I’ve got a question about character knowledge and the Assess the Situation move. When a player uses Assess the Situation, how much do you take the character’s personal knowledge into account?
Last night my group was facing a highly advanced alien robotic lifeform. Our Delinquent, who is 100% human, has a low level of education, and has never been to space or dealt with anything more advanced than a smart phone rolled to Assess and decided to ask how to break this super advanced cage made by the super advanced alien robot. She rolled an 11 and I didn’t really want to say “you have no idea”, cause she had a good roll, so I ended up waffling some response that honestly sounded like BS to me.
But at the same time, the team does have an alien (the Outsider) and a cybernetically enhanced person (the Transformed) who would have had knowledge relevant to this particular question. And I was a little sad to not give them the opportunity to use it for this particular obstacle.
Should I have stuck to my first instinct, which was to say “you have no idea” and give the other two members the opportunity to put their knowledge to use? Or is it better to reward the player for a successful roll, even if it requires a bit of a stretch?
Ideally, “you have no idea” should have come before any roll. [I have to repeat to myself often, ‘fiction first’ when MCing.] Holding a pair of dice does not give the character any power, doing something in-game does. In after-the-fact damage control mode, I would have went with the BS as well. But, we as MCs need to remind the players that “what do you do?” does not mean roll the dice. 🙂
PS: My next favorite question has become, “what does that look like?”.
Actually, I would ask how they are assessing it and use that to determine your answer.
My instinct would have been to Say “Ask [Name of Outsider or Transformed] for help, They know more about this than you do and they very likly can get you out of this if you just admit that.” If the Delinquent does ask and their teammate decides to humor them with a quick check tell them that; “Upon being asked you take one more seemingly futile glance arond, as you did when you were first thrown in here, but now you realize a glaring flaw in the Cage’s security system! It’s so ludicrously simple to exploit, that you had not considered it possible your captors could have left you alone with such a Flaw, thus you had not noticed it prior!” Then if they act on that flaw Either don’t make them roll for it, or give them a +2 forward.
This way you reward the roll of the Delinquent, acknowledge the character knowlage, and you set up a Potential character bonding moment all at once. Hope this helps.
Yeah, once you allowed them to roll the dice for this, you can’t just punish them for failure and provide nothing for a success..
Once they rolled the 11, you have to give them information they can use that makes sense for them to realize.
Here’s how I’d likely do it: “This looks just like the cage used in a. You’re guessing it has the same weaknesses.”
There is some excellent advice here. One thing I really agree with though is “once the dice hit the table, you must give the player everything their roll entitles them to.” You can’t play gotcha, and you can’t back out of an answer.
Assessing the situation doesn’t just have to mean being an expert about it. It means using your senses and your experience, too. So answer their questions, but from their point of view. “What is the biggest weakness?” “Well, you don’t understand half the technology, though your alien friend probably would, but it doesn’t take a super-genius to recognize that there’s a big cable plugged into a power source. You’re guessing it can be unplugged like anything else.”
“Oh, sure. This is like the thing that $Outsider and $Cyborg talked about the other day…”
Thanks for the advice, everyone! So, is the consensus is to have them pick which question they want to ask before they actually roll to assess? Because my players have just been asking if they can roll to assess the situation, and then after seeing their result they pick their question (or questions). There were a lot of things the Delinquent could have asked in this situation, it was just that particular question I had trouble with.
Well, no. I wouldn’t have the player ask the question(s) first as the dice roll determines how many questions they get.
What people are saying is that you, the GM, can ask questions before the player rolls the dice. Questions like: “How would you know what to look for?” and “Is this something your character knows about?”
Once you’ve decided that the Assess a Situation move triggers, you have to honestly answer any and all questions the player gets to ask.
What I would do in this case is tell the person “you don’t know why or how, but every 5 to 10 seconds something seems to shift back into position inside the case. It might be important, perhaps the outsider can benefit from this info” or something along this lines.
Todd Zircher great advice!