I’ll call attention to Success and Failure:
“Success” and “failure” are technical terms here: they do not mean that the player has or hasn’t got what he wanted.
When you refer to success or failure of player actions when talking about designing the situations and obstacles in your game, you would just mean whether the player got what they wanted. But there’s a separate, specific, technical idea of it. If the action was stopped prior to reaching the Carry Out rules, the action failed. Otherwise, it succeeded. No matter what happened in the game (or whether nothing happened) or what was or wasn’t output.
Normally, we never test for it and don’t care. Zarf said “I long ago made the executive decision to never rely on the action success result.” and that’s good enough for me. But if you wanted to, say, make use of Unsuccessful Attempt By rules, that would be a case where success vs failure mattered. That’s why I’m dwelling on the existence of this technical definition: because it can matter.
So Report rules are never reached if an action failed: they can only report on (technically) successful actions.
I said that in acknowledgement of this, from the guidelines on how to write rules about actions I linked to.
if the action is to look at something, then carrying it out is in a sense the same thing as reporting it
Actions whose whole point is to output info like look or inventory do those in Carry Out rules instead of Report rules.