Very useful and structured advice, direct to the point. Excelent video!

Great video! Concise and useful 👍

This is good advice to keep in mind for the puzzle-based dungeon I want to design, thanks!

bom vídeo !

I used to make this mistake a lot but now I usually manage things better. When a player fails an important roll, often they still succeed the task but take damage, waste time, or make a loud noise, depending on the context of the roll.

Oh, this is pretty good advice! Gonna hit that subscribe button. I wish your channel good tidings :)

Action RPG video games have a great model for this sort of thing. They'll often have sprawling end-game cut scenes and an array of NPC & universe outcomes that hinge upon players accomplishing certain tasks throughout the entirety of the game. It highlights that the "consequences" of a failed check/adventure don't have to be immediate, and they don't even have to be related to that specific check or adventure. And I think that works particularly well when it comes to these sorts of challenges and obstacles for vital clues or passageways. You can still have skill checks, puzzles, and other "game" elements, and you can still have those game elements mean something to the story, but it doesn't have to be felt in the moment. The scene can play out exactly the same whether they pass a certain check or not. The players don't need to know that because of that failed roll, when they get back to town and hear about an orc attack on a nearby village, now it's ALL the children being carried off, instead of just one. You could even treat the entire buildup to the final clash as one long skill challenge, where they need a certain number of successes in order to unlock "the best ending". They still make progress at every step, and they can still get a "good" ending just by winning the final encounter, but there's some other better end state that would have been possible if they'd had more successes. And maybe you don't even hint at that having been a possibility if they don't qualify. Whether the players know what potentially could have been is up to you, and whether you believe the enjoyment of the group would be enhanced by making such things known. Maybe it's something you bring up in a post-campaign wrap up conversation. Or maybe not. Every great GM has cards they never reveal.... Great video. Cheers!

I'd argue that the only real issue is when they can't tell what the problem is. If they fail to solve a puzzle, they can come up with another solution to getting the chest open, but secret passages are trickier. My real question is why is just your big bad behind a secret passage if you didn't design everything around that fact? Like, why is the bad guy hiding in a secret room? Sounds lame.