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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9069869" data-attributes="member: 6779196">But the alternative is not no chance. The alternative is nothing happens, because your character has yet to actually do anything, because you haven’t declared any action.Right, which is why I say this framing is misleading, because that doesn’t accurately reflect gameplay at my table, at all.No. I’m saying (literally, I said these exact words) barring extenuating circumstances, if you say your character does a thing, they just do it. Only when what you say you do carries a risk of failure and stakes might you have to make a roll.Indeed, it ought to go without saying, because I’m not saying anything particularly outlandish or revolutionary here. I’m just saying the players describe what they want to do and I determine the results, potentially calling for a die roll to resolve uncertainty, and then describing the results. Just like what the “how to play” rules say.That’s a very strange assumption to make in my opinion; in a game where the premise is that the players can do anything they can imagine (obviously within the limits of what’s physically possible for their characters to do), I don’t think it’s ever safe to assume that the players couldn’t come up with a way for their characters to go about trying to achieve their goals that would mitigate the risk. Even if I can’t imagine a way, players can often surprise you with their creative ideas.Anyway, that objection aside, assuming for the sake of argument that the player for some reason can’t come up with an approach that has little or no risk (I mean, adventuring is after all a pretty risky endeavor)? No, the degree of detail with which they describe their action has absolutely no effect on its possible outcomes. I care about what the character is doing, not how the player describes that action.A player does have to describe the action with enough specificity for me to understand what their character is actually doing, otherwise I can’t determine what the potential outcomes might be, and I think this may be what some people object to. They prefer to leave the fictional action somewhat abstract, roll a die to determine success or failure (and sometimes degree of success), and then retroactively fill in the details of the action in a way that makes sense with the results the die indicated. Whereas I prefer for the action to be specified, so I can use the logic of the fiction as the primary determining factor of success or failure, and only call for a die roll when the outcome is still uncertain.</blockquote>

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