Quote from: Shipyard Locked;737640Yes, I tell them.

I want them to know and see that I never fudge outcomes to fit some story or plan.

Transparency and cold impartiality are the style I aim for. This makes it easier for players to accept things like character death that I feel are important to the game aspect of the hobby.

That's important too - being seen to be impartial as important - if not more important - than actually being impartial, because if you openly demonstrate impartiality like that you kill any lingering doubts before they even have a chance to work on you.

I don't usually give out hard numbers, but I do give them an indication of the difficulty involved with the task at hand. "The wall is rough hewn, plenty of handholds and places to grip, you could probably climb it with your eyes closed." (Easy, low difficulty), or "If you didn't know better you''d swear this wall was one single piece of polished stone, handholds are almost nonexistent. This one is really going to test your skill." (Hard, high difficulty).

One of the nice things about ad/disad is that the maths are a little obscure.
So 2 disadvantages feels like its hard but the exact level of "hardness" is kind of vague. So in that sense it kind of mirrors the general feel of real life where stuff feels tricky but you can't really say how tricky  (unless you actually learn the maths of course )

In the majority of cases, I go ahead and reveal the difficulty number to the player.

Not for the first check/attack. I do subsequently, though. I just don't want them thinking mainly in numbers as they interact with the game world.

My default would be to state the difficulty. Generally I only hide it if the character is unaware of the reason for the roll.

I also like to have the difficulty set before the roll is made.


But I don't really set specific rules for myself as a gm; much of what I do is intuitive instead of planned.

"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
- Dave Arneson

Now, I will give players a verbal indication of how it looks to them...

"It looks simple/easy/moderate/hard/damn near impossible."  What their characters might be able to estimate.  I also will say "Roll x die, you want high/low."

But I never, ever give numbers.

Quote from: Brander;737600If it's a situation where the character could reasonably know how difficult a task is, Yes.  If not, No.  Unless I want to speed up play for some reason, then Yes.

As an addendum I was including things like modifiers and the like.

And like some others here I see telling a player the numbers as being the exact same thing as their character looking at the situation and having a level of confidence in whether their skill is good enough or not.  That way me and the player don't have to wonder whether my description means "hard" or "very hard."  Though again, they have to have a reason to know.  I'm not going to tell them an opponents skill in not getting hit until they have had a chance to fight them.

I generally do when playing Fate.  But then again, when playing Fate a "number" can really be translated into "mediocre, average, fair, good, great, fantastic" anyway, so it easily flows into the "in-character" stuff.

That, and the skills have low enough granularity that if you give any idea of how difficult something is, you may as well tell them the target.

Depends on PC in-character perspective (barring my laziness and letting the player run the check). Helps me get out of my setting in-character perspective and really think about my description to the player. I've caught myself assuming what I said was clear, but upon openly talking about certain description-based penalties that would be obvious to IC PCs, I realized sometimes I gloss or am oblique.

Like, a previous comment about misty dawn being relevant on how slick a rock wall is, but players didn't realize until I say its modifier that it makes things more challenging. Players think it was a throwaway comment about weather, or assume time rapidly sped up to mid-morning and dew burn off, and suddenly the cat came back as it were. That's when thinking from their PCs' eyes really helps me.

In turn it also guides me when they would normally have no idea. Helps remind me that description is important after those rolls, even if the response is subtle. That helps skip out on perception roll redundancy. So flirting with a brand new stranger gets no pre-roll description, but will get plenty of post-roll ones, even most subtle clues from the eyes and mouth. I let players roleplay how oblivious they are from there.

Quote from: Soylent Green;737628Yes I do. I think it enhances player engagement. More to the point it's part of the discipline that ensures that I have decided the target number before I ask for any dice roll. Don't laugh, this does happens.

It enhances engagement with the system. I don't want the players to engage with the system. I want them to engage with what is happening around their characters. Most of the problems with that come from trying to make the system complex, setting percentages based on "real" probabilities or making the system itself strategically interesting. So, I keep my process simple and make no secret of how it works, but I don't tell people the numbers... At least during play.

Quote from: Old Geezer;737683"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
- Dave Arneson

Now, I will give players a verbal indication of how it looks to them...

"It looks simple/easy/moderate/hard/damn near impossible."  What their characters might be able to estimate.  I also will say "Roll x die, you want high/low."

But I never, ever give numbers.

Same here, although I probably go about it differently. I divide actions into:

 - you want to do something, but maybe things can go wrong?
 - things have already gone wrong, you want to make 'em better.

For specific characters in a given situation, either an action is simple (no roll,) nearly impossible (no roll,) or possible. Players may want to change which character performs an action, or do something else first to set up an action, in order to make the action possible or even simple.

If there's a roll, it's 5+ on 1d6 to see if things go wrong or things get better, depending on the two types of actions listed above. If I judge it more likely or less likely, I can add or subtract 1 from the roll, to make things easy or difficult. If it's reasonable that a character would know, I say it's difficult or easy, or what could go wrong.

That's as complicated as I make it. Again, because I don't want them thinking about the die roll and the numbers added or subtracted.

I always say out loud exactly what the difficulty number is, including circumstance modifiers etc, and then roll the dice on the floor/table in front of the other players. I find it makes play much much more exciting.

Quote from: talysman;737747It enhances engagement with the system. I don't want the players to engage with the system. I want them to engage with what is happening around their characters.

Meh, I'm not proud, I'll take any kind of player engagement I can get.

Quote from: -E.;737642In your driving example, I think a person would know if a particular set of conditions was going to be irritating (a low modifier), treacherous (a medium modifier) or extremely hazardous (a modifier high enough that catastrophic failure was a distinct possibility).

I agree ... but how often isn't that the case, beyond an ignorant or overconfident player?

Beyond that, we still do -- usually -- know what the system basic roll is.  You know that your Climbing skill is 13, or that your DX is 14 (or, alternately, that you have no Climbing skill and an average DX, so any default roll your system allows would suck), so you can readily piece together that your roll to climb a two-story brick wall with a knotted rope is good, and surely can figure out that your roll to climb Whispering Death Crag barehanded in the rain comes with hefty minuses.

I always tell them the difficulty numbers unless is a roll I am making for them. I don't fudge, and if I tell them the numbers openly there is no chance for evven thinking about it.