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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 8010614" data-attributes="member: 6795602">Leaving aside the philosophies for a moment, it seems to me that in the real world it's impossible to turn lead to gold via alchemy but that didn't stop anyone from trying.Going back to those philosophies - I would say they are wrong.  I think that from our perspective Failure can never be 100% certain and so to us there is always some miniscule chance of success in whatever endeavor we try - and even moreso in an RPG featuring real magic and gods.More importantly, I don't think you can judge what is actually genuine or sincere for another.  I think the issue really stems from that philosophy of yours.Also a minor quibble, "I talk the dragon into giving me its treasure" did specify an action.  "talk" is an action.  That said, it's a vague action in that context as "talk" can take a great many forms and that vagueness makes it difficult to fill in interesting details about the Dragon's reaction.Yes, I'm not familiar with that game, but I believe it's one where the elements the player introduces can actually come to be in the fiction.  Which is why they must limit themselves to genre appropriate statements.  In 5e though where the DM is final arbiter of the fiction, and so you can say I look in the toilet for beam weaponry all you want and you will never find any.  All it does in the fiction is make your character look like a crazy loon.That definitely makes it challenging to run but the DM is still final arbiter and so it's also easier in some respects.Which is why the notion of auto-failure is so important in such games.  In any game where the DM serves as final arbiter then being able to declare auto-failure is essential to maintaining the appropriate genre.I think what you are calling "follow from the fiction" is actually "follow from the established fiction".  IMO that is an important distinction. I think there's a great deal of mislabeling examples because people are trying to force them to fit into one of those options.  Speaking of - violate gameplay premise is a concept I think I was the first to introduce in this thread as a plausible alternative for explaining why a dragon giving away it's horde still shouldn't be an option in a no/low-prep D&D game.That's a problem I've solved just by asking them to be more specific about where and how they are searching. If that PC's action can be used to establish something important about the Dungeon that wasn't previously established then I'm not sure how it followed from the fiction in any sense other than how any arbitrary action that is attempted by a PC always follows from the fiction. I guess where I'm at is that I don't distinguish there to be any meaningful difference between a PC action inventing strange runes to tell him where in the dungeon he is and a PC action establishing that the strange runes you just found are for that purpose.</blockquote>

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