Here's a post of mine from another thread that describes how Fantasy Flight Star Wars worked for me...
"I ran one campaign in Fantasy Flight Star Wars' (I think it was Age of Rebellion). I never got the hang of the rules and had to have one of the players interpret the die rolls for me.
Him, looking at the symbols on the dice: "I got two challenges, a threat, and an opportunity..."
Me: "So I guess you fired your last shot before your power pack drained. It missed the Stormtrooper, but it hit a pipe near the enemy's head, spraying out steam. This could fill the whole room, but it's close enough for the Wookie to grab to bend the pipe and blind your opponent."
Him: "No, that would be one challenge, two threats, and a celebration..."
Me: "Alright, you hit the Stormtrooper. As he falls, his blaster fires erratically, causing the Blast Doors to begin closing at the end of the hall. From the other end, you see a squad of 5 more troopers turn the corner, weapons raised. One activates his com: 'Lieutenant, we've found them!'"
Him: "No, that would be a success, a threat, a challenge, and a disaster with three raises."
Me: "Ok, you tell me what is the correct way to read that die roll."
I hated running that system. It codified all the narration, shackled my creativity and descriptions, seemed completely arbitrary in its rules with extremely similar and confusing language to separate different results."
Hmmm, yeah, that's unfortunate. That's nearly exactly opposite of my group's experience. Our experience was tremendously fun and satisfying---satisfying enough that it got a player who in the past 20 years hadn't played anything but WoD and D&D 3.5 / PF1 to actually buy
Edge of the Empire.
Maybe it was the fact that I'd had a significant learning opportunity running a narrative style game using
Ironsworn that made the difference. FFG /
Genesys system was right up my wheelhouse. It felt totally natural interpreting the dice, giving players more director-stance / background-level input on how scenes were playing out, interpreting die results using different techniques, etc.
If you're primarily encultured to use "trad" action resolution type results, the Narrative Dice system would feel much like you've described --- confining, awkward, difficult to resolve, and unsatisfying. "Trad" ethos runs fairly counter to the
Genesys / FFG system.
It's not really spelled out in the rules in a satisfying way, though. It's like FFG was afraid to go to that "bridge too far" by telling players directly, "Don't try to run this like your typical roleplaying campaign."
With my
Ironsworn experience, it was so easy to pick up the threads of what to do. It was obvious that interpreting a narrative dice result was meant to have more "reach", or potential narrative impact than strict "in the moment" action resolution. A single throw of the dice could indicate gears of NPC intentions / events churning in the background, a mounting threat (or a mounting opportunity) coming ahead that the characters may or may not be aware of; it could mean some circumstance you thought was true in your GM "head canon" may have just become very much untrue, because fate / the dice have deemed it so.
If you're comfortable using PbtA / FitD style narrative techniques, the FFG / Narrative Dice system sings. Once you're used to concepts like
Ironsworn's bonds and momentum, FitD's position/effect tradeoff, PbtA's fronts, and
Blades in the Dark style clocks /
Ironsworn progress tracks, the Narrative Dice system feels like a very natural extension of those concepts, just with a little more character-facing build structure around it.
*Edit -- Looking at your comment, it also seems that if your player/players were sitting there expecting you to interpret the dice, but without offering their own input and merely negating your input with "That doesn't follow from the dice, try again," then there was a significant mismatch between system expectations, player expectations, and the intended group dynamics.