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I think this is separate from the issue of rolling dice. I'm sure in the history of human beings there have been cases where a single conversation changed someone's mind about a deeply held belief. Religious conversions would probably figure in here, but I'm sure there have been other examples...

Obviously the universe doesn't. But some people go through life without losing their precious stuff, so it's not as if it would be unrealistic for that to happen in the case of the PC. The issue is decision-making process, not whether or not the fiction is verisimilitudinous.

I thought it was clear, from @TwoSix's post, that the runes were runes of demon summoning. The PC discovered as much by trying to read them. The prompt at the table for the GM to (i) decide on that bad news, and (ii) announce it to the player, was the failed roll. This seems like a...

Perhaps the people who keep asserting that inadvertently startling a cook is "completely unrelated" to a failed attempt at burglary:

I was watching a show recently where A had put a drug into B's drink, as part of a conspiracy with C and D. But B then didn't want to drink. So C proposed a toast, and raised his glass. And then everyone, including B, followed along - and so B drank some of the drink, and thus succumbed to the...

So is fighting. So is climbing. So is being an impressive and charismatic performer. None of these are processes that are much like the roll of a die. RPGing resolution is mostly about generating a decision as to what happens next in the shared fiction, not about recreating or modelling the...

Of course the suggestion is intelligible. @hawkeyefan gave an example from actual play of 5e D&D. I've given examples from actual play of 4e D&D. There has been discussion of a blog example (about sneaking into a house and inadvertently alerting a cook) that the blog author clearly thinks can...

You choose to play the RPG that includes that rule.

Hmm . . . this reminds me of several posts upthread asserting that in my MHRP-derived Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game, the PC caused the "quantum" runes to say one thing rather than another.

This is like saying, if all I write is fantasy, then why would I read examples of non-fantasy fiction? It seems obvious to me that examples from games that I'm not playing, and from approaches that I'm not using, can be helpful and interesting for me.

If you read the Apocalypse World rules, you'll see that "Make the players' character's lives not boring" and "Be a fan of the players' characters" are key principles in the game, and that those phrases are summations of the more extended advice that sits under them.

In what way are the rules for Apocalypse World unclear?

But . . . but . . . my results table goes to 11!

Why can't the GM say: "If you fail, then <whatever> will happen"? @hawkeyefan gave an example upthread, along the lines of "Sure, you're confident you (the PC) can climb the cliff, but if you (the player) fail the roll, it will take longer than you hope (in the context of a dark ritual being...

I don't know what you intend by "fail forward at a mechanical level". The mechanical level is rolling some dice and identifying a success or failure on the roll. "Fail forward" is about the process and heuristics used to narrate the consequence if, at the mechanical level, the roll fails. I...

If the GM rolls a NPC's to hit die, and it succeeds, that dictates stuff about how my PC behaved: did I dodge? was I taken in by the NPC's feint? etc.

Yes. That's why I referred to a bowdlerised version of "fail forward" that involves "the GM narrating failure in such a way as to keep things 'on the rails'".

Why do you say this? I mean, it's not as if the rulebook fails to tell us what is meant! And it's not what you say here.

Something that fits the fiction. What's your example scenario?

Presumably the GM formed the view that the cook makes sense, or else they wouldn't narrate a cook!