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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Part of the issue is that there's no way of knowing which lowlights now will affect which highlights later until (sometimes quite a while) after the fact.

For example, the sequence might go 6, 8, 4, 18, 9, 5, 14, 2, 4, 4, 10. Or it might go 6, 8, 4, 14, 9, 5, 13, 2, 4, 4, 11; the '14' is only built up by the preceding 6 and 8, the 4 goes with the 9 to give the 13, then the 5, 2, and second 4 make up the 11 at the end; the first 4 of the ending pair affects nothing.

And this is still a very simple version. Sometimes what seems like a disconnected lowlight now helps lead to a highlight three sessions from now; only in hindsight can anyone see how they tied together.

I'll just point out that skill challenges were maligned often, but they're a huge boon here! They allow for a mix of more and less intense fiction, and 'pool the stakes' in a helpful way. This can greatly facilitate seamless blending of gamist play and attention to pacing, etc. Super helpful and a major thrust of my own game design work.

 

[Faolyn]

Going from memory it stated nothing about the goal of climbing the cliff.

You missed it then:

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.

It was that you climb the cliff, the friend is dead because you failed your check and while you succeed at the climb there has to be a cost. It's why I looked for other examples (Failing Forward – RPG Concepts) that explain it with more detail than we get on a forum post. In the example I found it was failing to pick a lock so you still get in but there's a quantum cook who screams for help. The cook only exists because you failed to pick the lock. Of course I was then told that it was "Just a random web site" and not The Forge*.

I've literally only heard of the Forge through this thread.

So no, the friend isn't dead because you failed to climb the cliff in a fail-forward game. The friend is dead in a trad game because they were being threatened by something and you failed to climb up fast enough.

If I were running a D&D game and the characters hit the unable to pick the lock scenario there are multiple ways to handle it. In my game unless they really blow it (fail by 10 or more) they can still get the lock open, it's just going to take a while. At that point they can decide if they want to risk a patrol coming along, attempt to find a different entrance, give up on getting into this particular door, break the door down, something else like have the druid turn into a small spider and crawl in and open it from the inside. If they decide to break down the door that could alert someone in the building or in an adjacent building which could lead to complications but that's only if someone was there in the first place.

You can do all of these in a fail-forward game as well.

There will never be a quantum cook even if I think it would make for more tension and excitement.

Scenario: The PCs get to a new village. You expect them to stay the night, resupply, and move on. There's nothing particularly interesting in the village that would make them stay, you think.

Instead, one of them gets the idea to break into a house and steal stuff.

Is this house completely empty, because you didn't have the chance to populate it beforehand?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Of course, the more you emphasise that the "H"s must be different, the more that cuts both ways.

Situation A is quite different from what I described, because the player knows. Whereas I was posting about a situation - quite a common one, I think - in which the GM knows that the player's action declarations are futile, but the player doesn't.

The difference between Situation B and a method of resolution where the player's roll matters is that the player can influence their roll, by committing resources. As per my example.

This reinforces my point above about 4e SCs.

 

[TwoSix]

I just think that's a facile and limited way to look at RPGs specifically; I've argued before their constituent component is the ability to set and revise their own victory conditions and for play to continue after evaluation with new goals.

I can see that. From my perspective, I would say that for more narrative play, setting a character goal and and trying to achieve it isn't a "win/lose", it's a "blue/orange". Even if my character loses, I as a player still win because my character went on a journey. The only real loss is not trying.

 

[TwoSix]

And the standard answer is of course "because that is a different activity than the one we love?"

Sure. And not here, where everyone understands other modes of play and has assumedly already decided their preferences, but for a larger game audience, the question is "Do you love pretending to exist in a fictional world? Or do you just love making things up and telling a story? Or do you just like rolling dice and the camaraderie?"

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I’ve never understood this and it’s from 2 perspectives.

1. You advocate for a technique where any 1 of hundreds of die rolls could just as easily allow the DM to create the consequence of ‘your supply is cut off’.

Can you explain why you are okay with that but not a GM generating similar fiction absent a fail forward consequence?

2. Why would this be a jerk move if the players have aprior agreed to the move in order to play a specific game. Something I’m sure @Lanefan’s players have done.

I'll go you one further. Once I started a Traveller game. I just told the players that their characters were on a small station. They started going about the usual kind of activity of such PCs, meanwhile I described a disaster unfolding on the station which trapped them in a decaying orbit without any possible recourse. That was the scenario, absolutely certain death, no rolls, no deus ex machina, nothing. Play it out.

 

[Enrahim]

Sure. And not here, where everyone understands other modes of play and has assumedly already decided their preferences, but for a larger game audience, the question is "Do you love pretending to exist in a fictional world? Or do you just love making things up and telling a story? Or do you just like rolling dice and the camaraderie?"

I agree. But in such a listing you should also in this context include some questions that would show a player actually prefering various forms of non-narrative way: "Do you love experiencing to the cool exposition and storylines your DM provides?" "Do you love feeling like you really discover something that has exsisted out of view for a while?" "Do you love using deduction to solve elaborate mysteries with limited information?"

 

[AlViking]

You missed it then:




I've literally only heard of the Forge through this thread.

So no, the friend isn't dead because you failed to climb the cliff in a fail-forward game. The friend is dead in a trad game because they were being threatened by something and you failed to climb up fast enough.

The examples here an in the blog post I quoted made it clear that the dead friend and the screaming cook did not exist before the roll failed. It was not presented as a ticking clock scenario, because of a failure something "interesting" is created on the fly by the DM.

You can do all of these in a fail-forward game as well.


Scenario: The PCs get to a new village. You expect them to stay the night, resupply, and move on. There's nothing particularly interesting in the village that would make them stay, you think.

Instead, one of them gets the idea to break into a house and steal stuff.

Is this house completely empty, because you didn't have the chance to populate it beforehand?

In my games the house may or may not be populated. I will know by whom and where before the characters when to break into the building. No protagonists will be added after they attempt to break in because it would be more interesting.

 

[Faolyn]

I look at clocks in Blades in the Dark. They tick, but they do so at the DMs whim because he can always choose a non clock tick consequence for any roll. IMO, that’s an invisible finish line masquerading as something more objective.

And background events move entirely on their own, without GM input, in tradgames?

 

[Faolyn]

Shouldn’t there be some kind of roll to detect the guards? Or is that not how DW works?

I don't think so. Unless there's something that would keep people from hearing through the door (magical silence, soundproofed walls), or putting your ear to the door would trigger a Grimtoothian-style door trap, a PC who wants to listen at the door does so. Mind, they don't have to hear everything through the door--it is a door, so words will be muffled--but they'll hear at least some stuff.

Yes, that was something that took me a while to get as well when I started with PbtA.