Transcript
You hear the soft snick of the lock’s tumblers falling into place. The leaded glass French doors swing silently open and the rest of the party follows the tiefling rogue into the library. Moonlight streams in through the mullioned windows on the southern wall, riming the furniture and tall bookshelves in silver, making the polished mahogany gleam in the general gloom.
“I search for the stolen scroll.”
“I check for traps!”
“Check for secret doors!”
Okay. Roll an Investigation check.
Obviously a player making a low roll on an Investigation or Perception check is going to have an inkling that they’ve failed to succeed, and inevitably they’re going to feel like they’ve missed something. But if you can get your DM poker face down – and, let’s face it, that’s the best kind of poker face – you might be able to help maintain some game immersion and satisfy that craving for discovery even when reacting to low dice rolls.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we just talk about quick tips for new DMs, even if they’re common knowledge and your host is beating a dead horse.
No horses were harmed in the making of this video. At least not physically. Metaphorically, that’s another story.
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So let’s talk about this one tabletop rpg game mechanic that’s always bugged me just a little bit. Not the mechanic itself so much, but rather how using it sorta inevitably breaks immersion. I guess really all mechanics break immersion, so I guess that’s not really what I’m getting at. This mechanic has a tendency to kind of break immersion in a protracted sense within a player’s mind. The ubiquitous Investigation check. And to some extent the Perception check.
There are whole videos out there on the differences between the two and when to use one versus the other, et cetera, but we’re not getting into that today. Mostly because I have trouble parsing that out myself sometimes.
Anyway, the gameplay that typically leads to an Investigation check, like whatever’s happening just prior to the call for one, is usually an interesting or engaging bit of scene setting. At least for me. And a good chunk of rpg gameplay is all about discovery, right? For me, discovery is one of the coolest, if not THE coolest, aspect of, well, not just games but real life. Discovering things, unraveling mysteries, seeing what’s on the other side of that mountain, or what’s at the end of this tunnel, it’s all about that intrinsic human drive to explore, to find something new. To discover something. And Investigation checks are like a little poppers of discovery potential.
So your players are getting into a scene you’ve set, and then there’s this call for a game mechanic that carries an implicit notion that the player may well miss discovering something cool based on the roll of a die. And that’s fine, that’s part of this type of storytelling. The unpredictable nature of the story created by the RNG of die rolls is one of the core features of TTRPGs, right?
But Investigation checks are fun to make because they’re all about discovery. The thing that’s always bothered me about these checks is how a player will know or feel they’ve missed something when they miss a DC – or target number, for those of you not into DnD. It’s a bit of an inescapable metagame type thing. There’s just no real way to avoid it. And there’s always that delineation of the successful roll – beat the DC, find the secret door, fail the roll, find nothing.
So I’ve started using a technique for checks like these that is A) almost certainly not new at all and B) might be something you already do, whether consciously or subconsciously. My goals with the technique are to A) hit that “discovery” dopamine generator as much as possible, even when a player fails a check, and B) sort of bondo over this hard break of success slash fail.
Bondo is what they use to fill in and smooth over like dents in cars and stuff …
Anyway the technique is a very simple concept. You ready for it? Here it comes.
Bulleted lists. Eh?
Well, I call ‘em ABLs! Ascending bulleted lists. Does that make it sound more impressive? No? What are you, nuts? Who asked you anyway?
Let’s say your players enter a library in a gothic hotel looking for something or someone. They’re on a quest and the last clue has led them here. You rattle off a brief atmospheric description of the chamber. Inevitably, someone’s going to ask something that calls for an investigation check. They roll an 8 and with their bonuses it’s a 12. I glance at my ABL and I know right away how many bullet points – or details – they’re gonna get. Now let’s say I had set 15 as the DC for finding the hidden bookcase door. So this player has technically failed the check, and now I proceed in a non-committal way, with something like “All right, the first thing you notice is the decadently thick carpets on the floor, they appear to be very expensive imports. You also note a hint of candle smoke in the air.” And so on.
Here’s what my list looks like for this particular scene.
the carpets are thick, plush and imported
there’s a faint smell of candle smoke
one window is half-open
the heavy desk is very neat and tidy, with stacks of organized paper, a writing quill and ink pot placed just so, but the bowl of sand has been tipped over
one book in the darkest corner sticks out, as if it’s about to fall off the shelf
And my little numbers there are target numbers. So a player gets all the details that fall below their dice roll result.
Everyone always notices something with their investigation check, it just depends on the strength of their roll how important or specific the details of what they notice are. I mean, maybe for a nat 1 I would just explain that they’ve become preoccupied with that pesky boot lace that won’t stay tied.
Making ABLs like this serve a secondary purpose by helping me generate more details for specific locations or NPCs, and the more I know about a space or an NPC helps my ability to create a convincing setting and overall immersion. And often writing these details down can spur even more plot ideas or NPC attributes or backstory or whatever.
Now one issue this brings up is “prep”. Like what about checks that occur in spaces I haven’t either prepped or just have no reason to have extra detail pre-planned. I mean, let’s face it, in every session a DM is winging it more often than not. Just having this idea of tiered discovery gives me a general notion of how to proceed with my off-the-cuff improv. So while I’m never gonna come up with a whole list of things on the fly, I do have a mental framework to lean on. Just looking at a dice roll result will instantly let me know if I should give the player one, two, or three details, just as a rule of thumb. And doing that let’s me delve more into the scene as well because I immediately imagine myself in the space and just sorta describe what I imagine I see. Or hear. I always try to keep in mind the notion of the five senses and will try to hit things that aren’t just visual, like smell, sound, tactile surfaces. Even taste if it’s appropriate.
Back to that DM poker face. If you get good at that poker face, after some time, your players will either barely feel like they’re missing something on a roll higher than 10 or on the contrary, they’ll just start constantly feeling like they’re missing something. And that can be just as rewarding for you as any other result, ‘cause you can mess with ‘em all you want at that point.
Of course, one thing you should definitely avoid is having any singular NECESSARY clue or pivotal bit of information gated behind a, well, behind any DC or target number. If a piece of information is absolutely necessary for the completion of a quest or whatever, that info has to be made available somehow. Only put things that are not absolutely necessary behind a die roll.
Anyway, I’d really love to hear how you guys run Investigation checks. What tips or tricks do you use to make them engaging or fun or just not entirely binary metagame-y results. And if you’re a player and your DM’s done some cool stuff with Investigation checks, I’d love to hear about it. I truly am curious and always looking for new awesome ideas on how run the game better.
So, make an ABL. See what it inspires. No, you don’t have to call it that.
See ya!