Don’t touch those dice!

How many times as a GM has something like this happened during one of your gaming sessions:

GM – Okay everyone roll your search check
Player 1 – A two, guess I don’t find anything
Player 2 – Alright! A five guess I’m in the same boat.
Player 3 – Can you critically miss a search check?

So what do you do now? The players know they missed the check and you’ve got a piece of critical information they need. In most cases the players are asked to roll again and they keep rolling until they make it, you write off the item and try to adjust later or you give them the piece of information anyway typically resulting in “Why did we roll in the first place?”

I’m as guilty of this as just about everyone else is so I thought I would pass along this piece of wisdom – don’t touch those dice!

When you’re presented with a situation when you need the party to find something just pass along the information to the most logical individual. The character searching in the area or maybe the one with the highest ranking in the skill. You can decide but don’t roll it as it’s a needed piece of information.

You could also do this in any situation where the chances of the group’s failure is very small or non-existant. An example of this is when you have a powerful group of characters who come up against a modest number of opponents which pose no real threat, just describe the combat/outcome and move on – save the dice rolling for the critcal events and encounters.