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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7341796" data-attributes="member: 29398">OK, then how do you determine whether the assassin succeeded or not?But they haven't!  That's the whole point here - the players/PCs have only succeeded in setting things in motion.  Put another way, they have only achieved success in those things they can influence - the assassin is hired, equipped, and sent on his - his - mission.  It's not the PCs' mission any more; they've handed it off to someone else.Between "the success or failure of the last check" (which on success gets the assassin out the door and on his way to his mission) and "the end result being narrated ... by the DM" there's a great big process gap which I noted in the quote with '///////'; this gap represents the determination of the success or failure of the assassin's mission, and that gap has to be filled in by the DM.Then what's the point?If you don't have an internally consistent world where relevant things can be theoretically counted on to work offstage the same way they do onstage, using the same rules and limitations and process as when the PCs are present and involved, then you might as well throw out the rulebook entirely.  Even if in most cases all the offstage stuff is either ignored or fiated to a result achievable within the rules and process, in cases like this where the eventual outcome is a) highly uncertain and b) possibly life-or-death relevant to the PCs it's incumbent on the DM to at least vaguely try to follow the process - which means roll some flippin' dice and figure out what happens behind the scenes so you can usefully narrate what the PCs see and experience. they are used as they would be in any gamble of skill and chance, to introduce uncertainty and transform the exercise into one where the outcomes are not forgone conclusions, but have an element of tension. Yes it would be a different thing; different enough that I'm ignoring it as a possibility here.  What I'm trying to do here is poke at the idea of how a series of player/PC-initiated falling dominoes can or would be resolved when the PCs aren't involved in anything more than the first push.Well, yeah; here you'd play it out for real.As sometimes the importance of any given story element isn't known until well after the fact (if ever!), I tend to want to even out the level of detail where I can such that it's not always obvious.  That said, there's also times when it's blatantly obvious that ***THIS IS A BOSS FIGHT!*** and we play it as such. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Lanefan</blockquote>

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