[RPG] Can you decide not to sneak into a room after seeing your roll

dnd-5emetagamingstealth

If someone asks to stealthily open a door but rolls poorly, can they just choose not to do it, and let someone else open the door?

Best Answer

The roll represents an attempt to do something; the result of that roll, the result of that attempt. (See PHB p.6, "How to Play.")

As such, you can't choose not to attempt to open the door: you've already made the attempt.


I don't know how to say this without sounding snarky, but I do mean it in a helpful manner: there are plenty of roleplaying games where dice don't decide/influence the outcomes of characters' actions. If you don't want to live with dice deciding whether you're sneaky, maybe a different game is the right way to go?

[Reproduced here because, really, it should have been part of the answer and not a comment all along.]