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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 8155997" data-attributes="member: 6795602">That's fair.At the step of having an outcome in mind, not particularly much.But going beyond that just a little will reveal many differences.  In blades the desired outcome is stated up front and if success occurs it's mandated that the player get his desired outcome.  Neither of those are necessarily true in the case of D&D - though by far the most likely result in D&D is that the player gets his desired outcome.  Doing something against the rules of the game can also be described with "illegal".  "That's an illegal move".I answered both of those in my original post.The rules - technically yes (by my understanding)The social contract - that dependsBy the rules yes (others may disagree with my reading of the rules).  By the social contract, it depends.  In practice, most of those things will have the obviously desired outcome (or something approaching it)I think it's worth mentioning that in D&D the DM determines if the roll is even called for in the first place.  He is well within his rights to determine success or failure with no roll at all.  So there's very little reason he would ever want to turn a success into a failure and the like.  The system sets him up so he doesn't need to do that.  Now could a successful trap disarm look a little different than the player had in mind.  Yes!  The player has in mind the trap will be fully disabled.  The DM may decide it makes more sense that disarming this particular trap means you can at most temporarily disable it so that you can bypass it.Or could a successful persuade check for horses for the whole party mean that the party gains 2 horses instead of 5?  Yes!  No.  It's not what he may or can do.  It's what he does do.As noted again and again.  That's not really the way D&D works by rules.  The rules do not guarantee a player his desired outcome on a success.  He does often get it.  But other good results sometimes will be substituted.  I gave 2 examples of that above.  I don't think it's in the Spirit of the game to have a success turn into a failure and so whether there's rules against it or not, you don't really see DM's going, you passed your disarm trap check, roll a dex save because you disarmed the trap by setting it off with you on top of it.  That kind of thing just doesn't happen.Can he?  Most certainly.  If not by rule then by the knowledge that the players don't have enough information to spot him doing it.  If he did negate that one action most likely nothing would change in respect to the agency over the combat challenge.  Taking away one combat action is unlikely to take away the party's ability to overcome the combat challenge.  Much like a single bad call most often doesn't decide the outcome of a sports match.In terms of amount when compared to the typical D&D game, nothing.</blockquote>

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