In my experience, it should be noted, what such players are looking for is often not the solution what they are looking for is an action. On the other side of the screen, a player-initiated Idea roll is generally more viable: This is basically the players sending up an emergency flare and saying, “We’re lost! Please send help!” To return to our analogy of the video game walkthrough, this is the player who has been stymied to the point where they’re no longer having fun and just want to be able to move on in the game. Therefore you should not be rolling to see whether or not they get it. In which case, you shouldn’t be rolling the dice because failure is not actually an option: You need to give them information. Second, they ARE stuck and definitely need help to get unstuck. Well, there are two possibilities:įirst, they’re not actually stuck, in which case you don’t need to use an Idea roll.
What about run-time Idea rolls? In other words, you’re currently running the session, you can see that the players are irreparably stuck, and you need to fix the problem. Saying, “I need an Idea roll here,” is basically saying, “I have designed a scenario where the players are going to get stuck here.” Instead of prepping an Idea roll, figure out some way to redesign the scenario so that the players won’t get stuck there. If you’re a GM prepping a scenario and you come to a place where you think an Idea roll will be necessary, that’s a really clear sign that you need to DO BETTER.
A GM-initiated Idea roll, though, is often more like having an obnoxious friend sitting with you who’s played the game before and simply WILL NOT shut up and let you play the game for yourself. The basic function of the Idea roll is essentially like using a walkthrough in a video game: You don’t know what to do, so you have to consult a guide that can get you past the point where you’re stuck. For example, if the players are talking about how they can get an audience with a casino owner, the GM might call for an Idea roll and say, “You could disguise yourselves as high rollers.” Or when the PCs stumble onto a bloodstained altar in the center of a stone circle, the GM might call for an Idea roll and then say, “You could try putting that idol you found earlier on the altar!”Įven in games that lack a specific mechanic like this, you may see similar techniques improvised (usually with some form of Intelligence check). There are some obvious problems with that, too, but what I’m interested in right now is the far more common technique of using the Idea roll to tell players what they “should” be doing. Let me start by explaining what I’m talking about: In Call of Cthulhu, an Idea roll “represents hunches and the ability to interpret the obvious.” In some of the older scenarios published for the game, this roll would actually be used to prevent players from having their characters take certain courses of action because the character wouldn’t know to do them - sort of aggressively preventing player expertise form trumping character expertise. Here’s my random tip for using Idea rolls as a GM:
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