Cryptochecks Meta-Check Knowledge -- and What to Do about It
Dice image by SaeKawaii. CC0. Public Domain.
The party has arrived at a massive stone arch, through which only darkness can be viewed. A single fire rune appears on the keystone of the arch.
Hemlock (Rogue): Before we step through the arch, I check for traps.
GM: Roll an Investigation check.
Hemlock rolls a natural 1. The party groans.
GM: You are confident that the arch is completely safe.
Hemlock (Rogue): Okay guys. Looks safe.
Everyone hesitates.
Mina (Paladin, party leader): So, uh … Who who wants to go first?
No one, of course.
They are all pretty sure there’s a trap, thanks to meta-game knowledge from seeing the die roll, and how the GM interpreted the roll that they all saw.
Now someone has to pick up the idiot ball and stick his or her head through the archway. Which can be fun, and some groups are mature enough that players will cheerfully go with the dice. But not all groups have the luxury of such players. In other groups, players will cross the metagaming Rubicon and act like they have new, good reasons to keep checking for that trap that they all know is there.
Unsurprisingly, this kind of meta-tell has frustrated many GMs, particularly newer ones. A Reddit thread on the Behind the Screen subreddit asked for — and received — a lot of good input. Some points from that thread are worth repeating before I get to my own solution:
- Having the GM roll in advance or in secret deprives players of a lot of the thrill of playing a tabletop game. Rolling dice and seeing the results interpreted is part of the fun.
- Telling players what they have to do to avoid metagaming (someone now has to walk through that arch) deprives players of agency.
- Such situations can often be avoided if success is automatically awarded for asking the right questions or poking the right spots.
All good points, but let’s see if we can solve the problem.
I call the solution I am proposing the cryptocheck. It borrows some of the wisdom of point #3 above but retains the die-rolling.
The basic idea behind the cryptocheck is that the GM initiates three different kinds of simultaneous skill resolutions and then only uses one of them, depending on which conditions apply to the situation. Because the players cannot know which method resolved the challenge, they gain little-to-no out-of-character knowledge.
One of the three elements in the cryptocheck calls for role-playing — never a bad thing — and the other two are both simple die rolls that take place at exactly the same time. Thus, in practice, the cryptocheck turns out to be both simple and intuitive, even if at first glance it might seem complicated.
When to Use a Cryptocheck
Use this check when…
- A player action calls for an INT or WIS check.
- And the rest of the party should remain uncertain even after seeing the die roll.
Steps for the Cryptocheck
The cryptocheck process, visualized. Diagram by Graham Robert Scott.
- Set Conditions for Automatic Success. Decide on a specific action or approach that the PC might take, during this check, that would result in automatic success.
- Ask for Specifics. How does the PC check the arch for traps? What details does the PC focus on for that Arcana check? Where exactly does the PC look for that Perception check?
- Initiate Two Die Rolls.
- Have the player roll a check, just as he or she normally would.
- At the same time, roll a d20 of your own.
- Resolve the Check.
- Did the PC meet your conditions for automatic success? If so, describe that success and ignore all of the dice.
- Is there anything for the PC to learn? If not, then use your hidden die roll and the PC’s modifiers to determine what happens. (If the hidden result was low, false information may result.) Ignore whatever the player rolled.
- If there’s something to find and the success wasn’t automatic, use the player’s die roll to determine what happens.
How It Looks in Play
When you use cryptochecks, the party will have no idea how confident to be if …
In the bullets to the left, I’m using extremes of 1s and 20s just for illustrative purposes. Cryptochecks work for results of 2-19, too, of course. In fact, I highly recommend blending Cryptochecks with a gradient-success approach to Intelligence and Wisdom checks, like the one I described in this earlier article on how cognitive science can help improve your game, and using it in skill-challenge systems like breakthroughs-and-setbacks. These three articles are all interlocking parts of a skill-check approach designed to make knowledge and skill both more realistic and more fun for players.
- Hemlock rolls a 1 and says he found no traps. After all, if there weren’t any traps, then you used your hidden die roll, not his 1. For all they know, he’s confident there aren’t any traps because there really aren’t any, and you secretly rolled a 20.
- Hemlock rolls a 20 and says he found a nasty fire trap. If there weren’t any traps, then you used your own hidden die roll, which might have been a 1. It’s still possible he’s imagining things.
- Hemlock rolls a 1 and says he found a nasty fire trap, connected to that rune-marked keystone. If he specified that he was inspecting it for magical triggers and drawing on his Arcana knowledge to think about all of the possible meanings of the fire rune — fire trap, or a warning to bring fire with you upon entering? — then it’s always possible that he met the conditions for automatic success.
No matter what happens, a bystander has to consider more than one possible interpretation. Knowing what the player rolled isn’t enough, by itself.
Needless to say, the automatic success element is essential to this approach. In order for players to accept what Hemlock says after rolling a “1,” there has to be a chance that the “1” was ignored because the player said the right thing.
Indeed, if you’re going to use cryptochecks, you have to tell players how they work. They need to know that there are conditions for automatic success and that if there’s nothing to learn, you’ll be using whatever you rolled behind the screen. And it may take them a check or two to grasp why they no longer can be certain they know what’s happening just because they know what their buddy rolled. But once they get it, that old “meta-tell” hobgoblin that has so long haunted your gaming table will be largely neutralized.
It’s possible that the party might try spamming you with lots of redundant checks — maybe everyone will attempt checks on that archway (if they don’t already!) just so they can triangulate and work out what your conditions are. This isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s fairly normal in real life for several people to all look at the same thing and then argue over what they saw until they reach a consensus. As they sort through conflicting results, it’ll be a lot like real collaboration.
But in general, as a strategy, spamming the cryptocheck isn’t going to work out as wonderfully as they will initially assume….
Hemlock (Rogue): Before we step through the arch, I check for traps.
GM: Sure thing. Give me some specifics. What do you do?
Hemlock (Rogue): I check the two stones on either side of the base of the arch, the floor in front of the archway and directly under the archway, and the keystone with the rune.
GM: And how do you check them? Are you going to poke them, or touch them in any way?
Hemlock (Rogue): Uh, no. Not yet. I’ll just make a visual inspection for now, looking for gaps between stones, signs of movement, like where maybe two stones have rubbed against each other. Patterns of disturbance in the dust. Stuff like that.
GM: Gotcha. Roll an Investigation check.
The GM rolls behind the screen as Hemlock rolls a natural 1. The other party members all hold their breath. Was there anything to find? Did he meet the automatic success conditions?
GM: You are confident that the arch is completely safe.
Hemlock (Rogue): Well, guys. Looks safe to me.
Mina (Paladin, party leader): Maybe our dwarf might want to check, too?
Siggurn (Dwarven combat engineer): I check all of the same things that Hemlock checked.
Again, the GM rolls. Siggurn rolls an 18.
GM: You’re pretty sure the keystone rune is a magical trap that will blast you with fire if you don’t speak a command word first prior to entering the archway.
Paranoid enough to believe the worst, the party spends considerable time trying to disarm the trap before discovering that Hemlock was right all along — there is no trap. It was Siggurn who was mistaken: There was nothing to find, and the GM had rolled a 1 for him.
Meanwhile, in the time they’ve wasted, the drow patrols have found them again…†
♦ Graham Robert Scott writes regularly for Ludus Ludorum when not teaching or writing scholarly stuff. Graham has also written a Dungeon Magazine city adventure titled “Thirds of Purloined Vellum” and a fantasy novella titled Godfathom. Like the Ludus on Facebook to get a heads-up when we publish new content.
Great Suggestion. I like this versus the usual roll and find success.
Clever idea. I like it.
This is really great. Thanks! This has always been an issue and I think you’ve found a great solution.
The passive check solves the issue.
Passive checks are great for a lot of things, I agree. And they work in the above situations, too. But they have … some notably different impacts on game play. They don’t encourage uncertainty or suspense very well. They don’t let players roll actively at a challenge. (Players like to roll.)
And because you are designing the scenario for adventurers of their level (presumably), any DC you set for that passive check ends up really being a GM fiat decision about whether or not particular PCs will succeed. If I set that passive Investigation DC at 15, and only one PC in the party can possibly meet it, then I have basically decided that that character can learn something if he or she asks the right question in the right spot. I’ve also decided, by fiat, that no other character has a chance at it.
That’s fine, of course, but it isn’t really a check anymore.
The passive DC is generally best for situations in which the GM is rolling against the PC. Stealth vs. passive Perception being the classic example. If you want to roll the trap-designer’s trap-making skill against the PC’s passive Perception, that’s certainly one way to do it. But I’m not seeing much evidence on discussion boards or Reddit (or at tables) that many GMs are doing things that way. (I’m hedging: I haven’t seen any GMs do it that way, not with established obstacles or situations in which there was nothing to find. They always have the PC roll something.)
For those GMs — though perhaps not for you — this is one way to do things. You’re certainly welcome not to use it, though.
Online game tables solve this issue by using hidden rolls. The player rolls the dice, but only the DM sees the result. The same can be achieved at a table by using a dice tower with the results only visible to the DM.
This way, the player gets to roll, but the result is only known to the DM, who can then use RP to display the results, or even ignore the die roll if the RP is good enough to overcome.