Goose, devil, mental
17?
Let me suggest that it is inappropriate for you to attempt to crack that code, at least openly. I know that it is tempting to attempt to figure out what the roll is, but when he codes it, it's obviously a hidden roll which of he expects the player to be unaware. He uses those notes so that he will be able to remember the roll later when it matters. If you crack the code, you make his job harder--he must either save the rolls somewhere else for reference or invent a harder code.
Since the code is not part of the game, please accept that when he posts coded reminders for himself they're not for you to decode.
Of course. The first roll was a 75, which succeeded. That doesn't change the fact that this time, you failed; 01 would have been a failure.
If the player knows something is wrong by rolling the dice, would the character have that knowledge too?
How is the knowledge from player translate to the action of the character and vice versa?
The assumption is that whether you succeed of fail at any skill, you're going to have some sense of whether it was or was not difficult. That is, sometimes you will roll a low number that fails and your player sense will be, "that should have worked." In the same context, your character sense would be very similar, "I did that right, why didn't it work?" You might feel that the world was biased against you--in the literal, not the mechanical, sense, that this was a world in which psionics were tougher. Similarly, you might roll a high roll and have it succeed, and your feeling then might be, "that was easy; things work well here." If the low roll succeeded, it would tell you less; if the high roll failed, it would also tell you less. The successful low roll would tell you that the skill is possible in this world at least sometimes; the failed high roll would tell you that the skill doesn't work every time.
We let players know the rolls because it conveys more information than the more difficult effort of communicating the feeling. That is, if you roll a successful 40 I'm going to tell you that you got a good strong result, and if you rolled a failed 40 I'm going to tell you that it didn't work but you thought it ought to have, but the first description does not tell you that the bias really isn't that strong and, say, a 50 would have failed, and the second does not tell you that a 30 might have worked. Knowledge of the 40 gives you as a player a mathematical handle on what does or does not work numerically, and you as a character a sense for how strong the bias "feels".
And Scott's inclusion of a die roll when the chance of success is non-existent is exactly how I would do it at the table. I don't do it in my forum games because if you want to see the die rolls you have to look behind the screens where I also post the chance of success, so you'll know the roll was irrelevant when you look for it.
--M. J. Young
