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There's a pretty big difference between: DM: "You try your best but can't get the lock open. All still seems quiet. What do you do?" and DM: "You try your best but can't get the lock open. Oh, and there's someone behind the door just started screaming her head off, something about...

There's a difference between these two things. One could argue that the dice decide whether Coriander or the Orc ends up dead. The dice, however, do not decide what Coriander-Brenda wants the runes to say. Brenda decides that, and the dice then determine whether her decision comes out true or...

Which leads directly to the perennial question: when they don't match, which one takes precedence and which one has to change such that they do match?

That's a perfect example of rolling for degree of success, where success is already guaranteed.

Somebody has to decide, though, right? So if Jocasta (Jane) tries to read the runes hoping they'll show a way out of here, and fails; then Aloysius (Bob) tries to read the runes hoping they'll give the answer to the riddle on the vault door, and fails; then Ellerina (Steve) tries to read the...

That's fair. They're not something I ever want to see in my games, in any case. :)

No, I'm defining failure as failure and success as success. They're a binary thing, and can't both happen at once. What you're not getting - or are intentionally ignoring - is that what you and others call "fail forward" isn't failure if it includes success on the root task being rolled for...

I can think of a rather ridiculous number of cliffs and banks that I tried and failed to climb as a kid (and a much lower number where I succeeded!). I rarely fell, but always ended up back at the bottom more or less where I started; usually because I'd either bitten off more than I could chew...

When the roll says fail and yet you narrate success anyway, what was the point of the roll? Or was success always guaranteed and the roll merely to determine degree of success? If yes, I get it, but wouldn't that be somehow mentioned to the players up front, as in "Getting up won't be a...

In days of old, perhaps, but I think most people today tend to use "castle" for any big structure made of stone that isn't a church. Many refer to Buckingham Palace as a castle, for example, even though its primary purpose has always been a royal residence. Just down the road from me there's a...

In fairness, we aren't told the staffing levels of this hypothetical house. If it's Downton Abbey then sure, there's multiple kitchen staff and the cook almost never leaves the kitchen. If it's a smaller place that has for staff a cook, a butler, a gardener, and that's it then the cook won't...

Correct. The helmsman was guaranteed to fail (in some form or other) because prior faulty decisions and orders had put him in that situation. Were this a game scenario, the "roll" here would have been to see what form that failure ultimately took. And for me, the truly bizarre (and very...

The adding of colour doesn't change what happens next in the fiction. The adding of the cook very much does, as her screams waken the household.

I'm not so much trotting it out as trying to point out the contradiction in what (was it Hussar?) said, that D&D doesn't simulate anything. That said, I'm not sold on the idea of system being the only - or even the most significant - determinant of whether a given table's game runs more sim or...

As a starting point, perhaps, when the PCs arrive. But you then need to know how long it'll be before they are in the location the PCs are at, and having a timing breakdown for their patrols can be really useful for this if the PCs intend to stay in (or get stuck at) one place for any length of...

At a basic level, I agree with this. However... ....if getting what the characters want involves a lot of meta-play - e.g. acquiring and spending metacurrencies that don't exist in the fiction - that can hammer immersion pretty hard.

Which while I'm sure this worked for you in the moment, is also a direct violation of the integrity of the roll. The roll said the climber failed. You turned around and narrated success that took a bit longer. And this is my entire argument against fail forward, both as a term and as a...

And if the players don't ask for more detail then should someone try to climb that cliff and fail the DM is free to narrate whatever she likes as the reason why. Crumbly rocks, unexpectedly slippery moss, poor hand/footholds or spaced too far apart, being startled by a bird flapping out of a...

Not sure about this. You could have a pretty simulative game come out of designing a setting then turning the players loose for systemless free-improv roleplay. System can help, sure, but it's far from being the only determinant. The real thing that does the heavy lifting is the group of...

Assuming the ship can be turned in time to miss the iceberg. That's what did in the Titanic: the ship's design was such that it took so long to turn that, even with a competent helmsman putting the helm hard over on first warning, they still hit the iceberg anyway on a glancing - but deadly -...