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That sort of "but actually" nonsense is the province of children and lawyers. No one here has to be Jeremy Crawford defending rules minutiae. If a player tried to use that interpretation, the correct response is "Dude, you know that's not what it means."

Your second statement seems perfectly fine to me. You're laying out a possible fail state instead of a success state. The fact that the character seems to be motivated by mostly "idle curiosity" or "let's just see what happens" is probably more appropriate to trad play, though.

Good thing there isn't, then. Glad I could help you out, since you seemed extremely confused. Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. The limitations of "Cunning" in the context of "like a D&D thief" was immediately obvious. The fact you found some textual interpretation of the...

And again, the fact that the mechanical resolution method takes player intent and character modifiers into account INSTEAD OF being a purely neutral encounter roll or GM decision DOES NOT impact actor stance. The fact that the GM used your Diplomacy roll to decide that a high-level cleric was...

You've completely made up this "one true path" nonsense. I don't know what you're on about.

Magical runes detect movement by sufficiently large creatures, powering up the lights when they are present and powering them down after a short period of time.

It's totally not a railroad. It's you as a player understanding your role in the game. Could apply. But the GM and player both understand that's not the intent, which is all that's actually important in play.

I'm extrapolating the example into how I would generally approach based on my own experiences. I'm sure some people find it tricky. I personally don't, so I'm really just arguing against the idea that it MUST be more difficult. It would depend on the game, for me. Sometimes I like to play...

You don't need to give a textual limitation when you're comfortable with the fact that the player is going to be a partner in helping to create the correct fiction. We're not talking about a @Lanefan game where trying to push the rules to the edge to give your character an advantage is...

It almost seems like some of these threads cause some sort of "narrative panic", where posters can't help but look at and respond to narrative mechanics posts over and over again. But they have to continually assert that they're "just looking" and definitely don't have any sort of "narrative...

Absolutely. It's right there in the word!

The player just played their character. "Look, there's some weird runes over there. We've been stuck down in the dungeon for a while, maybe those runes can give us a clue to the way out!" And then the game goes to the mechanical resolution step.

If I walk into a tavern and describe, in-character, an NPC in the tavern without waiting for the DM to narrate what the NPC looks like, I am still in actor stance. "Describing things in character" is orthogonal to "the DM authors everything in the setting outside of the character".

The contents of a player's imaginings are of course imaginary (by definition). But the act of imagining is a real thing. What's real isn't what's in the players' minds, it's their acts of volition.

The limitation is that the DM and Player have discussed this phrase beforehand, and have come to an understanding of the extent of its meaning. Just off the top of my head, FATE, 13th Age, and Daggerheart all allow for the creation of short, pithy phrases to describe a character's capabilities...

I, too, used to enjoy suffering for my TTRPG art. :) Now I don't want to anymore.

Filling in the words in a Mad Lib is both "contributing to the fiction" and a railroad.

Exactly. Which is why I generally don't look for that sort of gameplay in the TTRPG space, and scratch that itch with boardgames and computer games instead. Negotiation-heavy story generation play is much more strongly suited to TTRPG play, on the other hand, and boardgames and computer games...

Maybe not in your D&D games. I've been doing that for a long time. How else am I supposed to know if there's a cleric in the town? I certainly don't bother to do that prep ahead of time.