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If the house is one that is likely to have a cook, why is it shocking or unrealistic for there to be a cook? How does that work? Do you pause the game or end the session early so you have time to prepare? Do you rely on random tables? Do you literally populate every single building in every...

I'm confused. Earlier you were saying that it was OK for a PC to listen at the door, hear there were guards, and then choose another way around. Now you're saying that's wrong somehow? See: Or are you thinking that if the PCs are trying to go from A to B, get stuck because of a door, and take...

In a typical fail-forward/narrative game, the GM isn't reluctantly acknowledging anything. If the PC hedges their bets and decides to find another way, great! The game will continue from there instead of from here. But no, it doesn't undermine player decision making or cut any of them off. And...

I don't think so. Unless there's something that would keep people from hearing through the door (magical silence, soundproofed walls), or putting your ear to the door would trigger a Grimtoothian-style door trap, a PC who wants to listen at the door does so. Mind, they don't have to hear...

And background events move entirely on their own, without GM input, in tradgames?

You missed it then: I've literally only heard of the Forge through this thread. So no, the friend isn't dead because you failed to climb the cliff in a fail-forward game. The friend is dead in a trad game because they were being threatened by something and you failed to climb up fast enough...

Well, you were saying that fail-forward didn't make sense because it kept players from doing things like listening at doors. My point is, they still can. And I don't see how this "proposes a play pattern...is to first anticipate all the fiction the DM might establish" any more than trad gaming...

By not being stupid, mostly. And because my players don't have "murder ALL the creatures!" as their primary impulse. It's amazing what can be survived by players who want to negotiate and befriend rather than kill. Welp, I've now shown you it can be done differently.

I don't understand where you're getting "any one of hundreds" of rolls. Are you assuming a random event table? However, I can't imagine any fail-forward game saying "you failed a die roll, so a war hundreds of miles away has cut off your supply of tea" because that's not how fail-forward games...

I had a player in a game once who decided, out of the blue, that they were going to offer every goblinoid they saw a job. A legitimate job, with pay. I think they were even working on a union when the game folded. You never know what the players are going to do. And because you never know what...

You're taking that passage a bit out of context. There's a house that the PC is sneaking into. You, as the GM, have an idea of who or what should be in that house, even if you didn't establish a list of inhabitants beforehand. So if the PC fails and startles someone, it's someone who you would...

IIRC, the original idea for this is that you had to climb the cliff to save the friend. If the friend is just waiting at the top of the cliff, then no, failure wouldn't result in their death.

That's not nothing, though. That was a success on a roll, not a failure. The failure would have been the kaboom, which is something.

And I think we probably both agree that's a very rare situation. Very much a jerk move, because it's entirely GM fiat. They have no ability to do anything about it. No more than any other adventure. The PCs can attempt to fight against a rival (either physically, socially, or legally), fight...

OK, this is still what I was talking about. The player can still try to hear or see through the door. They may or may not have to roll for it, depending on the game, but they can still do it. Because once they have done such a thing, those guards exist (It's Schrodinger's dungeon). And if you...

Is the task at hand climbing the cliff, or is it saving the friend at the top of the cliff? Because if the important thing in this scene is the friend, then that's what's being rolled for. But if the task truly is just climbing the cliff, then a truly bad roll (say, a critical failure in D&D)...

How is it interesting when literally nothing happens? And by nothing, I mean nothing. It doesn't cause time to pass or a clock to advance. It doesn't cause the expenditure of resources. It doesn't provide a clue of any sort (no dogs to not bark). It doesn't bring any new things to take action...

In that case, you don't skip it, if everyone is cool with it. But what do you do if one PC spends an hour collecting herbs while the rest are twiddling their thumbs?

Perhaps ironically, the bolded bit is actually the most realistic and plausible way to go. In real life, we can make educated guesses by drawing on our past experiences. But in RPGs, especially D&D, GMs are usually strongly encouraged to shake things up because having similar things happen too...

But that was making a decision about how the character spent their time traveling. What it wasn't was actually roleplaying out the search for herbs. Is that the problem here? Because then the question is, if this herbalism "side quest" takes more than a couple of minutes, what are the rest of...