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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9679037" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Hold up, you're conflating two different things here. Novel stuff, like encounters, creatures, situations, traps, all that, is not the same as an unknown result to an action declaration. I'm all about all about knowledge checks, perception all that (and have argued before they should generally be treated as defenses and used in a passive process) and think players should generally be given or have routes to get information about stuff, but that's orthogonal to my point. My point is that player action declarations should have knowable impacts on the board state for all possible outcome cases; the lock will be picked and open or not based on the outcome of my declared action, there are no other possible outcomes that are inherent to my action declaration itself. Other elements of the established gamestate that I could in some way assay might affect what happens next. If there are guards on the other side of the door, and hearing them playing dice is contingent on my investment in Perception, or perhaps something like burning a charge on a Ring of X-ray Vision, I might have access to that information and change my action declaration to mitigate the risk, probably bringing in whatever the stealth rules are, or finding another way around, or perhaps I don't successfully employ whatever mechanic governs knowing that, and we're in consequence town.But if the possibility of guards reacting is contingent entirely on my declaring an action in the first place, I've lost a whole avenue of gameplay. I can't have gotten the information ahead of time, and I can't have picked a different action.To put it more pithily, I'm saying that the tools of interaction should produce knowable outcomes; the objects being interacted with should contain the potential for unknowns. My problem with moving the unknown up to the mechanisms of interaction is that it's flattening; I want to play a game where picking the right action declarations matters.</blockquote>

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