this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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I've never actually played, so this might be standard practice anyway, but I think this would be a great time to have the DM roll privately for each player and not tell them if they passed or failed. If the players only know what their character saw (and not if they pass or fail the check, or even get an idea based on the roll) then metagaming is impossible. This could produce a situation where it's just a dog but the paladin thinks they saw a monster because they failed the roll, or it could be the other way around.
Doing it with DM-only rolls ensures the players have to actually figure out what they saw rather than knowing based on what they rolled or if they passed.
As I said, this could be standard practice, I have no idea. But I hope it is.
Most DMs do hide at least some pass/fail rolls from the players. The best is when you ask your players to make a perception check, and then smile and say they see nothing out of the ordinary without telling them if they passed or failed.
Some games explicitly encourage this. Pathfinder 2e for example has Secret rolls, which the GM does on behalf of the player so that they do not know their numerical total and must act solely on the result provided by the GM.
In this situation one of the players is going to immediately describe to the others what he saw, so it isn't really a secret. It does make the player who got the image describe it to the people who didn't see it though, which is a nice little bit of roleplaying.
Secret rolls are a thing when it's appropriate. You try and work out whether someone's lying to you, you shouldn't know how high the roll was.
The player could describe what they saw, but nobody except the GM knows if it's true.
It's equally plausible that the paladin failed the check and saw a monster when there was only a dog, or that they passed the check and saw a monster because there was in fact a monster. Their argument to the party would be the same in either case: "that's no dog, it's a ~~space station~~ monster".
The party then must question who saw the correct thing. Did the paladin actually see something everyone else missed? Or are they just seeing things? My point was that the players should not immediately be able to discern the truth. I find that this kind of uncertainty breeds intrigue!