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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7578306" data-attributes="member: 16814">This is a good question, Lan, I'll try to work through it.I'll start a bit differently from the other responses:  in your given example, there's no difference.  Yup, I agree there's no difference in outcome and the source of information is largely irrelevant.But.... (come on, you knew this was coming)...There's still a big difference in how you get to the outcome, and to illustrate, I'm going to change a bit of your example.  I'm going to say, "what happens if the check fails?"In the Legend Lore case (yes, I know the spell cannot fail if the statue is the Statue, but you also referenced mechanics that can fail), if you fail, the statue still is the Statue of Adonis, you just can't tell right now.In the Spout Lore case, if you fail the check, the GM gets to make a move against you.  This may be to 'state an unwelcome truth' that this is NOT the Statue of Adonis.  Or it may be that some other calamity looms because of the time you spent examining the Statute, possibly putting the Statue at risk of destruction.  Or, some other bad thing. The point here is that while success states may look very similar, the means to get there is pretty different and failure states look very, very different.  In your Legend Lore case, the characters are risking nothing by making a check to tell if this is the Statue they seek -- failure just means knowledge is delayed.  However, in the other case, failure can mean that this isn't the Statue after all, or that you think it is, but it's a fake, or that it is the Statue, but now it's at risk of destruction!  The tension and story importance of the checks is wildly different.Add onto this a few things others have said -- that knowledge that you're just getting more information that the GM decides is less thrilling for some (although it can be very thrilling for many others, as evidences by GM centered games being, by far, the dominate playstyle) vs knowledge that this roll will mean that the searching part of the Quest for the Statue has concluded and now we're moving onto the recovery part or it will mean that we must continue searching.  The difference is in the import of the roll, and this is a very big difference.  Outcomes may look the same, but how you got there, what you risked, is the crux, here.</blockquote>

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