I usually don't bother with secret rolls. Sometimes the players will know that they missed a roll. So what? The players know more than their characters all the time. The characters also know more than the players all the time. It usually doesn't diminish the enjoyment of the game.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1090112I consider any RPG with secret rolls and passive perception checks to be inherently broken, so the latter.

"Broken" how?

Quote from: Pyromancer;1090144I usually don't bother with secret rolls. Sometimes the players will know that they missed a roll. So what? The players know more than their characters all the time. The characters also know more than the players all the time. It usually doesn't diminish the enjoyment of the game.

As someone who has played with DMs that roll hidden checks out in the open, I can say that it absolutely diminishes the enjoyment. I work hard as a DM to make sure that the players do not know any information the characters wouldn't know other than the absolute minimum required by the fact they are playing a game.

When I am not lazy or impatient, I roll things like Detect, Empathy, Divination, etc, secretly. But I am often lazy and just have the players roll.

Quote from: Theory of Games;1090065I roll Perception/Notice checks for PCs. As well as most social checks. The characters wouldn't know when they "won" a contest because the NPC might be way better than them at the social skill. I found me making the rolls is better for dealing with NPC lies.

GM: Roll Insight

Player: 7?

GM: Yeah, your PC believes the NPC

Player: (thinks the NPC is lying based on the low roll)

I tell my players about Predator, the film, when the Special Ops team is moving through the jungle, literally invisible to the guerrillas they are stalking. But, the SpecOps team has no knowledge of the extraterrestrial hunter stalking THEM, who hears & sees them as if they were a marching band, despite their exceptional stealth.  

If players know they missed certain rolls, THEY KNOW THEY MISSED CERTAIN ROLLS which informs their RP behavior - sometimes. Usually?

Do you use secret rolls or keep it all out in the open?

Do I use secret rolls? Yes. All my rolls are secret. I don't work that hard to hide them, but I never consider it information players have a right to know. In that sense, nothing is "out in the open."

Do I have a player roll their own perception checks? Usually, yes. But players have no idea what the difficulty is. They can roll bad on the dice and still succeed. They can roll good on the dice and still fail. But we both know that doesn't prevent them from reading into the die roll. And I think that's fine, too.

It reminds me of my first day of psyche 101. The professor asked the students to right down their answers to a series of questions about the professor. Things we couldn't possibly know the answer to. Like his age, what kind of music he listens to, what his hobbies are and so forth. He was trying to prove a point about how much information people assume or pre-judge about others. I called this experiment bullshit. I wrote down answers like everyone else. Some were probably right, some were probably wrong. But only because that was the class assignment. If you had asked me if I was willing to place bets on my answers being right, I wouldn't have even bet a penny. I had zero faith in these answers. And so these answers were not very indicative of any prejudgments I made. His experiment focused entirely on whether or not students answers were true. But it did nothing to test how much conviction students had in those answers. That's pretty much how all tests and all academia work. All obsessed with true or false. No thought given to level of conviction.

So back to the scenario you lay out. By the player being able to see the die roll, that by itself is not going to tell him whether he succeeded or failed. The player still doesn't know that. What the die roll indicates is to not hold a lot of conviction in the conclusion. Like academia, RPG rules and mechanics generally ignore conviction. But it's an essential part to any person's point of view. So the character too should have varying levels of conviction in information gathered. Therefore what you describe is not actually a problem. It's more like a godsend insofar as it answers this flaw RPGs have.


You might ask, could this added "realism" or trueness to character slow the game down or become disruptive? And the answer to that is, yes it could. But this pitfall can be head off as well. Not with a rules change, but with an attitude change for players or DMs.

Bottom line is, whether its an RPG or life, sometimes the skill check just fails. Mistakes happen. But it's important to recognize there are two kinds of mistakes. There's the kind of mistake where you stub your toe in a piece of furniture. In that case, you recognize instantly you have made a mistake. And then there's the kind of mistake where there's a pile of gold in the corner of the room but you just never bothered to look there. If you never knew it was there, you never realize you've made a mistake.

It's that second kind of mistake you have to watch out for. The first kind, at least you can learn from it. The second kind doesn't appear on the empirical evidence radar. You can't learn from experience. So what does the wide man do with this? Position yourself to make more of the first kinds of mistakes, less of the second kinds.

In your example, what happens if the players don't believe the NPC and it turns out he's telling the truth? What happens if he's lying but they believe him? Which of them leads to the most readily identifiable mistake? Because if you're going to make a mistake, that's the one you want to make provided it doesn't lead to certain death. So this is the solution players can implement to keep the game from lagging. Forget the dice. Don't rely on them. Position yourself to learn from your mistakes. You'll find the game moves along faster, you'll figure things out quicker, and your mistakes will tend to have more excitement and drama.

Recognize that if this interaction is important, there have to be constraints on it that prevent players from checking over and over and over again. If players have all the time in the world to evaluate this NPC until they're certain whether he's telling the truth or not, then clearly there's no urgent adventure. If they can keep dicking around trying to gather more and more clues until they are certain about the veracity of their information, there are no stakes to the encounter. If either things are the case, the encounter shouldn't be played out. Or if it needs to be for other reasons, this thing shouldn't be decided by dice rolls. But if it is an adventure, if there is some urgency to things, then every additional check represents time wasted that goes against the group. Eventually the cost of finding the sure answer becomes greater than the cost of not having the answer at all. This may not 100% prevent players from doing this, but at least it punishes that behavior rather than reward it.

Quote from: Theory of Games;1090065I roll Perception/Notice checks for PCs. As well as most social checks. The characters wouldn't know when they "won" a contest because the NPC might be way better than them at the social skill. I found me making the rolls is better for dealing with NPC lies.

GM: Roll Insight

Player: 7?

GM: Yeah, your PC believes the NPC

Player: (thinks the NPC is lying based on the low roll)

I tell my players about Predator, the film, when the Special Ops team is moving through the jungle, literally invisible to the guerrillas they are stalking. But, the SpecOps team has no knowledge of the extraterrestrial hunter stalking THEM, who hears & sees them as if they were a marching band, despite their exceptional stealth.  

If players know they missed certain rolls, THEY KNOW THEY MISSED CERTAIN ROLLS which informs their RP behavior - sometimes. Usually?

Do you use secret rolls or keep it all out in the open?

Depends entirely upon the situation and the group.

If I have a group of veteran players who I know will react to skill checks in game, I will have them make perception checks for no reason other than to make them nervous. Often times, I will roll the dice and make a note of the result just to keep the players on their toes.

Each group is different, you have to adapt to the players expectations as GM to be effective. This is where being a GM is more art than science.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;1090143How is that different from the DM just rolling?

Technically the player rolled it. Well I like to think so.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1090112I consider any RPG with secret rolls and passive perception checks to be inherently broken, so the latter.

What is a "passive perception" check?

Quote from: Psikerlord;1090197Technically the player rolled it. Well I like to think so.

I tried it once but, honestly, using dice cups to hide the result of his roll from the player is the better solution. The delay is manageable and if you still feel it is too much in a given instance, you just let them roll openly.

Quote from: Joey2k;1090258What is a "passive perception" check?

A passive perception check is when the target's (usually a PC) Perception skill isn't rolled, but instead used as a target number for the sneaker's Stealth roll. For example, if a player has a +3 Perception and the bad guy has a +5 Stealth, you can either have the bad guy roll d20+ 5 vs 11+ 3 or have the PC roll d20 + 3 vs 11 + 5. Either situation has the same probability of success, so it doesn't matter which you actually choose. There's nothing wrong or broken about it. It is simply a tool that DM can use to maintain the pacing of the game.

In my game, I can do the same with any roll. A PC could roll an attack to hit to monster or the monster can roll a defense to avoid the hit. A wizard can roll a magic test against the monster's Save value or the monster could roll a save against the wizard's magic value. It just offers flexibility.

Quote from: Joey2k;1090258What is a "passive perception" check?

In a 5e passive check there is no roll, instead the roll is auto 10 (it's like the old "take 10" from 3e, also bad). So your passive perception is a set score like 13 (10 + 3 for your stat/skill bonus). This is broken because you auto spot/dont spot traps, ambushes, clues etc without a roll (you just compare PP 13 vs say Trap DC spot of 14 (you missed it!) or 12 (you see it, yay!). Also, monsters do this, so say hello to super ninja PCs who never get spotted with a little bit of min maxing.

The idea was to avoid rolls which might "tip off" players just by rolling. It does fix that "problem" but creates its own new problems, as outlined above. Course many tables didnt have a problem with the usual way of handing perception (rolling, like every other check in the game), and just make the occasional secret check for your players (or some other variant).

End of the day, the metagame "tip off" issue used to arise about very occasionally/infrequently. The static PP vs static trap DC and super ninja PC issue however arises constantly. A poor design choice overall.

Quote from: Psikerlord;1090311In a 5e passive check there is no roll, instead the roll is auto 10 (it's like the old "take 10" from 3e, also bad). So your passive perception is a set score like 13 (10 + 3 for your stat/skill bonus). This is broken because you auto spot/dont spot traps, ambushes, clues etc without a roll (you just compare PP 13 vs say Trap DC spot of 14 (you missed it!) or 12 (you see it, yay!). Also, monsters do this, so say hello to super ninja PCs who never get spotted with a little bit of min maxing.

I solve this by rolling the DC for the trap - d20+10 instead of 20, say - vs the PC's Passive Per.
If a PC invests enough in stealth to never be spotted that is not a problem IMO. Nothing wrong with one guy being the super ninja.

It does depend. Ideally, as the GM I'd roll it. In practice it depends on how much I think it is likely to matter that the player knows one more thing that their character doesn't and how lazy I feel. For persuasion attempts it often seems smoother for me to roll and then combine the roll with what the player said to determine a result.

One exception is systems that have a benny mechanic like Fortune Points or Force Points that can be used after the roll is made. It's difficult for the player to decide whether or not to use a point if they don't know what the roll was in the first place.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;1090143How is that different from the DM just rolling?

Obviously it's different if the player or the GM are using unfair/untrue dice since the probabilities aren't equal. And in certain cases the player knows that they rolled 9 or 10 really good or really bad rolls. But there isn't much they can do even if they do know that.

Otherwise it really isn't any different, but some people feel like it's different. People are often about the feels.

Quote from: Theory of Games;1090065Do you use secret rolls or keep it all out in the open?

I keep it all out in the open. If the Players see that they have failed a roll, they accept it and so on.