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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7054716" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe there is still some misunderstanding?No one at the table knows whether or not there is a vessel in the room. I haven't described the room in great detail; I certainly haven't drawn a picture of it. There has been no reference to anyone pouring a drink, or using the chamber pot.The player says (speaking as his character; and subject to the fact that I'm paraphrasing based on recollection), "There must be a lot of blood spilling out! I look around for a vessel - maybe a jug, or a chamber pot - that I can try and catch it in."I set a low DC, because spotting a vessel of some sort in a bedroom is not a hard thing to do; the roll was made, and succeeded, and so the PC did indeed notice the vessel he was hoping to.As I said, had the check failed (unlikely, but not impossible - a bit above 1%, from memory) then I would have had to narrate some consequence for failure, perhaps along the lines I described. As you've seen in my examples, (1) involves spotting a vessel but not being able to use it to catch blood, because it becomes broken in the course of the spotting (in the terminology of Burning Wheel, this is described as "successful task, failed intent" - a pretty standard approach to "fail forward" narration of consequences), while (2) leaves the question of a vessel open but tends to imply there is not one there (there is no reason to suppose that someone has hidden a vessel in the room, and nothing has been said to suggest that the room is so cluttered that a vessel might have been missed, and indeed the action that has unfolded so far tends to suggest that the room is fairly sparsely furnished).I'm not sure what you have in mind by the same result.No doubt, at some RPGing tables, the GM could just narrate one of the things I suggested, without there being a check.Can that sort of GM narration - what is sometimes called "GM fiat" -  yield drama? Yes. As I posted upthread, I've played in CoC railroads which are exciting and engaging, mostly because of the oratorical/theatrical skill of the GM. It's essentially storytelling, and being told a story by a good storyteller can be an engaging experience.Do I think the check yields more drama? At my table, absolutely. The "fiat" narration would be an instance of what, in the OP, I described as railroading - the GM is shaping an outcome to fit some pre-conception of how events should unfold. (To hark back to my recent reply to - I think -  [MENTION=6801286]Imaculata[/MENTION], it counts as an outcome and not just colour or framing because it goes directly to the players' goals for his PC.) Whether that is good or bad is a matter of taste, though my use of the "railroad" label probably reveals what my taste is. And part of what shapes my taste is that I find it more dramatic to learn, with the rest of the table, what happens in the fiction; and I think for my players it is more dramatic to participate in setting the stakes and then invoke the mechanics of the game to find out what happens, rather than simply be told a story by me.As for the possibility of narrating failure (whether following a failed check, or by fiat) simply as "No, you can't see an vessel" - I think that sort of "dead end" response tends to shut down creative and engaged play from the players, and instead encourages them to look for the "correct" solution that the GM has in mind. In other words, it tends to turn the game into puzzle-solving. I occasionally use puzzles in my game - eg in my main 4e campaign, which recently entered its 9th year, I think I've used one password puzzle and three riddles, where in each case there was a pre-determined answer and the players had to figure it out to get what they wanted for their PCs - but I regard it as very much in the "handle with care" bag of techniques, because of the risk of dead-ending, and certainly wouldn't adopt it as a general approach to adjudication.Yes.One paradigmatic illustration of the difference would be a TPK in a combat that was (given the ingame context and table expectations) fair, vs the GM just narrating "Rocks fall, everybody dies."Cashing it out: if there's a check the player is able to bring his/her resources to bear. S/he is playing the game. The GM just narrating failure doesn't allow the player to actually play the game in that sense. (One reason why CoC lends itself well to GM fiat narration is because players have almost no resources, and so the game doesn't set up any expectation that the players will actually play the game in the sense of deploying their PCs in a mechanical fashion.)</blockquote>

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