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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Enrahim" data-source="post: 9717428" data-attributes="member: 7025577">I think you are laying out the case well if we indeed had been looking at the player mailing a decission about what outcome they prefered. However consider the following interpretation of the situatuation:The characters find the runes. The player of the runes expert is asked what their character thinks the runes might be when observing them from afar. The player is the natural authority to ask such a question, and it ask about a here and now state - the mental state of the expert. No causality concerns are being violated here as far as I can see?Now the expert's frame of mind is established as a fact in the fiction. The expert then proceed to read the runes. The potential outcomes of this action should take into account previously established fiction. The expert's frame of mind is such an established part of fiction. Further the expert's level of expertise seem relevant for determining how important this established part of the fiction should be in terms of determining outcome. No escape from fiction or break of causality happening yet.Now the limitation of the shape of the rules present themselves. The single roll is only able to select among 2 different outcomes. That is that among the wast number of imaginable outcomes of reading the runes only two of them can be selected as possible at this stage. This is an enormous active colapse of any in-fiction probability distribution. How to decide which two outcomes to chose? Further remember that this roll is not in the game presented as determining success or failure, but to determine between a favorable and unfavorable outcome.I have as such a really hard time seeing how you can justify not having the runes being read as the way the expert thought they might being one of the two possible outcomes. It would make sense that this is aligning with the side that is increased in probability by high skill. The other outcome the game appear to delegate to GM's discretion, but likely with some guidelines. (Edit - it could in particular be that the negative outcome should align with lower skill. In this case runes meaning something else than the expert expected seem to satisfy this criterion)So here we do have a causality issue. A decission made outside the game collapsed the possibility space i the fiction in a way that cannot be accounted for in the fiction itself. But how is this different from the GM choosing exactly what to narrate on a success or failure in D&D?And note, when ask about their character's assessment, the player could come with a corrupt answer. But a GM could also come with a corrupt answer to any of the judgement calls they are making. For purpose of analysis this game appear to assume players to be held to the same standards as a GM i  this regard. As such this would be outright cheating the game, and not something that should be needed to be taken into account when analysing the game as it is meant to be played.</blockquote>

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