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So... The amount of simulation you lose from removing "random, unknown time limits that have a pretty decent chance of either not mattering at all, or completely screwing you over"? That amount of simulation is worth an absolutely $#!+-awful experience for anyone who isn't as simulationist as...

As a once-in-a-VERY-long-while subversion, maybe. More than once in a single campaign? No, absolutely not going to "love" that.

Unknown even to the GM, and randomly determined. Whether or not the players were told of this random, yet-unrevealed time limit at the start was not explicitly specified. I had assumed originally that it would not be. Clearstream later clarified that it probably should be mentioned, as it seemed...

But that's the point. The GM cannot do that. They don't know. Nobody does, not until after the player has finished their actions. Only then, after the player character is already dead, is the randomly-generated time revealed. So there is no known time limit. That's (part of) why I responded to...

It's a place with rats. A rat could run into it and experience an animal desire, and boom, object consumed, rat's desire made manifest, no more magic.

But that's the only way to get to what you're saying. That we must completely ignore the concern, because other concerns unequivocally matter more. If we don't do that--if we recognize that gameplay matters and needs to be counted--then we cannot simply declare that the experience HAS to be...

shrug Folks complained, sometimes quite bitterly, about feeling "interrogated" before--yes, that word was actually used. If someone wants to pick nits that hard about Fail Forward, well, I think they're being silly, but far be it for me to tell them what to spend their time on. I could comment...

My understanding was that the only reason Lanefan brought it up was to say, basically, "yeah, this really did have rules, and this is what those rules were." Hence why I have referred to it as "showing your work" or similar phrases. It's a demonstration of the rules-boundness of the GM; yes, the...

Wheras for me, having my efforts snatched away from me even the one time would be a pretty serious party foul, and having it happen twice would be "something better change or I'm out and I'm going to try to convince as many people as I can to go with me." Like I genuinely consider this a...

Okay...but the point was that you could not EVEN IN THEORY know that you'd gotten too much. There is no rhyme nor reason to who lasts, say, X/2 amount of time, and who lasts X amount of time. Totally, completely random, in a way that even the GM does not know. Like that's the key sticking point...

Whether it is like that or not in-play is not necessarily relevant. Someone, upthread, used a specific example from earlier (the "save a person at the top of the cliff") to examine different gradations of "gameplay" in a situation. I was simply providing additional descriptive examples, showing...

More the point was that "showing your work", as it were, exclusively after "your work" no longer communicates anything, won't really affect the trust-o-meter. It won't hurt, or at least it shouldn't if the players are reasonable. But nothing is really gained or sustained in the trust department...

That's almost certainly going to be an improvement, since your numerical bonus won't be used by mechanics nearly that much, so the GM can usually rely on giving that out when they want to reward clever thinking or beneficial conditions (and likewise to penalize unwise choices or harmful...

Sure, that's fair. I was mostly trying to create an example that was distinct from the "save my friend about to be sacrificed" thing, that would still demonstrate a similar experience of "wait so all that hard work I did was for nothing the entire time???" feeling that, even if it wouldn't be...

I joined late--the group needed a replacement for a player who had left, and we played for a couple levels before the GM decided "it really isn't that much different, let's try an epic game". That didn't last as long as I'd have liked because the GM realized "epic-level characters mean huge...

No, that's not what I had said, though I was the one who gave the example. My example was one where the player is fighting in a place where poison gas is present, and they have a random number of turns before it becomes unavoidably lethal but not instant death--so even if they beat their...

But this of course simply kicks the bias up to a higher plane of abstraction: assigning the odds. Which is already a significant domain of bias anyway. That very thing is the reason why I have to use such cumbersome phrases to explain why it is necessary that a meaningful chance of a result be...

Well, at least from where I'm coming from, they should have gone with a two- or three-tier system. I haven't thought enough about how a three-tier system would work to spell it out, but I have thought rather a lot about the two-tier version: Small bonus(/penalty) is +1 or maybe +2 Big...

And how can players distinguish that? Perhaps. As noted, you are insulated from a lot of things because your group has remained functionally unchanged for decades. Even on this site, which leans older, "traditional", and GM-centric, your experience is quite far from typical. Plenty of players...

I don't follow. Ahab was doomed and it's quite clear from the very beginning that he's doomed. Further--isn't this the very storytelling you claim to detest so? You're already turning this situation into a narrative arc!