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Deeply unclear what "traditional" means there, and I'm worried it's probably 5e. It's very clear my high player agency rules heavy stuff isn't welcome in the OSR, but 5e first players seem to glaze over when you try to present them with a fully developed skill system, so I think I might be out...

Oh I agree, but TTRPA doesn't have quite the same ring.

Yeah, that's pretty good. The point about solvability/optimization is too small, but it's a start. It's certainly better than this: Competition is a tool, not the point, challenge is necessary to reach the appropriate state, but not a metric that can be maximized for greater success. The point...

I feel like the traditional answer is "make the GM roll for it secretly" which is certainly one use of random tables. :p I proposed a compromise position earlier that might work for more people: slow the process down by introducing a GM side meta currency that has to accumulate and be spent...

I realize I've been shuffled into a 3rd rail, but I don't think that's quite fair. As you pointed out, everyone is fundamentally concerned with making player input matter and presenting novel events and things to interact with. The precise nature of what "matter" means and the exact...

I'd argue the issue lies in the mechanisms of interaction, but that leads us quickly out of short summation territory.

A thought I'm having on the fail forward discussion; is this a division of responsibility question? Setting aside the tools they have to change "the fiction" and the gameplay concerns I have, it almost reads to me like the real debate is over who is responsible to propose a change in the game...

Oh I see. Sorry, I was already drifting away from the initial example, which I would read as unparsably incomplete. The player hasn't specified an action specific enough to resolve, I would be asking how they wanted to achieve that goa. Or, more likely given how I've played in the past, the...

Sure. It would also be a terrible game, with basically no agency. I mean, I don't really care, personally. Simplicity is widely overvalued on RPG design, and is frustratingly mistaken for elegance, or treated as "cheap" in terms of design space, when it's really quite expensive. You give up a...

Sure, I'm commenting on an issue I had with the framing you both were using. Does it matter? If there's a factor that renders noise relevant (i.e. someone to hear it) then a player might want to do something about it. If not, then it doesn't matter if of they do, though perhaps they'll feel it...

No, I believe the design task is to set a series of rules that can as completely as possible adjudicate any player proposal, using knowable, player facing rules. That most systems fail at this is not an indictment of the goal. Obviously, some abstraction is necessary, but you can get pretty far...

I worry whenever "challenge" gets used this way. There's nothing challenging about a die roll; you don't demonstrate more or less skill by rolling a 5 or a 15. The challenge is the problem (getting the heirloom off the mantle or whatever) and all of the rolls and action declarations are tools to...

I think that's slightly reductive, that's also part of a set of principled restrictions on the GM's power, and it's part of the board state players make moves on. There's more going on than just moving some imagination from prep to at the table.

Oh I couldn't disagree more. The important part is the open ended nature of goal setting, not undefined interaction. A robust set of rules, if anything, makes it clear what players can achieve with each action and in the rare cases an activity outside then comes up, gives the GM more to model a...

This has always just looked like incomplete design to me. Surely you could just list the time it takes to perform the action and what failure/success look like? Damaging the door and/or leaving traces are modifiers, making it easier or harder to achieve, and acting silently is clearly a general...

Right, but mostly we seem to design discussion as a rhetorical proxy for arguing our baseline assumptions should be normative of TTRPGs as a whole. Has anyone actually gotten anywhere laying out their design parameters ahead of time, and then along for feedback within that framework exclusively? :p

Hardly news to you, but I've been banging on for a decade now that skill challenges are a terrible game. Great narrative pacing mechanism, terrible gameplay. Same issue with fail forward mechanism manifested differently; they take situations that have the potential for strategic decision making...

I'm doing no such thing. I'm pointing out a consequence of fail forward design, a thing it cannot do, not offering advice on how a game featuring it should be played. If you don't care about evaluating the quality of the players decisions, it does not matter. Getting into what "winning" is in...

We're going around in circles and I think I'm not explaining myself well. My whole point is that fail forward design structure can render player decision making less impactful; you're trading player ability to learn about and manipulate the situation for a more procedurally dynamic situation...

That's precisely the problem though; I want the player to force events to unfold in a desired way. If the game can always continue from some other there, then there was no point in picking a specific here as preferable. I get this, but I'm saying it undervalues the player's choices; I want...