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Well, at least for me? This was the thing people hammered home, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and... They harped on this. "D&D lost out! D&D FAILED FAILED FAILED FAILED because of 4e! 4e was the single worst thing that ever happened to D&D, so we need to NEVER do...

Ooh, so it's super vulnerable to things like Simpson's "paradox". That is, the situation where treatment A does better with low-severity patients, and treatment A does better with high-severity patients, but when combined all together, treatment B does better overall. Not saying that this...

Had they even an inkling that they had done so, don't you think they'd have touted it? They wouldn't even need to say they actually outsold D&D. Just say "based on our internal sales numbers, you, our loyal audience, have made Pathfinder the best-selling TTRPG we always knew it could be" or...

I mean, they pretty clearly didn't even try to do anything more than "Legally Distinct TTRPG That Totally Isn't 3.5e ᵇᵘᵗ ᶦᵗ'ˢ ᵇᵃᶜᵏʷᵃʳᵈˢ⁻ᶜᵒᵐᵖᵃᵗᶦᵇˡᵉ"--and in fact tried very hard to be exactly that and nothing else.

Okay. As is rather often the case, your experience has...some pretty dramatic differences from mine, to the point that your examples based on that experience genuinely sound so extreme as to be made up, rather than factual. That doesn't mean you are making them up, mind, but it means it's...

Er...no? It doesn't take that many iterated rolls. Going back to the 60% chance--what would you consider "near 0"? I would say "less than 5%", since that's functionally the zero point for D&D checks. log(.05)/log(.6) = 5.8645ish. So that means after only six rolls, the character has less than a...

Objectively, if you apply the same bonuses--so the only thing that differs is the roll itself--having to pass multiple checks ALWAYS reduces the chance of success. This is a simple mathematical fact. Even if they have a 95% chance to succeed (failing only on a nat 1), needing to make three...

Certainly. It's helped that I've mostly worked with new players myself, but my usual approach is to emphasize the impending nature of the consequence, rather than the it's-already-foregone nature. So, if my group's Battlemaster were to get a partial success on Defy Danger to evade a flame-spirit...

No, what I mean is, I cannot conceive of a situation in Dungeon World (indeed, in any PbtA game) where you would GET TO the house, and know NOTHING except the bits you've permitted. Like...this is functionally skipping over hours, perhaps multiple sessions, during which a great deal more...

Sure. It was an unforeseen problem when TTRPGs were young and largely untested. We've had plenty of time for that to get better, for us to get a sense of foreseeable problems and addressing them. I'm not suggesting that problems obvious to us are inherently or eternally obvious no matter when...

Perhaps, perhaps not. If it is simply "I feel like singing", no system I've ever played supports forcing a roll for that. If it is instead that one wishes to sing with some further intent, then we talk about what they're going for. Perhaps they are trying to woo someone in order to get that...

The conversation that is play. Like....that's literally how the game works. It is NOT simply "success on a search roll"--whatever that might be in a given system. I gave @Enrahim a breakdown of how it works in Dungeon World. Also? In nearly every possible game of this kind, this WOULDN'T be...

Well, more my point was that this is...a pretty easily foreseeable problem. As in, essentially every designer of a narrative game is going to see this possibility many miles away. Long before any books hit the table, designers will already know that absolute total freedom where ANY...

But this has nothing to do with @pemerton's objection? You're saying "you've been surprised". Of course. But that is irrelevant to the sequence in which the process occurs at the table. The manifesto claims that there cannot ever be any breakdown in time-sequence between events of play" (which...

Okay, finally here. So: the game I know is Dungeon World. In this post, I will not be talking about anything except Dungeon World. I have, technically, also played Masks some and a couple other PbtA games very minimally, and adjacent games like Ironsworn, but I'm not going to talk about them...

I thought you wanted answers regarding any possible such game, hence why I've avoided invoking any particular mechanics. Now that you have, I can easily do the example, but I took my sleep meds like 45 minutes ago and they've really kicked in now, so I'm afraid I will have to actually do that...

No. You need to say what system you're using. Surely you'd agree that the question "how much do I harm an enemy when I strike them?" would require that we know more about the system being used, rather than accusing anyone of requiring that the players "need to engage in basic game design in...

"Documents" is vague. Many entirely distinct things could all meet that description validly, e.g. receipts, letters, books, notes, pictures, all sorts of things. "Documents" are fungible. Any copy of a document qualifies, so there could be duplicates. "Documents" can be found piecemeal, where...

Precisely. A Swordmage is not "I am a physical combatant who happened to dabble in magic." Yet a Swordmage is also not "I am a magician who happened to dabble in physical combat." A Swordmage is someone for whom melee combat IS magic, and magic IS melee combat. (They may, of course, also have...

Then you cannot simply wish the ruby to be there simply because you know it's a safe and it's in the correct house. Because...people don't normally hide things in easily-accessible places? Because context matters? Play is a conversation. Sometimes that conversation is going to include context...