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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9118449" data-attributes="member: 59">Probably for the same reason that no one plays D&D the same way.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />That said, I think that blog post, at least in the section that you've quoted regarding consenting to a roll, is, at best, misrepresenting play.  (Especially with the hyperlink back to the post on safety tools, which frames the processes of play in a strange way, at least from where I'm sitting.)[USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s cited the No Fishing guidance from the Adventure Burner/Codex, which covers fishing for better Obstacles (Obs).  The sections immediately preceding it are "No Weasels" and "But Weasels," which I think are relevant here, too.  The former is derived from Mouseguard, where it's a hard and fast rule.  It says that once the Ob is set for a task, you must roll — you can't weasel out of it.  Crane resists making it a hard and fast rule for BW in the "But Weasels" section, which says that you can sometimes avoid making the roll, but that means that your characters changed their mind at the last minute, and the fictional situation advances somehow, even if it's just time moving on.  The example given is players deciding their characters will climb a curtain wall to gain access to a castle, but, upon finding out the Ob is too high, they walk away and approach the castle from the front gates.  In this case, Crane says that what's happening fictionally is that the characters showed up with their gear, ready to climb, looked at the wall, said, "Oh, naughty word that," and tried something else, presumably after ditching their climbing gear, etc.  So, there's a reframing of the scene as a result of the players changing their minds.  They went to climb, but they didn't.  But there is a mild fictional cost to that choice.  Which is all to say that to the extent that you can decide not to roll something as a player after an Ob's set, that refusal to test will manifest itself in the fiction.  And really if this is happening on the reg, something's gone wrong — managing impossible Obs is what artha, FoRKs, helping dice, and advantage dice are for — though I'm amused at the idea of a bunch of Burning Wheel characters muddling through a game like George B. McClellan at the beginning of the Civil War ("McClellan could have ended the war then, instead he did nothing" seems to be most of the first couple episodes of Ken Burns's The Civil War).</blockquote>

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