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Die rolls are a shortcut tool to allow both the Referee and the Players make decisions on the fly.

Most of the people I play RPGs with have a military background (as do I) but it allows you to quickly adjudicate situations like "how can I cross this obstacle while remaining in cover?" Make a roll = 2 successes, ok you notice a open drain cover so you can use that it move under the road without being seen.

That is different from "where is the best location to set up our machinegun" although if the players lack a military background then rolling could be used.

Everyones' gaming table will vary of course.

I could see a "tactics" roll for siting the machine gun even among military players. A 10m hex is pretty big (basically 5x5 1 inch/25mm squares in another system) and so there are some vagaries that can give a bonus to a successful roll. For example, a successful roll (likely requiring multiple successes) could improve the ranged combat modifier one step or apply it to same hex fire. If you zoom in farther to a 1 model/space scale, this option likely evaporates but 10m is still zoomed out enough that some level of diced abstraction of tactical acumen can be appropriate.

Actually the die can still be rolled even when the players know exactly what they want.

My players will state something like "I look for a position that will give me a clear lane of fire along the ditch with cover to the front and the left flank and with a concealed withdrawal route back to the main CP.

Me - "Um, ok, roll to see if you can find a good spot."

Actually the die can still be rolled even when the players know exactly what they want.

My players will state something like "I look for a position that will give me a clear lane of fire along the ditch with cover to the front and the left flank and with a concealed withdrawal route back to the main CP.

Me - "Um, ok, roll to see if you can find a good spot."

And then draw the map accordingly?

The map is concrete. Either such a position exists, or it does not. Rolling dice doesn't determine that.

Most of the people I play RPGs with have a military background (as do I) but it allows you to quickly adjudicate situations like "how can I cross this obstacle while remaining in cover?" Make a roll = 2 successes, ok you notice a open drain cover so you can use that it move under the road without being seen.

Well, that's Recon skill, & I would never use it that way.

In my view the player has put his character into a position. For example, he needs to cross a road without being seen. The map tells us there is no culvert under that road. He has to go over it, and the blunt fact is that he can't cross the road while remaining in cover. So to cross that road without being seen, he has to succeed on a Recon roll, which has a certain difficulty. It could be an opposed roll, if someone is watching that road. If he succeeds, he succeeds. Maybe the people he's sneaking past were looking the other way at the time.

To say "you roll 2 successes, so there was a culvert and you snuck through it," to me, is suggesting that the outcome of the roll determines the difficulty of the task.

So yes, everyone's table is different.

I would agree if any of the maps showed culverts or the like. At 10m, the maps are not detailed enough to completely write off tactics as a purely player skill. Some abstract uncertainty must be assumed and accounted for.

To say "you roll 2 successes, so there was a culvert and you snuck through it," to me, is suggesting that the outcome of the roll determines the difficulty of the task.

So yes, everyone's table is different.

I think this gets right at the heart of the philosophical difference of opinion we have been having. To me, the absolute core thing to remember is that myself and the other players are there to play make-believe together and tell a fun, dangerous, exciting story. In my experience, the best version of that comes about when the dice rolls and the characters are able to really substantially manipulate things. Since the story doesn't even exist yet, no one ever need be the wiser.

So I've got my idea of the difficulty of a thing, sure. Of what will probably happen as a typical result. But when the characters or the dice surprise, they surprise. When players around me come up with an idea I hadn't thought of, that they can justify, that they then absolutely nail on a roll... I'm sure as hell not going to discourage them from doing that by saying no or offering up something tame. I'm going to rewrite the story-yet-untold on the fly with them. "You know what. Yeah. It turns out this guard IS ALSO from Smolensk. What you said caught him by surprise and now you've got his full attention..."

The people you play with may have different opinions about what's cool and fun. But I've played all sorts of RPGs and to me there's waaay more fun to be had when everyone at the table is really free to build the story together. I love games that make it systemic... but I'm finding it just as easy to apply BitD/Mouse Guard/PbtA concepts to any other system.

The battlemaps that come with the game certainly lack fine detail - the interior of buildings being a big one.

And unless the Referee draws up a detailed map for every single encounter you are going to have a lot of uncertainty on what variances in terrain exist within the 10 meter hex.

However I think we can all agree that everyone is free to play Twilight as they see fit. The Character Generation and skill system presented in Alpha needs work and I suspect that FL is taking a look given all the feedback on the matter.

I think this gets right at the heart of the philosophical difference of opinion we have been having. To me, the absolute core thing to remember is that myself and the other players are there to play make-believe together and tell a fun, dangerous, exciting story. In my experience, the best version of that comes about when the dice rolls and the characters are able to really substantially manipulate things.

You're creating a false distinction. The difference of philosophy here is not some GM-railroading, players-can't-make-the-story thing. It's a question of how that story is created.

Skills deal with situations; they don't alter reality. The situation is a challenge put before the players. Some of that challenge is determined in advance, and it's just the ground truth of the situation. Some may be determined on the fly, by the GM: I roll dice to determine whether a thing is there or not. Nothing in that approach limits the players' ability to create their own story.

Example: the party needs to recce a bridge, because they are wise enough to guess that in my world, intact bridges will likely be guarded.
Q. Is there a ditch running down the road beside the bridge?
A. Why, yes there is. Nobody needs to roll for that; there is always a roadside ditch as you approach a river.
Q. Okay, can I sneak down there without being seen?
A. You will certainly be seen if an AP mine flings your body parts up out of the ditch. We don't need to roll for that realization: your character has been fighting in Poland for three years and you know that the road edges at the defile are always mined and that even if no one is here now, someone once was, and they left their mines behind. At least, it's probably mined. Do you remember that guy in your platoon who started freaking out about stepping off the pavement after buddy lost his foot? Well, I remember him.

There are three outcomes: you see a tripwire and live, you don't see a tripwire and die, or there is no mine.

Now, here is where I see a real difference: some people will roll Recon and on success they see the tripwire; on a mishap, they get to roll a new character; and anything else is there-is-no-mine. Skill itself determines the outcome.

My view is that either (1) the scenario is set in advance, or (2) there are 1D6 mines on 1D6 for 5+ (for example). On success, you see the tripwire. On failure, you do not. Now, I will also roll for the skill of the person placing the mines (D8, D8) with a negative DM based on whether they've been there a long time, so maybe they've become super obvious and you can't miss them. And I will let you have all kinds of positive DMs for methods of finding tripwires you can dream up, and you can push the rolls ... but the consequences of failure are the consequences of failure. If there's a mine, and you don't see it, you will set it off, because the tripwires were set (see skill of person placing mine) to make sure you could not get down this ditch.

On the other hand, maybe there are no mines and I make you sweat for nothing. You fail, and push the roll. You roll a mishap. There was no mine, but here's a point of stress for your trouble.

Now, one of those approaches is much less friendly to the player than the other. It basically says, if you do this, your character has a solid chance of dying. But one of those approaches also creates a much more dangerous gameworld than the other, one which arguably better models the risk of sneaking down a ditch to look at a bridge. I don't think it railroads the players or limits their creativity.

As to which makes a better narrative, narrative is the player who failed the roll, pushed it, rolled a mishap, and found there are no mines, describing how his character thought he had hit a tripwire and spend the next round throwing up in the ditch. It doesn't come from dice, it comes from how people interpret what the dice mean.

Anyway, although this is way off the original topic here, I think this is good discussion. There are various ways to skin this cat and none is necessarily bad. I feel mine makes better narrative possibilities but that's only because it's what I'm used to. To someone else, it's just a bunch of die rolls and then you either die or you don't. To each his own.

And unless the Referee draws up a detailed map for every single encounter you are going to have a lot of uncertainty on what variances in terrain exist within the 10 meter hex.

The battlemaps are certainly limited, but my more general problem with using them for anything but random out-of-the-blue encounters is, they're too small. So then there's a need to be able to make larger maps on the fly. This is unavoidably going to slow things down so I have always tried in v1 to have generic maps like "bridge," "hasty checkpoint," "L-shaped ambush," etc. That is, prepared battlemaps, but bigger. Personally, I'm leaning towards using measured distance rather than hexes in future.

Most of the time, there isn't really that much variation in a 10 m hex. Not if we're looking at a field, for example. The problem comes up in rubble and road edges and things like that.