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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8001098" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Oh, sure, but I’d then consider it a challenge. The hidden thing is optional, and finding it is like a reward for completing that challenge.This is the opposite of the statement to which I was responding with confusion. In your previous post you said it doesn’t need to be a challenge for the stakes to matter, now you’re saying the stakes don’t need to matter for it to be a challenge. I understand the latter, but not the former.I think we’ve lost the plot a bit here. I’m not advocating for never including missable content in the game. I’m saying, as the person designing the scenario where the key is hidden, I’m either hiding the key as part of a challenge, in which case I’m going to build some kind of time constraint or other consequence for failure into the scenario, or I’m just having it be hidden because it makes sense to be hidden, but it’s not really important. In the former case, the PCs don’t have the luxury of “taking all the time they need to search the room,” so of course I’m gonna call for a check. On a failure they search for 10 minutes, find nothing, and we get one sixth of the way closer to the next time I roll for complications. In the latter case, I’ll just narrate them eventually finding it because how long it takes is immaterial and the game isn’t served by the possibility of them failing to find it.Sure, fine, success at a cost is a useful tool. Again I think we’ve gone way off track from where we started. This particular line of discussion sprung from folks talking about keys hidden in sock drawers and whether or not “thoroughly searching the room” would be a valid path to success, and I took a step back to ask if scenarios where an object is hidden in a room and players have ample time to do a thorough search is actually a regular occurrence in anyone’s games. Cause I don’t see myself designing such a scenario basically ever.</blockquote>

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