Reroll abilities and RP

[ben-zayb]

What abstraction would a character have when OOC he rolled a 1 on a reflex save, and how would he know that he failed?

And how do you guys RP something like rerolls due to luck/feat/spell? How would one get an insight that his allies are doomed to failed their reflex saves from that fireball? If he ever gets a premonition, can he then take other actions that would save his comrades instead (such as immediate action spells)?

[Kelb_Panthera]

Rerolls are entirely within the metagame. They don't really require rp at all. If the reroll is fluffed as the result of some sort of insight or premonition, (how many of those are there anyway?) then the rp is still unnecessary if you assume it comes too close to the actual event to do anything other than react slightly differently, ie dodge a little further to the left than you were going to.

[Cespenar]

If it's a particularly dramatic moment, you can play it as the player first living the "failed save" version of reality, facing death/defeat, and then time loops back to the moment of the save, revealing that it was just one option - one version of reality. Then, with that knowledge, the player acts the tiniest bit different - dodges left instead of right, etc. and makes the save.

[supermonkeyjoe]

Depends on the source of the re-roll, if it was a luck based one I could imagine it would be something like: Here comes the fireball I dodge out of the way *natural 1* oops I stumbled *reroll and make the save* conveniently stumbling away from the worst of the damage.

Divine sourced re-rolls could take the form of some kind of divine intervention, a heavenly beam breaking through the clouds to shield the character or a glowing aura protecting them.

Some spell re-rolls could be roleplayed by the spell taking effect initially but the character shaking it off a moment later, breaking their way out of petrification, or shaking off the enchantment by remembering something incredibly poignant or emotional (cue flashback montage)

[The Dark Fiddler]

A game I recently found, called Enter the Shadowside, has a similar mechanic built into the core game, in that each character has Belief Points that they can use to alter rolls. It suggests that if a player uses them to succeed on a roll they otherwise would have failed on they get a quick glimpse of what would have happened had they been a bit less lucky, and I like that idea. It also suggests that doing this often enough will eventually lead to mental scars as you come close to dying a bit too often, and this idea works too, in some types of games.

[jackattack]

A character knows that he has failed a roll when he is consumed by white-hot flames, or falls into a pit, or whatever the immediate consequences of failure are.

When the failed roll has no immediate consequences, like a knowledge or professional or possibly even a craft skill, the character may well not know.

Especially with a critical failure. After all, what is worse than being completely wrong but believing that one is completely right?

I'd say play it straight. Treat your wrong answer, or botched craft, or professional misjudgment, as if it is a complete success. Defend your result when it is challenged. Require proof before you acknowledge the possibility of failure. This doesn't have to be arrogant, just certain.

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On rerolls.

In a "cinematic-style" game that allowed re-rolls, we ruled that each re-roll was a camera/editing trick that replayed the critical moment once for each roll. Used to great effect when I blew every re-roll I had breaking through a wooden wall to surprise a guard.

The funny thing is, sometimes a well-roleplayed failure can be more interesting, or better for the game, than a re-rolled success.