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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 7799174">Please excuse the following if it's hard to follow; I'm struggling to put this into clear language.I think one of the differences may be that you are viewing the "skill check" as the event, or the manifestation of the event or something.  I bolded a couple of passages to highlight this, but it's really woven throughout the post.  And it comes up in how you analyze contests and fail conditions.This also relates to the observation I made earlier about the arm wrestling, that your goal was to win the arm wrestling match and your approach was to push hard, whereas Charlaquin's goal was impresssing the onlookers and the approach was to engage in an arm wrestling match.So I think when you talk about making a forgery or picking a lock or engaging in arm wrestling, those events equate to a game mechanic, namely a skill check.What I think Charlaquin and iserith and Ovinomancer do, and what I'm trying to get better at doing, is treating those events as just something the characters do, for the purpose of accomplishing a goal.  When the success or failure of that attempt will determine which way the story forks, and the outcome is uncertain, you resolve it with a random number generator, biased by the character's abilities.  (That is, a skill check with modifiers.) So in your version, "attempting to stealth" is kind of the goal and approach (and I think you've mocked the division between those two concepts enough times that I think it's fair to assert this, although if you disagree I'd like to hear more).  And, so, yeah, I can sorta see how with that framing you could argue that the contested roll only has a success condition, not a fail condition.But if instead you see the dice roll as adjudicating not whether you stealthed/forged/armwrestled/picked, but rather whether you accomplished your goal (of sneaking past the orc, tricking the guard, impressing the crowd, or opening the door) then clearly a contested check can lead to a fail condition. In other words, it's not that your dice roll failed, it's that your goal and approach failed.</blockquote>

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