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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8281001" data-attributes="member: 82106">I would personally say that all this asserts is that there are different levels of difficulty. I could say to you &quot;Oh, its a single goblin, you killed it.&quot; I could say &quot;You searched and easily found the concealed thingy.&quot; In either case checks could be appropriate, regardless of what specific actions you declare. The point is, there's no clear boundaries here. Yes, SP has a, fairly arbitrary, convention that certain things are simply described instead of diced for. These are universally going to take the form of 'puzzles' where you must declare very specific actions in order to 'win'. I would note that 4e literally has a section of the encounter chapter which describes this process in detail. I won't say there is NO rationale there, often it is a question of whether or not a situation is immediately harmful to the PC, and just how explicitly 'contest like' it is. Note how in classic D&amp;D you just fall into a pit and take damage, but you fight a goblin and need to pass checks to kill it. This is really pretty arbitrary, in game process terms, but it has SOME basis in fiction. Clearly in the long process of 'evolving' these conventions, to use [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s construction of it, a lot of these conventions 'froze out' and became set in SP tradition. I think it has mostly to do with just what made the GM's dungeon crawl paradigm work. There wasn't a theory to it, really.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8281001, member: 82106"] I would personally say that all this asserts is that there are different levels of difficulty. I could say to you "Oh, its a single goblin, you killed it." I could say "You searched and easily found the concealed thingy." In either case checks could be appropriate, regardless of what specific actions you declare. The point is, there's no clear boundaries here. Yes, SP has a, fairly arbitrary, convention that certain things are simply described instead of diced for. These are universally going to take the form of 'puzzles' where you must declare very specific actions in order to 'win'. I would note that 4e literally has a section of the encounter chapter which describes this process in detail. I won't say there is NO rationale there, often it is a question of whether or not a situation is immediately harmful to the PC, and just how explicitly 'contest like' it is. Note how in classic D&D you just fall into a pit and take damage, but you fight a goblin and need to pass checks to kill it. This is really pretty arbitrary, in game process terms, but it has SOME basis in fiction. Clearly in the long process of 'evolving' these conventions, to use [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s construction of it, a lot of these conventions 'froze out' and became set in SP tradition. I think it has mostly to do with just what made the GM's dungeon crawl paradigm work. There wasn't a theory to it, really. [/QUOTE]

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