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<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7394233" data-attributes="member: 29398">By my definition, failure here means there's no door; with the obvious ensuing complication being that now our erstwhile Thief has to face whatever she was trying to avoid.However, let's assume a secret door is successfully found, and proceed.And for a bunch of different reasons.&nbsp; My example earlier was the player/PC was trying to escape from a losing combat.&nbsp; But the same desire could arise from the player/PC trying to get into somewhere, and a secret door would nicely avoid all those nasty guards and their dogs.&nbsp; Or that the passage has come to what looks to be a dead end and the player/PC is testing whether it really is.&nbsp; And so on...Or it could still be part of an attempt to achieve that important something.&nbsp; I think that has to depend on how much leeway is given in narrating what a success means and how far forward it can carry the fiction.Finding a secret door (success) doesn't give the DM the right to frame someone waiting at the other end of the passage (a complication), does it?&nbsp; I mean, if it does there might be hope for this stuff yet! <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&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />&nbsp; But the impressions I've been given is that the DM isn't allowed to mitigate successes, only add complications to failures.But if the DM knows ahead of time a) whether there's a secret door there, b) where and what it leads to, and c) what if anything awaits beyond it, then there's no need to think about how much leeway a successful action provides as the answers are already in place.Lan-&quot;this hypothetical castle we've built must have so many secret doors in it by now that its structural integrity is in serious question&quot;-efan</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 7394233, member: 29398"] By my definition, failure here means there's no door; with the obvious ensuing complication being that now our erstwhile Thief has to face whatever she was trying to avoid. However, let's assume a secret door is successfully found, and proceed. And for a bunch of different reasons. My example earlier was the player/PC was trying to escape from a losing combat. But the same desire could arise from the player/PC trying to get into somewhere, and a secret door would nicely avoid all those nasty guards and their dogs. Or that the passage has come to what looks to be a dead end and the player/PC is testing whether it really is. And so on... Or it could still be part of an attempt to achieve that important something. I think that has to depend on how much leeway is given in narrating what a success means and how far forward it can carry the fiction. Finding a secret door (success) doesn't give the DM the right to frame someone waiting at the other end of the passage (a complication), does it? I mean, if it does there might be hope for this stuff yet! :) But the impressions I've been given is that the DM isn't allowed to mitigate successes, only add complications to failures. But if the DM knows ahead of time a) whether there's a secret door there, b) where and what it leads to, and c) what if anything awaits beyond it, then there's no need to think about how much leeway a successful action provides as the answers are already in place. Lan-"this hypothetical castle we've built must have so many secret doors in it by now that its structural integrity is in serious question"-efan [/QUOTE]

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