The situation may be important, doesn't mean that description of every detail is. Do you know how amateur writers sometimes write text where every bloody sentence is overtly complicated flowery prose overflowing with abundance of adjectives, because they mistakenly think that many words and complicated sentences make the writing good? Whereas professionals control the flow of their text by varying the sentence structure, using more verbose descriptions when needed and more snappy and succinct ones where they will better serve their purpose. It can be like that.
That such a phenomenon occurs doesn't mean that this is the same thing -- it's a false comparison until you show it's the same thing. I mean, I'm tall, and basketball players are tall, but that doesn't mean I'm a basketball player (I was terrible at it so I stuck to goalkeeping). You've created a counter-argument whereby what I was talking about is likened to an amateur writer using too many words where your approach is using the perfect amount of words like a professional writer. I mean, really? Are you sure it's not a case where I'm the professional, using the exact right amount of words to elicit an engaging scene and you're the amateur not doing a good enough job describing what's going on so everyone's just kind of confused? See how easily abusive this line of argument is, and how gauche?
I don't have a problem in my games of too much narration. I'm quick and too the point and play moves quickly. If you have to imagine my play as some terribly example of what not to do to make your points, you're admitting how weak your thinking is. Not your approach, because it's a perfectly valid and enjoyable approach. I don't have to belittle you or your playstyle to advocate for mine.
GM describes a weird animal.
Player: "What the hell was that? Can I roll nature or something?"
Yeah, perhaps this would be good opportunity for the player to reminiscent about their backstory about living with the tribe of wild elves and learning about the wonders of the natural world. And if they do that, nice, we might tie this to that. But if they don't and say what I described above, that's cool too. They have proficiency in the nature skill, which means that they know stuff about animals. Let the dice decide whether this is one of the animals they know stuff about and move on with the story.
See, to me, this is a failure on the part of the GM. They've decided that there will be a mystery of what this weird animal is, but that the solution needs to be gated behind the PCs asking the GM questions and then the dice. I'm not even going to bother with that. Either the question of what the animal is isn't terribly interesting or important, in which case it gets rolled into my description, or it is, in which case the PCs don't know what it is just looking at it and need to do something to figure it out. Neither case waits for 'can I roll nature or something' or provides that as a viable approach to the problem. I don't like play that's essentially ask the GM questions and then roll dice to find out if you get an answer -- that's uninteresting in the extreme to me. If I'm going to have a weird creature, the mystery won't be solved by asking to roll nature, or something. Being proficient in nature will likely be a significant boon, but it's not going to be the random allocation of knowledge.
I fully get that it would be super bland that just asking for skill rolls was how it was always done, but this of course is not how it works.
No, of course not. Aside from the usual terminology issues, allows skill checks enables a certain kind of play that I do not want. It enables the ask questions instead of do things play, where the GM is incentivized to keep things mysterious and unclear until players ask about it, thinking that this establishes a mystery for the players. I did that for years, and it's not all asking for skill checks, but it's a lot of that. And, it's frustrating to wait for the right skill to be asked for, and then a success, to pass whatever bar I thought was necessary to just provide information. It's disheartening. Especially since you can outright give players my notes and it won't help much at all because I don't have magic answers or precise skill checks written down and because players will still screw it up by the numbers even if they know what's in my notes (which are usually a blurb outlining a situation, a few bullet points of cool things I think might fit, and a map).
Similar situation than the plot getting stuck because the player fails a critical roll can easily simply result from the players failing to think the 'correct' thing to do. Same with characters succeeding beyond expectations and 'ruining' the plot. These usually stem from the GM being overly committed to the one specific direction the story 'should' take and unwillingness to alter the premade plans. Common GMing problems, but ultimately rather easy to avoid.
Ah, man, I was prescient with my last paragraph, because here's the old tried and true, last stand, desperate chestnut tossed at those that use my approach -- the GM is just waiting until the exact right thing is said and then play proceeds. I've seen this phrased as pixel-bitching, phrased as magic words, and a few others. It's hogwash bullroar and a lazy argument that exposes that you've no idea what I do when I run, just an imaging of a terrible game. I feel you, I did that same back when I didn't know better, either. It's natural, again because you think that someone saying there's a different way to approach the game implies that they think their way is better and that casts you as the bad GM, so you retaliate rather than try to understand. You cast them in the worst light you can think of because it lets you off the hook -- what they do is bad, so I can ignore them and not question what I do. That's fine, what you do is fine -- good even, if your table has fun. I don't want to convince you that you play wrong, because I don't think that.
But, to address this hogwash, no, there are no magic words. I even posted an example of how I prep and play above, where two different characters tries two completely different approaches to climbing a crumbled wall, and both got a fair shake and a chance to succeed. If I had magic words, then only one would have had a chance, the other would have just failed. Or, there would be some magic solution I've prepared that will automatically succeed -- somehow I've prepped this despite saying in that earlier post that my prep is not solutions, but situations. I do not know how a scene will end because I don't prep an ending, just a beginning, which is usually fed directly from the last unknown ending. I run skill challenges that have no structure at all outside of X successes before 3 failures. Magic words are the last thing that could possible describe how my game works.
I did used to use magic words, though. Back when I ran like you do, which is why I think that accusation gets leveled so readily in these discussions. I had prepped situations where I thought the solution would be obvious -- the clues, the room, etc. -- but my players didn't get it so a series of random guesses occurred until it was close enough. Because you can't violate the prep, that's cheating (or metagaming, I can't remember, probably both)! I've left that behind as well, because I no longer prep solutions or answers and even my puzzles are PC sided, not player sided, so the answer is whatever the happens through PC action declarations, not putting together the Clue clues to find out who did it with what where.
