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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8277820" data-attributes="member: 29398">Much farther down you refer to something as not being a gameplay benefit; that and the above quote would seem to suggest you're coming at this from a game-first or small-g gamist perspective rather than an in-character-first perspective.  This alone would explain probably 95%+ of our disagreements. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The player experience is constantly going to be desynchronized from the character experience, no matter what you do.  Even before seeing the roll result, for example, you-the-player picked up a die and rolled it; but (almost certainly) your character didn't.  It's a very short jump from there to having the fiction reflect the roll result whatever that result may be, particularly if one doesn't necessarily see the PCs as always being perfect.This is another thing: starting with 4e and ramping up further of late there seems to be a massive amount of focus - far too much, IMO - on "keeping the game moving forward".  I see nothing at all wrong with the characters - and thus the players - being stumped by something and left with no obvious way forward; it only seems logical that this sort of thing would likely happen fairly often to the characters.  And if it means the players (either in-character or out) have to stop and scratch their heads for a while, then so be it.In the game I play in we hit one of these points in last night's session: a door we just couldn't figure out how to open.  Several in-game hours (and a couple of at-virtual-table hours) and a whole bunch of creative ideas and resource-burning later we figured a way through it; but now we're weaker and have found the opposition on the other side... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />When I referred to difficulty mitigation I didn't mean in-character risk, I meant at-table frustration.You're seeing the task from one degree further back than I am and thus - I think - equating task wth goal. To me the goal is to get through the door, the task is to pick its lock. Fail. Then the goal is still to get through the door but the task now becomes to break it down. Etc. Checks resolve tasks, not goals; and thus each task can have a different DC (or equivalent) even if all those tasks are in pursuit of the same goal.And there is nothing - nothing! - wrong or bad about this.  You're rolling in hopes of achieving the meaningful consequence(s) tied to success.See above.I'm not concerned about bringing gameplay to a halt, because the gameplay doesn't halt.  The progess of the story might stop, but that's very different; the gameplay continues as the players/PCs either look for find another way through, or go and do something else, or try to think of a solution, or whatever.With you and I this probably ties in to (EDIT) different expectations of (/EDIT) pace of play and-or degrees of patience.  I don't usually care if something takes them all night to solve; as the campaign's real-world duration is completely open-ended, there'll always be next session to get to what wasn't got to tonight.</blockquote>

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