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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6108444" data-attributes="member: 42582">The "fail forward"/"conflict resolution" approach to action resolution is meant to help with this.Instead of play grinding to a halt in the way you say, in order to avoid that one time which is always possible, the laming of your horse is confined to a complication narrated in response to a failed check which is itself tirggered at the metagame level (eg in the course of a skill challenge), and not by the mere thought on the GM's part that "Hey, your horse might be lame. Give us an animal handling check."Now if you don't want laming as your complication, you can still check your new horse for lameness (or, in BW, you might have an instinct "Alway check the health of horses before buying them"). But that won't reduce the likelihood of suffering complications - it just means that the GM will narrate something other than lamenesss when you fail a check - and so there is no general incentive to cover every base, and therefore to grind play to a halt in the way you rightly express concern about.There is still the possibility of too many checks - for instance, BW allows you to augment your Ride check with a prior Animal Husbandry check, which can reopen the problem you're worried about. BW's way of trying to reduce this is to give players a mechanical incentive to not always roll as big a dice pool as they could - because if you always roll the biggest possible dice pool your PC won't advance.In 4e, the solution that was adopted (as I see it) is to opt for broad skills with consequently only limited scope for chaining augments that encourage a lot of fiddly anticipatory rolling. And feats, skill powers etc that augment your rolls are things the system encourages you to use now, in the crunch of resolution, rather than in advance in the fiddly way you're objecting to.And in both systems you know that the GM is adjudicating failures and introducing complications in a "fail forward" style that means that, even if your horse is lamed, it's not game over. There will be other paths forward.The universe in    [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s game (or in mine, for that mater) is not "morphic". But the description of it isn't known in advance by the participants in the game.That to one side, it's not entirely luck, or even "pretty much" entirely luck. The details of task declaration on the part of the player shape the parameters for the GM's narration. They also settle the mechanical resources the player can bring to bear on the check (depending what is described, one skill or another may be rolled, with this or that modifier), and hence the likelihood of success or failure.As to the stakes, in a skill challenge the overall stakes will have been set at the start of the challenge (in Manbearcat's example, they are "escape with the idol"), but the mechancial stakes that than govern the internal resolution dynamics are set by the system: N successes before 3 failures at the given level of difficulty. Hence the player confronted by the ravine knows what, mechanically, is required to succeed at the next check and hence to head towards success. The challenge is leveraging the fiction to generate the required check, and trading off mechanical advantage against fictional positioning - in the ravine case, that may be as simple as saying "I dismount and climb down the side of ravine, doing my best to keep out of sight from anyone at the top." Test Athletics and Stealth, but lose your horse.Or perhaps the player decides to have the PC back up and try to jump the ravine - in which case test Nature and then test your horse's Athletics, probably a Hard test for the latter. But if you succeed you've kept your horse! (Perhaps if you fail, you and your horse clear the ravine but you drop the idol.)(This combination of mechanically determined difficulty and pacing with GM reframing of the scene in response to checks is different from Intent and Task in Burning Wheel, which is used, in conjunction with Let it Ride, to turn task resolution into conflict resolution. It's a bit more like a BW Duel of Wits, and very much like a HeroWars/Quest extended contest.)And contrary to your assertion, players' creative decisions have a huge impact on how things unfold. Especially when they start to iterate back on the stakes of the overall challenge. I linked upthread to an example of this: the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">dinner party</a> at which the PCs had to dine with their nemesis while not upsetting their Baron host. At the start of the challenge their goal was to get through the evening without embarassing the Baron by triggering a fight with their nemesis; by the end of the challenge, their goal had become one of goading their nemesis into attacking them, so that he would be the one who embarassed the Baron by revealing his own perfidy.It's not Gygaxian "skilled" play, of course. The players aren't making success mechanicallly easier via their cleverness (at least, not in general - on occasion they may do so). They're changing the content of the fiction via their cleverness, locking down some things (because checks are being made and hence the challenge coming to its conclusion) and opening up others (by creating new fictional positioning, and finding new ways to leverage it, and forcing the GM to engaged with it because the challenge isn't finished yet). That's pretty much the point of narrativist play.</blockquote>

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