Hello all,
Recently I wrote an post called No Roll Before It’s time wherein I covered what I think should be the proper flow of action between Players and DM’s.
1. DM’s give information
2. Players ask questions or declare actions
3. DM asks for a roll or check if required.
4. Repeat.
In that post I discussed how rolling before being asked can help dissolve the fantasy.
In this post I want to discuss a specific type of check that takes part 3 and breaks it down a little further.
Has this ever happened in your game?
A player declares their action, often a social skill; maybe they are trying to convince an NPC of something and they (as the actual Player) do a great job, but when they roll their check they get a 1, or otherwise fail the check and their awesome speech is wasted. Now, the general rule here is if the Player does such a great job, don’t have them roll. Just let their character succeed on the basis of the Player’s ability. It’s a guideline I use often, but was struck by an alternate option.
Have the Player roll the check first and then role-play the result.
In this process if the player wants to convince the King that the Party needs access to the Royal Forest but they get a bad roll, then they can intentionally role-play out a poor result; be insulting, or boorish. Perhaps spill a dirty/taboo secret about the King they learned earlier. This could create some fantastic role-play scenes and be hilarious at the same time.
I’m going to try this in my next session and see how it goes. If you do something similar, please let us know how it worked.
Thanks!!
Michael – AKA Mumbles.
