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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8274724" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think it is sort of literally true that a GM 'cannot narrate that success until you find out what the PC wants.' but that doesn't stop most GM's from going on ahead and narrating SOMETHING. 5e does not tell you that you need to go through this extra undocumented step of explicating what the check is accomplishing and how it is accomplishing it. Just one of several deficiencies.Here's my feeling. For a fairly unanalytic and casual audience who are mostly running modules, which probably describes about 75% or more of all D&D play, not challenging the GM with any puzzling and foreign ideas related to task resolution that works is simply the best option for a game publisher. It is also hard to publish 'modules' for a story game. They don't tend to be very linear, they require less elaborate specific fixed prep material, and they just don't generally work in ways that are amenable to a catalog type listing of encounters. 5e caters to exactly this. It is a system where you buy a module and run through it from page 1 to 50, describing each scene and when that scene is exhausted the players either choose to go to the next one, or rest. There can be some story devices involved (two paths, go through these areas in any order, time clocks to force a tighter resource game in some parts, etc.). None of these really asks much in the way of how the fiction is generated. Sometimes groups are a little more sophisticated or less interested in just following the 'bread crumbs' of what is written and the GM can elaborate or go off and insert some side thing. However, unless they abandon the rest of the module, at some point they need to rail things back on track, and a system that lets them basically dictate what happens next with 95% reliability is what they want. This is the true WotC market. Who's to criticize that, it makes loads more money than all other RPGs combined! It just won't work for you or me.Heh, yeah, I'm not really a Monte Cooke fanboy either. I mean, I just know so little about Numenera that I have not thought of reading it. Got many other things to do!</blockquote>

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