Paul Beakley yeah, that’s fair. And as you discussed in a previous post in this series, the push-your-luck element of Encounters needs to be turned up to max to give them any value.

I guess I see it in terms of a resource, though. The player knows that “rolls” are a resource, and is blind to how many rolls they have left. Because of that, it means that knowing the difficulty of any given roll before making it, and being allowed to back out of a high TN is made even more important. If the player is blind to the number of rolls AND the TN, then there is no intentional resource management, and the outcome starts to edge pretty close to randomness, from the limited-information perspective of the player. Now, the player can gather information by listening to what the GM has said about the conversation so far, and estimate whether a given action is going to be easy or hard, but given that not all people collect or process information at the same level in conversation, and that the character has access to information that the player doesn’t, I would still err on the side of letting the player ask the TN for a given action and then back down from the roll in an Encounter.

Though Insight rolls might be the answer to that.