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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6785818" data-attributes="member: 42582">Just to add to this with a concrete example. Let's compare opening a stuck door in classic D&D vs in Burning Wheel. ( [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION], may be interested in this. Or not, as appropriate!)In D&D (think OD&D, or 1st ed AD&D, or Moldvay Basic as the paradigms here) there is a chance to open doors that is determined by the STR stat. Each roll of that chance represents, in the fiction, one concrete attempt to bust down the door. A second attempt requires a second roll. (For some sorts of doors, like Wizard Locked ones or when attempting to bend bars/lift gates, there is no reroll permitted. This is an interesting early instance of Let it Ride, though I think more for game-balance purposes than narrative momentum purposes.)Each attempt is likely to trigger a wandering monster check by the GM (due to the noise), and a failure will alert any inhabitants who are behind the door. While there is no in-principle limit on retries (subject to the exceptions noted above), in practice the passage of time (say, 1 round for each attempt) which depletes torches or Light spells, as well as the risk of wandering monsters or alerting inhabitants on the other side of the door, means that the players are likely to apply their own limits.In BW, opening a stuck door would generally be a STR check. (In BW the STR stat is actually called Power, but that's a mere detail in this context.) Only one check is permitted (ie Let it Ride applies). That check represents the PC making his/her best efforts. There is an explicit rule (called Working Carefully) that permits the player to stipulate that the check takes 50% more time than usual, and which then grants a bonus die in the dice pool, but that gives the GM licence, if the check fails, to introduce a significant time-based complication. So a player could declare that his/her PC is opening the door "carefully" - which in this case probably means having more tries, with a longer run-up - but if the check fails despite the bonus then the GM can narrate a nasty time-based failure (eg "The inhabitants on the other side have heard your first attempt, and have readied themselves in an ambush and then pull the door open on you just as you hit it for your second try, so that you stumble into the room and find yourself at their mercy").Those are different resolution systems which, in their application, generate different consequences. The D&D system, in its very application, tells you how many physical, concrete attempts were made to break down the door and what the consequence of each one was, whether success or failure. The BW system, as an equally inevitable consequence of its design and application, leaves this stuff unspecified until the dice are rolled and, in the case of a failure, the GM narrates the consequences of that failure.Within classic D&D there is another resolution system which is noticeably less concrete and more abstracted than the one for opening doors. That is the one for thieves climbing. In the application of the climbing mechanics, there is no scope for taking account of considerations like finger strength vs balance vs facility with any equipment being used, etc. These are all just bundled up into an undifferentiated mass called the Climb Walls chance.And if the roll to climb is a failure, nothing in the resolution determines whether the thief fell because his/her foot slipped, or his/her fingers gave way, or s/he reached up into the darkness hoping to find a handhold but the surface was smooth, or . . . If any sort of detail of that nature is to be introduced, it will have to be by the GM's narration of the failure ("Schroedinger's handholds"). If a player wants to have regard to particular details of handholds, of finger strength vs balance, etc, the system has no way as written to accommodate that. Either the GM would have to design a new, more detailed climbing system - and then, perhaps, "map out" the details of each wall that might be climbed - or else the player's description of how his/her thief PC uses the handholds and balances on this leg so as to be able to reach up to that small crack, etc, will all just be colour that is irrelevant to resolution.It's in the nature of "fail forward" mechanics to work at a level of abstraction at least equal to that of classic D&D climb walls, and in most cases probably even more abstract than that.</blockquote>

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