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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 7835251" data-attributes="member: 6802765">There's definitely room for multiple approaches to the examples I gave. For context, I personally see #2 as closer to #1, in the sense that knowing if a wall is structural (i.e. whether it is load-bearing and thus likely too strong to just burst through, or a non-structural room divider that isn't much of an obstacle) may depend more on knowledge of the construction techniques and materials in use, rather than observation of a specific wall. Any sort of panelling or wall covering (in a modern building, plaster or drywall) will often make structural and non-structural walls visually indistinguishable. Even without wall coverings, telling the difference between (e.g.) a divider of stacked mud bricks (that might be burst through with a good run) and something like adobe construction (like running into concrete) is something I think depends more on knowledge than observation.As a player I'd be fine with your preferred approach to #2, as long as you still let the check be Intelligence (History) rather than requiring it to be Wisdom (Perception). Although if you required examining the wall to take an action I'd just skip the idea entirely: trying to burst through the wall is likely to be an action already, and spending two actions on an off-the-wall (or rather through-the-wall) plan to gain a tactical advantage is rarely worth the lost damage potential.For #1 and #3 I see our approaches as functionally equivalent from the player's perspective.Very impressive! Until the above example came up in play I'd never even considered including that much architectural detail in my descriptions. Even now I don't include it as a regular practice, because it's come up exactly the once. I still usually don't even decide ahead of time about which walls are structural and which are room dividers, so I wouldn't have that much detail to give up front. (Also, I sometimes fear I give too much detail in my descriptions already, so even if I knew which walls were structural I'd probably not prioritize that information and end up leaving it out of my up-front drecription)Generally-speaking, yes: all else equal I prefer that any highly-abstract mechanics with world-building implications be kept under the hood. If there are going to be checks that create new monsters where none existed before, I'd rather not know about it at the table. (Especially if the PCs had done their legwork and figured out IC the number of opponents in advance.) By constrast, if the PCs know an enemy patrol exists and have taken steps to avoid it, I'm totally fine with the DM ruling that the PCs' efforts reduce (but not eliminate) the odds of encountering the patrol, deciding there is an X% chance of the encounter an rolls openly. To me that's probabilistically modeling an uncertainty in the game world, rather that abstractly rewriting the game world.An example of the other extreme would be a table where, when exploring a dungeon, every X minutes there is a Y% chance of new monsters spawning into the game world and attacking the PCs. That wouldn't be immersive for me at all. It's not quite as bad if the monsters are moved rather than created (so fighting them now means less to fight later), and if X and Y are tailored to the environment and PCs' and monsters' actions rather than being constant.Ultimately immersion for me requires that the in-game world makes sense. So long as it's plausible that monsters are here, now, then great. Anything that undermines that plausiblity (like causally linking the existence of the monsters to the OOC accumulation of tension dice) I don't want to know about. The flip side of this is that as if it can be made to feel organic, I'm totally fine with the DM noticing that the players are losing focus and adding in an unplanned combat to refocus the game.</blockquote>

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