Hidden LM dice rolls?

[Winterwolf]

Hi all
I'm a bit of a lurker - looking to run some TOR in the near future. Slowly catching up with printed material...
Some wonderful material and ideas produced by so many of you!

My question is: Do any LM's out there hide dice rolls as is often done in other RPG's?
e.g. Test resolution to reveal hidden clues, information, treasure, etc.
I can see that one disadvantage of an LM doing so would be that, if not even being told about a Test, a character would not get a chance to use a Trait to automatically succeed at such at Test, nor to invoke a Trait if their hidden roll succeeds which gains them an Advancement point (unless the LM remembers this and gives them the AP later - without explanation?).
I can imagine as an LM doing hidden Tests of Perception for the characters on some occasions.

[Elmoth]

I do. I use 2 systems:

1. HIDDEN ROLL
Do hidden rolls for perception. I always tell the characters that they are doing a roll and make them roll behind my screen. Better if you make them roll for non consequential stuff as well as for crucial stuff, otherwise the players get on their nerves and do stupid things like preparing for an ambush when they roll, even if they failed. Might be funny if the situation does not require that, but is far from ambience-setting. A lot of killer games have done that to my group.

2. PRE-DONE ROLLS
Before a game I always roll around 50 D6 and around 20 D12. I write down the results. When I want them to roll without knowing it, I refer to these lists and use the rolls to calculate their results. No Trait application here, and this is the bad part about it, yup.

[SirGalrim]

In TOR I personally see no need to do hidden player rolls. I even usually make make LM rolls openly. Players are not allowed to act on the fact that they did a roll and failed. And it is seldom a problem. In the few cases a player still want to take some sort of action that would be more natural with a success then they can explain why their character is doing this. Usually they have good reasons. I don't want failed rolls to affect good role-playing of the characters personality and trait and good thinking of the players part. I don't feel there is any exploiting of this at our table.

[Kurt]

In TOR I personally see no need to do hidden player rolls. I even usually make make LM rolls openly. Players are not allowed to act on the fact that they did a roll and failed. And it is seldom a problem. In the few cases a player still want to take some sort of action that would be more natural with a success then they can explain why their character is doing this. Usually they have good reasons. I don't want failed rolls to affect good role-playing of the characters personality and trait and good thinking of the players part. I don't feel there is any exploiting of this at our table.

For me the issue isn't exploitation either, the people that I usually roleplay with are quite mature and understand roleplaying is a collaborative storytelling adventure, there is nothing to be gained through exploitation. The problem for me is that often not telling a player something is as important to the story as telling a player something. However, in this game that decision negates the ability of a trait. On page 93 in the rulebook, Katherine chose to state that a goblin was escaping, even though she considered that characters could do nothing. What would have happened if she chose not to state that?

Quite often I don't explain things that the characters don't hear or see for storytelling purposes to add mystery and excitement later on. It's a particularly useful technique for subtle linkages to past events. If I did not tell the characters that a goblin escaped then the following may occur.

The night is particularly cold and the extinguished campfire is not helping. You sit pirched on top of the ruin, keeping watch over your sleeping companions. The battle with the goblins earlier took its toll on you all. As the moonlight shines on the hills below you see movement off in the distance. Shadows are moving towards you, getting closer and heading directly towards your campsite ... Orcs!

If I was the player, my first thought would be to wake up the group, the second would be "How on earth did they find us so quickly?" This provides a sense of mystery, realism and excitement. So not telling the players about the escaping goblin was effective for storytelling, it caused another interesting narrative event to occur. Another issue is that events like these may be the desired outcome for story continuity and keeping the players on the right path. The LM has denied the player an ability to use the trait for an unforeseen event (or advancement point) to ensure a storytelling goal or outcome. It's a tricky dilemma to overcome.

I think I would need to remind myself of character traits before each session and review them together with key story events.

Cheers,
Kurt

[Stormcrow]

The rules for The One Ring do not call for any hidden rolls that I can remember. In fact, except for opposed rolls and combat, Loremasters don't do much dice-rolling at all.

When the Loremaster wants to decide something whose outcome is not controlled by the players, he can just decide it. He should only roll if he can't decide by himself, and then he should simply come up with the chance of something being true or false and roll whatever dice reflect those chances.

I find that game masters often think of themselves simply as rules-processors instead of arbiters. You decide what happens, not the dice.

[Glorelendil]

I think the debate over hidden rolls is one that's philosophically rooted in two opposing viewpoints about immersion and metagaming. To really grossly paraphrase the two positions:

Group 1 thinks that it doesn't matter what information the players have because "good roleplayers" won't use information their characters don't have. Therefore it's fine for the players to roll their own Awareness (or Perception, or Find Traps, or whatever) because to use the information gained by a failed roll would be metagaming, and immersion is when players convincingly enact the thoughts and emotions of their characters.

Group 2 thinks it works the other way: immersion is when the player is feeling the thoughts and emotions of the character. Therefore to have to pretend the character doesn't suspect anything when the player clearly does (having just failed an ominous Awareness roll) is breaking immersion. Metagaming is fine when it allows the game to quickly move past the non-immersive bits.

I'm pretty firmly in Group 2, but that doesn't mean I like hidden dice rolls. The solution, I believe, is in good adventure/encounter design: you ask the player to roll Awareness (or whatever) but you have something to offer him/her on a failed roll. "Yeah, you hear what might be footsteps on dry leaves." That leaves the player (not just the character) wondering what was missed, without necessarily spoiling the surprise.

There was a huge debate (well, lots of them) over at Wizards about using Perception to find traps when the character isn't explicitly looking for them, and the question of secret dice rolls came up. The arguments I found the most persuasive were the ones that said, in effect, "If you've got a binary outcome that depends on a 'secret' roll (whether or not it's actually rolled in secret) then your traps are badly designed."

An alternative to "If you pass the Perception check, you may then disarm the trap, otherwise you trigger it" would be:
1) Have the player roll Perception.
2) If they pass, they spot signs of a trap.*
3) If they fail, they get themselves into a tight spot. I.e., "Ok, you step on a pressure plate and feel it give, but you catch yourself in time and don't pick your foot up. What do you do?" (Yes, big Dungeon World influence here.)

That way they make their own Perception roll and see the outcome, but there isn't really a choice to re-roll ("Can I try again?" "Wait...I want to try, too!" or whatever) but neither are you totally screwed. Perception would have made something easier, is all.

*And, by the way, I'm NOT in the camp that feels it adds anything to actually describe the mechanics of the trap, and then expect the player to describe how they would actually disarm such a thing. "Wrong! It was the blue wire. Take 6d8 blast damage." I'd much rather tell the player, "You spotted a trap; it's a pressure plate on the floor. Tell us how it works and how you disarm it...."

/dissertation

P.S. And this relates to the recent thread about sneaking up and assassinating a lone guard, too. If the outcome is binary (i.e., you either sneak in successfully, or you wake up the whole fort) then the problem is in the adventure design.

[Glorelendil]

The rules for The One Ring do not call for any hidden rolls that I can remember.

I don't think he was asking if the rules require it; he was asking about how to handle situations where merely asking for the roll is giving too much information.

If the LM wants to go the DM fiat route, such as Stormcrow is advocating, one option is to define TNs by a skill level, not a dice roll. E.g., "Everybody who has Awareness: 3 or better hears footsteps crunching on leaves." That way it feels like the investment in a skill paid off, and it's not just an arbitrary LM decision.

[jamesrbrown]

We never have hidden rolls. Everything is out in the open and everyone adds ideas to the story. Sometimes a player will make a suggestion and I like it better than what I had planned or what I was going to say on the spot.

[Stormcrow]

TL;DR: Using common sense instead of unnecessary rules and dice-rolls preserves the flow of the game and the sense of immersion.

The rules for The One Ring do not call for any hidden rolls that I can remember.

I don't think he was asking if the rules require it; he was asking about how to handle situations where merely asking for the roll is giving too much information.

Yes, I was just bringing that up to dismiss it as an angle.

If the LM wants to go the DM fiat route, such as Stormcrow is advocating, one option is to define TNs by a skill level, not a dice roll. E.g., "Everybody who has Awareness: 3 or better hears footsteps crunching on leaves." That way it feels like the investment in a skill paid off, and it's not just an arbitrary LM decision.

I come from the very old school of Dungeons & Dragons, where the game was played in the manner of Free Kriegsspiel. A game of FK is umpired by a tactician expert in real war. The players tell him how they order their troops and he decides how that would play out in the real world, and thus in the game. There is no chance at all.

In original, original D&D, as Gygax played it, the players didn't even know the rules. What rules there were consisted mostly of the attack, save, and class tables. Everything else was up to the referee's discretion. The stuff you find in the original booklets about triggering traps two chances in six or determining wandering monster level by dungeon level are purely suggestions of the odds the referee could consider when making his decisions.

In The One Ring, I accept that more of the system is actual rules and less is up to the Loremaster to decide. Skills have delineated uses and the numbers of successes have specific effects. Traits have explicit uses. Much is up to players to control the system.

But for most things not defined as a task or test in the game, the Loremaster has a free hand. You don't make your decisions arbitrarily; you make them logically. In most cases the answer is pretty obvious. Is there a silk merchant in Woodmen Town? Probably not—the Woodmen can't afford it, so silk merchants don't usually go there—so the answer is no. Is there a silk merchant in Lake-town? Probably—this is the most active commercial location in the north—so the answer is yes. You don't need to roll dice to decide matters like these. How long does it take to find a silk merchant in Lake-town? Now THAT depends on how the players go about it, and thus gets resolved by a task, based on THEIR decisions, not yours.

The execution of perception is always controversial in RPGs, but I believe is should be handled in exactly the same way as the above. If something is obviously noticeable or obviously not noticeable, the Loremaster tells or doesn't tell the players that they notice it. It's only when (a) the players' characters have a significant but not overwhelming chance of failing to notice something and (b) it's important to them that they DO notice it that a Perception Test should be called for. If there's a giant spider lurking in the branches of the tree the heroes are under, and if one of the players says he's looking in the tree, no test is necessary—he sees it. If no one looks up and the spider does nothing, no one sees it and again no test is necessary because there are no consequences. If no one looks up and the spider does something against the heroes that they could potentially hear or feel and stop, THEN call for a Perception Test.

As for immersion, I find that the act of rolling dice and looking up results is the greatest obstacle to immersion in an RPG. We're usually not great actors, and our plots are usually a bit silly, and we usually tell lots of jokes and munch on lots of food and deal with pets or children or parents around us and so on and so forth, but while it's just "I say what we do; you say what happens; I say what we do about that; you say how that turns out, etc.," we inhabit that space called immersion, where we are putting ourselves in the situation and making decisions for our characters. But as soon as I have to make a dice-roll to determine what happens next, that back-and-forth flow is broken and immersion is disrupted; we have to think as ourselves and figure out rules and count up dice. If the Loremaster can make decisions without having to consult rules and dice, concerning matters that aren't spelled out in the rules, all the better for immersion.

This is true even when a test coming from out of nowhere results in no information. Even if I want to metagame and suddenly become suspicious and take precautions for no visible reason, it's still the dice-roll, not the metagaming, that cuts into immersion.

In a game like The One Ring, a certain amount of metagaming, or at least metagame thinking, is unavoidable. Generally metagaming stemming from failed tests leading to no information happens because the Loremaster interrupted a scene for the test and then continued it without change. Such tests are best placed at a point where an interruption is natural anyway. If, for instance, a failed Perception Test leads to an immediate attack, there is no metagame information because it was an interruption point anyway.

And for goodness sake, NEVER include a Perception test for noticing the secret door/macguffin/character that you simply MUST notice for the adventure to continue!

[Kurt]

Hi All,

The problem does not lie with the dice rolling. If you don't let a character roll an awareness check and he finds out that he has triggered a trap there is an opportunity to use the trait (unforeseen action) and for the player to say "Hang about, Hugo is Keen-Eyed and Cautious. I think that he should have an opportunity to roll".

A problem does occur when the LM does not tell the player something has happened and there is no immediate consequence. So in the example I gave above with the goblins, the consequence for not telling the players the goblin escaped could happen two hours later in "real time" (or even at the beginning of the next game session) and the trait will not be used to roll back the event (unforeseen action) or gain an advancement point.

If I were to take away the opportunity to use a trait for story purposes (which I do sometimes as explained above), then I would try to provide the opportunity for the character to use that trait at a later date.

Cheers,
Kurt