Stop Antagonizing Your GM with this One Simple Trick: Action Adjudication

I was fortunate, before beginning my GMing career, to read the advice of the Angry GM, whose writing I have found to be reliably insightful and clear. I know some who dislike his disagreeable faux-swearing schtick, but that's actually a style I'm very attracted to.

One of his rules, which I read years ago but only realized the full importance of recently, was this: When the GM asks, 'What do you do,' players either ask questions or declare actions. None of these involve rolling a die out of the blue or invoking the name of a particular skill. 

That's the action adjudication process. Set the scene, the players decide how their characters act, GM determines the outcomes of those actions, calling for rolls and clarifications as needed.

There are exceptions which prove the rule: in combat, if you know you can attack a certain creature, you can go ahead and roll with the declaration. But in most other scenarios, especially outside combat, you want to follow this.

Here's how things should go:

GM: You come to wooden door at the end of the hallway.

Thief: Is it locked?

GM: It isn't, the handle gives under your hand.

or

GM: It is, you can't shift the handle.

or

GM: The handle gives under your grasp, but the door doesn't budge.

The first scenario, the door is just a an opportunity to provide information, say by noises beyond or details on the door itself, and provides a decision point, whether to proceed or not. I find that providing new information and a decision point together moves the game well.

In the middle scenario, the door can still provide information, but now the decision is different. It's not, 'do we proceed or not?' It's, 'do we spend time trying to lockpick this, risk an encounter by breaking it down, or just leave it be?' There are now questions of resource management (time, risk) involved in the decision.

In the latter scenario, this may mean that the door is Held or Wizard Locked, or that it's barricaded from the other side. In either case, the typical options of lockpicking or kicking the door are unavailable. The party would have to rely on greater resource expenditure (Knock, or if that's unavailable, Dispel Magic). 

In all of these, the adjudication process has gone smoothly, and what remains is player choice.

Here's how the process shouldn't go:

GM: You come to wooden door at the end of the hallway.

Thief: *rolls dice* 23! That's under my Open Locks score, it's open.

GM: ...

In this case, the thief got it into his fool head that, first, the door was locked, second, that it could be unlocked, and third, that there was no possible modifier to his Open Locks score. 

If the truth is in the first scenario, then this is all unnecessary, because no roll was needed. If the truth is in the second, then what the Thief says may well be true, but in doing so has gone over the GM's head. In the third scenario, the roll was also unnecessary, and has no effect. 

The correct response from the GM in all the above scenarios is to invalidate the roll, remind the player about the rule, and return to play. If the second scenario turns out to be true, and the reroll does not succeed where the first roll would have, tough shit. No, you can't use the first roll.

That said, I haven't had this trouble in my S&W Castle Xyntillan game. Truth be told, I can't vividly recall any instance of this there, and can't confirm it's occurred at all.

In my 5e game though... whew.

This is how it often goes in 5e:

GM: While traveling through the mountains, you come across a wide gorge in your path.

PC: *rolls dice* 17 Athletics, I jump over the gorge.

GM: FFS not again...

The above example may be a problem in a few ways. Maybe the GM imagined a huge, 50' gorge, while the player imagined a more manageable gap. 'Wide' isn't very particular, and while the player should ask for the distance, the argument could be made that the GM should include that sort of info by default to avoid redundant questions. Or perhaps someone will come into the comments and insist that jumping over the gorge is an Acrobatics roll, not an Athletics roll.

Regardless, the core offense here is the violation of the adjudication process. Perhaps the gorge was small, and it could be jumped without a roll. Or perhaps it's too wide to be jumped, and magic, or a time consuming climb, or a jury-rigged bridge, or a wholesale reroute are necessary. Or maybe the roll would have been appropriate. But because it was done without adequate declaration, it doesn't count for anything.

In 5e, there's a further error; the GM gave no DC (difficulty class) for the roll to beat. In S&W with the Thief's abilities, the thresholds are at least implicit, with modifiers to them being rarer. But in 5e, DCs are part of the core resolution mechanic for everything! There's no excuse for that!

Of course, this can get a lot worse. For example:

GM: While traveling through the mountains, you come across a wide gorge in your path.

PC 1: *rolls dice* 17 Athletics, I jump over the gorge.

GM: Wait, you have to-

PC 2: *rolls dice* Sweet I make it too!

PCs 3-5: *do the same*

GM: *drinks away the sadness*

Sometimes this will all cascade, and a misinterpretation will be accepted by the rest of the party at light speed. And much worse is the player who rolls a die, and then declares his action if the roll was high, but insists there was no reason for the roll otherwise. And legendarily bad is the same player who hides the die as soon as it is rolled, and tells everyone else what was rolled without letting anyone see.

Now, in my own game, I made the rule explicit before the first session, though I have to remind players about it, especially when they use racial or class abilities I don't recall. Still, the explicit rolling without declaration is a rare issue, and the worse varieties haven't shown up.

But one variety of this behavior has made itself known.

It has nothing to do with rolling, or even with the action adjudication system proper. Rather, it's when a player runs with their interpretation of a particular element of the environment, and discusses it with the party without asking questions or declaring an action, so that the GM can't easily correct a misunderstanding.

An actual example from my last game, yet to be written up. The party came across the lodge of a dead frost giant, and the giant's hacked-up corpse entombed in transparent ice.

A few misunderstandings arose here, in part from my lack of description. Some players speculated if the giant would awaken if they broke the ice, if it was really dead, since they didn't realize its body was hacked into pieces. Then, the party got it in their heads that there must be treasure inside.

Now, as the GM, I know there isn't any treasure in there. Maybe there should be; having the entombed body of a frost giant with no treasure to recover may be a missed opportunity; but in any, case here that isn't the case. And I previously described the ice as transparent, so the player characters should be able to definitively see that there is no treasure inside. But the lust for treasure clouded the player's minds, and they got on to a discussion of how, when and who to break open the ice. It took the better part of a minute to get them all to understand that, no, there was no treasure. 

This is exacerbated by the tendency in this group to talk over each other and me. I think this is an issue of voice-based play and a difference in server culture. The times I've run games for people off the OSR server, there's an opposite tendency to leave dead air for others to speak. Also, not being able to see when others are going to speak is another reason in-person play is preferable to online. We make do with what we have. 

I'm collecting all my thoughts on the system and its pros and cons. One definite con is widespread bad habits among the player base. Whether this is because the player base is larger and composed in large part of new and more casual players, while the OSR scene is composed of many more people deep in the weeds of gaming, I don't know. But it does seem that you're more likely to have these difficulties picking up 5e players than OSR players. 

I really liked working with brand new players (so long as they're old enough and the environment works). Beautiful souls uncorrupted by bad habits instilled by other GMs. I heard a former Army sniper instructor express the same sentiment about recruits. Am I saying that TTRPGs are comparable to sharpshooting? Yes.

Still, I can do some good by beating the bad habits out of them and making the rules explicit. So if your GM looks like he's about to blow a gasket, try this one simple trick: ask instead of acting on information you don't have, and don't roll without a GM call first. 

Music recommendation: Todd LaTorre's new single, Darkened Majesty. 

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