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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9563555" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm all for cinematic narration and emersion, but I find that has very little to do with degree of success vs. pass fail and a lot to do with whether the system has touch points that players can engage with situationally to accomplish goals, or conversely which encourages the GM to mess with the players to up the challenge, and perhaps even more so the experience level and personality of the participantsThere are a lot of systems that try to encourage cinematic narration in a straightforward fashion.  I think of say Exalted with its attempt at rewarding the player for creative narration about how they attack.  The intent is nice but it fails utterly in my opinion because tactics is not about creativity alone, but creativity applied to terrain and tools.  Creative attacks on an empty stage quickly become boring and repetitive and performative and are often cringey the first time.  But as you note in your example, combat on the deck of a violently lurching ship creates tactical novelty and necessity and opportunity all on its own, leading to actual creative stunts.  So really this is about encounter design and whether your system has something more interesting going on than advantage/disadvantage to inspire both players and referees.  You don't need partial success; you just need something in the system to leverage to represent all those opportunities to engage with the imagined setting.  "Maybe in this situation a push attack really is more interesting and useful than a standard attack, so let's try that!"How the game reaches that point is less interesting than it can reach that point and gives advice to the GM on how to handle it.</blockquote>

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