AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, no, not really. Fictional position matters. Attacking a huge dragon with your bare hands, using a signal flag at night simply won't work. Any of your other options might work, but if you spell 'help' on the beach and your buddies own a ship but don't fly, is that a good plan? No!Which, read at a basic level, tells me that it doesn't matter what my character actually does as long as it does something; which means I'd have the same odds of success* if I hang a bright cloth from a tree or pile stones on the beach to spell out HELP or just stand on the shore jumping up and down waving my arms.
That's just not satisfactory for me. I want the in-fiction "what I do" piece to influence the at-table odds of success beyond just the seemingly-binary I did something vs I did nothing divide. For example, piling stones on the beach to spell HELP is only likely to succeed if my potential rescuers are a) flying and b) literate; if I instead think to hang something bright from a high tree my odds of success should improve, and even more so if I do all three things listed above rather than just one.
Otherwise, what's the point of coming up with creative ideas for actions?
* - leaving the fire option aside for the moment so as to equalize the day-night issue.
Indeed, if the resolution mechanism only takes into account the existence of an action rather than that action's substance.
So DW has a pretty effective system of judging action effectiveness, and that's fictional position coupled with the GM's responsibility to name what the PC's move is. The player describes their intent, but it has to 'follow from the current fiction'.
I categorically reject the notion that such is possible in any consistent way. You cannot possibly write a set of rules that will adjudicate an open list of arbitrary factors and situations. It WILL be devolved down on someone's judgment. Some person(s) at the table will make this call, period. I mean, in a subset of obvious common cases the plausibility of this judgment will not be too controversial, but go back to @Manbearcat's climbing. You (or I) cannot possibly adjudicate climbing in any realistic way. I mean, I've been taught basic "first responder rope handling" and done some moderately technical caving, but I have no substantive ability to judge climbing techniques, gear use, etc. Same with most other things that aren't basic ordinary stuff, including sword fighting and other such things that are quite common in RPGs. I'm going to just judge based mostly on factors of what will work well within the game context, and avoid complete implausibility.Ah! This feels significant. I'm rejecting this as a dichotomy.
I would not assign that authority to the GM, nor to the table at large. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I keep using the word "objective." The question of whether an ability is useful should be mediated by the mechanics. Taking an action will change the board state, and after a variety of actions have been taken, you can tell if the goal has been achieved, or not. In fact, I'd contend it's basically essential to have a meaningful state of gameplay (a term I'm using here to specifically refer to the process of trying to navigate a complex system of decisions to achieve a desired outcome; the basic play loop of any eurogame, for example), that this not be a decision made by a person (or people), but a process