Ralph Mazza still agreeing. But telegraphing “this is gonna be so easy/hard” via the fiction is, to me, quite a different conversation than “the player can walk away from a task they asked for if they don’t like the TN.” Yes, excellent policy, and I agree that it’d be bad form for the GM to just drop that chalupa out of the blue (hence the obligation to explain why it’s not TN14).

There are all kinds of entirely legitimate design considerations that might go into the formal transaction of introducing new facts into the fiction. There’s the whole fortune before/middle/after business. There’s the possibility of some external economy (hero points or traits or XP-generating options). Or there’s just the taste of the designer.

Mouse Guard says no weasels: you say what you want to do, and there are no takesies-backsies. But in that game, the GM is solely responsible for presenting obstacles, so the transaction isn’t identical.

Apocalypse World has this whole “to do it, do it and if you did it, you did it” thing: the thing you say happens in the fiction is what happens mechanically, and vice versa. Smart players will of course play to their strengths but ultimately it’s on the GM to decide what move, if any, has been invoked. That’s setting a target without negotiating.

And so on and so on.

My shruggie wasn’t disinterest! It was “I really don’t know!” Being a good Libra, I’m well wired to see all sides of everything all the time. So, yeah: It’s very player-friendly to let a player walk away from tasks they’ve asked for (in TOR tasks are requested by players and tests are required by the GM), but wishing it were so doesn’t make it so. I would argue that the presence of Hope is a strong telegraph that you should not let them back out, since they already have a failure-mitigating tool at their disposal. But I could also argue that you should, because much of the game is built toward PC success (Hope, Traits) so it kind of fits the vibe.

And for the record? “Don’t take it so literally” will actually never, ever work for me. Seriously. That is, to my ear, lazy fallback code for “system doesn’t matter.” You say “don’t read it like board game rules,” I say, “don’t read stuff onto the page that isn’t there.” Insert shruggie here.

On that note, I think the thread’s reached its course. Thanks for the interesting conversation! I didn’t think it would happen because of this session, but that shows you what I know.