this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Don't put important details behind failable skill checks and just dead end it there.
Like if they find a book with ciphered text, you might be tempted to be like "make an intelligence + investigator check to decipher it", and if they fail be like "you can't figure it out".
It's better to do some sort of degree of success or succeed at a cost so the game keeps moving forward.
Like, on a bad roll they translate it but whoops awaken an angry spirit that's now attacking them. Or they make some progress, but realize they need the key to fully crack it. The note in the margin says it's at such-and-such flophouse, owned by the PC's most annoying rival group.
I've done too many "you rolled .. 0? Ok. Well you have no idea what this altar means" and then later regretted it because the players didn't have a vital clue.
In my eyes rolls basically need to be Yes Ands or Yes Buts.
Roll well: Yes And you figure out some extra information/figure it out quickly so you have advantage on your escape/you look impressive in front of the guards who did let you into the room
Roll poorly: Yes But you take a bit too long figuring it out, now guards are walking into the room/one of the guards escorting you into the room points something out to you making you look a unobservant/you accidentally break something and you've now left evidence you were here.
For my skill checks I set multiple DCs for a roll including automatic information. So depending on how high they roll the more information they get but they always get something. This is especially true for information gathering spells. Things like getting based doors or guards they can fail. But these kind of failures just drive them to other options for getting based the barrier such as breaking down the door or getting the guard drunk.
I've found that when the players hit an outright failure, a lot of the time they just draw blanks or zero in on this one specific solution. It's a weird tunnel vision.
Like, they want to talk past the doorman and he says no after they roll. Good players on their game will then think about other options. Sneak in the back. Set off an alarm. Impersonate someone who lives there. But i've just had so many players that just get stuck on this, and will try to spend 10 minutes on "What if I ask him nicely?"
I've started including a spiel about this in my session 0. "If an obstacle in the world has exactly one purpose in the story, and you attack it dead on, you may fail. Especially if it's not also your strong suit. For example, there is a doorman of a fancy apartment building. His entire role in life is to look at people, and only let them in if they're authorized. If you walk up to him, not authorized, and go 'Hey bro let me in', that will be a very hard check. That is shooting fire at the fire elemental. Disguising yourself will be easier, but still is in his domain of 'Looking at people and only letting authorized folks in'. But going in a back door so he doesn't see, setting off the fire alarm so he evacuates, calling on the phone and telling him his car has been towed, those ideas hit him where he's weaker."
That's a food idea to include it on a session 0. For a long time I didn't realize how lucky I was to have such creative players until I started DMing with players new to rpg's who aren't used to that "I can do anything?!" mindset.
I think this is definitely video game logic where there is one solution to the problem. Doing a session 0 to talk about how to get around options is a great idea. I try to do the same as well as give a variety of different options when asking what they want to do next which includes some bad ones. (So you didn't talk your way past the guards what do you want to do next? Go clubbing? Go look to see the rest of the building? Get a haircut? What do you want to do next?). It helps if it incentive by the DM in game. I played with one DM who never let us fail (basically infinite inspiration which you could reroll as often as needed) which wasn't as fun as it seems. If the players have fun with a failure that is incentive to try even if you don't succeed.
It helps that a lot of my players have been doing TTRPGs for years so they have the out of the box thinking down. They come up with wacky good and bad suggestions. It sometimes hard to see the difference between the two until it happens.