Go to Part 1

Due to their ubiquity, and the multiple types of information conveyed through them, I personally don’t think there’s a “one true way” technique for handling passive perception tests. Partly because everything is a trade-off. Partly because the “one true way” is what allows the players to reliably reverse engineer from the information they have to the problematic metagame knowledge we’re trying to avoid. What I have instead is a cluster of techniques that I’ve found work well when you use them collectively – but not necessarily simultaneously – over the long-term. The techniques sort of weave together to form a tapestry that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

EXTRANEOUS TESTS: First, obfuscate the meaningful perception tests by calling for perception tests regardless of whether or not there’s anything interesting to be spotted.

Although these tests are, in some sense, “meaningless,” that doesn’t mean that they can’t be used for effect. The most obvious such effect, of course, is paranoia: “But I rolled a 28! What do you mean I don’t see anything?!” So call for these checks when things get a little spooky and it feels as if the PCs should be on edge. You’re performing a kind of judo here, turning the metagame knowledge on its head and using it to good effect.

Eventually, of course, players will figure out that you’re frequently “crying wolf” with these checks. At that point you can go for second order effects, using the checks to create false complacency: “I rolled a 28 and got nothing? Eh. GM must have been bluffing us.” And then the ninjas stab them.

If you pull that off a couple of times, the paranoia will start rolling back in. As a basic technique, you can get pretty far just riding this oscillation back and forth.

What Not to Do: I’ve seen some GMs who attempt to simply integrate passive perception tests into a regular routine. For example, they might have the group roll a perception test every time they enter a new room in the dungeon. My experience is that, compared to integrating extraneous checks for effect, this doesn’t work very well: Perception tests do chew up time and they do pull people out of the game world to some extent so that they can fidget with their dice. Furthermore, when they’re made routine, they’re often inserted habitually at the point where the PCs are encountering something new… which is the exact point where you want to maximize player engagement, not disengage for a mechanical interaction. (This is the same reason that I roll initiative checks at the end of combat.) If you want to pursue a “perception as regular routine” approach, I recommend embracing a very liberal let it ride technique to minimize the frequency of these checks. (Although, unfortunately, this will begin to reintroduce metagame knowledge issues, with the group getting an uncanny sense of how aware they’re going to be for a particular delve or run.)

REFOCUSING THE TABLE: As I mentioned in The Art of Rulings, extraneous perception tests are also the single most effective way to refocus the table’s attention on the game world when metagame distractions and chitchat have derailed the players. (You’d think that just saying, “Okay, let’s focus,” would be equally effective, but I’ve found that it isn’t. If you ask people to focus, they start up a sort of general “focusing process” that often includes apologizing, further dithering, and otherwise not focusing. Ask them to do something specific and concrete, on the other hand, and they become immediately focused.)

Of course, sometimes you can refocus the table by calling for a perception test to notice the incoming bad guys heading their way. So sometimes the meaningless “let’s refocus, guys!” test will, in fact, turn out to be quite meaningful.

INNOCUOUS INTEREST: Which brings us to the next thread of the tapestry, in which the “meaningless” extraneous perception tests are actually being triggered by more casual elements of the game world: There are claw marks in the ceiling, or the base of the idol has been rubbed to a bright sheen, or you think that you can detect the smell of a cooking fire from somewhere down the left hand corridor, or you take note of a particularly interesting historical detail in the painting on the wall.

Now there is no “bluff” at all. It’s just that when the PCs miss a perception test, the players have no way of knowing whether it was for an ambush or for noticing the local style of pottery.

A WORLD OF (NEAR) INFINITE INTEREST: Of course, now that we’ve convinced the players that there is no bluff, that’s exactly what we’ll do. A good check will always result in them noticing something, even if it wasn’t the primary thing that triggered the test. You rolled a 45 but you needed a 47 to notice the assassin hiding behind the arras? I’m still going to tell you about the claw marks, the idol’s sheen, the smell of cooking, and/or the historical detail in the painting on the wall.

So now, even if they appear to have succeeded on the test, the players can’t be certain that it wasn’t actually a failure in some broader sense.

Improvising these details is also just a really great way to develop the depth of the game world. But this is also a great opportunity to expand the dynamic scope of the environment: Sound and scent can be perceived without a direct line of sight, allowing you to hint at things nearby. Active elements of the area can also have affected the immediate surroundings of the NPCs (i.e., who or what has passed through here?). If you’re in a dungeon, check your key for nearby areas, look at your adversary roster, or roll on you random encounter table for inspiration.

OVERLAP OF PASSIVE & ACTIVE TESTS: Another technique is to overlap the demesne of passive and active perception tests. In other words, if your passive perception test is good enough, you’ll notice stuff that would normally require you to actively search the room.

The distinction here can be very clear in systems which use different skills for active vs. passive perception. For example, in 3^rd Edition D&D I allow Spot checks to effectively function as Search checks with a -20 penalty. (So if you roll 40 on your Spot check, you’ll notice traps, secret doors, and other hidden stuff that would normally require a DC 20 Search check.)

I find this is a great way to reward players for their areas of specialization, while emphasizing how awesome their higher level characters really are. It’s also a good technique to use if you’ve called for an extraneous passive perception test and someone gets a really amazing result: Check your notes and see if there’s an active search check (or even just something that you’d assumed would require specific observation) to notice.

(If you’re using the system described in The Art of the Key, I’m basically saying “check your bullet points.” If you’re struggling to figure out how certain items could be discovered through passive perception, check Matryoshka Search Techniques.)

SPLIT GROUPS: As a minor technique, when the group is split up, you can also ask for a passive perception test from everyone. Now they don’t even know which group (if either) actually had the triggering condition! And sometimes it’ll be both! (You can use thematic crossover techniques to unify the disparate action. You can see a humorous example of this in my Ptolus campaign journal.)

THE ULTIMATE EFFECT: So sometimes you make a perception test, and you don’t notice anything because it was a “fake” check, but sometimes it was because you failed it. And sometimes you notice something, but it was actually still a failure. And sometimes you notice the same sort of thing, but it will be because you succeeded on the test.

What the GM has done is obfuscate the true meaning of the test, and then obfuscated the obfuscation with an interwoven labyrinth of techniques. (And, importantly, most of these techniques are adding additional layers of value above and beyond simply obfuscating the purpose of your perception tests.) The result won’t completely obliterate every trace of metagame knowledge contained in the call for a perception test, but it doesn’t have to: It just has to introduce enough noise that the players’ won’t be able to reliably pick out the signal.

One particularly memorable group, for example, thought that they’d identified a “fake test” that I was using “just for effect”. Nope. They’d actually just missed their NPC “ally” pick-pocketing the magical artifact they were supposed to be guarding. When they realized what had happened, that was their breaking point and they gave up on that kind of metagame thinking.

The truth is most players aren’t actually interested in the metagame knowledge. But if the information is just lying there in plain sight, they can’t help noticing it… and then obsessing over it. It becomes this whole thing. In my experience, if you hide the information just a little bit and make it unreliable even when they do look at it, you’ll quickly break the instinct. (In a sense, you’re just trying to crank the DC for their passive perception test high enough that it would require an active perception test to notice the metagame knowledge.)

WHY BOTHER?

You may have noticed that we’ve been ignoring the elephant in the room: Why bother with all this? If the GM simply rolls all the checks, that’s a perfect solution for the metagame knowledge problem. So why are we not just doing that?

First, because, as I noted before, it doesn’t always work. Any limited resource that would impact the passive perception test (whether a meta-mechanic or otherwise) or player-faced mechanics in general prevents the “GM rolls” solution from being used.

Second, because I’m faux lazy. As a general rule, I try to push as much bookkeeping off my plate as the GM and onto the players as possible, because everything I keep on my plate is, in fact, a trade-off. I’ve found that there’s always room for more stuff that I could be tracking behind the screen to enhance the game. This also, as previously mentioned, tends to increase the accuracy of the result.

Third, as an experienced GM you learn how to take advantage of the momentary pause as people roll their dice: You multitask. You call for a check and you do this other thing while people get their results and then you grab the results. Passive perception tests, unsurprisingly, tend to occur just as you’re setting up for something new, and using that momentary pause to get your notes lined up for whatever that is turns out to be incredibly useful in keeping the game flowing forward. At a certain point, not only losing that crucial moment of prep but adding to it the time necessary to resolve all those passive perception tests yourself just starts feeling kludgy as hell.

Fourth, the refocusing thing works really well. You can take that technique away from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Fifth, I’ve found that this approach tends to have positive effects in general. Players who learn to stop trying to glean metagame knowledge from perception-type resolutions often also stop engaging in that behavior in other situations, too, either because they’ve learned that it’s not worth the effort or (more often) because they never really wanted to be burdened with the metagame knowledge in the first place. You win the battle in one place and you break the wider, often subconscious, habit across the board.

Go to Part 3: Divided Perception

With the possible exception of combat-related tests, I suspect that perception-type tests are the most common skill tests in RPGs: What do the characters see and when do they see it?

Despite their ubiquity – or perhaps because of it – perception-type tests are surprisingly challenging for many GMs, and the art of their use can be surprisingly contentious, with those choosing to resolve them in one fashion often feeling that those who resolve them using different techniques are heretics who are ruining their campaigns. (No joke.)

Let’s take a moment to further refine our field of study. Perception-type tests, broadly speaking, can be broken down into two categories: Active perception tests (determining what the character notices when they are consciously making an effort to observe) and passive perception tests (determining what a character notices reactively and/or while engaged in other activities).

Of the two, active perception tests tend to pose little challenge or oddity: The player states their intention and method, and then the action is resolved. There may be some fiddling about with hidden vs. open stakes and difficulty numbers, but these tests are fundamentally resolved like most other tasks.

When it comes to passive perception tests, however, things get more complicated, primarily because such checks inherently create significant metagame knowledge (i.e., knowledge that the player possesses which their character does not): The test, after all, is being made to determine whether or not the character is aware of something. But the mere fact that the test is being made in the first place reveals to the player that there is something the character is (at least potentially) unaware of.

This is problematic because:

• Even if the check is successful, the argument can be made that the significant bifurcation of the player’s experience from the character’s experience is non-optimal.
• It deadens the sense of surprise. (A jump scare is less effective if you know it’s coming.)
• It lets players to abuse their metagame knowledge, allowing them to take actions based on the fact that the test was made.
• Even if the player attempts to avoid such abuse, the mere presence of the knowledge can complicate the decision-making process, filling it with an extra burden of doubt and self-analysis. (For example, maybe you would have been extra cautious about that door up ahead even if you weren’t aware that the GM called for a perception test as soon as you saw it… but are you sure? And even if you’re sure, what will your fellow players think of your choices?)

In order to avoid this cluster of problems created by the metagame knowledge of the passive perception test’s existence, GMs have adopted a variety of special procedures for such tests. Let’s take a moment to briefly discuss the major approaches.

THE PLAYER ROLLS

The first approach, of course, is to just resolve passive perception tests by having the player roll them.

PROS: This is usually the way that other skill tests are resolved, so you’re simply being consistent with your methodology.

CONS: The metagame knowledge we just discussed.

THE GM ROLLS

Okay, simple solution: The GM rolls the test in secret.

PROS: The player doesn’t know the test is being made, so there is no metagame knowledge being imparted.

CONS: The GM has to track the pertinent skill ratings for the PCs. This can be difficult to do accurately, particularly if the system features a lot of different perception-type skills or has lots of buffs, equipment, and/or transient character abilities that cause the perception-type skill bonuses to shift around. In many systems it can actually be impossible to do this, as the players will have optional resources or limited use abilities that could affect the outcome of the check.

And even if the GM does execute the checks without error, players tend to have a greater confidence in checks they rolled themselves. “Whaddya mean we got ambushed? Don’t I get a Spot check? Did you remember that I get a +3 versus spotting cyborgs?”

There is also an inherent time cost (one guy making five checks generally takes longer than five people each making a single test) and a potential pacing problem (players actively resolving something are engaged; players waiting for the GM to finish rolling dice behind their screen are not engaged).

VS. STATIC VALUE

Instead of rolling passive perception tests, the PCs’ passive perception is boiled down to a static score which is compared, without a randomizer, to the difficulty of the test.

PROS: This eliminates some of the problems with the GM rolling. Instead of a time cost, this method can actually result in a time savings, which also means that the pacing problems generally don’t crop up.

CONS: Many of the problems, however, remain (such as keeping track of the PCs’ skill ratings).

More importantly, in practice this method effectively turns passive perception tests into pure GM fiat: The GM will obviously quickly learn what the highest passive perception score is in their group, and when they set the target number for a passive perception test they are ultimately just deciding whether it’s higher or lower than the party’s score. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the spectrum of GM fiat, per se, but what you end up with here is this sort of fake mechanic and a bunch of extra bookkeeping which seems to have no real purpose except to camouflage the fiat. If this is the approach you want to take, it seems to me that you’d be better off skipping all the hassle and just embracing the fiat directly.

UNCERTAIN TASKS

As discussed in The Art of Rulings, you could also adopt the uncertain task method described in Traveller 2300. In this method, both the GM and player resolve the test separately, and the combination of those outcomes results in either no truth, some truth, or total truth.

PROS: The method obscures some of the metagame knowledge imparted when the player makes the roll (i.e., they can’t intuit reliably based off their knowledge of what their die roll was). The GM also doesn’t need to track the PCs’ perception scores, because they can just ask for that information as the check happens.

CONS: This resolution method is more time consuming, particularly when you’re dealing with a scenario where everyone in the group is making the passive perception test. Muddling out five different test result comparisons can be laborsome by itself, but the spectrum of potential results can also create a great deal of confusion when different characters getting different results simultaneously. (Maybe you could have everyone roll and then only resolve the uncertain task comparison check with the character who rolled best to determine what the group actually observes?)

Go to Part 2: The Perception Tapestry

Go to Part 1

IMPROVISATION

One thing that I should perhaps make explicitly clear here is that, generally speaking, the only thing I’m prepping is the actual information itself (and that’s assuming I anticipated that the PCs would be interested in researching a particular topic). Everything else — the approach, the key moment, the specific contextualization of the information – is being improvised.

Like all forms of improvisation, of course, coming up with this stuff on-the-fly is a skill which can be learned, practiced, and perfected. It helps that the entire technique I’m describing here is not only an effective technique for narrating the outcome of gathering information, it’s also a very effective method of improvising that content (moving from the general to the more specific).

Improvising Approaches: The biggest improvement you can make in terms of improvising approaches is to do some research into how information gathering can be done. This can be very genre/setting-dependent, but studying real-world tradecraft for spies and detectives can be useful. For RPG specific resources, check out:

• Night’s Black Agents, which includes a fantastic section summarizing game-oriented approaches to gleaning information
• Spookshow, a somewhat obscure RPG in which you play a ghost recruited by the government to work as a spy (and also includes an absolutely fabulous discussion of real world spy techniques)
• GURPS Espionage, specifically its detailed tradecraft section

But the other thing you can do is work backwards from the source: Look at the information you need to impart, think about how/where that information can be found, and then create the appropriate approach that will get you to that information.

Alternatively, look at the special abilities a character has and extrapolate unique ways they might use them to gain information: A druid who can speak with the rats of the city. Superman flies high into the air and eavesdrops with super-hearing. A luck dragon closes his eyes and follows his heart. Et cetera.

Improvising Key Moments: At a basic level, improvising the key moment flows pretty naturally out of the approach. You look at what sources of information the approach would be likely to find, and then you create a specific instance of such.

If you find it difficult to improvise this stuff off the cuff, though, there’s ways you can cheat through smart prep. A fairly generic way of accomplishing this is to prep two or three contacts for each PC. (Or have the players prep them for you.) You don’t need a lot here: Just a name and one sentence describing them. Something like, “One-Eyed Pete: Grit addict that the PC used to sail with on the Abandoned Mermaid.” Regardless of what information they’re looking for, you can just reach for the most likely (or, for greater interest, the most improbable) contact they have and figure out how they would know (or could point them towards) that information.

Depending on the nature of the campaign you might find something other than the PCs themselves to hang this prep off of. For example, in an urban campaign you might create two or three contracts per district and use them appropriately.

This sort of thing can also be genre-dependent: In a Trail of Cthulhu game, for example, you might prep a set of evocative Mythos tomes that you can slot information into as necessary. In Eclipse Phase you might want to come up with a list of reputation subnets. For Delta Green maybe you just need a list of cool code names for old operations.

On that note, also look for opportunities to reincorporate sources of information that have already been tapped: That’s basically what H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard did with the Necronomicon and Nameless Cults, respectively, lending those fictional tomes a weight and meaning that would be absent if they had instead elected to use a different tome every time. (On the other hand, notice how the Mythos benefits from having BOTH the Necronomicon and Nameless Cults, each with a unique history and slightly different connotation for the knowledge it contains. And it can become kitschy if every single obscure fact just happens to be in the same book. So there’s a balancing act.) The same principles apply to NPC contacts, darknet bulletin boards, or any other source of information, allowing your players (and their PCs) to develop long-term relationships and associations with these elements of the campaign (which will, of course, often elevate them to a level importance above and beyond merely being a receptacle for data drops).

Improvising Contextualization: The specific contextualization of the information the PCs are seeking is so specific to the information and the key moment you’ve created that it’s really difficult to cheat that specific moment of creativity. But there are a few things to keep in mind:

• How do they know the information
• What’s their opinion of the information
• What’s their motivation for giving the information
• What’s their relationship to the information (and to the PCs)

(Note that most of these can apply to both people and inanimate sources of intel.)

Prepping It All: “What if I just prep all of this stuff in advance?” If you’re a new GM and you’re really struggling, this can be an option. But I generally advise against it because it becomes a trap: You’re not practicing your improvisational skills, so you’re not getting any better at it. And the prep is fragile (leading to lots of wasted prep) because it can be so trivially disrupted by the players choosing an incompatible approach. (You prep One-Eyed Pete, for example, but the players decided to hit up the newssheet archives at the Old Library looking for information on the Vladaams instead.)

You’ll generally be better off prepping the tools that make your improv better rather than that trying to avoid improv entirely. At least in my experience.

TIERED INFORMATION

One last thing to briefly consider here are research and canvassing tests that can gain multiple pieces of information, particularly those checks where the information is tiered (so that better results yield more difficult or detailed intel).

Here’s a typical example of a tiered Gather Information check from D&D:

DC 10: The Republicans are a fringe political group. They want independence for Ptolus or something like that.

DC 12: The Republicans specifically want to abolish the mercantile system of government and replace it with a “deot for all”, with the Trade Circle being popularly elected. As part of this effort, they desire independence from the central authority of Salesia and the Merchant Council.

DC 15: The Republicans have been more active of a late. They’ve delivered several petitions to the Commissar and have been organizing small rallies here and there throughout the city.

DC 18: No one’s sure how the Republicans are organized, if they are. Recently their public face has been Helmut Itlestein – he’s appeared at several rallies as a speaker, issued petitions, and the like.

DC 30: It’s said that the Republican movement is, in fact, secretly run by an organization known as the Knights of Enlightenment. Nobody seems to know much of anything about the Knights of Enlightenment. In fact, the name means absolutely nothing to pretty much everyone you talk to.

When constructing a tier of information like this it’s important that the information actually is tiered. I’ve seen a number of published adventures where they have five or six bullet points worth of information they want to convey, so they just string them onto an escalating DC table, resulting in nonsensical things like a telephone directory look-up requiring a DC 40 test or the like.

An alternative approach here is to randomly choose X pieces of information from a list of available results on a successful test. When using this approach, however, I think it’s important to communicate that if they spend more time — i.e., make additional checks — there’s more information for them to find. This can be very effective in handling the rumor table for a location or region, for example.

In either case, when you have many different pieces of information which can be obtained, you need to figure out whether you want to have one key moment or several different key moments. In doing so, you need to primarily consider two factors:

• The drag on pace created by framing multiple key moments; vs.
• The potentially increased interest created by multiple key moments

There’s no “right answer” to this. You’re going to have to gauge your player’s interest and engagement with the information being sought; the overall pace of the scenario; and the amount of interest you feel the players will have in interacting with the key moments.

If I have any rules of thumb to offer here, it’s that:

• The more interactive the key moment is, the more likely the players are to sustain interest through several of them (as opposed to listening to the GM drone through flat narration).
• If the group split up to find the information, giving everyone a different chunk of the information custom-tailored to the approach they take is generally well-received.
• Players are generally more interested if there’s a clear build to the information they’re receiving (so multiple key moments can work better with tiered information than with an undifferentiated exposition dump).
• Handouts are a great way of mixing up information delivery.

On the other hand, big exposition dumps aren’t really the most interesting way to convey information. So in your prep, you may want to look at other ways of structuring this information into your scenario than through a single skill check. (Framing heists is one way of doing that, although obviously that’s a technique which can also be overused. You may also want to check out Getting the Players to Care.)

Something else you can experiment with here is to actually ditch all of the advice I’ve just given you for a bunch of the information and then only frame to key moments for one or two of your bullet points.

For example, if someone rolled a DC 30 success on that Gather Information table above, I might say, “Asking around town you quickly figure out that the Republicans are some kind of fringe political group that want to abolish the mercantile system of government and replace it with a ‘deot for all’, featuring a popularly elected Trade Circle and independence from Salesia.” Then I might hand them a list of recent and upcoming rallies along with a flyer featuring a speech by Helmut Itlestein, and then frame to a scene where they chat with the Commissar’s personal assistant who can reveal the rumors that they’re being secretly run by the Knights of Enlightenment.

NEXT: Perception-Type Tests

As a sort of extended addendum to The Art of Rulings, this series is going to take a specific look at some common types of action resolution, with a particular eye on sharing the tips and tricks I’ve learned for making them work well.

We’ll start with those scenarios where a PC wants to conduct a general survey of a large body of knowledge in order to glean information that’s specifically useful to them. These tend to break down into two broad conceptual categories: Canvassing (talking to a large number of people to find the information you want) and Research (searching libraries, online resources, or other static databases for the information).

In most systems these days, you’ll find these two approaches ensconced as specific skills (making the most basic adjudication decision of which skill to roll relatively simple). For example, 3^rd Edition D&D uses the Gather Information skill to cover canvassing. It’s not unusual, however, for investigation-focused systems to break them down into sub-categories. (For example, in Trail of Cthulhu you can use Cop Talk, Oral History, Streetwise, or even Credit Rating to canvass for information.)

Oddly, however, I can’t think of a system which actually groups these two broad categories — canvassing and research — into a single broader skill. (Perhaps because the traditional stat breakdowns derived from D&D often separate intellectual tasks like research from social tasks like canvassing?)

Unfortunately, it is slightly more common to find systems which, for whatever reason, lack one of these skills. Surprisingly, for example, Call of Cthulhu includes the ubiquitous Library Use skill for research tests, but lacks any clear skill for resolving canvassing. (Given my predilection for investigation-based scenarios, I generally find this lack incredibly annoying any more.) Defaulting to an ability check can often work, although we’ll discuss a few other options below.

Regardless of whether the PCs are researching or canvassing, the approach I take as a GM is roughly similar:

1. Summarize the approach
2. Make the key moment distinct
3. Contextualize the information

EXAMPLE 1: D&D

For example, in a D&D campaign where the PCs are using the Gather Information skill to canvass for information about the Vladaam crime family, I might want to deliver a chunk of information like, “There are a lot of stories suggesting a long-running feud between Sheva Callaster and the Vladaams.”

First, I’ll say something like, “You start hitting up your contacts in all the dives around the Docks.” This summarizes the approach that’s being taken to gain the information. (As opposed to, say, attending a fancy soiree in the Nobles Quarter.)

Next, I’ll identify the key moment that they find the information: “In the Inn of the Lost Sailor, you find your old sailing partner One-Eyed Pete lost in the haze of his grit addiction.”

Finally, I contextualize the information: “Pete warns you that you’d be better off staying well clear of the Vladaams. People who mess with them tend to disappear. Only person that doesn’t seem to be true for is a lady by the name of Sheva Callaster: He once saw her get jumped by three Vladaam thugs and she chased them off as if she were brushing dust from her shoulder.”

EXAMPLE 2: ECLIPSE PHASE

The same general approach can be used for Research tests in Eclipse Phase. Say you want to deliver a chunk of information like, “Achjima worked for Dolma Gope’s resleeving clinic.”

First, summarize the approach: “You start rooting through the corporate recruiting boards.”

Second, find the key moment: “You strike gold when you find a recent resumé for a young woman named Alicia Corey listing Achjima as a reference.”

Third, contextualize the information: “You hit the girl up. She’s turned pure infomorph because her body was ‘forcibly reclaimed’ by the local triads and she couldn’t afford a replacement. She’s eager to accept a few creds towards the new body fund and tells you all about her college days with Achjima. Sounds like Achjima has always been a radical interested in singularity seeking. She’s pretty sure Achjima is working for a woman named Dolma Gope now: Achjima was bitching about her the last time they talked.”

THE ALTERNATIVE

Player: I want to make a Gather Information test on the Vladaams.
GM: Roll it.
Player: 18
GM: You find out that Sheva Callaster has a long-running feud with them.

Player: I’ll make a Research test on Achjima. 45 out of 60.
GM: Achjima worked at Dolma Gope’s resleeving clinic.

I suspect the reason we want to avoid this sort of barebones alternative is fairly obvious, but the anemic narration of outcome results in an atrophied fiction-mechanics cycle which is (a) boring, (b) divorced from the character’s experience, and (c) difficult or impossible to build off of interesting ways.

Adding just a little bit of specificity creates interest, helps to immerse the players into the game world, and provides the opportunity for both you and the players to build on the interaction. (For example, by coming back to speak with One-Eyed Pete in the future or asking Sheva Callaster for details about the assassination attempt One-Eyed Pete witnessed.)

SUMMARIZE THE APPROACH

Summarizing the approach is basically a statement of intention and method, right?

When it comes to gathering information, I tend to have a very low specificity threshold for triggering action resolution. Usually a statement like, “I’m going to ask around town to see if anyone has heard of greenfire.” or “I’m going to spend the afternoon researching the name ‘Azathoth’ in the local libraries.” is more than enough. In fact, moreso than any other skill, I’ll often just allow a simple “I’m going to use X skill to do Y” to move us into action resolution (i.e., “I’m going to make a Gather Information check on the Blood of Amber.” or “I’m going to use Library Use to research the ‘cold price’.”)

Why? Well, primarily because the players don’t necessarily know where the information exists to be found. That’s why they’re making the check in the first place, right? In actual play, it’s generally not interesting for the players to play ‘guess which book you should look in to find the answer’ games.

As the GM, of course, you can always set a higher threshold for activating character expertise. But this is why my approach starts with summarizing the approach: Because we’ve resolved the action at a very high level of abstraction, the first thing we want to do when narrating the outcome of that action is to make it more specific. As a GM, setting this broad parameter of how the search was conducted also makes it easier to improvise the more specific details that follow.

Of course, just like any other type of action, player expertise can always trump character expertise. In other words, they’re free to get more specific in describing how they track down a particular piece of information. (For example, rather than just “searching the library”, maybe they specifically hit up the morgue of a newspaper hoping to find older stories.) In the case of gathering information, it is insanely rare for this to work against the PCs finding the information they want (and would require them to basically look for it in a way which very specifically could not possibly work). On the other hand, particularly appropriate efforts can work to their advantage (lowering the difficulty of the test or perhaps negating the need for a test entirely).

THE KEY MOMENT

The key moment is where the PCs gain the information they’re looking for. (So the approach is how/where they’re looking for it; the key moment is when the approach pays off.) The most important thing about the key moment is its specificity: You’re taking the general concept (“asking people around the Docks”, “searching through corporate job postings”, “looking in the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts Library”) and creating something unique and particular (One-Eyed Pete, the girl who worked with Achjima, Moste Potente Potions by Phineas Bourne).

Framing Key Moments: Rather than simply summarizing the key moment, however, you can instead frame it as a scene.

The simplest example is framing to the moment where the PC approaches the NPC who has the information they want. Instead of summarizing what One-Eyed Pete has to say about Sheva Callaster and the Vladaams, for example, you instead say, “You’ve heard that One-Eyed Pete knows a thing or two about the Vladaams. You find him bellied up to the bar at the Inn of the Lost Sailor.” From there, you can then simply roleplay out the ensuing encounter (which will also contextualize the information, obviously).

Handouts can also be a form of this: The information is in a newspaper article, so you explain where they found it and hand the players a copy. The actual act of reading it is where the information is imparted.

You can also frame to a challenge. For example, your Research test brings you to Alicia Corey, but convincing her to talk might require additional social skill tests. (This effectively becomes a fortune in the middle technique and might be used to resolve a partial or complicated success on the Research test.)

A more elaborate version of the same is what I think of as “framing to a heist”: The PCs discover that the information they want is some place inaccessible, and now they’re going to have to figure out how to break in and get it.

CONTEXTUALIZE THE INFORMATION

At this point in the process you have a raw piece of data (“Sheva Callaster has a long-running feud with the Vladaams”) and you have the key moment where the PCs will gain that information (One-Eyed Pete). What you want to do is take these two pieces of the jig-saw puzzle and combine them in a way which is greater than the sum of its parts: The way One-Eyed Pete tells you the information reveals more about One-Eyed Pete, and it also gives a particular slant which colors and transforms that information.

The information would not have been the same (and would not have the same consequences) if it had come from anywhere else.

The importance of this can perhaps be most easily understood when it occurs in more specific circumstances:

• If the player specified a particular angle of approach, by having that choice influence the nature of the information they receive you’re building on and rewarding their creativity.
• If you’re framing to a heist, the nature of the information affects how the heist is carried out. (A kidnapped witness is very different from a file folder locked in a safe.)

And so forth. The key thing to understand is that even if you’re just going for the most basic, unprompted summarization of what happens, contextualizing the information not only makes it more interesting (and thus more of a reward for success) it will also affect (and also suggest) the ways in which the PCs can use that information.

Consider the example of Alicia Corey dishing information on Achjima’s relationship with Dolma Gope:

• Achjima was gossiping about how much he hates working with Dolma Gope.
• Achjima gave her Dolma Gope’s digital business card with an open-ended recommendation to get a job with her.
• Alicia is jealous of Dolma Gope, who she thinks (falsely) is having an affair with Achjima.

Every one of those conveys the same core nugget of information (Achjima works with Dolma Gope), but each one opens up different avenues: Achjima gossiping about how much he hates Dolma Gope might let them drive a wedge in their relationship when they meet with her, the business card might be a viable angle for gaining a meeting with Dolma Gope, and so forth.

(Note: You, as the GM, don’t think up the consequences or options of the contextualized information. That’s the player’s job. The point is that the mere act of contextualization implicitly opens up these opportunities which wouldn’t exist if you stick to the basic vanilla.)

Go to Part 2: Improvisation and Tiered Information

Go to Part 1

It is surprisingly easy to mess up the resolution of group actions. (In no small part because so many games include group resolution mechanics that are flawed. Or don’t offer a group resolution mechanic at all.)

The primary problem is skewed probabilities. The classic example of this is a group of five PCs trying to sneak past a guard. The GM looks at the standard mechanics for this sort of thing and, with logic seemingly on their side, has each PC make a Stealth test.

Say that these PCs are pretty good at stealth, so they each have a 70% chance of passing the test. “Since they’re all pretty good at this,” the GM thinks, “they’ll have a pretty good chance of sneaking past this guy.” But, in reality, they don’t. Because the failure of any single character is a de facto failure for the entire group, they now only have a 17% chance of successfully sneaking past the guard.

This categorical error happens because our brains do not intuitively grasp probabilities. So we set up a stack of “pretty good odds” and fail to realize that, collectively, a string of uninterrupted successes is still incredibly unlikely to happen.

This gets even worse if five PCs are trying to sneak past a group of five NPCs. In 3^rd Edition D&D, for example, this effectively becomes a check in which the PCs are rolling 5d20 and keeping the lowest result while the NPCs are rolling 5d20 and keeping the highest result. The average roll of 5d20-keep-lowest is 3. The average of 5d20-keep-highest is 17. That 14 point differential means that it’s virtually impossible for a party of characters to sneak past a group of evenly matched opponents.

(The odds are actually even worse than that in 3^rd Edition, because virtually all stealth attempts will require both a Move Silently and a Hide check.)

The argument can certainly be made that this is realistic in some sense: A large group should have a tougher time sneaking past a sentry than one guy and more eyes means more people who can spot you. But I would argue that the probability skew is large enough that it creates results which are both unrealistic and undesirable.

In the case of stealth, for example, the effects of the skew are obvious: Since it’s virtually impossible for them to succeed, group stealth attempts quickly drop out of the game. When stealth is called for, it takes the form of a sole scout pushing out ahead of the rest of the group. And when the scout becomes too fragile to survive when the check finally fails, stealth stops being a part of the game altogether.

THE FOUR TYPES OF GROUP ACTION

When dealing with a group action, the first thing a GM must determine is what type of group action they’re dealing with. In general, I find this breaks down into four categories:

(a) Everybody is performing individually and succeeds or fails individually.

(b) Everyone is attempting the same task, but as long as one of them succeeds it’ll be fine.

(c) Everyone is working together to accomplish a single action collectively.

(d) Everyone is working together / assisting each other, but everyone still needs to accomplish the action (i.e. succeed).

Consider a Climb check, for example:

• Everyone starts climbing the wall independently.
• Bob tries to climb up and grab the idol. Then Nancy does. (Or maybe they’re both trying at the same time, but as long as one of them gets the idol, the idol has been gotten.)
• People lower a rope and help pull someone up. (Limited by the number of additional people you think pulling on the rope will meaningfully help.)
• Everyone is belayed together and assisting each other in scaling the mountain.

Or a Stealth check:

• Each person tries to sneak past a guard one at a time.
• Everyone simultaneously tries to infiltrate the room with The Button in it from radically different directions, so that even if one of them gets discovered (i.e. fails the check) the others are unaffected by it. (This is somewhat contrived, but I can’t actually think of a non-contrived example of a Stealth check where members of the group can fail as long as one member succeeds.)
• Steve distracts the guard by showing him a nudie mag while Gwen sneaks past him.
• Aragorn leads the hobbits through the dark wood, working to keep the whole group concealed from the roving Nazgul.

TYPE 1: SIMULTANEOUS INDIVIDUAL ACTION

Everybody is performing individually and succeeds or fails individually.

The first type is not, in fact, a group action. It is many simultaneously individual actions which, although they are identical to each other, are each seeking to accomplish a separate goal.

When resolving “group” actions of this type, use the normal process you use for resolving individual actions.

Here’s a relatively clear cut example: The group needs to make six porcelain dishes. There are six PCs, so each of them makes a Craft check in order to make a single porcelain dish. If they all succeed, then each of them has separately created a porcelain dish and, as a result, they have created a total of six porcelain dishes.

Despite these types of actions not actually being a group action at all, this is the form of group action resolution that most GMs seem to default to. I think this is a combination of most systems (notably those most GMs start out with) not featuring any explicit mechanics for other types of group actions, and the fact that it’s also frequently the easiest resolution method. (It’s really easy to simply say, “Everybody give me an Athletics test.” And it’s also really easy to use the resolution mechanics for individual actions because those are, generally speaking, the simplest mechanics and the default mechanics in any roleplaying game.)

Basically my whole point here is that rather than defaulting to this form of resolution, I think most GMs would benefit from thinking of this as the last resort when it comes to resolving group actions. In other words, make sure that it’s not a group action before defaulting back to simultaneous-individual resolution.

But if you’re looking for a general rule of thumb on when it’s “okay” to use Type 1 resolution, look at any situation where the failure of one character doesn’t cause the other characters to ALSO fail. Thus, it’s okay for everyone to climb up a wall separately, because one character falling behind the rest doesn’t mean that those who succeed are automatically held back. (Although the consequences may nonetheless be dire.)

TYPE 2: INDEPENDENT GROUP EFFORT

Everyone is attempting the same task, but only one of them needs to succeed.

Use this type of group action when the characters are all aimed at accomplishing a single goal, but are each acting completely separately in their efforts to achieve that goal.

When resolving an independent group effort, you’ll actually still use the normal process for resolving individual actions. But as long as at least one of the individual actions succeeds, the attempt is successful.

You can also think of this as “best result counts”.

To use our previous example: The group needs one porcelain dish. Each of the six PCs makes a Craft check in order to make a single porcelain dish. As long as at least one of them succeeds on the check (i.e., makes a dish), the group will have the one dish that they need. If the quality of the dish matters, the dish they’ll use will be the best one they made (i.e., the one with the highest check result).

The disadvantage of this method is that it actually causes probability to skew in the other direction. It’s the situation you end up with where everybody in the group says, “I search the hall for traps” (either simultaneously or sequentially), greatly increasing their odds of success.

Once again, it can be argued that this probability skew is realistic. (More eyes on a problem makes it more likely that someone will spot the solution.) And I, personally, tend to have much less of a problem with this sort of skew because (a) success rarely causes the gameplay experience to flatten (due to dropped strategies) and (b) I think it’s actually very difficult for a GM to err too much on the side of the PCs succeeding.

However, when it’s necessary or desired, this skew can be counteracted by having consequences — or the risk of consequences — for participating. This often takes the form of something bad happening on a failed check; or on a failed check with a sufficiently bad margin of success. (Are you sure you want to search the hall when a poor check means potentially triggered a trap? The materials for making a porcelain dish are expensive, so does it make sense to have Sally — who’s terrible at the Craft check — participate in the group pottery session?)

One thing to consider is the possibility for a sufficiently large margin of success by one character participating in the independent group effort to negate (or ameliorate) the consequences of failure for another member of the group. (For example, Elyssa fails her Search test by 5, but Raasti succeeds on his by 10, so he reaches over and snatches her back mere moments before she bumbles into the tripwire.)

TYPE 3: COLLABORATIVE ACTION

Everyone is working together to accomplish a single action.

For example, when multiple characters are working together to fix a car. Or build a gravity gun. Or research an obscure topic at Miskatonic University.

The distinction here is that there is one thing the group is attempting to achieve, and they are all contributing to that single attempt. Mechanically speaking, there are a couple of broadly applicable approaches.

Assistance: One character is “taking point” on the attempt. (This is generally whoever the most skilled character is at whatever the primary task is, but not necessarily depending on circumstance.) The other characters who are assisting the point man grant a bonus to the point man’s test. This assistance may require a successful skill test in its own right, which may or may not be the same skill test that the point man is making (and may or may not be made at the same difficulty).

The form of this bonus can vary. 3^rd Edition D&D, for example, hard codes this as the Aid Another action and grants a +2 bonus. In a dice pool system you might grant the point man a bonus die. The Cypher System has several different bonuses depending on the relative skill levels of the characters involved and the type of help being given.

Collective Margin of Success: An alternative method is to look at the total margin of success generated by the entire group and compare that against a target number. (This is very common in dice pool systems where you count successes, since it’s just as easy to count successes from multiple sources as it is to count them from a single source.) This approach can be quicker (since all of the skill tests can be resolved simultaneously), and can also be particularly appropriate in scenarios where there’s no convenient “point man”. The disadvantage is that the target numbers from these collaborative actions tend to be out of sync with the target numbers for individual actions, which lacks elegance and can cause some headaches when it comes to consistency.

With either approach, there may be practical limits on how many characters can simultaneously assist in a specific attempt. (You can only squeeze so many people under the hood of a hotrod.)

TYPE 4: PIGGYBACKING

Everyone is assisting each other in a task where all need to simultaneously succeed.

The distinction between Type 4 and Type 1 can be something of a gray area: Everyone climbing a wall separately is clearly a Type 1. But if the team is working together, employing belaying techniques, and the like, at what point does it become Type 4?

In my opinion, when in doubt, default to Type 4. I don’t always do a great job of this myself, but for all the reasons discussed above I think it’s the better way to go.

Basic Version: One character takes point on the attempt and everyone else “piggybacks” on their success or failure. (If they succeed, everyone succeeds. If they fail, everyone fails.)

In GUMSHOE, the point character suffers a penalty based on the number of characters that are piggybacking. However, piggybacking characters can spend a single point from a skill pool (usually, but not always, the same skill pool as the point character’s test) to negate their penalty.

When I adapted piggybacking to the D20 system, the piggybacking characters needed to succeed on a skill test at one-half the normal DC of the test. The point character could reduce the DC of the piggybacking test for their allies by increasing the difficulty of their own test.

Simple Variant: Have every character participating make a skill test. If at least half of the group succeeds, the entire group succeeds.

Complex Variant: Everyone who succeeds on the test grants a bonus to those who would have otherwise failed. If the collective bonus from those succeeding is enough to bump all the failures up to successes, the attempt succeeds.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve jotted down several different options for resolving the various group actions. For any system you’re running, however, you generally only need one for each type of group action. In some cases, of course, the system itself may come prepackaged with a mechanic for doing that. If you find yourself needing to add a mechanical structure for one of the types, you should hopefully find it relatively easy to take one of the options presented and find a way to use it in the system you’re using.

Practical experience has taught me that, generally speaking, the GM should make the determination of whether or not a group check is appropriate and what mechanic should be used for resolving it. For example, when I first introduced piggybacking mechanics into my D&D games, I left it up to the players to determine whether or not a particular attempt at Stealth would be a “normal check” or a “piggybacking check”. The problem was that players fairly consistently went with the default method of resolution, and they would also consistently rebel the minute the point character failed their test and would want to default back to individual tests.

So I recommend that, in practice, you treat group checks just like any other ruling: Determine how the action should be resolved and declare that to the PCs.

“Okay, this will be a piggyback check. Who’s taking point?”