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That's where I like to use an informal sliding scale on rolls like this. Roll a 20 (or a 1 if using roll-under) and you nailed all four of those without any trouble. Make the success by the bare minimum and sure, the door's unlocked but it maybe took some time or made some noise or whatever -...

Most of the time that'd be too much telegraphing for me. They did some experimentation with summoned monsters and learned some stuff, then did some personal trial and error and learned some more (for better and worse), then got out of there with the gem and destroyed it. One of the PCs had met...

Meanwhile everyone in the house is now wide awake listening to these guys have a long conversation in the garden...

There's some who would think this was a hella cool way for their character to die (and who might also reference Moby Dick). To some extent that's going to happen regardless. If the module I'm running says the room they're about to enter is a mage's lab with the mage in it, the story I can...

To the bolded: so in DW a character can never outright fail, or fail backwards, at an attempted task? Yeah, that's a bit much.

If the in-fiction characters aren't managing risk and avoiding obstacles when-where they reasonably can, that doesn't say much for their collective wisdom. :)

Indeed, but ideally they're not quantum: there's an in-fiction reason those wanderers are there and (unless there's a gate or spawner somewhere) in theory there should be a finite number of them after which there will be no more. I ran a dungeon recently that had Mind Flayers (infrequent) and...

Unless your characters all come with built-in featherfall I'd think there's often going to be a negative consequence of failing a climb, and it'll hurt. :)

Why can't it more consistently be "fail backward", though? When breaking into a kitchen and failing the roll, why can't the narration be that a previously undetected alarm goes off, or that an unexpected electrical trap in the lock shocks the thief for [a bunch of damage, however the system...

I'm not going to argue with that for any edition; though the targets of criticism will be different in each. :) Thing is, what some people criticize about D&D can be the same thing(s) that other people see as its strength(s). An example from this thread: the task-based resolution that D&D uses...

You can actually have it both ways, to a point: have one of the options in the table read "Make s*** up." or "DM prerogative". This can be really handy if it's a table you use frequently, as unless there's lots of options it can start getting repetitive after a while. As do I, to a certain...

Except the characters in the data came in at a wide variety of levels; they didn't all start at raw 1st. Also, the results are fairly similar across low- and high-hit point classes (with some outliers in rarely-played classes due to insufficient data). Were hit points the main determinant, I'd...

A far better zero to hero* example might be Arya Stark's progression through GoT. * - well, maybe not capital-H "Hero" n the Good-aligned sense, perhaps more just "pretty damn competent at what she does". :)

Except it's still not stakeless. Simply allowing Jane to break into the warehouse without a roll makes a pile of assumptions I'm not willing to make, the most significant of which is that she's in fact capable of breaking into this warehouse at this time; which in a much higher-level view means...

The answer to the first question depends greatly on what the specific PCs can bring to bear on the situation. What they in fact did, after simple observation revealed nothing other than some timing elements, was summon two sets of creatures (3 summoned monsters [giant toads] and 3 summoned...

100% still engaging with the game and story, only in a way you personally don't approve of.

Exactly. One (later, two) survivors instead of zero. Works every time for me.

They don't. It's that old trust thing again. So if you were DMing that scenario with the floating gem generating flashing lights each colour of which had different effects ranging from useful to deadly, assuming the PCs had no prior experience with or knowledge of such a thing, what if...

It's ages since I read Moby Dick, I only remember the ending where they die together. It seemed to map fairly closely to a scene someone (you?) was positing as being a bad thing, where a PC kills her foe but then dies due to poison inflicted by said foe. I'm referring only to the scene in...

At a quick glance, I like the "segment" version better, except I'd still have it be individual initiatives rather than side-based and with ties fully allowed. There also needs to be something in there about delaying one's action until-unless it makes sense, so for example an archer with higher...