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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5958573" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your B looks to me like "fortune at the beginning". What do you think it is in the middle of?Yes. You can't narrate until after the dice are rolled and the mechanical consequence determined. (As per your decapition example upthread.)Agreed - 4e extends FitM out of the round and accross multiple rounds (at least in some cases eg its dying rules). You don't have to retcon, though, provided you take care with your narration. 4e has nothing useful to say about this in its rulebooks, but the original HeroWars rulebook does (like 4e, HeroWars/Quest resolution means you can't always get definitive narration until the encounter is resolved).In my view, one of the biggest weaknesses in 4e's presentation of skill challenges is that it didn't explain how to handle this, even though - in the example of play in the Rules Compendium - it shows the GM using the very techniques that are needed.The most important technique is liberal metagaming by the GM - introdcing new complications or consequences into the fiction which don't result from what the PCs have just done (or failed to do), but that either keep the scene alive, or close it off, as required.A simple example: in a negotiation challenge, if the players get a big Diplomacy success, but it's only half way through the challenge, the NPC says "Your words ring true. Unfortunately, I swore an oath to my late uncle never to get involved. So, alas, I cannot help you." Now the rest of the challenge is working around the NPC's oath.Or, if the PCs fail a Diplomacy check, thus ending the challenge, but within the fiction it seems like there is more that they could say, the NPC says "I'm sorry, but no matter how persuasive your pleas I cannot budge. Now you must leave." The PCs then have the option to escalate beyond negotiation to force (a combat encounter) or to leave and try to find out why the NPC cannot budge (a new non-combat challenge).And I'll close with another example of FitM, or something very close to it, from traditional D&D. Consider a reaction roll of an innkeep when the PCs enter the inn.On one approach, the GM already has worked out a personal history of the innkeeper, including that he hates mages, because 10 years ago the wizard's college forcibly conscripted the innkeeper's youngest son when he began to exhibit signs of "the gift". The PCs' party incudes an obvious wizard (robes, staff) and so the GM applies a penalty to the recation roll. No fortune in the midle here.But here's another way the same scene could go. The PCs walk into the inn. The GM has no notes on the inn or its keeper, and so rolls an unmodified reaction roll. The dice come up low - the innkeeer is unfriendly, even hostile! Why?, wonders the GM. And then invents a backstory to explain the innkeepers unfriendly reaction: ever since the wizard's college forcibly conscripted the innkeeper's youngest son - when he began to exhibit signs of "the gift" - the innkeeper has hated wizards and those who associate with them.GMs have been running encounters in this second sort of way from the beginning of RPGing, I think - using the action resolution mechanics to set parameters for the fiction, and then filling in gaps in the fiction to build up the story within those parameters. That's what FitM is for.</blockquote>

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