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The problem is not with appearing or even being childish. Hell, I've always held that being grown-up is vastly overrated. The problem comes when one type of RPG is held up as childish in order to make another type appear more adult.

In a no-retries paradigm, the consequence of failure is that the lock avenue is now closed to you and you have to find another way. No-retries is very sim - sometimes you've got your A-game on and sometimes you don't, which is part of what the roll abstracts.

Unfortunately, oftentimes people who are "serious" about something (doesn't matter what) tend to both know more about it than the average person and know they know more about it than the average person. This can (and often does) lead to a sense of "I know more than you" that comes across in...

IME when "something else happens", resolving it invariably takes up more (sometimes much more) time than "nothing happens" would have*. * - assuming the players are reasonably quick thinkers and-or already have a plan B in mind if plan A fails. If on a "nothing happens" they just sit there...

You've many times gone on about how rolling for the runes and rolling to kill an Orc are the same thing. So explain me this difference: When I roll to kill an Orc, you-as-DM already know things like the Orc's AC and how many hit points it has. Its specific characteristics are pre-established...

Which points out what might be a difference here. When I think of what happens in the fiction due to a roll, I'm thinking of the immediate stakes on which the roll is made. Do I climb the cliff or fall. Can I open the lock or am I stuck here. Can I sneak past the guards or do they notice me...

Faolyn's guacamole recipe aside, it's highly credible that the runes could - on someone's successful roll in hopes of such - be something completely bland and inocuous: "Constructed in 1085 by Balin and Co. If we built it, you can't break it." or "Dedicated to the memory of my love Marilene...

Unless you want them to, I suppose... Trying to pick a lock has stakes, namely whether you can get beyond it or not. There may or may not be any threat of harm involved, but there's still no guarantee they'll get the lock open. They might have to resort to boots or crowbars or a different...

My not being able to pick a lock isn't a major fact about the world at large but it is a major fact to my character in the here-and-now moment, and as it's my in-character perspective that matters to me-as-player, that makes it a major fact to me. Now sure, it might not be or remain a major...

The analogy there is that the GM - who in theory controls the setting - gets to put the runes there but doesn't get to determine what they say. Similarly, the neighbour gets to buy the barbeque and put it in his yard but doesn't have any say in who ends up getting to use it.

Again, that's different than what happened with the runes. A closer analogy might be if you and your friends got together for a raffle, one of your friends looked at your neighbour's barbeque and said "I wanna win that - let's make it the prize!", and you then drew for the barbeque (note that...

Same here, which makes it a fine date because I know I very likely won't have to worry about it. :) (I mean I suppose there's a small chance I'll live to age 103, but I ain't counting on it)

Because one of two things would quickly happen: either they'd feel overwhelmed with compounding badness or feel like I'm leading them by the nose. Neither of these is desirable.

In fairness, there's certainly some causality to be seen there in hindsight - thing A led to thing B. But it's an indirect causality, because there were opportunities between the occurrence of thing A and the occurrence of thing B to divert the flow of events such that thing C or D or E...

4:15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, January 5th 2065. How's that?

That there's potential positive consequences (you get to eat pickles) whose achievement is uncertain - just how stuck is that jar, anyway - is enough to make it roll-worthy for me. And that's the whole point! It's on the players to find and try a different method, not on me-as-DM to hand them...

So? Sure, but if every time you failed to open the pickle jar you dropped (and maybe broke) it or hurt your wrist or the cat dragged in something half-dead you'd pretty quickly come to associate Bad Stuff with stuck pickle jars and thus you'd stop eating pickles from jars entirely. Same is...

It's different if you break it into two steps. The step that's common to both is the randomness of whether the bettor (or dice-roller) wins or loses. The step that's different is that in one the bettor also gets to declare what the stakes are, where in the other the stakes are set externally...

I brought it up more recently, based on someone else bringing it up somewhere further upthread. The cook's screaming is not my invention. Well, at least we agree on that much. :)

...things might happen. It's only if the players choose to do nothing that indeed, nothing further will happen. If you want to look at everything in hindsight like that, then loads of things end up as being wasted time. Trying to court one particular lass in junior high school was, in...