billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
The sorts of consequences that I and others are talking about are connected to the action that failed. It's just that they're not causally connected to the task attempted. They're narratively or thematically connected to what it was that the player was hoping the PC would achieve by the check (@Manbearcat uses the phrase "fiction first" to convey this).
So a failed Ride check is narrated as a lame horse, or to encountering a yawning canyon - narratively/thematically connected to attempting to escape on horseback.
A failed Diplomacy check is narrated as rain which leads the NPC to retreat back under cover before the PC can convey his/her full message - narratively/thematically connected to attempting a successful, genteel negotiation with a dignatory.
What counts as the limit of narrative/thematic connection (which, if violated, makes the game seem absurdist) is obviously highly sensitive to shared genre expectations, shared plot expectations, and past experiences at the game table. Everyone seems to agree that "Rocks fall. Everybody dies," is a bit too much. But there's a lot of space to be explored between purely ingame causal processes and "Rocks fall. Everybody dies."
For me, the appearance of Schrödinger's gorge (it exists in a quantum state until the player's die roll fails the check) robs my PC of his agency. There's nothing he did that caused the check to fail, rather it was something else that happened to occur. I find that unsatisfying and anti-immersive.
There are many ways that a player can explain how the check failed because of what the PC did (or failed to do successfully). In the horse-riding example, directing the horse badly could cause the horse to receive a minor injury (pulled muscle, wrenched tendon) and thus become lame. If racing through low hanging foliage and I fail my ride check, the horse slows because my PC directed him badly and the horse balked at being slapped in the face by the branches rather than an irate lemur reached out to poke my PC's horse in the eye.
The task, as a player and as I see it, is to describe how my PC was not up to the task, not how the task was complicated by some other factor that caused my PC to fail. This way my PC owns his failures (as well as his successes).