Except I'm not asking if you are still embezzling funds. I'm asking if embezzling funds is okay. It's not a hard question to answer, you just don't want to.
For that matter, you don't even have to answer from a D&D perspective. I'm curious how other games handle it.
Dungeon World explicitly says play is a conversation and you work through what is going on that way. In general, you are in the fiction. It neither has nor needs mechanics because you're just describing things and asking questions. However, sometimes, the fiction requires clarification: an attempted action where both failure and success are interesting outcomes, or where there's a clear
doing of something that is relevant to the evolving story. When, and only when, something like that happens, it "triggers" a move. Every move has a trigger phrase, and (for any well-made move) it's pretty clear what does or doesn't trigger something.
This invokes two DW rules:
You have to do it to do it, and
If you do it, you do it. "You have to do it to do it" means that if you want to use a move, you don't declare it and then roll or the like: you have to
do the trigger, in the fiction. We would then execute the move, and then return to the fiction again. Hence, it is explicitly against DW's rules to say "I roll Diplomacy." You instead would need to do something like, "I say to the guard, 'Surely, ser, you have a sense of decency, of fair play! How can my accuser go on to this meeting with the judge, while I am stuck out here? No law could possibly call itself just if it listens only to the accuser and not the accused!" (In DW, this would be either a
Parley, with the NPC's desired thing being their reputation of honor and decency, or a
Defy Danger, with the PC taking the risk that this is a corrupt guard or jackbooted thug or the like.) That's the trigger from one direction, and the other makes it bidirectional; that is, "if you do it, you do it" means that
whenever the trigger happens, the move
must happen. The player can't just "closely examine a situation or person" and then hope to squeeze benefits out some other way: you DO trigger
Discern Realities (because that is its trigger phrase), and we execute the move's text. Hence, the first is an "only if" condition (you do the move only if the fiction matches it) and the second is an "if" condition (you always do the move if the fiction matches it).
As part of this, there are rules that are straight up binding on me as a GM, e.g., I am not allowed to give anything but an honest answer to
Spout Lore or
Discern Realities questions, and I cannot tell a player that
Ritual magic effects are flatly impossible ("Ritual effects are always possible, but...") Likewise rules that are binding on players: if they get a partial success on
Spout Lore, it's on them to make the merely interesting answer useful; the only questions I am obligated to answer for
Discern Realities are listed, or added by special moves elsewhere; they must accept the 1-4 requirements I posit for their
Ritual magic, or else not perform it in the first place.
Together, we "Play to find out what happens." Both the players and I make proposals, and we talk it out. Sometimes, their opinion carries more weight than mine, not because theirs
dominates mine but because we agree that their opinion was the better one. Sometimes, probably often I'd say, my opinion carries more weight than theirs, but that's because I
persuade them, not because I lay down the law and threaten ejection if faced with defiance. Just like the
conversation that play is described as.
I am not an absolute authority on the world we play in. If I were, it wouldn't be
possible for me to play to find out what happens. Instead, I am merely one contributing factor, though certainly the largest individual one. This world would not exist in a recognizable form without the things the players have personally introduced into it.
