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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8505552" data-attributes="member: 16814">I was about to like the previous comment, but then you take the immediate opportunity here to, as you did in your response to me, accuse me of bad faith engagement.  There was no gotcha question.  I responded directly to your prompt -- you asked for the change in proposal from the one I first presented which was aimed to elicit answers to where I had confusion about your claims.  The second response which you are characterizing as gotcha questions here were following your response and further statements and were aimed at eliciting the same -- better understanding of your position.  You've now made this personal and about my motivations rather than my arguments in three recent posts.  Please stop doing this -- address my arguments.Further, I didn't overlay multiple consequences at all -- I have no idea how you come to this position.  I provided three independent goals to see how your claimed approach handled them.  One where the situation was dire, one where the situation was uncertain, and one where the only interest was entirely within the PC -- not external pressure but internal pressure.  None of these were calculated to be gotchas, none has multiple overlapping consequences (how could they, there's not consequence anywhere in them!).  They were aimed at eliciting asking over a wide range to see how your engaged them with your claims.  The answers didn't really show your claimed approach, though, because they didn't follow the basic loop of play and you continued to insist even in your last response.  That loop is the GM describes the situation or scene, the player declares actions, the GM evaluates and resolves those actions (perhaps calling on mechanic or just deciding what happens) and then the GM narrates the outcomes.  The scene described is the cliff -- it's the immediate obstacle.  The action is climbing the cliff.  The result for case 1 was for something outside this scene -- like decided the outcome of an adventure on a single check on the way to the expected end.  The result for case 2 was addition of new fiction not related to the declared goal or the challenge -- still, you were trying to be cool and show some creativity, but it's not helpful to do this when showing adjudication process -- it clouds the result.  So, that aside, you reverted to status quo -- no progress -- with no other real consequence other than discovery that the rival was engaged.  You actually offered a different path to success here.  I'm not sure what the actual meaningful consequence was in this case.  And then, in case three, it's just straight up no progress with offer to retry.  I don't see the principled approach you're claiming here -- you insisted that something outside the loop must be present to give the loop meaningful consequence, so I provided that curious to see the results.  And the results either ignored that (case 3), muddled it (case 2), or turned the scene into the resolution for a major event straight out (case 1).  To offer my approach as a counterweight, I don't really care why a character is doing a given task at the level you asked for.  I want to know what the PC is doing for their action and what the intent of that action is only.  Climbing a cliff?  Need to know the approach -- free climbing is fine -- and need to know the intent -- usually to get to the top, but there might be an added "get to the top without being seen."  I need to know this bit not so that I can provide meaningful consequences by attacking a goal, but because I want to make sure that I'm 100% clear on what the player wants to do so I don't step on it.  Climbing has lots of available setbacks and consequences that I can leverage that aren't just 'no progress,' and I never need to reach to a larger goal to get to them.  Since the PC in the examples just wants to get to the top, I can treat a failure in any number of ways -- I have threatened loss of gear (a slip causes a sword to begin sliding out of a scabbard, you can let it go and regain your position and complete the climb, or try to grab it, but that's going to be another check depending on how you want to try it at the same DC, failure means you lose your hold entirely and follow the sword down, success means you grab the sword before it slips out and continue to climb okay), I've paid off in hp damage (you slip and slide and tumble down about 20 feet before you fetch up against an outcrop and arrest your fall; take (2d10) damage from getting banged around), I've paid off in attacking the immediate intent (you wanted to climb stealthly, but at the top of the climb, a rock pulls free and starts a clatter down the cliff, dislodging some others for a good bit of racket.  You hear the guards say "what was that" and steps coming your way.  You're hanging at the edge of the cliff, pulling yourself up will be like standing from prone, what do you do?).  Lots and lots of ways.  All have impact and drive further play.On the other hand, when dealing with secret info, sometimes results are best left at no progress.  There's a secret door in a room and the players search but fail to hit the DC?  They don't find anything, move on.  I tend to avoid this by having secret doors be foreshadowed or otherwise used in short order, but sometimes you just need to have a regular old secret thing around.  And there's no way to reconcile "meaningful consequence" to this.  Although, I typically use passive check for this.Oh, and passive checks! (slaps forhead!)  That's the thing I've been trying to remember that absolutely puts paid to the 'meaningful consequence' bit as you've presented it!  According to the rules, passive checks are for when the PC is performing an action in one of two ways -- over time, so we average the d20 result for an average result to compare at a moment it's useful, and/or when the GM wishes to know a check result but doesn't, usually for reasons of secrecy, to ask for a roll.  Often passive checks are used for keeping an eye out for danger.  The PC is actively doing this on a constant basis, but we aren't asking for checks on a continuous basis because that sucks in play.  Plus, we may not want to alert the player to a threat if the PC doesn't notice it, so passive checks to keep an eye out are also used this way.  If a passive check fails to detect a hidden threat or item or door, nothing happens.  The "meaningful consequence" is on a later action, and the result is the same as if you didn't keep an eye out -- you either never notice it or you're surprised if it attacks.  Yet, according to the concept of a passive check, we can often have situations where there's an active action taken by the PC that results in no result on a failure.  Sometime this does result in a "meaningful consequence" but it also sometimes does not, and this isn't even blinked out despite passive checks being full up ability checks with a slight alteration in resolution but not in intent or effects.</blockquote>

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