I assume you are talking here about your table.Of course not. That part of the fiction is not the players' to decide.
At other tables, which adopt different conventions and different rules, that may not be true. At those tables, therefore, the players would have greater agency over the content of the shared fiction. They would be deciding more things about it.
Again, I have to assume that you are talking here about your table. Because what you say here is literally false of some RPGs (eg Burning Wheel, Cortex+ Heroic)."I look in the box" and "I stab the orc" are the same, in that each identifies an attempted interaction with an already-known piece of the fiction: the box and the orc are each already present.
However, "I look in the box for the Crown of Revel" tries to bring in another element, that being the Crown, the presence or absence of which remains yet unknown to the players. In my view, saying the words "for the Crown of Revel" does nothing but add flavour; and while adding flavour is always cool in and of itself it has no other relevance.
Put another way, the only mechanically relevant bit of that declaration is "I look in the box"
Trivially. I and other GMs the world over are doing it day in, day out.As everyone seems to agree that part of the GM's job is to set obstacles and challenges (right? We're all agreed on this?), if the GM has no way of knowing where the Crown is ultimately going to be found how can she lay down any obstacles to finding it?
I have many actual play reports on this forum. They will give you examples of how it is done. Here's a simply imagined illustration:
the player declares I look in the box for the Crown of Revel. The GM sets an appopriate difficulty, using whatever framework the system establishes (eg Burning Wheel has default obstacles for Scavenging tests; Cortex+ has the Doom Pool being rolled to establish the oppositiong to this sort of action declaration). If the check succeeds, the PC finds the Crown in the box; if the check fails, the box is trapped and the PC triggers the trap. After that is resolvd - as is appropriate to the system - we keep playing to see if and where the Crown might be found.
This is a more long-winded of saying "at my table" while also showing that you have very little udnerstanding of how even a game like Classic Traveller (first published 1977) works, let alone something like Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World.I'm able to understand that there's different ways of playing different types of games. That said, there's a very real chance I define RPG differently than you do.
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Fundamental disagreement here: determining the heretofore unknown contents of a box is not an agency players get to have in an RPG unless a player's PC put the contents in there in the first place.
A game that gives players that agency has moved away from what I see as an RPG (in which one Plays a Role, that being of your PC) and into shared worldbuilding, which is something very different: a player is no longer simply playing the role of a character in a setting but is also given the responsibility of determining elements of and within that setting, which any player worth his-her salt will very quickly take blatant advantage of.
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I'm dubious about accepting that as a valid way to roleplay, in that there's no internal setting consistency, no continuity, and therefore nothing to base any long-term in-character thoughts and-or memories on.
On reaching a new valley: I look in the valley for the village of Terynia. Action resolution succeeds and suddenly there's a village there; but for some reason we were never told about it before the trip even though in theory it's been there all along; and had we known or even been able to speculate about its existence sooner we might very well have done things differently.
Also as a system it's broken as hell the minute the players don't severely self-restrain, which IMO they shouldn't have to do.
Everything I've quoted here - the unrelenting refusal to consider that action declaration might include I look in the box for . . . (which obviously does not require doing anything but playing a PC - it's pure actor stance); the inability to think of setting and world building beyond Gygax-era maps-and-key; the idea that sysetms will, indeed must, "break" if the players can declare these sorts of actions and have them resovled - screams I learned to play D&D c 1980 and haven't looked beyond those boundaries in the 40 years since.
If that's what you're trying to convey, you're succeeding. If you want to have a conversation about what RPGIng might and can be, though, you going to have to at least contemplate that D&D c 1980 is not the be-all and end-all of RPGIng.