What trumps: Player foresight or character foresight

[gigyas6]

Not a rule question as it's not a rule, and even if it were, many GMs use this differently, myself included.

I thought of an example recently that is, I'd think, rather interesting.

The party walks in to a bar and sees a shady man. The shady man notices the party, and immediately reaches for something.

This can usually go one of two ways.

A) A player realizes or believes the shady man is drawing a weapon, and proceeds to threaten. Or..

B) The character does not necessarily know this until doing a perception/sense motive test, which is usually table wide.

Of course, option C is mixing the two, but that often gets confusing and players can get upset. ("You didn't roll perception to see the spider." "Am I supposed to roll perception every time I take a step?")

Similarly, a character can be *definitely* drawing a weapon on a player, and either the player reacts in game - or initiative is rolled to see if they react in time, with sense motive/perception to see if they're surprised.

Personally, I like letting players be smart players and not limited to character limitations when investigating/exploring. It's a bit weird if a player has the foresight to say "Hmm... That painting looks a bit weird. I wanna check it out" only for the GM to follow up "No you can't, your character doesn't know it looks weird."

Conversely, I like using initiative if a scene gets tense, but let players notice weapons in the example above for "free". Honestly, initiative failing for them can let me do a fancy GM thing to push a story point across, but them getting the upper-hand on someone trying to sneakily assault them can be equally dramatic.

I'm curious as to how other GMs rule this, however, as I've not played in a stable game with a GM other than myself in a while.

[zapbib]

If you describe it, the character sees it. If you say there is a spider, don't make them roll perception for the spider. Make them roll perception first, then tell them if there is a spider. To not go in that way is just gonna break immersion and can ruin your game fast. Remember that only hidden things need perception, be descriptive as a gm.

Initiative should always be rolled at the start of combat. It's a physical roll after all, how fast can they react to what they see. This is why some class have bonus like: always armed even if they miss initiative etc.

You can give bonus/malus to initiative roll according to if your players were dubious or expected a betrayal etc. But yea, this is as close to an absolute as it can be: always roll initiative.