Quote from: RMS;1011817I've heard about CoC published scenarios that suffer from this problem frequently.  If that's correct, then it seems that we've set people up to think this is a good idea.  To be clear, I think it's a horrible idea.

Also, I'm a huge Chaosium fanboy, but only played a handful of CoC games in my life as the genre really doesn't interest me.  I've just read this complaint multiple times, so it does seem that allowing failed perception rolls kill an adventure or stall it is more common than it should be.

I've read about  a few modules that assume the PCs will do X to achieve Y and otherwise can't get to Z. My impression is (1) that's not well made and I wouldn't buy it (but I don't  buy modules anyway) and (2) did the ref not read it before running it? He should have found the problems and worked up workarounds...or just not run the module at all and maybe borrow the  best ideas from it.

Quote from: Dumarest;1012001I've read about  a few modules that assume the PCs will do X to achieve Y and otherwise can't get to Z. My impression is (1) that's not well made and I wouldn't buy it (but I don't  buy modules anyway) and (2) did the ref not read it before running it? He should have found the problems and worked up workarounds...or just not run the module at all and maybe borrow the  best ideas from it.

I completely agree with you.  However, if someone is learning how to write their adventures based on published module by professional game designers then it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that those same people think it's a good idea to put such silly checks in their own games......and years later we read their players complain about those on internet forums.

After all, someone wrote and was paid to produce those things, presumably!

Quote from: RMS;1012010I completely agree with you.  However, if someone is learning how to write their adventures based on published module by professional game designers then it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that those same people think it's a good idea to put such silly checks in their own games......and years later we read their players complain about those on internet forums.

After all, someone wrote and was paid to produce those things, presumably!

Well, for sure, and it helps that a large percentage of nerds seem to be completist collectors who have to buy every product to feel whole. Plus I wonder is some people buy and play a flawed module of that nature and assume the problem is their playing and not the module, for surely no one would write and publish a module with a chokepoint like that!

I often think "professional game designer" is the main reason why there are so many lackluster games and modules out there.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1011844I'm going to have a hard time with vocabulary on this, so bear with me. I don't find that there are any... non-combat resolution mechanics (roughly "skills") that I've ever found particularly satisfactory in a way that works well all the time (or if misused, mis-written, or poorly applied). Rolling perception over and over until someone gets it is a great example. The stealthy character trying to hide in the room with the perceptive character where each of them roll their checks each round until the perceiver rolls near 20 and the stealthier rolls near 1 (or whatever, depending on system) is the logical extreme of this. Using social skill test instead of actually roleplaying is another iconic example. But other less common ones as well. Climbing-- having the same chance of climbing a 12' wall and a 1000' cliff makes no sense, but rolling every 'round' is just a recipe for falling (or in reality just never using the climb skill to climb anything you can't survive falling off of). Having set, in-the-book success metrics (like the skill DCs in 3e D&D) is usually a bad idea because the designers rarely can anticipate what the median scores games will be played at, but free-form just invites threshold creep (once players start repeatedly succeeding by 5 or more, 5 or more becomes the new threshold for success). I have never found a skill/resolution system where the best advise isn't "be a good GM in the first place"... which is fine for me since I and the GMs I play with are experienced, but for a newbie seems like it must be really frustrating.

One of the big problems is GMs thinking they MUST make players roll for:

a) things that PCs should just automatically succeed at
b) things that PCs should just automatically fail at no matter how good their 'skill' is

Quote from: RMS;1011817I've heard about CoC published scenarios that suffer from this problem frequently.  If that's correct, then it seems that we've set people up to think this is a good idea.  To be clear, I think it's a horrible idea.

CoC has produced most of history's greatest published adventures. It's also produced a shitload of bad gamer habits.

"b) things that PCs should just automatically fail at no matter how good their 'skill' is "

Perception can be an ingame skill too however, makes the "automatically fail at no matter how good their 'skill' is" not a sustainable claim, as everyone can roll a critical success, like even against invisible enemies you notice the pushed away branches or the pressure on the grass from the feet.


Also, I'm almost blind with 8 dioptre glasses in RL, so I rather prefer to roll for things than be expected to see things, but that's just me.

Don't ever have the players roll if you don't want a random result. This should be somewhere in the opening paragraph of every DMG for every game ever published.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1012882One of the big problems is GMs thinking they MUST make players roll for:

a) things that PCs should just automatically succeed at
b) things that PCs should just automatically fail at no matter how good their 'skill' is

This is a true statement that I feel targets the exact other end of the spectrum of resolution mechanics than my main issue. I'm talking about areas where there is as real chance of both success or failure, but the determination of how to adjudicate whether one succeeds or fails is challenging. Usually because the same method (such as roll 1D20 and get below your score in this) is expected to work the same for uncontested and contested situations, or (or more challengingly, and), it is an ongoing activity, and the decision about how often one should be made to roll is in question.

Quote from: Dumarest;1011746Do you mean the only way to obtain or ascertain the critical information was via successful perception roll? If so, that's just shitty planning and maybe the game was better off dying there than being dragged out to see how else the ref could ruin his own devices.

I think Gumshoe was written to avoid that issue. But I haven't played it so I can't say more; maybe someone else has?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1011844I'm going to have a hard time with vocabulary on this, so bear with me. I don't find that there are any... non-combat resolution mechanics (roughly "skills") that I've ever found particularly satisfactory in a way that works well all the time (or if misused, mis-written, or poorly applied). Rolling perception over and over until someone gets it is a great example. The stealthy character trying to hide in the room with the perceptive character where each of them roll their checks each round until the perceiver rolls near 20 and the stealthier rolls near 1 (or whatever, depending on system) is the logical extreme of this. Using social skill test instead of actually roleplaying is another iconic example. But other less common ones as well. Climbing-- having the same chance of climbing a 12' wall and a 1000' cliff makes no sense, but rolling every 'round' is just a recipe for falling (or in reality just never using the climb skill to climb anything you can't survive falling off of). Having set, in-the-book success metrics (like the skill DCs in 3e D&D) is usually a bad idea because the designers rarely can anticipate what the median scores games will be played at, but free-form just invites threshold creep (once players start repeatedly succeeding by 5 or more, 5 or more becomes the new threshold for success). I have never found a skill/resolution system where the best advise isn't "be a good GM in the first place"... which is fine for me since I and the GMs I play with are experienced, but for a newbie seems like it must be really frustrating.

Hmm. My wizard was nearly killed in a shipwreck caused by a severe storm because there were what I thought an absurd number of strength checks (or saving throws, some of them) needed. Fortunately the very strong paladin saved my wizard. But arguably one (especially a bookish wizard with no relevant spells) should be likely to die in a shipwreck.

Anyone who has a chance of climbing a 1000' cliff should automatically climb a 12' wall, and conversely anyone who might fail to climb a 12' wall should certainly fail to climb the 1000' cliff. But I can represent both a short climb or a longer one with either a single roll with varying DC or a varying number of rolls against the same DC; if I have a feeling as to how hard it should be, it's easier to set the DC for a single roll on d20 to get that than for multiple rolls. But multiple rolls amplifies the difference in skill levels, which is sometimes what I want.

I don't think the "contest until someone fails" is so bad; the number of rolls until the stealthy character is found determines how long the search took, and it should be automatic if there is no reason the amount of time matters. The social skill test doesn't make sense in the same way, unless you're modeling some of the threads at this site; my NPCs lose interest and end the conversation after a few checks, unless the PCs are constantly ramping up the offers (which would be roleplaying).

Regarding the comment about in-the-book success metrics, the bounded accuracy of D&D 5e seems to help with that; the range of bonuses doesn't vary that much between very low level and very high level characters, and less so within a small range of levels.

But despite all my quibbling, I see the point in general, and I don't have a good answer for how often repeated rolls should happen.