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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7094509" data-attributes="member: 29398">From the players' side this seems like nothing more than splitting hairs.  They see the yellow-robed guy, eventually realize he's more significant than first thought, dig further, and learn some things about his motivations-goals-personality-history-etc.Whether you decide he's engaged to the Baron's niece a) on the spot during a played session (i.e. from what's already in the DM's brain) or b) 6 years ahead of time in your world design phase (i.e. from what's already in the DM's notes) doesn't matter a whit to the players at the table.  You-as-DM still decided it, and they as players still learned it.It's different from the DM side, of course, but that's irrelevant - it's the players' perspective that matters.The illusion is in making a) and b) above completely indistinguishable from the players' side (regardless of  whether the information being presented is true, false, or neither).  The illusion is in keeping the players unable to tell whether you're running from notes or from what you're making up on the spot...and this applies to both your system and mine: my illusion is that I'm using notes when I'm sometimes not, yours would be the opposite.And success on the check means there is?  We're right back to my somewhat silly example of Schroedinger's diamonds from about a jillion pages ago, where as a player I can bring diamonds into existence in the game world just by having my character search for them.  Players shouldn't be able to punch their own ticket to a solution like this and so easily bypass the challenge.  In the citadel example, why would a party bother doing anything else (such as scouting, tracking guard movements, even attempting to sneak in) before finding a dark bit of wall and seeing if they can roll up* a secret door?  In the diamonds example, why bother adventuring to get rich when I can just generate a diamond about half the time I search for one?* - for such it is, no more than a die roll.Only true if there's in fact a secret door there to be found.At its extreme, isn't this just another form of railroad?Lan-"I search for a secret door that is, in fact, a painted-over diamond"-efan</blockquote>

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