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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6673564" data-attributes="member: 6775031">No, I'm only describing what "counts" in the simulationist sense. The only thing that matters is the thing which would really happen if these events were actually occurring, and it wasn't just a story or a game. If the DM dis/empowers a player, then that might also count as a violation of game rules, but it's only worth mentioning here because it spoils the simulation.In this case, because the power derives from your desire for the player to make an interesting choice, rather than from the nature of the world. If anyone else could have made the same decision, even if it was off-screen because it was some NPC that nobody has ever heard of, then you were merely adjudicating the world in a consistent manner - you weren't actually empowering anyone to do anything.Although that edition makes the matter a bit fuzzy, if the PCs are intended to represent characters who possesses unique abilities within the game world. Such a distinction makes it excessively difficult to determine where the line is drawn.I am referring to an RPG in the immersion/simulation/roleplaying sense. If you want to expand that definition to include a bunch of other things - like shared-authorship storytelling games - then that's on you, but you shouldn't be surprised to find disagreement.I suppose that it's remotely conceivable that you could play AD&D in such a manner, with each saving throw or lost HP giving a chance to inventively narrate how it corresponds to the fiction, but that seems fairly counter-productive and extremely counter-intuitive. Perhaps that was some vestige of story-telling game which was discarded by the time 2E came out.Which is not a reason that derives from the fiction, and is thus meaningless from an immersion/RP standpoint.But the idea of stakes does solve the conundrum of retries by a bit; it's not that you can't succeed, so much as you can't succeed before something happens to make the check irrelevant. The die roll, in that case, would indicate the aggregate of all attempts during that period. From what I understand, if you weren't chasing someone, then you might keep trying to climb "until it proved fatal", or "until you suffered serious injury". Is that correct? And if so, would the former check be easier than the latter, since it would encompass a greater number of attempts?If I don't know how to build an airplane, then I just don't know it. Maybe I have a 4% chance to build one, right now, but after a sufficient period of evaluation it will come to light that I either do or do not. When I learn more about building airplanes, then perhaps it will be time for another evaluation.Except one of those results would be ridiculous. If such a thing does not exist, then that state cannot possibly depend upon your ability to perceive it, such that it would be guaranteed to exist if only you looked hard enough. I guess it's possible that the chance of success is always low enough that there's sufficient room in the failure category to cover both possibilities (e.g. 30% of armors are flawless, so the highest possible chance of finding a flaw is 70%), but that would still leave you with a huge variety of world states which cannot possibly be modeled. And what if someone else wanted to attempt the same task? Would he or she be bound by the same result? Or could they only possibly succeed if they had a better Perception check than the first person?</blockquote>

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