Failing Forward

[Imaro]

I see "fail-forward" (or D&D 5e's "progress combined with a setback" or "success at a cost") to be just another form of stake-setting. On a successful check, you succeed at your goal. On a failed check, you succeed at your goal with a cost or complication. I use it when outright failure wouldn't be particularly interesting or when the a binary pass/fail would result in a disconnect between player and character knowledge.

For example, many people suggest rolling ability checks secretly when players try to search for traps, knowing that if a player sees a low result on the die and hears the DM saying "There are no traps," "You believe there are no traps," or "You find no traps," the player may be tempted to repeat the task or have another character make a pass at it. (Cue the cries of "Filthy metagamer!" Not that I give even a single flumph when players "metagame.") By using progress combined with a setback, I can narrate a failed check as being, for instance, "You find the trap - and your foot is on the pressure plate! There is a continuous, disconcerting clicking noise coming from the walls around you. What do you do?!" I thus avoid that disconnect and don't have to take the dice from the players as others DMs do.

So question... in a situation like the above... when has the trap actually been sprung (when do I suffer it's effects??). It seems like just in looking for the trap and failing you've now put my character into a situation where he's (partially??) sprung the trap just by looking for it. Not sure this would be cool with me as a rogue since it would mean when I fail at searching for a trap (not necessarily doing anything to spring it) I then end up guaranteed to suffer it's ill effects... if I fail to disarm it... well, and since I'm the rogue I'll be searching (and failing) at a higher rate than other characters.

 

[iserith]

So question... in a situation like the above... when has the trap actually been sprung (when do I suffer it's effects??). It seems like just in looking for the trap and failing you've now put my character into a situation where he's (partially??) sprung the trap just by looking for it. Not sure this would be cool with me as a rogue since it would mean when I fail at searching for a trap (not necessarily doing anything to spring it) I then end up guaranteed to suffer it's ill effects... if I fail to disarm it... well, and since I'm the rogue I'll be searching (and failing) at a higher rate than other characters.

You would suffer the effects when it made sense in the fiction. In the case of the example, which is missing a lot of context, I've used progress combined with a setback to avoid the issues I've described and put your character in a spot where your decisions as a player will help determine an outcome. Your foot is on the landmine. What do you do now?

As with anything in the game, when the DM narrates the result of the adventurer's action, it must follow from the fiction established up to that point. If yousaid your character was, say, standing stock still and just looking around, then a result that you stepped on a pressure plate would not be appropriate as it establishes your character as doing something without your say so. But I could also say such an approach to the goal of finding traps isn't sufficient and say that you do not find any traps at all by standing stock still and looking around - no roll.

 

[ExploderWizard]

"Fail forward" is about preserving momentum in play. It is part of a broader approach to RPGing in which the GM is expected to frame the PCs into challenging and/or confronting scenes (challenging and confronting both to the PCs and the players), and when the GM stopping to ask "What do you do now?" is a rare pause in the dynamics of play, rather than the norm.

This has nothing to do with railroading or "tunnel vision".

If there is one thing that I would lament if it became a rare thing then " what do you do now?" would probably be it. That most basic of questions drives a game of meaningful player choice. Failing forward facilitates players who never have to really think of anything significant. No matter how much they screw up, a clear path forward (with more or less punitive bumps depending on how much they screwed up) will always open up allowing access to the next scene or hoop the DM wants them to jump.

It is a good thing to hit "game stopping" failures once in a while. Allowing players to create their own path from there to whatever comes next. That path might not be forward at all. It might be in a random direction taking the game to a place never before imagined by the players or the DM. Most importantly, the choice, wherever it may lead, belongs to the players.

 

[Neonchameleon]

If there is one thing that I would lament if it became a rare thing then " what do you do now?" would probably be it. That most basic of questions drives a game of meaningful player choice.

And here I'm with you. It's also part of the basic GM advice in Apocalypse World and many of the legion of derivative games - to ask after almost every GM action "What do you do now?"

Failing forward facilitates players who never have to really think of anything significant. No matter how much they screw up, a clear path forward (with more or less punitive bumps depending on how much they screwed up) will always open up allowing access to the next scene or hoop the DM wants them to jump.

Where forward can mean "Falling head first down the bottom of a well."

It might be in a random direction taking the game to a place never before imagined by the players or the DM. Most importantly, the choice, wherever it may lead, belongs to the players.

Fail forward does both those nicely.

 

[Imaro]

You would suffer the effects when it made sense in the fiction. In the case of the example, which is missing a lot of context, I've used progress combined with a setback to avoid the issues I've described and put your character in a spot where your decisions as a player will help determine an outcome. Your foot is on the landmine. What do you do now?

But who decided it made sense in the fiction? For me at least, and maybe this is some of my disconnect with the fluid environment/narrative... I don't necessarily follow that in failing to find or see a trap... I then proceeded to spring said trap. There is nothing in my action, even if we pre-suppose I move around the room in some fashion to search it, that from the roll to locate a trap failing it then follows that I have sprung it... I have a much larger disconnect with this than the secret roll and, in all honesty, it does feel a bit like taking away player agency.

As with anything in the game, when the DM narrates the result of the adventurer's action, it must follow from the fiction established up to that point. If you said your character was, say, standing stock still and just looking around, then a result that you stepped on a pressure plate would not be appropriate as it establishes your character as doing something without your say so. But I could also say such an approach to the goal of finding traps isn't sufficient and say that you do not find any traps at all by standing stock still and looking around - no roll.

Yes but the fiction I see when "searching" the room may be different from the fiction you see. I could be creeping along the edges of the wall, prodding the floor with items ahead of me, only searching certain areas and so on... while you assume I'm at some point walking across the exact spot that the trap is laid. What if I'd rather just fail at finding it as opposed to failing forward here so that the tough guy in the group can go first in case there is a trap?

 

[iserith]

But who decided it made sense in the fiction? For me at least, and maybe this is some of my disconnect with the fluid environment/narrative... I don't necessarily follow that in failing to find or see a trap... I then proceeded to spring said trap. There is nothing in my action, even if we pre-suppose I move around the room in some fashion to search it, that from the roll to locate a trap failing it then follows that I have sprung it... I have a much larger disconnect with this than the secret roll and, in all honesty, it does feel a bit like taking away player agency.

The DM decides, at least in D&D. (I know this is a general RPG forum.) The player describes what he or she wants to do and the DM narrates the results of the adventurer's actions. You describe that you want to try to find traps (goal) by searching around (approach). Provided you have established that your searching around includes moving around the area, then the DM's narration that you stepped on a pressure plate is reasonable, right? There is no agency lost here. You did what you wanted to do. You even found the trap. It's just you found it at a cost due to the failed check. That's just stake-setting. As opposed to "Yes/No" stakes, we have "Yes/Yes, but..." stakes.

Yes but the fiction I see when "searching" the room may be different from the fiction you see. I could be creeping along the edges of the wall, prodding the floor with items ahead of me, only searching certain areas and so on... while you assume I'm at some point walking across the exact spot that the trap is laid. What if I'd rather just fail at finding it as opposed to failing forward here so that the tough guy in the group can go first in case there is a trap?

Reasonable specificity as to what the character is doing (the approach) and hopes to accomplish (the goal) is a good idea to ensure that the DM and player are on the same page. I think that applies to any interaction in an RPG. Sometimes it's beneficial to discuss and agree on the stakes prior to the roll, though some don't like that level of transparency.

In any case, you do not want to risk setting off the trap while searching for it, you can adjust your goal and approach accordingly when describing what you want to do to the DM.

 

[Balesir]

Good thought, and it wouldn't shock me if you were more than somewhat correct; but I would caution against over-generalizing.

Oh, heck, yes - this is really no more than idle noodling, but it all helps form ideas that are compared to ongoing reality. I play the long game, on that score

In my experience, the best indicator of which playstyle a person wants is how well they internalize the rules of the game (besides the ones that get them excited about their specific characters.) Bearing in mind that there IS a personal cost for internalizing these rules, i.e. the amount of time spent out of game thoughtfully reading about relatively dry system maths, I would say that for most players this is a simple cost/benefit exercise: is the benefit of interacting directly with the rules system worth the effort of learning the rules?

Quite possible, but then I am probably atypical in that I quite enjoy reading (good) text books...

Of course, any player's answer to this question will depend on how much their current gaming group leverages the system--but that just reinforces the point that most players I've encountered see system awareness as a cost that must be justified, rather than an absolute, personality-based preference.

In a current D&D gaming group of 8, I would say four of us avidly read and digest the rules. The others read bits where they must, but those four get to know the core mechanisms at least well enough to be able to parse them "live", with no looking up except in real corner cases.

Maybe this is related to them being keen board gamers and engineers/programmers/mathematicians? I don't know.

It's by the by, but in my game prep I distinguish between "hard scenes" which are solely DM-provided, and "soft scenes," over which everyone has (or is encouraged to have) some authorship. At the end of the day, my DM motto is "You Can Tell a Craftsman by His Tools," and I do take some amount of pride in my role as facilitator when I'm able to deploy the right technique in the right situation.

My guess would be that most GMs do, to some extent, but it's good to be aware of it and vary it deliberately, rather than by "feel".

I tend to slant particular games toward a specific style and feel. Part of that comes out in the selection of game system for the specific purpose. At a convention dedicated to the Hârn world this year I ran scenarios in three different systems, and got three gratifyingly different "flavours" of play, all within the one game world.

 

[Balesir]

It seems intuitive to me that you would need a singular authority - that actually knows everything going on behind the scenes - to avoid contradiction. Of course, that could just be one of those personal biases talking.

It's actually easy to avoid contradiction without a single authority. You just undertake (as a rule) not to contradict anything that has been stated as true in the game. You also, by implication, agree not to assume that anything that has not been said is necessarily true.

I'd be interested in seeing how Universalis handles this sort of thing. Oddly, I have never even heard of the game.

Universalis is a bit of an extreme case (and is probably a good example of a game you would hate - just as a warning ). It is a roleplaying game (in that you play the roles of characters - possibly more than one in a single scene) that has what are normally GM tasks handled by the players. Resources ("coins") are spent to add "facts" into the story and game world. One coin creates a character with a function; a second coin adds a name... and so on. One coin lets you take control of any introduced character and play them as you would a PC (until someone else takes them off you - which you can resist with coins).

The mechanism for consistency fits into the resolution of contests (which occur between players, as opposed to conflicts, which involve characters), which is done by simple bidding of coins (anyone may bid on either side). Consistency is encouraged in that bids supported by pre-existing "facts" are doubled in the contest. If enough players either support or are not bothered about the break with earlier "truth" it can pass, but if it's a "truth" players care about it's generally impossible to overturn it.

Edited to add: here is a review of Universalis on Boardgame Geek, of all places...

 

[dd.stevenson]

Quite possible, but then I am probably atypical in that I quite enjoy reading (good) text books...

Maybe this is related to them being keen board gamers and engineers/programmers/mathematicians? I don't know.

It would be really, really interesting to know the present-day segmentation of D&D fandom. Were I to fumble about for a starting hypothesis, I'd say that there were three important clusters of home games happening: a blue-collar segment, a campus segment, and a white-collar technician segment. At least, those are the demographics I've played with in the past; there maybe are others (such as active military) that I'm just unaware of. Interestingly, I don't see much intermixing between the two--a student isn't all that likely to show up at a non-campus game, and I've never seen a plumber in a white-collar or campus game. For the most part, this pattern has carried over to my online gaming as well.

Supposing the above is more or less correct, it's well possible that each segment tends toward divergent playstyles, since people IME learn "the right way" to play D&D from whomever they first play with, and tend to feel that other playstyles are "doing it wrong."

How's that for noodling? I'm not all that comfortable with the idea that playstyle is related to social class, but looking back over the groups I've played with, it's hard to deny that this is a hypothesis that correlates well with the facts of my experience.

In a current D&D gaming group of 8, I would say four of us avidly read and digest the rules. The others read bits where they must, but those four get to know the core mechanisms at least well enough to be able to parse them "live", with no looking up except in real corner cases.

Right now I play 5E online with two four-player groups--one I'd describe as Australian blue collar, and the other as expat English teachers with strong white-collar tendencies. In the first group, one player knows the rules well, and two are pretty competent about their own character rules but not super keen on the rest, and a fourth is all about the fiction and doesn't even know his own character's rules very well. In the second group two know the rules well (but they both actively DM themselves, so I tend to discard these cases as outliers,) one competent at his own class, and a fourth is new to wotc D&D and hasn't learned the rules much at all yet.

 

[GMMichael]

Whoops. The Internet wins again at being a less-than-ideal communication medium. I wasn't trying to cheese anyone off.

From yet another angle, how about actually engaging with posters describing their use of the technique, and its purpose - in some cases giving actual play examples.

"Fail forward" is about preserving momentum in play. It is part of a broader approach to RPGing in which the GM is expected to frame the PCs into challenging and/or confronting scenes (challenging and confronting both to the PCs and the players), and when the GM stopping to ask "What do you do now?" is a rare pause in the dynamics of play, rather than the norm.

I was enjoying your FF definitions on an earlier page, but that was when I realized that several posters were using their own definitions of FF. Which means we're not all talking about the same thing. If you want me to engage with you on your use of FF, just say so. I was hoping that reminding the group about where the thread started would help us to all engage together.

I think preserving momentum is great. It boils down to a style preference, though. I see it like music: some artists, especially some techno artists, keep the exact same beat throughout the whole piece. Others see tempo as a tool for adding variety.

Ascribing use of a tool to a flaw on the part of the user is, remember, *insulting*. We expect folks to show respect for each other on these boards. Expect... and require.

Noted. I would, though, like to point out that what I said isn't intentionally insulting. I could have said:

Cars are an indispensable tool for GMs with broken ankles.

That would be saying neither that cars are designed for GMs with broken ankles, nor that you must have a broken ankle to use a car. See what I mean?

I think the key words in Morrus's definition that you might be missing are... "failing and stopping the game..." so it's not that the PC's don't fail, it's that they don't both fail and said failure stops the game (so they can actually fail... it just shouldn't stop the game), personally I would rather design my adventures with multiple paths for the goals of the PC's... but since I am not omniscient and my players can throw me for a loop at times I am not adverse to using fail forward as a tool in my DM toolbox...

Valid point...but we might be disagreeing on an important point here: "stopping the game." I, personally, have never seen this happen. It could mean at least two things:
- The GM's one-and-only plotline caught a snag, so there's no further plot until the PCs get past that snag.
or
- Something in the game happened, evidently a roll of some sort, that caused all players and the GM to have no idea what comes next.

If we can agree on these, we can continue to discuss their significance in Morrus's definition. If we can't, then there's an alignment thread somewhere that I promised I'd get back to...