Quote:
Originally Posted by Skarg
I guess I've never seen the mindlessly rolling dice for two hours thing, nor a GM letting people re-roll dice over and over but insist they do it.
It seems to me players are supposed to roleplay when their characters don't find something. And the GM can describe situations where the PCs fail to find things as if there is nothing there. ITL mentions up to two or three rolls to spot something, and also mentions the principle of making repeated attempts to do something harder. So it seems to me if people are wasting lots of time rolling to spot things, someone's probably doing something a bit off.
Framing situations with meaningful choices with different sorts of consequences makes sense.
And again, if the GM doesn't want there to be a situation where something might not be found, they probably shouldn't make it hidden so that it might not be found. No one says anything has to be hidden. It's also perfectly valid to say something is hidden but searching will eventually find it and it's just a matter of when and by whom, or they can decide that doesn't even matter and just say "the group finds [the thing] after looking for a bit".
But if you do want a game where something is hidden, and you do want it to be possible that it won't be found, it seems to me ITL presents a fairly reasonable system for doing that.
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Honestly, I've never seen it (or DONE it), but I HAVE heard stories where this has happened. Whether they are true or not, I don't know. The point I was trying to make though is to not be a slave to the rules. The rules are there as a guideline to enable you to run a more or less coherent fantasy game and resolve certain actions in a consistent way; not to be slavishly followed down in flames, though sometimes it seems like that's what some folks want to do...
There are two ways that I personally handle the issue of "hidden, not found, key to adventure" and that is; 1) use the Three Clue Rule; and 2) use the rolls to determine not success vs. failure, but rather DEGREE of success; you rolled a fail, so you find out SOME of what you needed to know or find a clue to where the bijou REALLY is -- something that means you still have some work to do. So you rolled a catastrophic failure, you found the bijou but you also found the GUARDIAN of the bijou...or it found YOU. Both 1) and 2) give you some options to run with...without either spending a week searching, or derailing the entire adventure.