"All of which are things a good GM tries to get their players to do with their own brains.
Rolling Investigation, by the PHB’s standards of Investigation, is more-or-less equivalent to telling the GM that you’re giving up and would like the GM to give you the answer, provided you shiny math rocks number is big enough. Almost everything the Investigation skill accounts for are the things a player is supposed to be doing themselves, with no more assistance from the GM than a good, solid, consistent description of the scene.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do, not for the GM to do for the player. The player rolling a die and saying “my Knows-Things number is [X], what does that let me know?” is not fun, engaging, or proper roleplaying.
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do. Rolling a die and saying “Is this number high enough for me to solve the mystery?” is terrible gameplay and makes it almost impossible to conduct any sort of proper mystery games/sessions.
Noticing patterns? Once more – that’s something a GM wants the players to do, not the dice. If the GM is deliberately establishing patterns for their players to pick up on, a player casually throwing a d20 and saying “does this let me know the plot?” is going to incense them. And frankly, if a GM is not deliberately establishing patterns, a player can throw all the dice in the world and get nothing. But if Alice-the-cleric says “Say, have you guys ever noticed...?” and lays out a pattern the GM had no idea they were laying down? Well. That is a super cool moment, and something the GM can absolutely use to better the game."
What a good DM does is different at every table. If you enjoy watching your players become frustrated at not being able to advance the plot, good for you. Trying to get most of our players to work through puzzles or clues is like pulling teeth, if they don't work it out in a few minutes we roll a die and move it on.
I’m lucky enough to always be playing with more than one DM and happen to be playing with two who exemplify the far ends of this spectrum right now. The first DM never has us search a physical location in game. We, the players, literally say to him “We toss the place,” and he provides us a list of what we find without a single roll or description beyond just that: “We toss the place.” We do however, in great detail, spend game time operating the tavern we own, talking to NPC’s, investigating clues we find, doing research at libraries and colleges, mobilizing our contacts, interacting with the world socially and generally advancing the plot(s). This game is rich with not only the main plot but also several inter-related subplots as well as dozens upon dozens of fleshed out NPC’s, gangs and other organizations so the one thing we never, ever do is spend valuable game time bickering with DM over whether and how we handled some specific object in precisely the correct fashion needed to reveal a thing.
The other DM is quite the opposite. We rarely do much other than have the rogue describing how he searches a room, tries to find a trap, how he disable the traps he finds and other pointless minutiae (while the rest of the group sits passively BTW). To paraphrase one particularly egregious instance: “You looked over, under, behind and between the statues; you wiggled every possible appendage, pushed on every part of the statue that could be a button, tried to rotate them, tried to move them forward and back as well as side to side but oops, you didn’t say you tilted them so sorry, after about a half hour of game time back and forth with the DM, you didn’t find the lever that reveals your loot…haha roll initiative because the ghouls were alerted by your fruitless messing about.” None of this ever seems to move the plot along. In fact, there is not much plot in that game at all, definitely no B plot or any kind of subplots. We move from combat to combat and spend the rest of the time playing gotcha with the DM, who seems to delight in getting us for not saying the exactly correct things to avoid said gotcha. We have gone several sessions without actually speaking to anyone. There have been entire sessions where my character (by virtue of being not-the-rogue) has done nothing at all other than watch the rogue try to do his thing.
I’m afraid that by my descriptions it’s painfully obvious which method I prefer. Frankly, if math-rocking in combat alone was not enough and I didn’t like the fellas in the group on a personal level so much, there’s no way I’d still be “playing” the second game. As Linklite (I do believe) alluded to: the dice rolling allows skipping the pointless bickering over minutiae in order to get on with really playing the game. I have been playing for over forty years. I spent a lot of time playing within the pointless bickering paradigm that more or less describes old school play and I simply do not understand how anyone is so enamoured of it. All the players are telling a story together, not trying to outsmart the one player at the table with all the information along with boundless tools and power at their disposal. Furthermore, if my success in the game is dependent on the abilities I have as the player, why do I have a character at all? If there is no way to portray a character as smarter/dumber or wiser/more rash or more/less socially capable than I am through dice rolls, what even is the point of Int, Wis and Cha in the game? I’m just playing myself over and over again, aren’t I?
"All of which are things a good GM tries to get their players to do with their own brains.
Rolling Investigation, by the PHB’s standards of Investigation, is more-or-less equivalent to telling the GM that you’re giving up and would like the GM to give you the answer, provided you shiny math rocks number is big enough. Almost everything the Investigation skill accounts for are the things a player is supposed to be doing themselves, with no more assistance from the GM than a good, solid, consistent description of the scene.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do, not for the GM to do for the player. The player rolling a die and saying “my Knows-Things number is [X], what does that let me know?” is not fun, engaging, or proper roleplaying.
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do. Rolling a die and saying “Is this number high enough for me to solve the mystery?” is terrible gameplay
There are several things that make the skill necessary:
Players cannot know all the things that their characters know.
The GM cannot describe anything in as much detail as would be visible to the people actually there.
Trying to remedy either of the above makes things incredibly tedious, and doesn't help, because the players aren't going to retain information at that level of detail, anyway.
Investigation (and other skills) exist to close these gaps. They can toss the room, or search for secret doors, or examine the murder scene, or do research in the library, and the DM can sum up what their characters have learned or found. The decision to do so still rests on the players, and they presumably decide because of roleplaying reasons.
and makes it almost impossible to conduct any sort of proper mystery games/sessions.
Mysteries and puzzles generally get kind of weird and often don't really work in RPGs, because you usually end up making the players solve them with their brains and their real-world knowledge. The sort of puzzles that would actually exist in-world would often rely on world-building detail that even the DM is unlikely to have thought about. Making things the players can solve will often have to break verisimilitude.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do....
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do.....
Noticing patterns? Once more – that’s something a GM wants the players to do, not the dice......
What if I'm not very good at making logical deductions, drawing connections between disparate clues, or noticing patterns? Am I now prohibited from playing characters that are? What if my fantasy is to play a Sherlock Holmes-esque character? Is that out of my reach?
Is the same true of other skills in the game? Do I need to be an Olympic gymnast to play a monk? Should I memorize the Forgotten Realms wiki before I try and play a wizard with grand historical knowledge. I dread to think what expectations are placed upon me if I want to play a character competent at arcana....
Sardonic absurdities aside, I would hope I've pressed upon you the importance of skills in D&D? They enable the fantasy the game is built upon. Few people want to play characters shackled by their own real life limitations, so I'm not sure why Investigation would be an exception to this?
Investigation is for clues. That's all.
If someone, try as they might, can't solve a puzzle, find a compartment, or something of the like, have them roll investigation.
Or, you know, just have investigation point them in the direction of the answer, without actually telling them the answer.
Roll for Initiative: [roll]1d20+7[/roll]
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"All of which are things a good GM tries to get their players to do with their own brains.
Rolling Investigation, by the PHB’s standards of Investigation, is more-or-less equivalent to telling the GM that you’re giving up and would like the GM to give you the answer, provided you shiny math rocks number is big enough. Almost everything the Investigation skill accounts for are the things a player is supposed to be doing themselves, with no more assistance from the GM than a good, solid, consistent description of the scene.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do, not for the GM to do for the player. The player rolling a die and saying “my Knows-Things number is [X], what does that let me know?” is not fun, engaging, or proper roleplaying.
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do. Rolling a die and saying “Is this number high enough for me to solve the mystery?” is terrible gameplay and makes it almost impossible to conduct any sort of proper mystery games/sessions.
Noticing patterns? Once more – that’s something a GM wants the players to do, not the dice. If the GM is deliberately establishing patterns for their players to pick up on, a player casually throwing a d20 and saying “does this let me know the plot?” is going to incense them. And frankly, if a GM is not deliberately establishing patterns, a player can throw all the dice in the world and get nothing. But if Alice-the-cleric says “Say, have you guys ever noticed...?” and lays out a pattern the GM had no idea they were laying down? Well. That is a super cool moment, and something the GM can absolutely use to better the game."
What a good DM does is different at every table. If you enjoy watching your players become frustrated at not being able to advance the plot, good for you. Trying to get most of our players to work through puzzles or clues is like pulling teeth, if they don't work it out in a few minutes we roll a die and move it on.
I’m lucky enough to always be playing with more than one DM and happen to be playing with two who exemplify the far ends of this spectrum right now. The first DM never has us search a physical location in game. We, the players, literally say to him “We toss the place,” and he provides us a list of what we find without a single roll or description beyond just that: “We toss the place.” We do however, in great detail, spend game time operating the tavern we own, talking to NPC’s, investigating clues we find, doing research at libraries and colleges, mobilizing our contacts, interacting with the world socially and generally advancing the plot(s). This game is rich with not only the main plot but also several inter-related subplots as well as dozens upon dozens of fleshed out NPC’s, gangs and other organizations so the one thing we never, ever do is spend valuable game time bickering with DM over whether and how we handled some specific object in precisely the correct fashion needed to reveal a thing.
The other DM is quite the opposite. We rarely do much other than have the rogue describing how he searches a room, tries to find a trap, how he disable the traps he finds and other pointless minutiae (while the rest of the group sits passively BTW). To paraphrase one particularly egregious instance: “You looked over, under, behind and between the statues; you wiggled every possible appendage, pushed on every part of the statue that could be a button, tried to rotate them, tried to move them forward and back as well as side to side but oops, you didn’t say you tilted them so sorry, after about a half hour of game time back and forth with the DM, you didn’t find the lever that reveals your loot…haha roll initiative because the ghouls were alerted by your fruitless messing about.” None of this ever seems to move the plot along. In fact, there is not much plot in that game at all, definitely no B plot or any kind of subplots. We move from combat to combat and spend the rest of the time playing gotcha with the DM, who seems to delight in getting us for not saying the exactly correct things to avoid said gotcha. We have gone several sessions without actually speaking to anyone. There have been entire sessions where my character (by virtue of being not-the-rogue) has done nothing at all other than watch the rogue try to do his thing.
I’m afraid that by my descriptions it’s painfully obvious which method I prefer. Frankly, if math-rocking in combat alone was not enough and I didn’t like the fellas in the group on a personal level so much, there’s no way I’d still be “playing” the second game. As Linklite (I do believe) alluded to: the dice rolling allows skipping the pointless bickering over minutiae in order to get on with really playing the game. I have been playing for over forty years. I spent a lot of time playing within the pointless bickering paradigm that more or less describes old school play and I simply do not understand how anyone is so enamoured of it. All the players are telling a story together, not trying to outsmart the one player at the table with all the information along with boundless tools and power at their disposal. Furthermore, if my success in the game is dependent on the abilities I have as the player, why do I have a character at all? If there is no way to portray a character as smarter/dumber or wiser/more rash or more/less socially capable than I am through dice rolls, what even is the point of Int, Wis and Cha in the game? I’m just playing myself over and over again, aren’t I?
There are several things that make the skill necessary:
Investigation (and other skills) exist to close these gaps. They can toss the room, or search for secret doors, or examine the murder scene, or do research in the library, and the DM can sum up what their characters have learned or found. The decision to do so still rests on the players, and they presumably decide because of roleplaying reasons.
Mysteries and puzzles generally get kind of weird and often don't really work in RPGs, because you usually end up making the players solve them with their brains and their real-world knowledge. The sort of puzzles that would actually exist in-world would often rely on world-building detail that even the DM is unlikely to have thought about. Making things the players can solve will often have to break verisimilitude.
What if I'm not very good at making logical deductions, drawing connections between disparate clues, or noticing patterns? Am I now prohibited from playing characters that are? What if my fantasy is to play a Sherlock Holmes-esque character? Is that out of my reach?
Is the same true of other skills in the game? Do I need to be an Olympic gymnast to play a monk? Should I memorize the Forgotten Realms wiki before I try and play a wizard with grand historical knowledge. I dread to think what expectations are placed upon me if I want to play a character competent at arcana....
Sardonic absurdities aside, I would hope I've pressed upon you the importance of skills in D&D? They enable the fantasy the game is built upon. Few people want to play characters shackled by their own real life limitations, so I'm not sure why Investigation would be an exception to this?
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