I like playing characters smarter than me or with knowledge that I don’t, as a player, have, so this is a necessary part of how I play haha. It’s rewarding, but it does need the GM and player to be on the same page. Once they are though, it’s very fun!
Hello Kate, this is a funny situation! I wrote some time ago a post where I try to get to the same conclusion by following just the opposite path! In my "players skills vs characters skill", the 'right' model is using the first ones ... ahahah!!! Funny, isn't it?
My two cents has always been that a good puzzle is more about what you do with what you rolled, which can include players own abilities, the characters abilities and background, and anything else relevant coming into play.
This balance of roll + player PC package is important as it keeps your players with low int or wis involved. I've played in enough games where the GM wouldn't allow anyone with bellow avg to roll for solving and I've played games where the DCs were so high that they might as well have said the same. Yes this puts more work on the GM to take into account these things and make something that works well for their table.
I am the puzzle master and I would be bored out of my skull if because of rolled stats I had to sit there and just twiddle my thumbs while the player playing the Wizard struggled with a basic substitution cypher. It would be equally boring to hand wave the whole thing.
Do we reduce every conversation with a npc to don't talk just roll? Of course not, that's part of the fun. It's the same with wilderness exploration/travel. Sometimes a single roll is fine, but if you turn the adventure to find the lost temple of whatever into a single check where is the gameplay? Same with mysteries, you wouldn't let someone just go I roll to solve the mystery when they didn't even know what the mystery was.
Roll for clues, roll for hints, roll for the GM to fill in some of the missing gaps. Just don't turn the entire game into single checks. That's not player choice, that's not a roleplaying game. It's just a crummy dice game at that point.
And that's my old player moment of remembering how 3.5e was endless stories in the community of campaigns coming to a grinding halt because of a failed survival/perception, whatever check.
I like playing characters smarter than me or with knowledge that I don’t, as a player, have, so this is a necessary part of how I play haha. It’s rewarding, but it does need the GM and player to be on the same page. Once they are though, it’s very fun!
As other aspect of play, this needs the table consensus! But it works, I promise!
Hello Kate, this is a funny situation! I wrote some time ago a post where I try to get to the same conclusion by following just the opposite path! In my "players skills vs characters skill", the 'right' model is using the first ones ... ahahah!!! Funny, isn't it?
My two cents has always been that a good puzzle is more about what you do with what you rolled, which can include players own abilities, the characters abilities and background, and anything else relevant coming into play.
This balance of roll + player PC package is important as it keeps your players with low int or wis involved. I've played in enough games where the GM wouldn't allow anyone with bellow avg to roll for solving and I've played games where the DCs were so high that they might as well have said the same. Yes this puts more work on the GM to take into account these things and make something that works well for their table.
I am the puzzle master and I would be bored out of my skull if because of rolled stats I had to sit there and just twiddle my thumbs while the player playing the Wizard struggled with a basic substitution cypher. It would be equally boring to hand wave the whole thing.
Do we reduce every conversation with a npc to don't talk just roll? Of course not, that's part of the fun. It's the same with wilderness exploration/travel. Sometimes a single roll is fine, but if you turn the adventure to find the lost temple of whatever into a single check where is the gameplay? Same with mysteries, you wouldn't let someone just go I roll to solve the mystery when they didn't even know what the mystery was.
Roll for clues, roll for hints, roll for the GM to fill in some of the missing gaps. Just don't turn the entire game into single checks. That's not player choice, that's not a roleplaying game. It's just a crummy dice game at that point.
And that's my old player moment of remembering how 3.5e was endless stories in the community of campaigns coming to a grinding halt because of a failed survival/perception, whatever check.