When a player fails a skill check, is that final? Can she try again? Also, if there is no immediate feedback, does she know how well her attempt went? I try to deal with all these questions in this article. Something to consider for your game is whether or not your players get to know what the difficulty of a skill check is and if they get to roll it themselves. If they roll it themselves, they might know how well it went, even though their characters don’t. As an example, getting a total of 5 on a Thievery check to look for traps might not find any at all, and the player will know and want to try again. Instead, you could have rolled for him and said “You look, but don’t notice any traps on the door’. Then, you laugh inside you when everybody is surprised by the trap they didn’t detect. On the other hand, in real life, you sometimes know how well you did. And last, but not least, your players might want to size up challenges and ask, do I think I can do it? Read on for my 2 cents…
How well did the attempt go? – “Did I make it?”
For physical challenges, there is no need to keep it a secret. The character will know how long he jumped or if he’s able swim in that armor. For the other cases, being social-, knowledge- and handycraft – challenges, I suggest a new roll with a bonus based on how well trained the character is in the relevant skill.
On the roll to see how well an attempt went, add his skill check bonus twice (add the ability modifier only once). If the result of this roll is 50% or less than the target value for success, the player doesn’t know, it could have gone either way. If it’s 50-75%, he knows he probably (didn’t) do good enough, at 90% or more, he’s pretty certain how it went. There is also the chance that he makes an error when estimating his success. If the roll is in the low 20% or so, consider telling him the opposite of what is true!
Sizing up the challenge… – “Can I do it?”
When it comes to knowledge-based skill checks, the character of course knows immediately if he has the piece of information or not. For other challenges, here’s how to size up a challenge.
Just like in the previous case, we do another roll with a bonus to determine how certain the character is he can do it. Only this time, he doesn’t get to add the relevant ability modifier, instead he adds the higher of his wisdom and intelligence modifier.
For example, Johnno the barbarian sizes up a challenge, an endurance check of 24 in difficulty. He has a skill check bonus of 12, 8 (trained) + 4 (abilty), and a +1 to wisdom and -1 to intelligence. His bonus becomes 8+8+1 = 17. With a roll of 9, he gets a total of 26, which lands him in at more than a 100%. You know his skill check bonus is 10, and that he’ll therefore ordinarily get a 20 on these rolls (average is 10.5 for a d20 die), which means he’ll fail more than half the time. You tell him that “It looks possible, but risky”.
How to phrase this to the player can be a bit tricky. Here are some examples.
- This is easy (or hard)
- You’ve no clue, it could go either way
- This is close to the limits of what you can do
- Impossible, not gonna happen
- Highly unlikely that you will succeed
- Possible, but (a bit|very) risky
The character’s personality plays a role here too, is he over-confident or under-condifent?
Is another attempt possible? – “Can I try again?”
Knowledge checks: No, not unless you bring some new, relevant knowledge to the table, like a book.
Social checks: Yes, usually you can, at a penalty. This penalty should increase with each failed attempt, for example, -4, -8, -16, -32. The penalty should be especially high if the character failed his first attempt badly.
Physical checks: Yes, almost always. Obviously, you can’t try to jump across the cliff again if you fell down and are laying there with broken bones and can’t get up 
Handycraft checks: Sometimes it’s just too tough, but consider giving the player one reroll if the player agrees to spend some time (10 minutes, a day, a week) to try again more slowly, especially if he’s trying a new approach.
Tags: Rules
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