[Donjon] Framing the Question

[James_Nostack]

As I understand it, players in Donjon can say, "I roll to do x," and if they roll well, not only do they succeed in the task but they get to state facts about the outcome as well.

What happens if a player deliberately frames the question to incorporate free facts?  As in,

"I roll to detect a secret door on the north wall leading to the biggest pile of unguarded treasure in the world?"

...in opposition to the more modest,

"I roll to find secret doors."

By definition, if the first player succeeds in his test, he's already got like 3-4 facts there based solely on how he framed his test.

Possible Solution #1
The framing of the question is ignored.  A successful roll finds a secret door; all the rest of it has to be bought with facts.

Possible Solution #2
The difficulty of the task is augmented by the number of facts included in the frame.  Essentially that test will get assigned a difficulty of Medium, Hard, or Crazy.

I favor the second one, but I felt like asking anyway.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I favor the first, but it's totally one of those issues I leave to the local group.

Notice I do that a lot in my games? Like narration rights in TSOY. The text glosses it, but that's so it's more playable for more people. Same with this question.

[Grover]

Here's an alternate thought - it's a bit of mechanics drift, but I think it works in the spirit of the game.  So you roll to detect secret doors, but before the roll you specify that it must be on the north wall, there is treasure behind it, it is unguarded, and it is the biggest pile in the world.  In order to succeed in your attempt, you must get 4 sucesses, to pay for the 4 facts you want to state.  

I was thinking about something like this in the context of transmogrifying spells, or really any effect where the player wants to establish a large change in the game world that wouldn't logically have partial effects.  So, say you want to turn someone into a frog (all 1 stats, no abilities).  Then you need the number of successes necessary to drain all your opponents abilities down to 1.  If you don't get those successes, nothing happens (no frog-men).  

The disadvantage of this method is that it might make that sort of thing _too_ difficult.  There's probably some middle point where you get enough of a bonus that frogs are still possible, but not totally dominating.

[timfire]

Here's an alternate thought - it's a bit of mechanics drift, but I think it works in the spirit of the game.  So you roll to detect secret doors, but before the roll you specify that it must be on the north wall, there is treasure behind it, it is unguarded, and it is the biggest pile in the world.  In order to succeed in your attempt, you must get 4 sucesses, to pay for the 4 facts you want to state.

<snip>  

The disadvantage of this method is that it might make that sort of thing _too_ difficult.  There's probably some middle point where you get enough of a bonus that frogs are still possible, but not totally dominating.

If this became an issue, I would probably propose that rules tweak. Honestly, I think that if you did, then the players would learn pretty quick that they're more likely to succeed if they only propose something general (I want to find a secret door), rather than something complex.