D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Lanefan]

But it is a cost directly caused by the failure. If you had successfully overcome the difficulty of the cliff, your friend would be alive (albeit perhaps on death's door, if you got a partial success; that'd depend on what the roll was and how the GM adjudicated it). Because you failed, your friend is dead when they very easily could have survived.

It's like a Superman story. Superman is not interesting if you ask, "Can he complete this single task?" Whatever the task is, the answer is almost surely "yes", unless there's Kryptonite involved, in which case it's almost surely "no".

Absent kryptonite, Superman has about +40 in any skill you can possibly think of; and he doesn't auto-fail on a 1.

Which is part of what makes him the most boring superhero ever.

The PCs, on the other hand, don't have +40 to every skill roll they ever make and thus can - and do - fail at what they try, on a fairly frequent basis. This is a great part of what makes them interesting: they're not perfect.

But when you introduce collateral damage and bystander complications, suddenly he becomes fascinating. Can he save everyone from this burning building? Maybe, maybe not! That's a lot of variables and a tight timetable. Can he stop the volcano, or at least delay it enough to permit and evacuation? Unclear! That's putting him up against a threat that he can't just punch into submission.

Overly simple, hard-binary failure/success is much more limited as a mechanical structure than you (or indeed many!) recognize.

The other question, that I poked at upthread but got no feedback on, is one of resolution granularity. You want "Climb the cliff to save my friend" to be all one action, I want it to be at least two discrete actions (and maybe more depending what awaits at the cliff-top) each resolved separately. For example, you could succeed easily at climbing the cliff (step 1) but then still succeed or fail on whatever it is you do to try to save your friend (step 2). But if you fail climbing the cliff you never get to your friend, who is now hosed.

 

[The Firebird]

That's a huge assumption. It's incredibly easy to come up with something interesting that is 100% in the fiction. Example: they're in an area where there are monsters or guards. They take too long to do something and those monsters or guards (or someone who then alerts the monsters or guards) find them. Example: They get through the lock, but the lockpicks break.

How do either of those feel contrived or nonsensical?

For me, knowing how the decisions are made makes them feel contrived. Even if the outcome is reasonable I know that nothing is fixed. It's not enough for the decisions to sound plausible retroactively if they aren't flowing from anything solid. Just my opinion.

 

[SableWyvern]

Because these cases are rarely about things like outdoor survival rolls. They're usually more about things like the Very Important Thing is in a secret compartment, behind a locked door, or requires a riddle to be answered, requiring a single roll or very small number of rolls, and getting past it is either impossible for one reason or another or requires multiple sessions of play to do so.

But if you run a game where it's OK to not find out what's behind the door or in the compartment (which I typically do), then you can just accept the failure and move on.

 

[pemerton]

They rarely if ever play second fiddle to NPCs except when they actively want to (which happens now and then) but do have to realize that in effect they're usually playing second fiddle to the world they live in (not unlike our real world in that respect) and that far more often it's going to be the world moving them rather than them moving the world.

Given that "the world" in this context is authored by the GM, I read this as a description of GM-driven play.

 

[Faolyn]

Even if-when 'nothing happens' clearly makes the most in-fiction sense?

Then the next question is, does "nothing happens" clearly make the most sense, or does it seem to because it's what you're used to?

Depends on the player.

It still, however, puts the players into a position of having to work against their characters rather than for them, where I'd rather the players focus on advocating for and inhabiting their characters and leave it to the DM to provide the headaches.

If they know they get a choice in the matter, they might be more willing to work against their characters. If they have to worry about a GM laying down the law all the time, they become less willing.

Both. They go to the dangerous places and at the same time they're free to do what they can to avoid or mitigate the dangers found there.

So they are both opening tea shops and raiding dungeons at the same time?

No, I know what you mean. But you're not getting what I'm saying. The players are most likely specifically doing things that are interesting to them. If they literally were planning on opening a tea shop, that would be interesting. Having it simply fail wouldn't be, though. It would just be all their hard work going to ruin.

Either the world is bigger than the characters or the characters are bigger than the world. The latter is the usual conceit of superhero media, and - WotC's best attempts notwithstanding - I don't want to see D&D as being or becoming a supers game.

And thus, without "hammer[ing] it into their heads", I want as an underlying foundation that the game world is bigger than any of its inhabitants

That's ridiculous. The PCs are the focus of their stories. It doesn't matter if their stories are not important to the world; they're important, or should be important, to the players. That doesn't make them supers. Even the grittiest story about peasants are focused on the peasants, not the world.

 

[Faolyn]

But if you run a game where it's OK to not find out what's behind the door or in the compartment (which I typically do), then you can just accept the failure and move on.

Then that's not a game where progression is locked behind a single roll.

 

[Lanefan]

Given that "the world" in this context is authored by the GM, I read this as a description of GM-driven play.

You keep repeating this phrase as if it's a bad thing.

It isn't.

 

[Faolyn]

It may be the admiration, rather than the person, that is secret. Or, as in The Scarlet Citadel, the unexpected visitor may come to gloat rather than to help.

As I've already mentioned, LotR provides another version, with Frodo and Sam. And yet another, when Gandalf is rescued by Gwaihir.

I never got to that point. The part where Tom Bombadill, well, deus ex'd the group from the barrow-wights and then dressed them up like dolls made me throw the book across the room (not really; I respect books, even those I don't like).

In its various manifestations, this is a very common trope in the inspirational fiction for FRPGing. To me it makes little sense if a FRPG is designed so that it can't occur.

Personally, I can't stand most "Appendix N" books. I accept that they inspired others to produce better works, but it's been a struggle to read any of them.

Also, that second sentence doesn't make any sense. You can have a secret admirer in any game, even one that has nothing to do with those particular books.

 

[Faolyn]

For me, knowing how the decisions are made makes them feel contrived. Even if the outcome is reasonable I know that nothing is fixed. It's not enough for the decisions to sound plausible retroactively if they aren't flowing from anything solid. Just my opinion.

Except that nothing is fixed anyway--that's why you roll the dice, to find out what the outcome will be.

 

[SableWyvern]

Then that's not a game where progression is locked behind a single roll.

Sure, you can look at it that way. As I've mentioned several times, the things I'm arguing are simply that a single point of failure isn't some dire problem that will inevitably rear it's ugly head in any and every game, that if it does occur and is a problem there are other ways of dealing with it, and that fail forward is not some universally useful mechanic that every new GM needs to be prepared to use and master.

If someone enjoys using fail forward in their games, great. I have no problem with that.

If someone says every GM needs to learn to use fail forward, that it's some kind of universally applicable solution to single points of failure or that using it doesn't impact the feel and style of game being played, then I will disagree.