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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 9749266" data-attributes="member: 3400">I think people are getting pretty pedantic about the whole task/goal thing. D&D is vague enough that a roll might be either or both. Taking a look at the play examples, in one case you've got Gareth looking at a painting to assess its age. Task or goal? Effect or intent? Immaterial - they're pretty much the same. The player (Phillip) wanted to know the age of the painting - both a goal and a task, really. It's appraising the age of the painting to... know its age.The issue of throwing the rock to distract the guard is both as well - anyone just thinking the task is throwing the rock is really just putting that poor player on. It's ridiculous to focus on that level of trivial detail when you know for a fact the PC is trying to distract the guard. Moreover, whether distracting the guard or throwing the rock is a task depends on your granularity, not on any inherent nature of the event at hand.Checking if that actually distracts the guard is the real nature of the task here - you can even use varying difficulties to determine how distracted the guard is. DC 10, the guard notices it enough that it might keep him from hearing something else, but probably otherwise dismisses it as an annoying cat/raccoon in the woods. DC 15, the guard actually looks over there which might enable a PC to sneak by in another direction (see Obi-Wan's Death Star stealth antics), DC 30, the guard actually leaves his post because PC Hercules hit the tree hard enough to knock it down and the guard had to go over and see what the hell was going on.</blockquote>

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