Anytime my player use their actions and resources to interact with the world as of it’s real I like to support it. I in turn treat the world real back which is what the player wants to do. We like to talk it through to make sure it feels fair to both of us.

For this example where your player is pouring oil and lighting a weapon rack on fire. So I would tell them that the oil will become visible once poured. So I would do a stealth check to get it lite. And either 1d4 rounds until the notice or give the enemy a check each round. Its fun to have these back and forth

I also like powdered detergent. I get mine from the package free store and then add in those scent boosts pellets for our scent only. Work so much better than liquid detergent

Sounds much more useful than a language that no one speaks

In a statement, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced the federal government has rescinded its approval of the program, calling it “slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners.”

At first I was wondering when Sean P Diddy Combs was appointed Transportation Secretary. I get that he is accused of sexual assaults which is a great qualification but still…

I was just going to say I love the idea of learning Esperanto but why and where would I ever learn it.

I’ve found that when the players hit an outright failure, a lot of the time they just draw blanks or zero in on this one specific solution. It’s a weird tunnel vision.

I think this is definitely video game logic where there is one solution to the problem. Doing a session 0 to talk about how to get around options is a great idea. I try to do the same as well as give a variety of different options when asking what they want to do next which includes some bad ones. (So you didn’t talk your way past the guards what do you want to do next? Go clubbing? Go look to see the rest of the building? Get a haircut? What do you want to do next?). It helps if it incentive by the DM in game. I played with one DM who never let us fail (basically infinite inspiration which you could reroll as often as needed) which wasn’t as fun as it seems. If the players have fun with a failure that is incentive to try even if you don’t succeed.

It helps that a lot of my players have been doing TTRPGs for years so they have the out of the box thinking down. They come up with wacky good and bad suggestions. It sometimes hard to see the difference between the two until it happens.

For my skill checks I set multiple DCs for a roll including automatic information. So depending on how high they roll the more information they get but they always get something. This is especially true for information gathering spells. Things like getting based doors or guards they can fail. But these kind of failures just drive them to other options for getting based the barrier such as breaking down the door or getting the guard drunk.

Be careful with red herrings and other false clues and leads. Most parties will make their own false leads and other conclusions without any prompting based on something completely random or unnecessary. So limit this as much as possible and make it obvious when investigating why someone is innocent if they are. The investigation is part of the fun.

Also try to make sure there are multiple ways to get an important piece of information with the general recommendation to be three different ways. These should involve the players special skills / spells /etc. to encourage and not penalize people who doing what they do best. These channels should be flexible as well because the party may do something you didn’t expect such as interviewing the mice in the castle to see what they heard that night. So if they do anything they should get some information even if its a duplicate of something they already found out.

When I was doing my most recent adventure there was a ballroom scene where the party was trying to find out something suspicious. There was two mysteries going on: a secret fey run raucous boozed filled Mirror Ball and some extradimensional horrors had body snatched people to eat their brains. So I had some set DCs for various secrets they could learn from automatic to DC 35. So when they did something that might get some information I picked one and they learned it. Some of these secrets were given multiple times from multiple sources. They ended up getting all of them except who is the extradimensional horrors by befriending and raising the social standing of the busty redhead wallflower who was secretly the queen of gossip by some massive performance and persuasions checks. So be flexible about how they end up learning the secrets because they can and should all be given as information to the party even if it makes the killer obvious.