Because, relevant.
[video]
He's completely wrong, though. And I'm not sure how he could have made this video without realising how wrong he is. Clearly you can't say for sure that you could make a difficult climb, otherwise it wouldn't be a difficult climb (unless you're a skilled climber and have plenty of time, in which case you get an automatic 20).
Oh good, somebody else said it. My mind was just blown away when I watched that piece of shit last night. (The video and his argument, not the person. Never saw or heard of him before.) An interesting idea, at best, but so are many fan fiction concepts that people throw around. They have the best of intentions, but ultimately they're just crazy at the end of the day.
Also, NOT relevant in the fucking slightest.
A rolled dice is literally testing the likelihoods. He's right that the character doesn't envision dice to test their odds, and that there's a high likelihood that they don't go to a task with an expectation of failing. But the dice ARE there to represent the CHANCE of failure. Not the character's agency of recognizing that they cannot climb that wall. Otherwise why would they have bothered? And no, the answer is not "because they have no other choice." That ignores the ENTIRE premise of RPGs: player choice. They are DERIVED by what the player wants to do, and countless many "dice rolls" (whether physical or invisible and calculated) were attempted by players simply wishing to try something they had no idea how well they would do. What he fails to understand is that this is what DMs are for, or why older CRPGs hid their calculations from the player. Neither the player NOR the character they're role playing are aware of their chances of success, they only have a notion.
For example: I can remember one D&D Campaign I played many years ago where I tried to talk my way around some NPC giving a quest, and each time I tried the DM had me make a charisma role. Later on I found out that the dice roles were a formality, because the NPC had such ASTRONOMICALLY high charisma that it would've been mathematically impossible for me to persuade him to do anything (he was a boss character, basically). I didn't know that, my character didn't know that. We both simply assumed that since the character I was playing was very intelligent and charismatic that it would be possible to use his way with words to find out if this NPC had ulterior motives, or was hiding anything. In no ways was this like that hypothetical wall that my character "knew he could climb". This was an NPC my character (and I) felt like our chances of persuading were decently high enough, and it was absolutely false. We never stood a chance. That bastard fooled me just as well as he fooled EVERYONE else, because the dice roles made it impossible for me to learn otherwise. I could see my own dice roles, but I couldn't see the DM's. That's the major difference this guy is missing.
It IS all about probability and chance. That's why we role dice- a gambler's tool -at all! Maybe I could find his claims less nonsensical if he'd argued that each side of the dice represented some alternate reality where different events tied to each attempted action took place, and the dice determined which reality we would experience. But that would still be arguing something I consider to be absolute nonsense anyway! So basically... yeah, dude has no idea what he's talking about.
