This is a common occurrence in my game, and it might be in yours too:
DM: The Baron tells you, “I haven’t seen the Duke.”
Player 1: I roll Insight to see if he’s lying. Crap, rolled low.
Player 2: I roll then. Mine is pretty high.
Player 3: My bonus isn’t very high, so I roll to assist.
This happens for many kind of skill rolls. An idea occurs to one player, who rolls a skill, which then prompts several other players to also roll. If a check is declared, then everybody rolls who can roll.
You can’t blame the players: after all, rolling dice is fun, and if you roll high, you get the spotlight, and probably advance your quest. (Succeeding in a skill roll is rarely a bad thing in D&D, since there’s no cost involved.) However, the end result is that the average skill roll result is inflated, probably past what the designers intended. It also means, especially in groups with lots of players, NPCs don’t stand a chance. There can potentially be one chance per player to roll high against an NPC’s skill who only gets one check or DC. It also serves to take a bit of the emphasis off of a PC’s particular trained skill.
So what are some options? First, given the scenario, you can always just restrict who can roll in a given situation. Maybe only the person actively engaged with the conversation can roll an Insight check (or only the person actively observing and not talking is the only one who can roll.) The same can be applied to assisting others- my personal pet peeve is one PCs try to assist on knowledge checks to recall something specific. While the argument could be made that they’re sharing information with each other, I always picture one PC massaging the brain of the other one.
Skill Challenges, depending on how they’re handled, can be a good way to limit this. Instead of one roll determining success or failure (and thus encouraging everyone to focus on the same roll), a series of skill rolls, with PCs having to choose where to direct their efforts. PCs can still assist or try to do the same thing as another PC, but there is a two-fold cost: opportunity cost on the round and the possibility of incurring a failure.
Finally, you could create staggered amounts of information for each skill roll. The person who rolls the highest on a knowledge check gets one key piece, the second highest gets another piece, and so on. (For added fun, insert bad pieces of data. This often happens when someone critically fails, though is likely to be dismissed as a joke.) This also won’t work in the initial example, where the answer tends to be yes or no.
It’s an issue that I have yet to fully tackle in my game, having gotten in this paradigm of allowing as many rolls as people who speak up. The more I want to create nuances in my campaign of information gathering though, the more it annoys me, and the more I’ll try and restrict it.
How about you? Any suggestions on this problem? Is it a problem in your games?
If someone fails an insight or knowledge check, I sometimes just tell them the truth anyway. Obviously this only works if the player knows they failed the roll (or is pretty certain they failed) and it creates all sorts of dramas.
This really removes the meta-gaming of: “I failed that roll, therefore that information I learnt is not real.”
What this means is that the ‘success’ of a roll reflects the reliability of the information they gain, not necessarily the ultimate accuracy of the information. Of course, when in doubt, just lie to them.
Since we play in the same games, it’s no surprise that this happens to me also, but what I’d like to know is if this was a big problem in other editions of D&D or in other RPG systems and I’m just noticing it now with 4E or if it’s something with how 4E does skills that brings this to light?
If multiple players are trained in a skill, I’ll usually let the 2nd or 3rd player roll for the same thing, but I like to try and spread things out and make it feel as if all of the players who rolled are contributing to the situation (either adding to it with successes or detracting with failures – false, misleading, or contradictory information).
A simple solution would be to hold the party to that first character and first roll, but any other rolls are treated as assisting and add a +2 or maybe a friendlier +5 per success depending on the situation. Then again, I’ve never had the “massaging each others brains” imagery problem, I think shared knowledge checks are fine.
Could you expand a bit on the “opportunity cost on the round” concept? I understand more checks = more chance for failures, but the opportunity cost concept is not clear to me.
It really depends on how much of a stake the information PCs gather is.
If there is little to none… having everyone rolls nearly guarantees success… but then again, why roll at all.
I’m not a huge fan of ‘info gathering as a Challenge’. Like Robin Laws did in one of his games, I’d rather give info for free but see how players put it together.
Regardless, lately I’ve used a sub-system akin to: One PC rolls, up to two others assist and it worked fine.
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I say have the players who roll to assist describe exactly what they’re DOING to assist. It’s pretty low commitment to roll a d20. The player has to invest more to come up with exactly how their character is assisting.
So if I want my character to roll to assist on Insight, I’d do so and if I succeed on the assist, I’d describe how it happened:
Mielka can totally recognize a lie when she hears one. She raises an eyebrow sky high when the Baron says he hasn’t seen the Duke.
Then the original player can say, “I notice Mielka’s eyebrow arch and it lets me know my hunch was correct. I call the Baron on his lie.”
It makes the roleplaying better AND it discourages the folks who want to play by the numbers and disappear into the shadows afterward.
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I don’t mind the “assist” roles that you speak of, but I make my characters explain how they’re trying to help. If it’s a “communication” skill, the character needs to come up with a convincing way to actually help the conversation. Sometimes I require the helping character to make a different type of roll in order to see if their action improved the initial action. For example, if someone is trying to make a Bluff check, the player helping might have to make a successful Intimidate check in order to be “helpful” to the character making the Bluff check. Physical stuff is pretty easy, again, I just make sure the character provides me with a good explanation of what they’re trying to do.
Oh…yeah. It helps if I read the previous comments. So what E said, lol.
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As with E, I generally make each assist be justified: That is, you have to explain to me exactly how they’re assisting, and decide if it’s viable or not. Also, I nearly always give a penalty to the roll if an assist fails. “No, really, cut the red wire!”
Doesn’t matter what game I’m playing, I hate, hate, hate when the creative or insightful player at the table states their action and makes a roll (searching, seeing if an NPC is lying, or whatever), and then the other players just roll the same skill like little automatons. Hate it. In fact, I frequently ignore the “me too” players in these situations, because it diminishes the idea of the first player if he fails just because of a bad roll.
To help alleviate this, I frequently add in a “secret” idea bonus. That is to say, if you thought to search the room, it’s easier for you to find the clue or whatever than the person who’s just following suit. Similarly, while you can search the room, if you tell me that you’re specifically searching the statue, and the statue holds the clue, I’ll give you a bonus. (And if the clue is that the statue’s eyes are buttons and you specifically state that you’re searching the statue’s eyes, you just succeed–but I probably wouldn’t actually tell my players that.)
These, by the way, are great examples of how it’s different to be a DM than a designer. I’d never write rules like these into a game, because they would play so differently for different groups and in fact wouldn’t work at all for some. (They’re ripe for obnoxious abuse, for one thing.)
I love games with “helper roll” mechanics, mostly because it takes care of all these problems. The idea guy is the main roller, and the copycats are helpers. I also agree that a player’s got to justify how they’re helping to actually get to add a bonus.
I’ve seen a few attempts at tables that I’ve been a player at, as well as a few things that my own players have brought to me to address this problem. The simplest reason is that people ‘roll too’ because they don’t think that their rolls have a negative effect- the prevailing concept is that if an assist roll fails, nothing bad happens, so people ought to roll regardless.
There’s a few glaring flaws with this, most notably is that it devalues skill choices in the first place, in my opinion. People who put effort into becoming adept at a skill and on who the burden of success and failure is levied are being ‘assisted’ by people who know nothing on the topic. To put this in a more common light, it’s akin to the professional artist working on a painting and someone without the barest of art theory telling them to put a little pony in the corner. Sure, it’s possible to get lucky, but for the most part it’s getting in the way- a distraction at best.
I’ve heard of making assist changes levying a negative bonus for those that fail, and I’ve also heard the option for letting only those trained in the skill attempt the assist (or, if nobody in the party is trained in the skill, opening it up to whomever has the highest ability to assist- they have an *idea* of how things might go, but they’re all working from guesswork).
Most notably, these measures only need to be levied as a stopgap measure against meaningless rolls from the players, if only to give a sense of importance to those that roll when they do. However, this isn’t just a player issue- if all of the players are giving meaningless rolls, then that’s the DM’s responsibility to address the issue of why rolls which don’t have any value are being used in the first place. Regardless, I find that it’s generally best to address this issue at the start of the game, approaching the players with your expectations of how skill challenges and skills are to be approached. Structure can be a good thing for players!
In my game, the only person who can roll is the one who came up with the question. It was their character’s brain connections that formulated the question so it’s only theirs that can answer it. I don’t allow anyone else to roll for it – they have to come up with a novel question of their own. That way each player has to put more into the session as they aren’t allowed to piggy back on someone else’s failure.
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I would have each failure add +2 to the DC. A failed attempt is likely to annoy the NPC somewhat (or whatever is happening). In fact there might be a fail state if too many attempts are blown – the NPC storms out and refuses to talk to the PCs at all, or maybe even becomes hostile.
This is similar to a skill challenge, but then I run skill challenges in a much more fluid way than they are written (essentially, a series of skill checks becomes a skill challenge -after the fact-).
I would also recommend some player narration. I never let a player “roll for intimidate” or whatever. They need to describe their actions. In fact my preference is to have the player describe the PC’s actions, and then -I- decide which skill applies to that action. Just because the player wants to roll intimidate, doesn’t mean they can if their actions are actually a bluff or diplomacy.
Insight is trickier because it is more passive. I think your “only those involved in the conversation” suggestion might be a good one.
This is the exact dialogue I use:
“What exactly are you trying to do..”
and then when it comes time to roll dice:
“Wait wait wait..Only you can roll-(points out the idea guy) and you can have up to two people try and assist, but they have to be able to say what they are doing to assist. Ok, go ahead.”
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Bartoneus: The opportunity cost of not doing some other action or roll (like a different skill) vs. spending your round doing the same one. I also don’t think it’s specifically a problem with 4e, or D&D, specifically, though it’s also not a problem with every skill-based system.
Chatty: There’s still that case like in my initial example: the players actively want to know if someone is lying. I could just say “He’s lying, what do you want to do about that?” but I don’t want to demotivate them using skills or thinking about it.
E, Deadorcs, Jesse: It’s usually not a problem justifying their assists, it still causes the numbers vs. one roll issue.
Monte & Shilling: I like both of your suggestions, though in some ways, they work out to be the same thing. The initial roll is at one difficulty, successive rolls are higher. That’s probably what I’ll do… I especially like it for search checks, since you know that a PC has already covered that side of the room.
Also I chnage how many people can assist based on the situation. My standard number of allowed assists is 2, but if its a door where they can fit 4 characters behind to push.. I’m ok with allowing all 4 to roll assists. (As an example)
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I run skill challenges in initiative order. You can either roll a skill to attempt to get a success, or you can roll to assist *the next* person who attempts to roll for a success. It does create situation where the players are more deliberate about what rolls they make when, but at the same time it does prevent the piling on aspect in most instances. (Also makes it easier to keep skill challenges “in game” without player knowledge since they are already used to doing things in initiative order.)
I also adjust things on a per situation basis – 4 players assisting on a Diplomacy roll is definitely out (unless some kind of round table cabinet level meeting or some such), but 4 players assisting trying lever up a portcullis or shove open a door is fine.
Insight is a problematic skill at times, especially with players wanting to assist on “liar checks” or wanting more than one PC to make a “liar check”. Going in initiative order keeps this in check – the player who has initiative can make the “liar check”, no one else can. That or allow only one player to make a roll, unless the situation warrants otherwise.
My DM rolls most of these checks for us. We play DnD 3.5, so things like knowledge checks, bluff, intimidate, or sense motive are all rolled behind screens. He just asks for your modifier and then rolls from there. It helps against meta-gaming because you’re never quite sure if you rolled poorly or if there’s just nothing there.
In the same way, I don’t mind multiple checks for things like insight because if everyone’s in the same room, each character could potentially pick up something from an NPC. However, you shouldn’t assist with checks for knowledge or insight. You either make the check or you don’t. Someone assisting wouldn’t make much of a difference. I always saw assisting as a tool to be used for physical tasks like strength or climb checks or for a heal check because you could help with the bandages or nursing the injured person.
As for the numbers vs. one roll issue, you should look at it as each character getting the same chance to succeed on a check. If the NPC rolls badly, they just didn’t bluff well enough this time. In the same way, when we all succeed as a party, my DM will tell everyone what we learned and then we either “relay it to the party” or if you’re playing a jerk character, you keep it to yourself. It increases the chance of role-playing, especially since the players know the info, but their characters don’t.
Something in my last comment came back to haunt me…
In 4E we have ‘passive’ checks. So how do we differentiate these from active checks? This seems particularly pertinent to passive skills like insight.
If players want an ACTIVE insight check what do they have to do (to differentiate it from a passive check)?
Maybe they need to question and cross-examine the NPC? Or at least ask pertinent questions.
At the very least it would seem to require more than “listening attentively”.
What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If they want to try and bluff someone have every NPC in the area roll a check against theirs. Imagine the look on their faces when they try to BS their way past the duke and after about 50 rolls, one of the guards leans over and informs the duke that the party is full of it.
A more serious suggestion is just having the player who is involved with the activity make the roll.
What i find fascinating is the star wars d6 1st edition. it activly encourages you to reroll a fail with a different skill! it does say only for low levels, but its still a kinda stupid idea, Ok you failed on streetwise try rolling against knowlege alien species to see if he’s lying!
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I like where this thread has gone, our party does this all the time and i am frustrated as a player when we all say “I’ll try” or “I will assist” especially if that player wasn’t following along to the story line.
Idea of negative penalties on failed assists makes sense. Would you allow those trained to make the attempt penalty free? How about separate checks? do you raise the DC if the first guy trys and fails? ie. Bob’s character doesn’t have thievey but decides to pick the lock instead of the rogue, mucks his roll making it harder when the rogue gets there?
Our DM has done a good job of calling out when you need to be trained to assist or to even make a roll but we still get 4 people assisting one person on some checks even if they only have a +1 in their skill to attempt to help.
Also we are trying to avoid making everything in the game a skill challange. Although they are fun in their flavor text, often times they are geared to one or two players and the rest have to sit and listen through an hour of trying different things.
Darkness: If you go with the penalty idea, you could always make it so that a trained failure is a +1 to the DC and an untrained failure +2 to the DC, it makes sense that someone who is trained would mess up the situation less with a failed attempt. I might use this and see how it works out if the situation arises, there is still the issue though of a completely non-perceptive character that’s not paying attention rolling a 20 when the intent elf ranger rolled a 1, but I guess that’s just how luck goes sometimes!
With something like insight, one method I came up with is putting a tangible penalty on failures. For Insight, I’ll have the NPC look over at the failed rolls player and say something like “Why you giving me the stink eye boy?”. This puts the NPC on the defensive, increasing further DCs, and potentially making them hostile. Failed diplomacy checks can create similar effects, so that the players learn to only send in the guys who are actually good at the skill. This even applies to ‘assist’ rolls in some cases, like the rowdy fighter interjecting an incriminating comment while the bard is trying to convince the constable not to arrest them (“And they had no gold on their bodies when we found ’em!”). Also, I like the idea of the ‘brain trust’ concept, but I force the players to handle it AFTER the encounter, becoming a small skill challenge where they can all add in their Insight to know if they were lying, History/Nature/Arcana to provide factual discrepancies in his story, etc. The key though is that they can’t really do that until the guy is out of earshot and they all start comparing notes. During the conversation, only the first guy who speaks up gets a ‘hunch’ roll, which doesn’t really reveal much, but if successful will help on the after encounter group review.
This only happens when failing or succeeding on a roll doesn’t move the plot forward. Which means that the first roll was useless in the first place. Roll less dice or make something happen when a die is rolled.
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YAX – Excellent point & post. One of the things our group is struggling with is the class room mentality 30 hands in the air and the teacher has to keep asking the students until one gets it right or all fail. I am trying to help speed our session along by making players role play their part. A rogue disarming a trap might get help from the highly perceptive ranger when the ranger examines the tracks in the room leading to the disable switch etc… If we have our barbarian realize he’s not a mage before he raises his hand for an arcana check, that’s one less person trying to do something they aren’t skilled at and saving precious game time to boot.
Actually, to piggy back on Faux Amaranths idea, here’s a concept for assisting: If you make an assist roll untrained and FAIL, you impose a -2 penalty instead of a bonus. If you ARE trained, then you can only provide benefit or neutral. So If the Wizard, Warlock, and Swordmage all sit in the library researching magic theory to crack the maggufin ward, then the highest modifier player rolls, while the other two assist. Meanwhile, the Fighter is explicitly BARRED from trying to help after he started coloring in one of the tomes… Think this would be a nice split down the middle.
Actually, a big mechanic I also like is using the passive Insight/Perception values (which I gather and keep tabs on behind the screen). This way I can keep the players guessing on not only IF they’re missing something, but what they’re missing (i.e. They think they caught the Baron in a lie, when they actually failed to notice the Baron’s assassin’s closing in from behind). Since I also like using my laptop at the table (how common is that now?) I’ll also use a dice generator so that the players don’t neccessarily know that I’m rolling ANYTHING. I’ll even use the reverse, rolling dice behind the screen for no reason what so ever while they walk down a dark corridor. It’s the gaming equivalent of the old Friday the 13th “chk chk chk… kill kill kill”. I greatly enjoy toying with player’s notions of what to expect, how the metarules of the game operate.