GM techniques (especially for non-combat challenges/resolution)

[Manbearcat]

A complicating factor here is that AD&D doesn't really have an action resolution system! There's combat which has its own fairly detailed system; there are thief abiliites, which at least as presented are purely task resolution except perhaps hide in shadows; and there are some rules for dealing with doors and traps.

Fail forward depends on there being a player intent behind the action declaration, which the GM then draws upon to establish the failure. In AD&D, you might be able to use ability checks or similar to resolve actions and adjudicate them in a fail forward fashion - but this would be complicated by the pretty ad hoc gating of certain capabilities behind non-weapon proficiencies.

On this, I would say that AD&D 2e actually suffers from too many various forms of discrete action resolution (2 of which you've mentioned above) rather than a dearth of them. Accordingly, it does (naturally), suffer from a unified framework of action resolution. Simultaneously, (alluding to my post above), it suffers from a dearth of all the things I mentioned above that would lend coherency, intuitiveness for players, transparency, system-guided GM constraint, and systemitized PC protagonism! As such, this is why I would put it squarely on the opposite end of the GM Force spectrum from a game that properly leverages Fail Forward (such as Burning Wheel). The only use AD&D 2e would have for Fail Forward is as another vessel for the covert GM Force (Illusionism) that it promotes!

And a comment on GM-force: if the GM is providing the intent of the action (eg deciding what will be gained by opening a door, listening at a door, searching for a trap, etc; this goes back to [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]'s post upthread) then success with complications tends to mean that the intent is realised but something bad accompanies it; and the "badness" is also a reflection of the GM's intent as to where the "plot" should go. You find the clue, but break your thieve's tools in doing so or You open the door, but make a loud noise.

I definitely agree with this. It hooks back into my premise above of. In order for Fail Forward to create interesting decision-points for the players (through the lens of their PCs) and emergent story trajectory for all participants (GM included) to be surprised by, the entire "system biosphere" needs to support that paradigm.

In terms of actual conversation at the table and machinery of play, that means precisely what you're describing above. What is at stake needs to be systemitized, verbally agreed upon, or completely intuitive for all participants. Player intent and resolution mechanics (rather than GM intent and heavy mediation in action resolution) needs to be the pivot point upon which the gamestate changes. If these things become obfuscated/non-intuitive to players due to opaque system machinery or circumvented by GM mandate (lack of systemitized GM constraint), the outcome becomes just another lever to pull to ration preconceived plot via "Illusionism" or "GM-sided plot control techniques" as [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] put it above.

 

[Random Axe]

[MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]

"Fail forward" in the sense I'm trying to explain is in lieu of GM plot. Instead of GM plot, the story is created by the checks: successful checks and things unfold as the player playing his/her PC hoped; failed checks and the things the player cared about are in play, but it's getting worse rather than better.

The way I'm interpreting this is, on a failed skill check (let's say a social Underworld/Streetwise check to track a crime lord) the lead they are following suddenly bolts, forcing the PCs to give chase (leading to more physical or intelligence-based skill checks to catch up with him or head him off). If they succeed those subsequent emergency skill checks they catch up with the tail and can roleplay some more to attempt to get their original intended info (either through persuasion or bullying), or they could lose the pursuit entirely.

 

[pemerton]

The way I'm interpreting this is, on a failed skill check (let's say a social Underworld/Streetwise check to track a crime lord) the lead they are following suddenly bolts, forcing the PCs to give chase (leading to more physical or intelligence-based skill checks to catch up with him or head him off). If they succeed those subsequent emergency skill checks they catch up with the tail and can roleplay some more to attempt to get their original intended info (either through persuasion or bullying), or they could lose the pursuit entirely.

Maybe. It depends what's going on both in the fiction (given the established fiction, the framing of the (failed) check, etc, what sort of thing might happen next?) and at the table (what were the players looking for from the check? what was at stake?).

Maybe in the crime lord situation, the lead they are talking to suddenly collapses - dead, poisoned! That could easily make sense if (eg) one of the PCs is a poisoner, so that dealing with poisons and drug suppliers and so on is part of that PC's schtick, and now (in a sense) that rebounds upon him/her (poetic justice can be one way of honouring theme and respecting stakes) while also ensuring that play goes on - what sort of poison? who arranged the assassination? etc.

Maybe the crime lord pursuit drops out all together because some other line of activity becomes more engaging and the games spins off in a new direction! (Whether or not it's true in film and novels that everything should resolve, I don't think it has to be true in RPGing - the lack of ability to rewrite and to edit I think means that resolution can't always be guaranteed.)

From the GMing side, the key to the sort of approach I'm talking about is that there's no conception of "the story" or "the adventure" and so there's no event or information or whatever that has to happen or has to be acquired. The GM is adjudicating and narrating by reference to genre and theme and stakes and what is generating shared energy at the table.
[MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] mentioned improvised or semi-improvised. I think improvised is self-explanatory. Semi-improvised is an interesting category. There's no reason why the GM can't have some NPCs written up, with (loose) backstories and some sense of how they might fit into the unfolding situation at the table. These can then be brought out, to serve as foils or opposition or whatever as demanded by the situations that are being established in play.

There's no reason why the GM can't have some situations in mind either - eg the poisoners' cult hideout.

What's key is that the GM doesn't have a preconceived series of events and outcomes.

Where the boundary lies is (I think) always a table-relative, mood-of-the-session-relative matter. Let's say the GM has prepared an idea for some sort of infiltration of the poisoners' cult hideout. So when the check to interrogate the lead fails, the lead drops dead in front of the PCs, poisoned. The PCs look around, the players succeed at a check, spot a figure with a blowpipe, a chase ensues, they arrive at the cult hideout. Is that fail-forward - establishing a new situation that respects the failure and reframes the situation as one adverse to the PCs but still engaging what was at stake for them in the context of the failed check? Or is that rail-roading - using the players' (and thus their PCs') hunt for the crime lord as an excuse to drop in something that is purely the GM's enthusiasm?

My view is that there can't be a general or universal answer to that question. It's about trust and expectations at the table. It's about understandings of time frames (if everyone knows the campaign is going to go for years, there's probably a tolerance of slow build up that would be completely intolerable in a one-shot). It's about how the GM communicates to this group of players, here and now, that the things they take to be at stake really are at stake in this poisoners' cult hideout, even though the way they're being put at stake is driven by the GM and comes as a surprise to the players.

Hopefully that makes some degree of sense!

 

[Garthanos]

This thread rocks

 

[pemerton]

This thread rocks

So let's bump it! (Some XP awards brought it back onto my radar.)

 

[5ekyu]

[MENTION=6881836]Josiah Stoll[/MENTION]

I saw you've been looking at some other threads discussing GMing techniques. There's a range of approaches. The default on these boards emphasises GM-driven play (or APs where the GM channels the module author). What I'm going to talk about in this post/thread is a different approach. You might find it helpful, or not - all I can say is that it's been working for me for a long time now.

RPGing is fun when the players are engaged. Combat is often engaging by default, because PC death is at stake. To make non-combat engaging, the players have to be able to see that something is at stake that they care about. This is what will get them wanting to engage. And they have to be confident that engaging the situation won't leave them hosed. The fear of being hosed leads to turtling, tedious tactically-focused play, a game that moves at the pace of treacle, etc. And also easily drifts back to GM-driven as the players look for the "correct" way to win (ie the one the GM has in mind) so that they can avoid being hosed.

Where do ge the engaging stakes from? Your players. This can be overt - some systems build this into PC gen (eg Fate aspects; Burning Wheel beliefs), but it can be done in other systems too (when I started a 4e campaign I required each player to establish a loyalty for his/her PC, and also a reason to be ready to fight goblins). Or it can be implicit - in 5e, background in particular might be an implicit signal of how a player sees his/her PC and what s/he might be ready to care about in play.

Here are four actual first sessions. None is 5e (one 4e, one Burning Wheel, one Cortex+ Heroic, one Classic Traveller). But they show various things I've done as GM, working with my players, to create situations with combat and non-combat elements to them that the players will engage with in play.

The other aspect I mentioned - avoiding a fear of hosing. "Fail forward" adjudication is designed to help with this. The key idea is that failure doesn't mean "You suck, it didn't work!" It means "Things didn't turn out how you wanted!" That could be because the PC sucks. Or because some external factor intervened that the PC didn't know about. Or maybe the GM narrates the failure by "revealing" (I use inverted commas because, at the table, the GM is making it up as part of narrating the failure result) some hidden aspect.

The BW session report I linked to gives one example: the PC tries to meet with a senior member of his cabal to get work; the check fails (in BW its a Circles check; in 5e it might be a CHA check to reach out to connections), so instead of an offer of work or a hot tip from the senior sorcerer, the sorcerer sends a thug to tell the PCs to leave town. See how, even though the player didn't get what he wanted, the stuff he cares about is still a focus of play. The sorcerous cabal is still important to the game, and the PC hasn't been shown to be a failure; but now he has to somehow win back the trust of his cabal's leader (or whatever else he wants to do in response to the situation).

Especially when it comes to getting a mediocre-skill fighter involved, these two things can work well together: if the non-combat situation invovles something the fighter PC (and the player of that PC) cares about then the player will declare actions; and even if they fail, "fail forward" adjudication means that the player didn't just get hosed or make a fool of him/herself or his/her PC - the thing s/he cares about is still there, still in play, but the situation around it has changed. So the player (and hopefully the other players too) get drawn further into the game, fiction keeps developing, instead of following the GM's trail of bread crumbs you're creating some story together.

Absolutely agree with some of this but especially the ways to treat failures as more than just crap.

I mean, for all the misrepresentation otherwise, even 5e has "some progress with setback" as one of its core rules definitions for what a failure on an ability check can be.

I dont know how long, or how many systems, ago it was when I started looking at every result of a check/action as an opportunity to bring out or spotlight something new and/or interesting. But, I am pretty sure it was not soon after that that my gameplay improved and my players found fun in trying when everything did not seem a threat to their survival.

Then when I see things like this, exposed even today "If you like the randomness of the die, the GM probably isn't applying consequences for failure." It brings back home the old days and how much I still have to work with players to get them over the consequences of that style of play. It also tends to show itself in the " if they die, gotta have punishments" and "make zero hp tougher" styles imo.

BTW your sorcery thugs mad me laugh, remembering all the fiction and movie examples where the investigators get stymied on their investigations but then when thugs show up to beat them up, warn them off they realize " we are onto something after all." Your failure may spawn someone else's un-forced error, especially if they are say " paranoid."

DEFAULT DISCLAIMER - All styles valid. Your preferences may vary. No bad wrong fun. Just saying that we have more fun with these than we did with the others. You baby is cute too.

 

[5ekyu]

The 5e basic set has Fail Forward embedded in its GMing section on noncombat action resolution in the same way that 13th Age does. Given that 5e draws some inspiration from 13th Age, the easiest thing to do is just follow 13th Age advice for 5e noncombat action resolution failure:



This is a skill that must be honed by GMs but most times it begins with a Yoda lesson; "you must unlearn...what you have learned."
So to begin, this means undoing their internal and cultural-inflicted programming whereby they have been conditioned to perceive every moment of action resolution as a binary event constrained by 1st order causal logic interpretation of the micro-task at hand:

You attempt to climb a treacherous face; you climb it or you fall.

You attempt to convince a chamberlain to grant you audience with the king; he's convinced or you're rebuffed.

Action resolution (particularly noncombat action resolution) doesn't have to be governed by 1st order complications, or tight causal logic of the micro task. Failure can be interpreted as 2nd or 3rd order complications, on the grounds of genre logic, or in consideration of the macro goal.

You don't fail to climb the face. You lose something precious (perhaps a divining rod falls from your hip and clatters down the face, coming to rest in a wyvern nest which is full of eggs) that has future or immediate implications on your greater goal and now you're faced with an interesting decision-point that adds new conflict.

You don't get rebuffed by the chamberlain. He agrees and then casually walks you through the receiving hall while you're assailed with the horrific specter of a bloody orgy where demons are simultaneously feasting upon and mating with the king's court.

You failed the insight check while chatting up the guy for clues in the bar. Watched them closely and still found him to be less than truthful on a few key bits. Why is he bring that way? What reason did he have to hide something when asked about the other night? Uhhh... where is my pouch with the stones and that signet ring? It was right here on my belt when we started talking in the bar!?

Wait, what halfling? I didn't see no halfling!!

 

[Numidius]

And a comment on GM-force: if the GM is providing the intent of the action (eg deciding what will be gained by opening a door, listening at a door, searching for a trap, etc; this goes back to [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]'s post upthread) then success with complications tends to mean that the intent is realised but something bad accompanies it; and the "badness" is also a reflection of the GM's intent as to where the "plot" should go. You find the clue, but break your thieve's tools in doing so or You open the door, but make a loud noise.

That is quite different from "fail forward" as I'm putting it forward in this thread, which is about player-established intent.

------------

To elaborate on that last comment about framing within a challenge: a success within a skill challenge should make it more feasible for the players to declare the sorts of actions they want to - it reflects the PCs taking control of the situation

Dense thread. I'm quoting the bit that is frequently overlooked, IME, by players and GMs alike.
The "traps" of task resolution with implied intent

 

[pemerton]

You failed the insight check while chatting up the guy for clues in the bar. Watched them closely and still found him to be less than truthful on a few key bits. Why is he bring that way? What reason did he have to hide something when asked about the other night? Uhhh... where is my pouch with the stones and that signet ring? It was right here on my belt when we started talking in the bar!?

Wait, what halfling? I didn't see no halfling!!

Did you post this on the "lying NPC thread" too? It's a nice example.

 

[5ekyu]

Did you post this on the "lying NPC thread" too? It's a nice example.

Thanks and i thinks its in there like a dozen pages back or,more.