Failing Forward

[ExploderWizard]

I am not a fan of the concept because it specifically supports game play that is supposed to lead to expected outcomes.

As a DM, when players do the unexpected, or improvise to mitigate failures, it takes the game in interesting directions that would never have been possible if I was using a mechanic to ensure that the adventure "stayed on track".

An adventure directed by the imagination of the participants can never come to a grinding halt unless they want it to. I think some groups get too invested in pre-written plots that they think are cool to remember this. The only adventure that matters is the one created together by the group, not what is prepped prior to play.

Finding out what happens next and what the players do in response to setbacks or failures is part of the fun of being a DM.

I am also not all that fond of narrative style games compared to traditional rpgs, but lets assume that I planned on running one. If the purpose of this game is to create a collaborative story with the players, isn't using a mechanic to channel their input towards the narrative that I want to tell depriving the players the chance to shape the story on their own? If it is truly OUR story created together I shouldn't be nudging them down any particular path.

 

[GMMichael]

if I've been good I've provided for other ways or can think of them on the fly. Even within an unchanged fiction.

This. To put it another way: Fail Forward is the tool of the Railroading Game Master. Obviously, the entire game will grind to a halt if there's nowhere else to go but forward on the railroad. Sandboxes don't have this problem. Neither do games that don't have a success/failure dichotomy.

 

[Reinhart]

Fail Forward != Railroading

And because so people think that the two are related it shows how few people actually understand the concept. Let's boil it down to three bullet points:

• Actions should have consequences.
• Failure should be interesting.
• When one door closes another should open.

I'm pretty sure you don't need those explained further. But no-where does this mean that failure should just be the same narrative result reskinned to sound bad. The original term comes from business, for goodness sakes. It's about allowing teams to fail early and learn from their mistakes.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Fail Forward != Railroading

And because so people think that the two are related it shows how few people actually understand the concept. Let's boil it down to three bullet points:
Actions should have consequences.

Why do think that fail forward is the only concept that makes this true? If the party cannot manage to get a door open then the consequence is that they have to think of something else.

Failure should be interesting.

It is because it forces players to actually consider alternative courses of action.

When one door closes another should open.

It might, or the players might have to think a bit to find that next door. In no way is being spoon fed alternative options a requirement for imaginative play.

I'm pretty sure you don't need those explained further. But no-where does this mean that failure should just be the same narrative result reskinned to sound bad. The original term comes from business, for goodness sakes. It's about allowing teams to fail early and learn from their mistakes.

Why does a failure have to be the result of a mistake? You can make all the correct decisions then flub the execution of a plan. There might have have been no mistakes made, the dice just flipped you the bird. Sometimes your best effort just doesn't do the trick. Time to try something else, perhaps you will have better luck with that.

 

[Celebrim]

Sure they do. It's a game.

Yes, but it is a very different sort of game. Eventually, as this idea becomes more and more important to the mechanics of the game, it creates a game experience so at odds with the way RPGs were (mostly) played for the first 20 years or so, that some people don't even recognize it as an RPG.

Saelorn is saying that he understands the purpose and design of an RPG is to create stories within a simulated world and not merely to create stories. The more you move away from that simulated reality, the more you move the RPG away from the war gaming side of its roots and the more you move it toward the theater game side of roleplaying. The recognition that many sorts of stories aren't created from first principles about the imagined world, but in fact are governed by logic that creates a specific narrative is an important one, but we are still I think grappling as designers with how to incorporate those ideas into an RPG without deprecating the 'game' part of it most people are familiar with.

In particular, even in the field of literature, it is jarring for the reader to recognize or believe that what has just happened depended principally on the power of plot and not on the internal logic of the story. Many readers will regard such moments where the author's hand on the story is obvious as diminishing the story, or popularly 'breaking the suspension of disbelief'. Within an RPG breaking this suspension of disbelief can be even more jarring and is even harder to hide from the player, because they are themselves an author of the story. Likewise, most players don't want to have the feeling that something came about in the story merely because they wished it to, but because they overcame some challenge in a way that was believable within the framework of the story.

 

[Reinhart]

Why do think that fail forward is the only concept that makes this true?

Do I think that fail forward is the only concept that makes this true? Why do you think that I think that? That's a weird thing for you to think.

If the party cannot manage to get a door open then the consequence is that they have to think of something else.
It is because it forces players to actually consider alternative courses of action.

I trust you know when and how failure is interesting in your game. I hope that you can share a similar trust to other GM's.

It might, or the players might have to think a bit to find that next door. In no way is being spoon fed alternative options a requirement for imaginative play.

Why are you assuming that I'm advocating spoon feeding players?

Why does a failure have to be the result of a mistake? You can make all the correct decisions then flub the execution of a plan. There might have have been no mistakes made, the dice just flipped you the bird. Sometimes your best effort just doesn't do the trick. Time to try something else, perhaps you will have better luck with that.

I'm referring to the business concept there. Calm down. When someone tells you that there are common misconceptions about a concept and explains the concept, why do you feel the need to just repeat all the misconceptions again as if you didn't listen or understand a single word? You assume a tool is flawed because you're using it wrong. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Well, then don't do that." Heck, sometimes it's like you're holding a completely different tool and calling it by the wrong name. Your criticisms aren't going to make sense or be much use until you establish a common basis.

If I had more time and less honesty I'd introduce an article criticizing Fail Forward as something that mandates railroading and player coddling. Then I'd introduce an alternative concept named something like "Momentous Consequences." The new concept would be the exact same thing as what I've explained Fail Forward really is, but since it's presented as the alternative for what people think Fail Forward is, it'll be readily adopted by the opposition. Plus, it will frustrate the people who actually know and care about Fail Forward. Those who adopt the new term will see that frustration as vindication that their concept is superior to Failing Forward and defend it all the more vehemently. But everyone would just keep doing what they're already doing: allowing failure to help drive the story events in interesting ways.

 

[Celebrim]

Note that "fail forward" is typically applied to *individual actions* - in most game terms, single die rolls. It does not generally apply to overall efforts. We are talking about having a way to progress in the middle of the story, not a way to ensure success at the end.

I disagree with this statement. Typically I see fail forward being applied in a game at the level of a scene, usually in games with explicit bangs and scene framing, and as such doesn't apply to single die rolls but to the overall outcome of the scene. Fail forward requires that regardless of whether the player wins the stakes of the scene, the consequence of failure is another scene. Regardless of success or failure, the story always advances forward and it never gets stuck.

This can work if we don't know what the experience is going to be at the end and we aren't invested in it. You can create one or more episodes where the character has highs and lows but life continues on. I just don't think that sort of slice of life story is actually the genera normally people are trying to replicate in an RPG.

In my opinion, most attempts at this technique applied to a traditional RPG narrative invariably hit situations where failure tends to be mere color, because they are invested in the outcome. Mystery novels end with the mystery solved. Heroic stories end with the villain defeated. Ironically, fail forward tends to be implemented by people who want to have heroic story telling, but in my opinion undermines this goal by delivering a story that has the transcript of a heroic story but not the experience of being in one. Indeed, I'd say that too many Indy games have falling in the trap of focusing on transcript production over experience of play. If your game is significant time discussing the transcript you want to create, you are probably doing something wrong. To put it a different way, most players want the experience of cribbing in the choices their character makes on the pages of an infinite choose your own adventure book. They don't want the experience of writing those pages. The more the game starts to resemble the process of writing a choose your own adventure book, the more it starts to resemble the process of collaborative script production and the less it captures the experience of actually reading the book or watching the movie. Whether that is fun or not is a matter of taste, but I don't think it is the experience people - often even the RPG designer themselves - set out to create.

 

[Janx]

I generally agree with Umbran and Celebrim on this.

If somebody thinks Fail Forward is a "PCs can't ever lose" mechanic, they are likely doing it wrong.

FF is a reasonable solution to a design/adhoc GMing mistake of boxing the good content in such a way that the players are stuck.

The GM certainly has a choice, in the case of the unfound secret door to the BBEG, to let it stand and have the PCs go home early. After a 6 hour game of dungeon crawling, this could be acceptable.

The GM might interpret FF as the PCs go home, and at the end of the session, an NPC steps up and mentions "hey, did you guys find the secret door on the back wall?" Or it turns out the BBEG really wasn't home, because he was in town smashing it. The PCs have failed, and the plot moves forward.

Or he can come up with some way to revealing some new info, having the bad guys make a move that enables a new attempt, or something.

I think the point is, the GM finds a way to salvage game material, fun, and time. It would be a darn shame if the PCs get stuck by a stupid dice roll in a boring search scene early on in the session and he let's the PCs go home and nothing new happens, so they call it a night.

 

[Umbran]

I disagree with this statement. Typically I see fail forward being applied in a game at the level of a scene, usually in games with explicit bangs and scene setting, and as such doesn't apply to single die rolls but to the overall outcome of the scene.

Well note the first - I was talking about mechanics implementing fail forward. Surely, individual GMs may choose to do just about anything any time they please, and we cannot speak to frequency of such without some major data-gathering efforts, if at all. So, I turned to the game with such mechanics that I expect is most commonly played.

Second - "scene" is not "overall effort", in general. A scene is typically one chunk of an overall effort - the overall effort will, in the end, be a chain of scenes, and the point of fail forward is to make sure that one crappy die roll does not mean the players have to give up and go home.

This will, in general, come to your awareness on the scene-level, because the result of not failing forward is the failure to move on to another scene. That can become a confounding bias when you're looking at the result and trying to suss out the implementation. You may become aware of it on the scene level, because you notice it on the die roll that would otherwise bring things to a crashing halt, and miss it on all the other times because it either doesn't apply or doesn't call for anything drastic on the less-important die rolls. Can you actually find a mechanical implementation of it on the scene level? I can't think of any at the moment.

Take, for example, FATE. It does have some notion of "scene". And there's a thing that allows fail forward on that level - if a PC is "taken out" in a fight, the GM has a choice as to what to do with that character. The character may die (which we can consider failing, I expect) or the character may live, and be captured, or otherwise discomfited (which we might consider failing forward).

However, this decision *isn't mechanical*. There is an affordance for failing forward, but not an actual mechanic that enacts it. It gives an explicit moment where a human choice is to be made, not a mechanical resolution.

Fail forward requires that regardless of whether the player wins the stakes of the scene, the consequence of failure is another scene. Regardless of success or failure, the story always advances forward and it never gets stuck.

We might quibble a bit on wording of this later, but for sake of argument, I'll leave it be for the moment.

This can work if we don't know what the experience is going to be at the end and we aren't invested in it.

I think it is quite the opposite - if you (the player) have a notion of how you want this to end, and are invested in it, not failing forward leads to breakign from expectations, which is a good way to leave you with a dissatisfied player. In short, the player kind of expects to get a shot at the BBEG eventually. DO you frustrate that expectation?

You can create one or more episodes where the character has highs and lows but life continues on. I just don't think that sort of slice of life story is actually the genera normally people are trying to replicate in an RPG.

They aren't? I'm not so sure. I would be completely unsurprised if, on the whole, when you look back at the history of most campaigns, that's basically what it looks like - a series of highs and lows, but life continues on from one adventure to another (until it stops, either abruptly and violently, or at the end of the campaign). The only difference is that in a game that isn't using fail forward, some of the lows can be of the "stuck unable to move forward on the player's intended goal" variety, where those particular are going to be less frequent with fail forward in place.

Ultimately, that's the basic difference - does the player experience those points of frustration that come with having hit a brick wall due to dumb luck, or not? The idea of fail forward is an entirely metagame, pragmatic one - don't subject the player to such moments when you can easily avoid it.

To put it a different way, most players want the experience of cribbing in the choices their character makes on the pages of an infinite choose your own adventure book. They don't want the experience of writing those pages.

That's fine. So, where in this whole discussion have we had it be that the *player* gets to choose how the fail forward occurs? Hm? I believe the answer is *never*. This is not a mechanic in which the player writes the pages. The GM is still doing that - creating a new setup where the player gets to make more choices, and avoiding the times when the player has no meaningful choices to make.

 

[Balesir]

It is because it forces players to actually consider alternative courses of action.

Well, I think rather that failure is interesting if it involves meaningful stakes. Sure, those stakes can involve the narrowing down of the characters' options - and this can even be beneficial in that cutting off the simpler options can get the players thinking about the more interesting ones. But, generally, I find that simply narrowing down options is a pretty poor basis for stakes - particularly if it is applied to most or all of the actions in the game.

And I think what Fail Forward is really saying, at its best, is "consider the stakes of any conflict carefully, and don't make them a (boring or repetitive) narrowing down of PC options". Make failure interesting by making it diverse.