Here’s my random tip for using Idea rolls as a GM:
Don’t.
Let me start by explaining what I’m talking about: In Call of Cthulhu, an Idea roll “represents hunches and the ability to interpret the obvious.” In some of the older scenarios published for the game, this roll would actually be used to prevent players from having their characters take certain courses of action because the character wouldn’t know to do them — sort of aggressively preventing player expertise form trumping character expertise.
There are some obvious problems with that, too, but what I’m interested in right now is the far more common technique of using the Idea roll to tell players what they “should” be doing. For example, if the players are talking about how they can get an audience with a casino owner, the GM might call for an Idea roll and say, “You could disguise yourselves as high rollers.” Or when the PCs stumble onto a bloodstained altar in the center of a stone circle, the GM might call for an Idea roll and then say, “You could try putting that idol you found earlier on the altar!”
Even in games that lack a specific mechanic like this, you may see similar techniques improvised (usually with some form of Intelligence check).
GM-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS
The basic function of the Idea roll is essentially like using a walkthrough in a video game: You don’t know what to do, so you have to consult a guide that can get you past the point where you’re stuck. A GM-initiated Idea roll, though, is often more like having an obnoxious friend sitting with you who’s played the game before and simply WILL NOT shut up and let you play the game for yourself.
If you’re a GM prepping a scenario and you come to a place where you think an Idea roll will be necessary, that’s a really clear sign that you need to DO BETTER. Saying, “I need an Idea roll here,” is basically saying, “I have designed a scenario where the players are going to get stuck here.” Instead of prepping an Idea roll, figure out some way to redesign the scenario so that the players won’t get stuck there. (The Three Clue Rule will often help.)
What about run-time Idea rolls? In other words, you’re currently running the session, you can see that the players are irreparably stuck, and you need to fix the problem. Well, there are two possibilities:
First, they’re not actually stuck, in which case you don’t need to use an Idea roll.
Second, they ARE stuck and definitely need help to get unstuck. In which case, you shouldn’t be rolling the dice because failure is not actually an option: You need to give them information. Therefore you should not be rolling to see whether or not they get it.
PLAYER-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS
On the other side of the screen, a player-initiated Idea roll is generally more viable: This is basically the players sending up an emergency flare and saying, “We’re lost! Please send help!” To return to our analogy of the video game walkthrough, this is the player who has been stymied to the point where they’re no longer having fun and just want to be able to move on in the game.
In my experience, it should be noted, what such players are looking for is often not the solution; what they are looking for is an action. They feel stuck because they don’t know what they should be doing. A Matryoshka search technique, therefore, is often a great way to respond to this.
Something else to look for is the clue that they’ve overlooked. Not necessarily a clue they haven’t found, but one which they don’t realize is actually a clue, which they’ve radically misinterpreted, or which they’ve completely forgotten they have. For example:
- “You realize that patent leather can also be used for furniture, not just shoes.”
- “While S.O.S. could be a cry for help, couldn’t it also be someone’s initials?”
- “You suddenly remember that you still have Suzy’s diary in the pocket of your trench coat. Didn’t she mention something about the color purple, too?”
Trail of Cthulhu innovated a cool mechanic along these lines for its Cthulhu Mythos skill: You can use this skill to “put together the pieces and draw upon the terrible knowledge that you have been subconsciously suppressing, achieving a horrific epiphany. The Keeper provides you with the result of your intuition, sketching out the Mythos implications of the events you have uncovered.”
There are two important features to this mechanic: First, it doesn’t require a roll. (Again, if the players need help, then denying it to them on the basis of a dice roll doesn’t make sense.)
Second, it has a cost: The sudden insight into the terrible realities of the universe will cost you Stability and, quite possibly, Sanity. Importantly, this cost is NOT exacted “if the player deduces the horrible truth without actually using [the] Cthulhu Mythos ability.” The cost, in my experience, not only dissuades players from relying on the mechanic instead of their own ingenuity, it also enhances the sense of accomplishment they feel when they solve the mystery or gain the insight without using the mechanic.
The 7th Edition of Call of Cthulhu has similarly modernized the Idea roll, using a fail forward technique where a failure still gets the PCs the necessary clue/course of action, but also results in some sort of negative consequence: Getting the clue might bring you to the attention of the bad guys; or you might waste weeks of time digging through a library before finally stumbling across the right reference; or, like Trail of Cthulhu, the insight might force a Sanity check.
Another cool technique it suggests, particularly in the case of failing forward, is to aggressively reframe the scene: Jump directly to the point where the PCs have followed the lead and gotten themselves into trouble as a result.
A final interesting variant here is to make the Idea roll concept diegetic instead of non-diegetic; i.e., to make it a decision the character makes instead of the player. In a fantasy setting, for example, the character might literally make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Knowledge in order to receive a divine vision.
GM DON’T LIST #10.1: TELLING PLAYERS THE PLAN
Like an aggressive Idea roll on steroids, some GMs will go so far as to just literally tell the players what their characters will be doing for the entire scenario.
For example, I was playing in a convention one-shot where we were street samurai who got hired to be ringers on a Blood Bowl team in order to rig a high-stakes game. This was a really cool premise, turning the usual expectations of the game on its head and giving us an opportunity to explore how the PCs’ heist-oriented abilities could be used in a completely novel environment.
Unfortunately, the session quickly went completely off the rails. Rather than letting the players make any meaningful decisions, the GM had pre-scripted every play of the game: We were reduced to simply rolling whatever skill had been scripted for us. (It didn’t help that the rolls themselves were essentially pointless since the outcome of every drive and most of the plays had ALSO been planned ahead of time.)
This was an extreme example of something closely related to GM Don’t List #7: Preempting Investigation, but I bring it up here mostly because I’ve seen several GMs who use Idea rolls to similar (albeit usually less absurd) ends. These game are characterized by the players making an endless stream of Idea rolls, with the GM constantly saying things like, “Pierre [your character] thinks he should come back and check out the Le Petit Pont after dark.” Or, “You could probably get a pretty good view from the top of Notre Dame. You’ll need to figure out some way to get up to the top of the towers.” Or even, as literally happened in one game, “Rebecca thinks she should stab the Archbishop in the chest.” (“No, really, she thinks this is really important.”)
Basically: Don’t do this. Present your players with problems, not solutions. Give them the space to mull over a situation and figure out what they want to do (or what they think they need to do) in response to that situation.
I had a fairly extreme example of Telling Players The Plan this month. I was playing in a one-shot of The Wonder Vault Heist with pre-generated characters in cypher; each scene in the heist was preceded with a flashback of being told exactly what to do in that scene by a mysterious npc backer. “When you get to spinning hallway, hacker PC, you need to hack the panel to stop the hallway from spinning!” “When you get here, hologram making PC, the security system needs to see person X. So make a hologram of person X!” and so on. It seemed like the adventure might have had some juice, but being told a step by step plan instead of being allowed to react and make decisions truly sucked every drop of life out of the proceedings.
I popped over to DTRPG to check this out and it turned out I had grabbed it awhile back when I was picking up a bunch of 3rd Party Cypher system stuff.
From the adventure:
Scene 1
Read the aloud the following: [boxed text] What do you do?
The truth is that at this point it doesn’t matter what they do.
…
… alrighty, then.
Totally agree, but I will add one solution I’ve used. When the players are stuck, it’s often because there are different assumptions in their heads than in mine. So I call a break and have a meta-conversation with them. What do they think is happening? Why do they think this is happening? What do they think their choices are? Often I can correct the difference in thinking without providing a solution but removing the error that was holding them back.
What do you think of players spending a resource to get a clue? Is it OK for the GM to offer this?
Recently I was running Mini Six RPG, which has “Spend a Hero Point to get a clue or lucky break” mechanic. HPs are a limited renewable resource. I was using an old school D&D adventure. The players were stuck, no one had thought to look behind the tapestries in the throne room for the secret door – even though I’d added description to the tapestry there which hinted at this. So I reminded them of the mechanic, a player spent an HP, and I narrated that a breeze ruffled the tapestry beside the throne, & there seemed to be something behind it.
Is that ok?
Would it be ok if instead I told them the likely significance of the art on the tapestry?
Would it be ok if I just said “You could check behind the tapestries”?
I can’t speak for Justin, but personally I think the first of your three suggestions (the one you actually used) is the best. It’s more interesting, it’s more immersive (b/c it paints a picture of what’s happening “on-screen” as it were, rather than being meta knowledge), and it preserves player agency better. (Instead of “Well, the GM told us we should check behind the tapestry, so I guess we’d better do that,” you’ve provided a hint but the decision to follow up on it still rests with the players.)
I sometimes think I live in a parrallel universe when it comes to RPGs when I read things like this…like who the hell uses idea checks? That seems to go against the fundamental nature of RPGs and I never thought anyone would actually use them or even of heard the concept.
Bizzare
I am 8 sessions into a new campaign in which I am finally putting the principles of open-ended situations into actual practice. And it’s so much better than anything I have run (or played before). I can’t imagine ever going back to running something that is a scripted story.
It’s so much easier on me, and the player seem to be having an absolutely blast with it. In fact the worst session so far was the one where I tried to adapt a printed adventure centered around a setpiece. Really don’t want to do that again.
I still find myself occasionally wondering what the correct solution to an obstacle would be, or how to conflicting NPC motivations can both the satisfied. Like I have a secret passage that lets the players inside a castle, but someone piled up a stack of crates in front of the hidden door. What’s the correct solution to open the door without causing a huge noise?
But this really isn’t my problem anymore! The players can come up with something. Or they don’t. They can always chose to go back and try another way inside, or just topple the boxes and make a lot of noise. It’s up to them, any outcome would be fine to continue with the game.
Now I am actually experiencing what other GMs have been writing about for years, and simply sit back and let the players talk, until they tell me they have made a decision what they want to do. No more trying to come up with contingencies as the players are doing unexpected things that are not in the script. Such a better way to run and prepare adventures.
@Wyvern – thanks! I was running the orange version of Palace of the Silver Princess. PCs were looking for the ruby My Lady’s Heart. In strict old school D&D it’s up to player skill & random luck whether they succeed, whereas Mini Six is a ‘cinematic’ system where PCs get ‘lucky breaks’, so I experienced a bit of conflict between these two paradigms. In the end I guess I made it easier for them to get the ruby, but they then gave it away to Cathrandamus the NPC Cleric and are currently pursuing him (on behalf of evil Baroness D’hmis) to try to get it back… which is certainly more interesting/dramatic than a flat failure.
@Yora, welcome to Team Chaos. The water’s fine!
@Wyvern, I’m not familiar with Mini Six, but issues like that come up all the time when adapting material written with one set of assumptions to a game with different ones. It could be how cinematic it is, it could be how horrific, it could just be how much magic. Rolling with the punches is part of the game for a GM 🙂
The solution you came up with seems fine, though if you were completely happy with it I assume you wouldn’t be here asking about it. My 2 cents (and you should know that my own games lean realistic, not cinematic, so I may not be the best advisor):
In a cinematic scenarioit’s basically given that the PCs are going to beat the villain. So the stakes aren’t “do you win?” — but there should be *something* at stake. It could be “do you win in an awesome way?”, or “do you survive to enjoy victory?” or “what do you sacrifice to earn victory?” Something like that. So when players get stuck, and spend a hero point to say “yeah, we’re stuck and need help”, think about what “damage” they take in order to earn advancement.
Alternately, this is a cinematic story. They need to learn about the secret door. What’s the most cinematic way that could happen? Maybe somebody busts through it, being chased by the PC’s enemies! Okay Fighter, you’re in front. What do you do?
@Simon: Sounds fine to me. I talked about this a bit in the Fudging article (GM Don’t List #9), but these run-time Don’ts are often the result of the best intentions, but even more than that, sometimes they become unavoidable. If you end up in a situation where it becomes necessary, that’s OK. It’s not like you’ve sinned against God and man, right? But it’s good to take that as a signal to think about what happened afterwards and see if there was something you could have done differently.
In this case, it doesn’t seem like there was. It seems like the situation falls into the muddy reality of real life vs. the hypothetical perfection of theoretical discussions.
Like, in a perfect situation players who are stymied would turn to you and say, “Mr. GM, we we stymied. We would like to use a player-initiated Hero Point spend/fail forward Idea roll/Cthulhu Mythos spend to resolve this predicament.”
But in the real world they’ll (a) forget that those mechanics exist and (b) may not clearly communicate their distress. So yeah, you can look at a table full of players who are clearly lost and just grinding their gears. As I mention in the article, if you’re convinced this is the situation, what you DON’T want to do is roll dice to see whether or not they get help: They need help. In this case that meant reminding them that the Hero Point mechanic exists. And I really like that approach because it still gives them the option to say, “Nah. We’re good. Don’t need a hint yet. We’re enjoying gnawing on this problem.”
… although, there are some situations where being stuck is fine. For example, in the megaudungeon open table I’m currently running there have been frequent times when the players get stuck trying to figure something out. I don’t intervene in those cases because while they are LOCALLLY stuck (and may need to come back to figure something out later), they aren’t UNIVERSALLY stuck: There’s still tons of stuff they can do in the scenario.
Same thing can apply, for example, in mystery scenarios: Yup. They can’t figure out how to get the clue at the haunted mansion. Do they still have other stuff they can do (i.e., other clues they know about and can pursue)? Then it’s fine to let them grind that out and give up. See, also, Using Revelation Lists.
In my current dungeon-based campaign, there have been a few times when the players were like “I don’t know where we can go; haven’t we explored everything open to us?” but that’s more because their mapping was, to be charitable, sub-par. I provided some hints/reminders to them along the lines of “well, there’s a door you never opened in THIS area, and on the upper level there’s a hallway you never went down” more as reminders of things they had lost track of over many months of real time (even though game-time it was only a few weeks). This is kind of the flip-side of player skill trumping character skill: the characters are much closer to the adventure world than the players and it’s okay to say “you as characters in this world would know/remember this.” The players, after all, spend most of their time and energy focused on things like combat, and even in a very combat-heavy game the actual game-world time spent on combat is going to be much, much less than the time spent wandering the dungeon halls or considering which hallway to take next or similar exploration-type decisions.
(Interestingly, once we changed over to online play using Roll20 in the current pandemic, my players have said they have a much better grasp of the dungeon geography and layout, because now they all see it instead of having to try to decipher scraps of map, or more often relying on other players to do so.)
So what Justin says is right on – as long as there’s SOMETHING at least potentially productive they can do, they’re not really stuck. My players found the entrance to a dungeon vault for which they needed a password, which they didn’t have. There are a few ways they might have either fought their way into the vault or found the password, but they never did (well, they haven’t yet). And now, several levels later, they have found a back way into the vault completely by accident.
@Justin Alexander
I’ve DMed a lot of Delta Green and CoC over the last two years. My handling improved vastly after reading your entry on the Three Clue Rule. I was similarly allergic to the notion of Idea Rolls, for all the reasons you describe.
But there was one area in which I couldn’t find any other way around it.
That area was memory.
Some context:
Our sessions occurred every other week. Scenarios were almost always two-parters. No matter how well players had done finding clues and making sound deductions in session #1, by the next one all four of them had forgotten practically everything.
The result was that session #2 usually began with confusion about what had happened and where to go next. With no one remembering, they couldn’t help each other. So they tended to either lock up in indecision or circle back to the same people and places they had already visited, gaining no new insights and losing a lot of time.
Extensive recaps were out, because if I highligted the clues they would know what was significant and what wasn’t. It would bias their investigation.
We experimented with note taking, but that detracted from the experience. They spent most of their time scribbling and games started to feel like a lecture series.
The solution (which I hesitantly employed but which was ultimately well-received), was to implement limited “Recall Rolls” for the sole purpose of remembering information they had already found. This functioned as a kind of “staggered recap” in which details would be re-divulged if they connected to something new they encountered. Naturally, it’s also much easier to remember things if they only come up in the moment of significance, rather than all at once in a front-loaded recap.
Does this bias player attention and risk prescribing action? Yes. It also biases them when you call for a Perception check as they enter a room and then talk about just the significant features, and not every single item in the room. Fortunately, because these risks are so similar, I was able to apply similar techniques to mitigate them. These too I got from your series on Perception checks.
For one, I sometimes called for Recall Rolls when there was nothing to remember. If they failed, they would never know.
I also employed hidden penalties for some rolls, so if they succeeded marginally and I told them nothing, they still wouldn’t know.
Third, I called for Recall Rolls to remember insignificant details so that even if they succeeded and got something, they wouldn’t necessary know it was important (eg “His surname is Blaire. You recall encountering someone else with that name two days ago.” . . . when the only significance that held is that the barkeep is cousins with the cable guy).
This seemed to work pretty smoothly, although Mission Creep did happen. One player would ask to make Recall Rolls to automate deductions. In those moments, I just had to tell them no.
If you or anyone else have any better suggestions, I would love to hear them.
@Justin #11 – thanks for your response, that’s reassuring!
Hopefully in future they’ll get more familiar with the get-a-clue mechanic & I won’t need to remind them. They had been using the Hero Points just for the default +6 on a dice roll.
@Jin Cardassian: Great technique! I’ll also use memory checks as a diegetic means of refreshing player memory. As you note, there’s a risk for bias, but I do find there’s a difference between “let me solve this puzzle for you / tell you what you should be doing” and “you seem to have forgotten something that you know.”
I had not actually given a lot of conscious thought to how I use this mechanic, but it largely matches your technique, and is very similar to how I describe using Perception-type tests.
Something I’ve never done which, for some reason, you comment makes me think of: Prompting memory checks for memories of things that didn’t happen during the session.
(Although now that I write that, I guess I actually HAVE done that with amnesiac scenarios. But I’m thinking of something less scenario-specific than that: Just sometimes the check isn’t reminding the player of something that happened in a previous session; it’s “reminding” them of something that happened long ago.)
And a lot of opportunity for more tone-poem type memories. (“This reminds you of the spring you spent in Tokyo when the cherry trees were in blossom…”)
In terms of recall in complicated campaigns there are three unrelated techniques I’ll use:
(1) You are 100% correct that GM-led session recaps have a tendency to bias. What I’ll generally do is have the players do the recap instead. This not only avoids the bias, it’s also an early warning system that lets me know what they’ve forgotten / what they don’t think is important. (And also vice versa: Oh! They really liked Victoria as a character? Guess she should come back at some point.)
In some cases I’ll jump into these recaps, but I remind myself that they’re not just about mission-critical information; they’re also about cool stuff that happened and important character beats and stuff like that.
Some groups need to be trained to do effective recapping and some just have really bad memory. I find that you can usually prompt them at a very high level (for example, by saying “okay, the next scene was in Robert’s lab, what happened there?”). Just running through what happened scene by scene works pretty well.
I often generate a bullet point of list of scenes as I’m running (because I record with a smartpen), which helps with this sort of high-level run-through.
(2) Campaign journals. These are time-consuming, but in very large and very complicated campaign they’re invaluable. The Ptolus campaign journal is an example of my gold standard, but this is very time-consuming.
With some groups you can get the players to produce similar documents by offering bennies or XP rewards. In Trail of Cthulhu games I’ve had people regain Stability by writing “recap letters” to their Sources of Stability, for example. There are other ways you can make this part of bluebooking.
(3) Physical props. Also time-consuming, obviously, but when vital information is encoded into physical props, players can choose to review those props at any time. My Eternal Lies campaign is an extreme example of this. In long campaigns with lots of props like this, I’ve found that about once every 12 sessions or so there’ll be a time when the players just sit down and review everything they have (usually as part of organizing newer stuff they’ve accumulated).
One place I’ve used Idea rolls recently was while running The Pact Stone Pyramid (which is quite a good dungeon). There is a very clever ‘trap’ which consists of four vampires embedded in the walls and staked with long staves that stick out into the corridor and are gem-encrusted. With the obvious threat being that greedy magpies will yoink them for the gems, thus waking up the vampires from stasis and enabling them to exact revenge. My players were explicitly puzzled why the ends were sharpened but didn’t get anywhere so I said “Knowledge checks for anyone examining the staves” -> “a sharpened wooden staff is a stake”.
Which then didn’t actually resolve their confusion because they had Buffy on the brain and thought vampires got instagibbed by staking.
A recurring problem I had when running a campaign that wound up with more of a mystery aspect than I first anticipated involved players understanding the need to look for clues, splitting up to do that, being perfectly fine at it, then reporting back to a safe discussion area, reporting their findings to each other, then… staring blankly, having no idea what else to DO in a non-clue-finding scene. This unfortunately led to my having to call for Knowledge checks from them to jump-start these scenes. I’d ask them all for a Knowledge check that was relevant to the clues and information they had at the time, then use the results in a very specific way: I would give them responses privately, specifically starting with the person with the lowest successful roll and proceeding slowly in order to the highest. This would result in something at least superficially resembling a natural discussion of a topic, as opposed to how in many cases someone with expertise in a field is likely to just talk over the rest of the characters. While I was never satisfied with this bit of brute force as the one and only way I could make these scenes work, it did at least strike me as one tool to keep in the box.
This experience showed me that unless they’re already intimately familiar with the mystery genre, players don’t seem to think to discuss clues and information amongst themselves to draw conclusions about what to do next. The concept of a mystery involving progression from clueless to wrong to less wrong to right doesn’t seem to come naturally to everyone; instead, people seem to assume that mysteries are a kind of hunt for enough plot coupons to turn in to ultimately “buy” the ending. On top of that, the majority of players seem to be afraid of “looking stupid” by admitting confusion or asking a question — whether that’s directly, or by making a Knowledge roll they think might be relevant to the situation (a player-initiated Idea roll instead of the aforementioned GM-initiated ones). Intermediate conclusions used as a basis for initiating further investigation don’t seem to be a natural idea for everyone.
Now I just wish I knew how to turn “discuss the clues to reach a probably-intermediate conclusion” into a full, proper structure that actively involves the players. It seems like it would strengthen mysteries as a scenario type if people understood the whole fundamental gameplay loop better. GUMSHOE strikes me as solving the opposite problem — brushing away the easy part of the mystery, not helping people understand on a broad basic level what they’re supposed to do with clues once they have them.
There was a virtue in Ars Magica called “Common Sense” that was basically allowing the GM to tell a player “That is really a horrible idea”. Other than that, if my players are lost and ask for help, I would not refuse to give them some new hints based on a failed roll. After all, if they are stuck it is my fault as GM for not offering enough clues to figure out a way forward.