Sure. I thought I gave some examples of my own along these lines.
But in the approach I take (which, if I was running 5e, I would bring to bear - because in this particular respect I don't see 5e as that different from 4e), these would still require a check. But the DC required to persuade a Troll King to allow a fight between fighter and champion might well be lower than the DC to persuade a Troll King to let the PC go.
To me, this raises the question of
how much should failure snowball? This is very system dependent, but my overall take is that if the players are unsuccessful and so their PCs are captured by the Troll King, then they can expect to have to make some suboptimal moves. A bit like when a fight goes bad and the wizard has to start declaring melee attacks.
That was me, not [MENTION=6779196]Charlaquin[/MENTION].
As per a post I made not too long ago days-wise but maybe 100+ posts upthread, there are different approaches possible and this thread is bringing out some of those differences. Just to mention some of the posters I've interacted with:
The approach I'm describing (which I use in 4e and which I think could be ported to 5e) has some similiarities to [MENTION=6919838]5ekyu[/MENTION]'s, but is not identical (as can be seen in the discussion of the Audience With the Troll King scenario). [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] also does some things similar to me - eg in some recent posts mentions the idea of keeping up the pressure on the players via their PCs - but not identically I don't think.
I also have some similiarites to [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6779196]Charlaquin[/MENTION] - eg regarding the fictional specification of the declared action as very important - but some differences - eg I call for more checks than they do (see my quote upthread from Luke Crane for the reasons why).
I don't know for sure what
you mean by "fail forward" - it's a term that has become somewhat bowdlerised. When I use it I mean it in the sense that Jonathan Tweet uses it (in both 13th Age and the foreword to the 20th Anniversary edition of Over the Edge - I think the wording is identical, or close to, in both sources). Here's the 13th Age quote (p 42):
A simple but powerful improvement you can make to your game is to redefine failure as “things go wrong” instead of “the PC isn’t good enough.” Ron Edwards, Luke Crane, and other indie RPG designers have championed this idea, and they’re exactly right. You can call it “fail forward” or “no whiffing.” . . .
A more constructive way to interpret failure is as a near-success or event that happens to carry unwanted consequences or side effects. The character probably still fails to achieve the desired goal, but that’s because something happens on the way to the goal rather than because nothing happens.
And I posted a quote from Luke Crane's BW rulebook on failure and consequences upthread. So what I am talking about is exactly "fail forward". And losing the Troll King as an ally, or getting embroiled in an honour duel, would be paradigm examples.
If you've got players turtling because of the fear of failure then to me that's a sign that you're not using fail forward at all. (Or else it's a sign that they don't want to play the game - I don't know how common this is, but I have had strange experiences in club games where there are players there who clearly don't want to be playing.)
For the character, of course having to fight an honour duel is a bad thing. But for the player, that's exactly what playing the game looks like, isn't it? And fighting the honour duel with the Troll King's champion is more interesting than fighting Random Monster #101. In more general terms, unless the player is planning to finish playing the game, having things get worse in the fiction doesn't stop the game being exciting and engaging.
I think I draw the boundary here a bit differently from you - for instance, I regard "You reach for the handhold but miss, and slide down a few feet before catching yourself on a ledge" as a permissible narration of a failed check made to resolve a climb. And upthread I gave some other examples, like narrating a missed attack as
losing one's footing in muddy ground or narrating being hit as
being successfully feinted by the opponent. In the example of wiping the poison of a doorknob, I would regard
You must be more tired than you think you are - you missed a spot as acceptable.
But I also think that this brings us back to the narration of failure. There are many ways to narrate a failed check made to influence a NPC by way of a rousing speech that don't require narrating that the character didn't speak well.
And for what it's worth, I think this approach has no more support from the 4e DMG than from the 5e rules. In fact it directly contradicts what is said in the 4e DMG discussion of how to frame and adjudicate checks in a skill challenge, which - to borrow a phrase from a different game - emphasises that such checks begin and end with the fiction.
Deciding what the character would or wouldn't do is something I leave up to the player. It also depends a bit on system: to give an example, I've been playing quite a bit of Classic Traveller recently, and I think there is an expectation in that system that a player's play of his/her PC will, to some extent, represent the INT stat of the character.
To elaborate: in our 4e game the fact that most of the PCs had relatively low INT compared to the rest of their stats only really came into play when knowledge-type checks were called for. But in our Traveller game players look to the INT of a PC to get a sense of what that character ought to be doing - in particular, there have been a couple of ex-military PCs with low INT but high Education who have been played as "everything they know they learned from the manuals"-types.
Why the difference? 4e has a very structured system that "directs" the player into tactically and mechanically sound choices for his/her PC (the character's "powers", the character's strong skills, etc). And nothing about it suggests that the rules are a "model" of the PC: they're clearly a set of parameters for underpinning and then adjudicating action declrations. We learn who a PC is from the
outcomes of those action declarations in the fiction. The fighter will present, in the fiction, as a physically rather than intellectually oriented character simply in virtue of what the player is led to do with the character in virtue of those established parameters. There's no need, in addition, to "roleplay" the character's stats.
Traveller, on the other hand, is quite different. The PC build process is clearly a model of the PC's life so far. The numbers on the PC sheet
are a model of the character: they're not a set of "moves" or parameters for declaring actions. No one had to direct or even suggest that the low-INT chacracter's aren't that bright: the players could see this as implicit in the way the system presents the PC as a tool for play. Similarly it wasn't at all controversial that when we were wondering which character might be the right one to wriggle through the slit-window of a gun emplacement, it was the one with high DEX but low STR and END. Whereas in 4e we wouldn't ask about stats: any player could try to have his/her PC do it, making an Acrobatics check to see how it went.
This caught me by surprise. Or maybe I've missed something about who's criticisng what? Anyway, what surprised me was that I saw lots of criticism directed at 4e on the basis that it encourages and sometimes depends upon "metagaming". From my point of view, I saw this aspect of 4e reflecting D&D catching up with changes in game design that had been taking place since the second half of the 90s.
