Quote Originally Posted by Pleh View Post
I don't think I would ever take away roll from my players.

Rolling their own dice they bought with their own money is a rather integral part of the experience for my group.

For specific cases where I want to avoid metagaming, I find the most success by dealing with the metagame in my DM prep. I'm treating the question as generally referring specifically to perception skills, but it should apply to most knowledge (thus meta knowledge) skills.



Wheb prepping, I find a common DM impulse to gamify everything that *could* be described with a skill check as a check, both/either because we want to honor the rules, and/or because it isn't much of a game if everything hidden is trivial or impossible to find.

But I feel I run better games when I let this half baked flow chart help me verify that the skill check in question makes sense to run as an actual check.

When it turns out I shouldn't be making this content into a check, but want to preserve the game of rolling dice for the players, that's when I can start exploring how to change my plot to *make it* into a logical skill check. How can I make my trivial content nontrivial to find? How can I make the impossible content actually accessible? Is the entire idea just rubbish and should I move on or replace it with a better idea?
I like this thought process immensely. I've done similar things and it's always worked well.