Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7769392" data-attributes="member: 29398">Maybe the DM has branching story ideas or adventure hooks in mind e.g. if they happen to find the hidden document that shows the Baron is an enemy spy that might lead to a whole different story or focus, and if not they'll just keep investigating the disappearance of his son like they were already doing.  The DM has placed the document there but isn't going to lead the party to it; if they find it, great, and if they don't find it, also great.No, it's a bug.  Achievement of goals (which is almost always in the 'fluff' realm) is brought about by successful completion of actions (using 'crunch' if mechanical success-failure determination is needed), which means the game mechanics should leave the goals part to take care of itself in the fiction and not look any further than the actual actionsNothing precludes anything in the end, but what does the system encourage or discourage?  If the GM has to fight the system in order to drill down to more granular resolution levels (or in order to ignore goals as a part of the mechanics) then I posit that's a system failure.Because there's so many situations where a single failure can lead to many different outcomes, locking in the results of failure just makes no sense.  Even the fairly simple example we're using - trying to climb a wall quietly while burdened by a bag o' gold - has three obvious variables: the climb itself, the noise level, and retention of the gold; along with the fourth less-obvious variable of whether anyone notices in any case.I'd personally rather break this down into two or three separate player-side determinations (the noise, the climb, and gold retention if the climb goes badly) and one DM-side determination (does anyone notice, as affected by the player-side results).  And if this takes an extra moment or two at the table, I don't care.An overkill example, and as none of those actions are likely being done under duress (well, except for feeding the cat: failing that one can and will have dire consequences!) there's obviously no roll.But someone trying to steal a bag of gold out from under the King's nose and whose life may be forfeit if caught - yeah, that's duress.  Rolls all around.The player isn't given any chance to make a choice as to what to do at the point her PC realizes she's not going to make it up the wall.  Realistically she could drop the gold and try to keep climbing, or try to gracefully jump back down with the gold and carry on from there, or plow ahead regardless and hope to get out with some of the gold, or whatever.  The GM also hamstrings herself: by declaring that even on failure the PC is going to get up the wall and escape she's taken both falling and capture off the tableThe PC can easily make the climb unburdened, but by choosing to try it when burdened she's made it more difficult for herself and thus opened up failure as a possibility.  To me that puts all the usual consequence-of-failure options on the table, along with some others due to the added variable of the bag of gold.Also, by declaring the consequence of failure as merely being the loss of the gold the DM has arbitrarily much reduced the risk involved to the PC.As one possible option of many, yes it does; others include being noticed by a passer-by outside the wall, or dropping something else that could maybe later be used as evidence to tie the crime to you, or injuring yourself somehow in the process, or ... <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=":)" />As a principle yes, but in practice?The article tries to do two things.  It's sort-of succeeded in one (getting its point across) and certainly succeeded in the other (generating discussion).  Beyond that, who cares? <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=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification