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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SableWyvern" data-source="post: 9678783" data-attributes="member: 1008">I have been giving some thought to how Blades would have worked for me if we had only called for a roll if we felt there were plausible and interesting outcomes for all possible levels of success or failure.And it would absolutely have broken the game for me. I was OK with the results not always being as plausible as I might normally expect; that's what we'd bought into and we had a lot of fun with it. One of my players found it extremely fun just to see what kind of complications I would throw at them -- he'd love making a roll when he couldn't imagine how there was any way it could go horribly wrong, and then having me pull something out of nowhere. And it would be plausible enough, but only in the context of the over-the-top, all-action-all-the-time, keep digging until you're out the other side, game we were running.If we'd put a stop to the any roll occurring until the normal threshold of plausibility was met for all possible check results, the game would literally have just come to halt.So, yeah. There is an extreme edge case where you might be able to satisfy my normal plausibility threshold, but not while I still consider the game playable.Edit to add: On top of that, when the dice told me I had to come up with a complication, it was often challenging. I found Blades easier than any game I've ever run to literally run on zero prep. Show up, no clue what would happen -- not the faintest -- and it all just goes off perfectly. But actually running the session was more mentally exhausting than any game I'd ever run, because I was always being forced to improvise. I had no choice. The dice said "Complication" and I was honouring that, so complication there must be. Had I been in a position to have to decide before the dice, "Are there meaningful complications to be had here for every possible outcome," that's a lot more mental overhead, as I have to assess every single, not just one. If someone had me at gunpoint, forcing me to stick to, "no roll unless there are interesting outcomes for every possibility," I would almost certainly have just vetoed most of the situations where players were looking to make rolls. "Nope, not enough interesting outcomes, no roll."</blockquote>

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