were positioned consistently around the room and skipped over a section)
he succeeded on the roll, but i narrated it that he stepped on a plate and the trapped statues let out an evil cackle and nothing happened
why? because he made an assumption in the poetry layer and was "punished" in the poetry layer (despite nothing happening) which resulted in them thinking more stuff was awaiting them ahead
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
My only issue with this (and why I don't do it at my table) is that my character will have a level of knowledge well beyond mine of whether this thing should be prodded and poked, smelled, or whatever, whereas I the player am shooting in the dark. That's why I've put points into investigate, so my character knows how to do it well. That a player is taking the time to investigate is enough for me, as a DM I can narrate that well enough.
To each their own though, it would be interesting to be a player at your table and try it that way.
like i said, it requires trust between the people at the table--i totally believe in the separation between character/player attributes, but i also think anyone can pretend to be a sleuth.
here's the thing that might help people get their head around it. i get you're not sherlock. but you know what a detective is. you know sherlock inspects things carefully and i know you have an imagination. like, you're not an elf either, but you know what elves do. why can't you apply the same thought to your rogue? make something up!
be the smell rogue, is what i'm saying. it's my job as the DM to make your input work or not work based on what you roll, but if you don't give me anything i can't give you anything back.
My only issue with this (and why I don't do it at my table) is that my character will have a level of knowledge well beyond mine of whether this thing should be prodded and poked, smelled, or whatever, whereas I the player am shooting in the dark. That's why I've put points into investigate, so my character knows how to do it well. That a player is taking the time to investigate is enough for me, as a DM I can narrate that well enough.
To each their own though, it would be interesting to be a player at your table and try it that way.
I mean, as a GM you should also freely tell players things that their character should know about a situation if it would be obvious to them, or remind them of something they had learned earlier if it's still relevant and useful.
It all loops back to being a fan of the players. Fuck having to make a DC 15 Nature check to know bears live in caves and have big claws.
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
i love the idea of making a player narrate it and depending on what they say they either set off the trap and dodge the result or disable the trap before it fires
yeah! it requires trust first and foremost; you shouldn't, as the dm, take that as a signal to just hit your trapfinders with pies in the face at every turn just because they didn't figure out the special sequence locked in your Super Clever DM Brain, because that makes them feel inept despite their skills saying otherwise and makes you look like a vindictive ass
just as on the opposite end you shouldn't discount cleverness; if the player says they look for something specific and they nail it in one, that should be a cookie reward all its own. it's an opportunity to really make a player feel special that wouldn't otherwise happen if you just evaluate rolls
i'm a big fan of bending narrative around rolls as long as there's narrative to bend. my rogue in an earlier area with a locked door with no obvious means of entry splashed some water on the surface of the stone to bring the texture into sharper relief and make stuff easier to see. that is something i would have never come up with on my own and hella clever, and he got some good information about it (if i recall correctly he learned some more info about the door because it was a time worn design or something)
i'm also speaking from the perspective of a DM who typically doesn't adhere to the "shit ton of encounters per rest" methodology, so like my combats i want hazards to matter, so the damage tends to be high
for my 11th level party for example my traps tend to hover somewhere in the 20-40 point range (1/3 to 1/2 of a character's health depending on which character eats it
edit: worth appending that if you adhere to the more traditional x encounters per day style it is beneficial to expedite your trapfinding if expediency is a main goal
repetition and the subversion of the expectations of said repetition is the best way to execute traps in a dungeon, in my opinion
and when i say traps, i don't mean a hole with a net that some goblins put up, i mean indiana jones / tomb of horrors / dark souls traps that were intended by whoever built them to kill the shit out of things that get caught in them
for example -
level 1 pressure plate
identifiable by discoloration on the stonework. the players maybe hit this one once, or twice, and once you say "discoloration" they know what to look for, so they start sniffing it out. they pry up the plate, the mechanisms are there, the rogue fucks with them (my rogue took a crowbar to them and bent them all out of shape rendering the trap useless)
level 2 pressure plate
no discoloration (higher dc). the players are still looking for the right thing, but maybe these pressure plates are consistently located between some other marker like the level 1 plates (i had them between two statues usually, or at the top/bottom of stairs). still easy to disarm.
level 3 pressure plate
no discoloration, and maybe they're placed irregularly, maybe not. this one has an extra layer of security underneath; mine were reinforced with another metal plate that required another character, because the sandstone tiles they were under weighed like 50 pounds, so either someone helped by holding up the first tile, or they took disadvantage.
level 4 pressure plate
put a glyph of warding underneath the tile.
etc etc etc
if you do this be prepared for your group to slow down and start combing the proverbial beach for land mines. this is what i wanted since we don't dungeon crawl in the traditional sense hardly at all; i wanted them to really take their time and treat the dungeon like the threat that it was. if you don't want this behavior to emerge, use it sparingly/not at all
I'm not a fan of the player's knowledge being more important than their characters skills or knowledge, especially for situations like examining magical traps
Also I don't think we'd get far if checking every single door and chest for a trap was a 1on1 roleplaying session between the DM and the player who is best at finding traps (most doors and chests aren't trapped)
by the by the thing I wanted to check for traps, that the DM told me to roll an investigation for, wasn't even trapped, there were spectres inside of it - so he said "I should have just told you that after careful examination you decided it wasn't trapped, and not triggered the spectres until you tried to open it"
the module says "if the players touch it" or wording to that effect, which a check for traps shouldn't set off, a check for traps should either determine its trapped, or tell you that you aren't sure if it's trapped
I'm not a fan of the player's knowledge being more important than their characters skills or knowledge
Also I don't think we'd ever get everywhere if every single time the players interacted with a door we had to take a minute to have them narrate how they check it for traps
I'm not a fan of the player's knowledge being more important than their characters skills or knowledge
Also I don't think we'd ever get everywhere if every single time the players interacted with a door we had to take a minute to have them narrate how they check it for traps
A minute? It's barely 10 seconds to narrate that.
Really? 10 seconds to describe how you check the handle, underneath it, the floor tiles, the top of it? Do you just pick one? Can't we just truncate it, if it's an action we're doing over and over (sometimes a half dozen times in the same room) by saying "I would like to check the doors and sarcophaguses for traps)?
It sounds exhausting and I would just stop checking for traps, instead relying on summons to barrel through every door while the party waits inside a leomunds tiny hut
ArcanisTheImpotent describes games where the players are so paranoid that the game slows, by design, I'm glad that works for that table. I don't like it, because not every door, floor tile, and chest is trapped. Sometimes I'll throw in a complex trap that requires a good deal for players to get through but I'd probably lose them if I did what was described on this page for EVERYTHING. I'm currently focused on speeding my games up, cutting out the fat to spend more time on the roleplay goodness and less time on fiddly bits.
Thats fine, all of it is fine, I'm just saying it doesn't mesh well with how I play Dungeons and Dragons
Similarly, I have never found a game that focuses heavy on survival mechanics to be satisfying, or with weapon degradation, or managing complex crafting systems, or managing how players set up camp and where they poop - drilling down on any gameplay mechanic can be done which is why D&D is so great, people can focus on things they enjoy
And to go back to what started all of this, no it's not reasonable to expect players to describe how their incredibly perceptive and intelligent character with expertise checks for traps if you're not playing in a game where that's ever been asked of them before, and causing an auto fail because they don't know if they have to touch a sarcophogus to determine if it is trap free. Seeing as my DM now agrees with me on this, I'm going to stick with my gut feeling of being "gotcha'd"
you like to cherry pick shit out of people's posts and then strawman the fuck out of them
i've played 51 sessions and we've done three "dungeons" at this point, everything else basically being roleplay shit, and this is the first time i've used traps to any significant degree
you take my post of asking for any input to supplement the roll into a "minute long one on one roleplaying session"
despite giving several examples taken right from my game
despite me saying for a change of pace in this particular dungeon i wanted to make them slow down and be a bit paranoid as a bit of contrast
and then liken my asking for any amount of flavorful narrative (of which i've given like 8 examples throughout all my posts, starting with "I look at it with my eyes" which seems pretty basic to me) to be akin to demanding the group describe in great detail how they set up latrines
The portrayals of Arc as an iron-fisted tyrant of a DM who demands one-on-one RP sessions a full minute in duration, including specialized CSI knowledge, just to disarm a trap is actually hilarious to me.
Here's what actually happened as I recall it:
Rogue: I check for traps.
Arc: Ok, what are you actually doing to check for traps?
Rogue: I'm looking over the floor carefully and trying to discern if there's anything off.
Arc: Roll investigation.
Rogue: I got [result over 20].
Arc: Sure enough, you notice that some of the sandstone on these two spaces are a slightly different color.
But hey if that's too burdensome and time consuming to actually play out for most folks, then I guess I'm just WAY BETTER at roleplaying than I thought I was. Man, and I've never even had to describe where and how my character poops, just think of how much great characterization opportunities I've missed out on with that.
If you don't make it explicit where your character poops, and what you do with it afterwards, you can't complain when you get attacked by a poop golem 3 sessions later because it was gathered by a scatomancer from an unwarded latrine
A player saying, or asking a player to say "I try to motivate my group with a rousing speech and rolled a.....17" is very different than actually giving a rousing speech at the table.
If you don't make it explicit where your character poops, and what you do with it afterwards, you can't complain when you get attacked by a poop golem 3 sessions later because it was gathered by a scatomancer from an unwarded latrine
Great now my brain is gonna stat out a shit golem, and the fucked up wizard that made it happen
If you don't make it explicit where your character poops, and what you do with it afterwards, you can't complain when you get attacked by a poop golem 3 sessions later because it was gathered by a scatomancer from an unwarded latrine
Great now my brain is gonna stat out a shit golem, and the fucked up wizard that made it happen
Also when it comes to skill checks, they are totally pull lever get bacon. It's my job to tell you what success looks like expressly because the player doesn't know what failure looks like. They go to inspect the eldritch statue, I have them roll, they succeed the check, I describe them not touching the statue because in their inspection they've realized that's the trap. Boom move on. If they fail the inspection check, they pickup the eldritch statue like an idiot and trigger the trap, that probably means a save vs effect and then move on. The far more interesting thing about traps is less their immediate functioning or discovery and far more the answer to the questions, "how did it work, who put it there, why did they put it there".
If you don't make it explicit where your character poops, and what you do with it afterwards, you can't complain when you get attacked by a poop golem 3 sessions later because it was gathered by a scatomancer from an unwarded latrine
Great now my brain is gonna stat out a shit golem, and the fucked up wizard that made it happen
Damnit half my game happens in a mega city with extensive sewage. Great just great, one of these nights when I can't get a full party together I'm gonna take the nicest, most prim and proper characters and make em fight literal shit golems, Its gonna have a whole subsection for if when it gets lit on fire.
Ha it's literally just a clay golem replace the acid feature with a fire feature and it starts doing a bunch of extra fire damage with its hits and exudes a disorienting stench cloud effect when it gets lit on fire (save vs disadvantage on attacks checks and saves while within 15, save negates that particular cloud forever, every shit golem has their own particular stench).
It's literally just a scrub tier wizard doing the magical equivalent of dropping flaming turds on the character's doorsteps.
Well thread I had to think of all of that, my players are going to have to play it, and I blame all of you.
The way I always ran it (I say it this way because 5e isn't really interested in actually giving you hard rules so this is somewhat extrapolated from the book rather than hard RAW) Perception might have you notice a trip wire or a pressure plate, or an arrow slit that might fire an arrow trap. Investigation is how you figure out how the trap works (if necessary, in some cases it's easy to bypass without doing any investigation, e.g. the trip wire).
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Yes And...
I lick it.
I usually bake that sort of thing into a player's passive investigation skill.
it won’t work for everyone but my table is pretty immersion heavy and we do fine
I had one guy crit his investigation check (we do those at my table) on a crossbow trap and asked if they could take it with them to set up later. I said sure and they ended up using it a few times to cover their backs during combats. Kind of like the turrets in Aliens.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I think that's what he was going for but my problem with this is that I don't actually 1. know 100% what I'm looking at, I don't have a 3d model of the door or sarcophogus in front of me, and 2. I'm not an experienced investigator while my character is. I think it should be reasonable for me to say "I do what my character thinks would be best to do"
It's like asking me to describe how I check for glyphs of warding, to me
i dunno, I just do? My own real life lack of understanding how thieves do shouldn't hurt my character
Spending most of my time on the DM side, in modules traps always say how they work, so it's really easy to describe how the thief disarms it, I don't describe them searching for every possible kind of trap, I say "you find a hidden wire underneath the lid of the chest, even the slightest movement will set it off", I don't ask "how do you examine this chest for traps" because if I did regardless of how high their investigation is they're probably going to pick something that will set the trap off
i wasn't at the table but it sounds like he was looking to play pixel bitch and hit you with a gotcha, which isn't fair play
my rogues aren't master trapsmiths either in real life, but to me "I do what character would do best" is a cop out, just like "I charm the guard" is a cop out
you don't have to craft a speech to charm a guard, but you can describe the idea you want to convey ("I put on my best smile and engage in some small talk"), or say the words (I say 'bla bla bla' and distract him with small talk for 15 minutes), and supplement the roll. the same goes with searching a room or looking at a device for a trap. "I closely inspect the box" isn't some herculean leap of deduction to get where we need to go, because to make traps engaging you have to allow wiggle room for people to get lucky or outsmart the trap, otherwise it becomes a "I roll to find trap, 31." "You find trap and disarm it."
if we ask for a minimal level of engagement, we can reveal information about the trap, and the players can talk about it and do a little puzzle solving, and try weird shit, and suddenly traps become memorable and interesting.
the game is about defeating monsters, exploring dungeons, overcoming traps, and gathering loot at its core; if we aren't giving traps substance, it's basically just any other skill check to gloss over, so... why have them at all?
this is all framed with a "your mileage may vary"
I never bother with writing elaborate backgrounds, but I gave her a few plot hooks: a bond with her travelling theatre troupe and (as part of her entertainer background) and she has love letters from adorers sorted in a binder by region and social standing. There ought to be an admirer in every city and region she visits who could either complicate matters or open a door somewhere.
I think it's completely reasonable for the dungeon master, not the player to know the answer to the question does the rogue have to touch the chest to check if it is trapped
as an aside, would you just not let someone on the spectrum play a high charisma character or would you have them automatically fail at checks for inadequately explaining how they convince someone of something
and as someone that has/had folks on the spectrum at my table, pulling that in is pretty ableist in the other direction
“I persuade the guard” is low effort
“I put on my nice smile and sweet talk the guard”
both are highly abstract, neither are difficult to do, but the second one actually engages with the world instead of just being a “pull lever, roll dice, process result”
it applies to traps, it applies to combat
and some people and groups are fine with pull lever roll dice, and that’s fine too, but i think it makes for a really boring game for everyone if the game amounts to a string of dice rolls end to end, and it certainly doesn’t help the DM or the players if they want to create a story that’s unique and all their own
Although "should" is a term that I probably shouldn't (hah) use, as your table, your rules
On the subject of traps: I haven't looked at the trap disarm rules in a while, and might even be thinking of 4th Ed, but isn't there a thing where if you fail a trap's DC by enough then Bad Shit happens? I assumed that took care of the whole "how do you do it" scenario, as a slight fail means that your character knew enough not to trigger the trap, but a big fail means that your character's hand slipped, or cut the wrong wire, or whatever
I have seen traps that specify fail states, but only in Warhammer Fantasy, where in Shadows Over Bogenhaven there's a door with a handle that triggers a pit trap unless the player opening the door specifically says that they are turning the handle the other way
But that's 1st Edition bullshit that WFRP has running through it like a stick of rock, like how you can lose experience if you fail an Intelligence check when trying to level up
neither your way or my way is spoken of by the rules, so it's up to you how to do it
but to me, skipping straight to a die roll leads to "I turn on my trap radar" style play where people are just rolling dice and comparing numbers
i derive my fun from the poetry layer, and that style of play sucks all of that out into the void
YMMV
i just don't think it's a stretch to ask players to add just a little bit of how they're doing something, because if you look at it from the opposite direction, it helps the DM to give direct feedback in line with whatever they roll
for example:
"I think there's a trap, I want to investigate."
"How? What are you doing?"
"I'm going to get close to the statue and inspect it carefully" *roll roll* "28"
"You don't see anything out of the ordinary, but as you get close to it you hear a strange click-click of a mechanism inside the statue's head."
"Oh shit, I'd like to disarm it with my thieves tools." *roll roll* "13"
"As you go to disarm it..."
etc etc
it makes things an actual obstacle rather than some die rolls we pass over. if you want them to be that, that's fine, but i'm not interested in that, and i think probably some folks out there feel the same way, and it doesn't require you to be sherlock fucking holmes to give some extra bits to help the GM breathe some life into the world
This is me cannibalising your methods, in case you were worried that I was being judgy
Something I try to enforce with players regardless of the system we're playing is that when you want to roll the dice, you have to tell me what your character is doing first. Because you might think you know what sort of check you want to perform, but if you can't tell me in even basic terms how your character would be accomplishing it, maybe it's not actually the right skill to making the check? And if you do have a good idea of how your character is performing an action, guess what? That might affect the difficulty of the check, or lead to me saying you don't even need a dice roll to accomplish something.
When I GM I am always trying to operate as a fan of the players, and the more the players give me to work with, the more I can be a fan of theirs.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Sometimes for the benevolent reason that there's no fail state so it's simpler to let you succeed!
Sometimes
If my DM said this gadget could only be explored with acrobatics or thieves tools and not with investigation that would be more reasonable. Same if they told me the answer to whether I touched it wouldn't have a mechanical impact and he was just trying to get me to give a little more detail.
If you want to throw puzzle shit at me, fine, but it should be clearly marked, and I want you to give some non puzzle stuff to me that uses my players skills at some point
that's because at the outset i explicitly said (and have restated) playing from a position of "hah, GOTCHA dumb player" is shitty
but I also don't agree with low-effort "I want to disarm trap" "Ok" "I got a 28" "You disarm the trap" sequence
and i vehemently disagree that "puzzle shit" should be clearly marked. i am not behooved as the GM to tell you the HP, AC, and immunities of my monsters, nor do we allow our players to look at the DM and say "my 18 int wizard would cast the best spell at this monster."
that's lazy
seriously, have none of you guys played Dungeon World/PBTA games?
the game's mantra is "to do it, you have to do it" (@DarkPrimus above touched on this, he laid out this philosophy in his post)
yes, absolutely--part of the reason i ask for a "how" in my framing is so i can give them actionable information that will vary based on their attempt, because the goal is to portray a world at my table as much as it is to play the game
if a player says "I want to smell the statue as my investigation" and rolls a 30, vs "I prod the statue with my fingers" and rolls a 30, the information they get in return will be different. it will lead to the same place, probably ("you find a trap!") but the devil's in the details. how a character does something on screen is just as defining and fleshes out the world and offers more value to the table than "I roll investigate"
edit: i should also clarify that with both players rolling a 30, they won't suffer harm as part of the trap. but the narrative result they get will be different on the poetry layer. if the trap is set off by touching in my notes, maybe they set off the trap and avoid the harm completely. maybe the person that sniffs the trap (the smell rogue) smells the grease of the mechanisms and disarms the trap with his array of smelling salts. i dunno! the point is the outcome suits the input of the player and feels like a world and not a computer that calculated a pass/fail
like, if you operate under the assumption that there's One Solution, and your players narrate into the Not Solutions and you punish them, that's just dirty pool any way you cut it, and you're going to look like an ass
i'm arguing that the "ideal" way is somewhere in the middle, where the player provides a few dashes of flavorful input, and the DM takes that to season the result and tailor it to the character's methods to make the world feel real and like their actions matter
and i'm not saying i hit the mark all the time, either! but i think your success factor goes up when you treat it as a world to explore, and that the die roll governs the pass/fail, and it's our job to make the situation interesting so the character looks good and the player feels good (or sometimes you do the opposite)
example: in my recent session my party was on like, level 3 of the dungeon, with each level having been more assholey in the trappery
he rolled a 26 on his trap finding and i said that he stepped on a plate (because he assumed they were positioned consistently around the room and skipped over a section)
he succeeded on the roll, but i narrated it that he stepped on a plate and the trapped statues let out an evil cackle and nothing happened
why? because he made an assumption in the poetry layer and was "punished" in the poetry layer (despite nothing happening) which resulted in them thinking more stuff was awaiting them ahead
To each their own though, it would be interesting to be a player at your table and try it that way.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
@webguy20
here's the thing that might help people get their head around it. i get you're not sherlock. but you know what a detective is. you know sherlock inspects things carefully and i know you have an imagination. like, you're not an elf either, but you know what elves do. why can't you apply the same thought to your rogue? make something up!
be the smell rogue, is what i'm saying. it's my job as the DM to make your input work or not work based on what you roll, but if you don't give me anything i can't give you anything back.
I mean, as a GM you should also freely tell players things that their character should know about a situation if it would be obvious to them, or remind them of something they had learned earlier if it's still relevant and useful.
It all loops back to being a fan of the players. Fuck having to make a DC 15 Nature check to know bears live in caves and have big claws.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
just as on the opposite end you shouldn't discount cleverness; if the player says they look for something specific and they nail it in one, that should be a cookie reward all its own. it's an opportunity to really make a player feel special that wouldn't otherwise happen if you just evaluate rolls
i'm a big fan of bending narrative around rolls as long as there's narrative to bend. my rogue in an earlier area with a locked door with no obvious means of entry splashed some water on the surface of the stone to bring the texture into sharper relief and make stuff easier to see. that is something i would have never come up with on my own and hella clever, and he got some good information about it (if i recall correctly he learned some more info about the door because it was a time worn design or something)
i'm also speaking from the perspective of a DM who typically doesn't adhere to the "shit ton of encounters per rest" methodology, so like my combats i want hazards to matter, so the damage tends to be high
for my 11th level party for example my traps tend to hover somewhere in the 20-40 point range (1/3 to 1/2 of a character's health depending on which character eats it
edit: worth appending that if you adhere to the more traditional x encounters per day style it is beneficial to expedite your trapfinding if expediency is a main goal
repetition and the subversion of the expectations of said repetition is the best way to execute traps in a dungeon, in my opinion
and when i say traps, i don't mean a hole with a net that some goblins put up, i mean indiana jones / tomb of horrors / dark souls traps that were intended by whoever built them to kill the shit out of things that get caught in them
for example -
level 1 pressure plate
identifiable by discoloration on the stonework. the players maybe hit this one once, or twice, and once you say "discoloration" they know what to look for, so they start sniffing it out. they pry up the plate, the mechanisms are there, the rogue fucks with them (my rogue took a crowbar to them and bent them all out of shape rendering the trap useless)
level 2 pressure plate
no discoloration (higher dc). the players are still looking for the right thing, but maybe these pressure plates are consistently located between some other marker like the level 1 plates (i had them between two statues usually, or at the top/bottom of stairs). still easy to disarm.
level 3 pressure plate
no discoloration, and maybe they're placed irregularly, maybe not. this one has an extra layer of security underneath; mine were reinforced with another metal plate that required another character, because the sandstone tiles they were under weighed like 50 pounds, so either someone helped by holding up the first tile, or they took disadvantage.
level 4 pressure plate
put a glyph of warding underneath the tile.
etc etc etc
if you do this be prepared for your group to slow down and start combing the proverbial beach for land mines. this is what i wanted since we don't dungeon crawl in the traditional sense hardly at all; i wanted them to really take their time and treat the dungeon like the threat that it was. if you don't want this behavior to emerge, use it sparingly/not at all
Also I don't think we'd get far if checking every single door and chest for a trap was a 1on1 roleplaying session between the DM and the player who is best at finding traps (most doors and chests aren't trapped)
by the by the thing I wanted to check for traps, that the DM told me to roll an investigation for, wasn't even trapped, there were spectres inside of it - so he said "I should have just told you that after careful examination you decided it wasn't trapped, and not triggered the spectres until you tried to open it"
the module says "if the players touch it" or wording to that effect, which a check for traps shouldn't set off, a check for traps should either determine its trapped, or tell you that you aren't sure if it's trapped
A minute? It's barely 10 seconds to narrate that.
Really? 10 seconds to describe how you check the handle, underneath it, the floor tiles, the top of it? Do you just pick one? Can't we just truncate it, if it's an action we're doing over and over (sometimes a half dozen times in the same room) by saying "I would like to check the doors and sarcophaguses for traps)?
It sounds exhausting and I would just stop checking for traps, instead relying on summons to barrel through every door while the party waits inside a leomunds tiny hut
ArcanisTheImpotent describes games where the players are so paranoid that the game slows, by design, I'm glad that works for that table. I don't like it, because not every door, floor tile, and chest is trapped. Sometimes I'll throw in a complex trap that requires a good deal for players to get through but I'd probably lose them if I did what was described on this page for EVERYTHING. I'm currently focused on speeding my games up, cutting out the fat to spend more time on the roleplay goodness and less time on fiddly bits.
Thats fine, all of it is fine, I'm just saying it doesn't mesh well with how I play Dungeons and Dragons
Similarly, I have never found a game that focuses heavy on survival mechanics to be satisfying, or with weapon degradation, or managing complex crafting systems, or managing how players set up camp and where they poop - drilling down on any gameplay mechanic can be done which is why D&D is so great, people can focus on things they enjoy
And to go back to what started all of this, no it's not reasonable to expect players to describe how their incredibly perceptive and intelligent character with expertise checks for traps if you're not playing in a game where that's ever been asked of them before, and causing an auto fail because they don't know if they have to touch a sarcophogus to determine if it is trap free. Seeing as my DM now agrees with me on this, I'm going to stick with my gut feeling of being "gotcha'd"
i've played 51 sessions and we've done three "dungeons" at this point, everything else basically being roleplay shit, and this is the first time i've used traps to any significant degree
you take my post of asking for any input to supplement the roll into a "minute long one on one roleplaying session"
despite giving several examples taken right from my game
despite me saying for a change of pace in this particular dungeon i wanted to make them slow down and be a bit paranoid as a bit of contrast
and then liken my asking for any amount of flavorful narrative (of which i've given like 8 examples throughout all my posts, starting with "I look at it with my eyes" which seems pretty basic to me) to be akin to demanding the group describe in great detail how they set up latrines
O K
The portrayals of Arc as an iron-fisted tyrant of a DM who demands one-on-one RP sessions a full minute in duration, including specialized CSI knowledge, just to disarm a trap is actually hilarious to me.
Here's what actually happened as I recall it:
Rogue: I check for traps.
Arc: Ok, what are you actually doing to check for traps?
Rogue: I'm looking over the floor carefully and trying to discern if there's anything off.
Arc: Roll investigation.
Rogue: I got [result over 20].
Arc: Sure enough, you notice that some of the sandstone on these two spaces are a slightly different color.
But hey if that's too burdensome and time consuming to actually play out for most folks, then I guess I'm just WAY BETTER at roleplaying than I thought I was. Man, and I've never even had to describe where and how my character poops, just think of how much great characterization opportunities I've missed out on with that.
Great now my brain is gonna stat out a shit golem, and the fucked up wizard that made it happen
Excrementals.
Damnit half my game happens in a mega city with extensive sewage. Great just great, one of these nights when I can't get a full party together I'm gonna take the nicest, most prim and proper characters and make em fight literal shit golems, Its gonna have a whole subsection for if when it gets lit on fire.
Ha it's literally just a clay golem replace the acid feature with a fire feature and it starts doing a bunch of extra fire damage with its hits and exudes a disorienting stench cloud effect when it gets lit on fire (save vs disadvantage on attacks checks and saves while within 15, save negates that particular cloud forever, every shit golem has their own particular stench).
It's literally just a scrub tier wizard doing the magical equivalent of dropping flaming turds on the character's doorsteps.
Well thread I had to think of all of that, my players are going to have to play it, and I blame all of you.