AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I guess that's the queue for 'fail forward.' Or just not giving something vital a chance of failure in the first place.
Or speed things up, depending on what the SC was about. How you'd narrate it really depends on the SC, early failures could leave the scene in a skin-of-their-teeth mode the rest of the way.
Right, I think what is awkward about it is just how the GM doesn't KNOW and it can suddenly change. Now, some SCs that's fine, its easy to understand how a situation can take a radical turn. OTOH other situations its a bit harder. Fail forward is of course always a good idea. Its just sometimes I'd like to be able to build up to the failure a little more.
Lets imagine a huge battle scene that plays out as an SC. You can always narrate a back and forth going on, but its hard to simply present all the elements on the field at the start and not pull new ones out of your hat to explain how things go back and forth. Not all GMs were really prepared for that I think. I don't think that the descriptions of SCs and their general formatting as it was laid out in the DMG, or even DMG2 really, quite fully expostulated the way in which an SC like this would, by how the checks went, create new game elements. I mean suppose the PCs kick butt, and they get 5 successes in a row. The evil army is ON THE ROPES! Then all of a sudden things start going wrong! 1 failure, 2 failures! All of a sudden things took a big turn! Well, its quite easy to narrate some completely new and utterly novel bad guys showing up to turn the tide, and that's exactly the sort of thing I'd advocate (as I suspect so would you [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], etc). Its just never called out in any 4e material, and its not always how every GM wants to handle it. I suspect a lot of frustration with SCs came down to this, even if it wasn't well-articulated very often.