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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8272400" data-attributes="member: 16814">There's been an argument recently, not sure if it was by @dave2000 or @ruinexplorer or someone else, sorry, that D&D supports multiple ways of adjudicating failures than outright failure.  This is put forwards as if it is a good thing, that it solves the binary pass/fail problem, or at least the 'worst thing happens on a fail.'  And, to so extent it does, but at what cost?Now, we've taken a system that is already GM decides -- does this action have a chance, what's the DC, what's the roll, what happens on a result -- and we've added additional confusion as to how this roll will be used in a larger adjudication process.  We haven't nailed it down, though, we've just added more GM decides points.  This means that players have even less understanding of what risks are in an action, and they already don't find out what some of those risks are until the GM has irrecoverably accepted their action and asked for a roll, setting both the ability used and the DC (and presuming they don't actually overstep to naming the skill proficiency, although many do this anyway out of prior edition training).  The result is that things are even more dependent on the GM and the players have even less insight into how a given action will be resolved.  When we're talking about potentially show stopping actions, this is not a plus.Usually this is going to be countered by claims of GM trust among the players, and that's fine, but the argument isn't about whether or not a given table's players have lots of faith in their GM, but if the system provides support.  Here, the argument is that 5e provides additional support by offering many potential ways for the GM to decide how to adjudicate a failure roll.  This isn't actually functionally true, though, because this "support" just erodes other areas and puts them even more on GM support.I mean, I can do a lot in 5e because I have a great rapport with my table, mostly because I'm almost always 100% clear about the stakes, what a success looks like, and what a failure looks like.  I learned to do this from other games, though, and brought this in to help clear up the black box problem of "GM decides" that exists in 5e.  When I say I do this, I'm almost immediately met with claims from others that this destroys the mystery of the game, so its clearly not a universal solution, but it works at my table.  This means that my solution is idiosyncratic to me, and isn't "supported" by 5e because the other ways of doing it have equal "support," which is to say, they tell the GM to decide how they want to do things.t;l:dr -- adding more GM decides points doesn't actually offer support for a thing, it puts it even more on the GM and hides it more from the players.</blockquote>

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